Seymour Hersh is an investigative journalist and a regular contributor to The New Yorker on military and security matters. His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US Military’s treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Hersh has been awarded four George Polk Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes, many of them for his work at the New York Times. In 2004, he won a National Magazine Award for public interest for his pieces on intelligence and the Iraq war.
Robert Fisk is currently the Middle East correspondent to the British newspaper The Independent. His careerspans thirty years, beginning with 1970s Belfast and Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution, the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, and encompassing the 1979 Iranian revolution, the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, 1991 Persian Gulf War, and 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Fisk has received numerous awards including the British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year award seven times. Fluent in Arabic, Fisk is one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden (three times between 1994 and 1997). His latest book, The Great War for Civilisation – the Conquest of the Middle East, was published in 2005.
John Pilger has reported from conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh, Biafra, among other areas. He has twice won British journalism’s highest award, ‘Journalist of the Year’, for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. Pilger is also a filmmaker and has won an ‘American Television Academy Award’, an ‘Emmy’, and an award for Britain’s best documentary from the Royal Television Society. His most recent film entitled Stealing a Nation was produced in 2004 and his latest book Freedom Next Time will be released in June of this year.
Charles Glass is a freelance journalist who regularly contributes to publications such as TIME, The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Daily Newsweek, and The Guardian, among others. Glass was ABC News chief Middle East correspondent from 1983-1993, during which time he was taken hostage for 62 days by Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1987. He wrote about this experience in his book Tribes with Flags. The sequel The Tribes Triumphant will be published this year. Glass was awarded the George Foster Peabody Award, and has received additional awards from the Overseas Press Club and the Commonwealth.
