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Washington Post reporter Dana Priest to give talk on human rights after 9/11

Dana Priest, a reporter covering national security issues for the Washington Post, and an analyst and correspondent for NBC News, will give a talk on Monday, May 9, from noon to 1:30 p.m. at the Namaste Lounge at Colleges Nine and Ten. The title of her presentation is "America's Disappeared: The CIA and Human Rights After 9-11."

photo of Dana Priest interviewing an Afghan farmer

Dana Priest, interviewing an Afghan farmer in this photo, was profiled in the UCSC Review magazine in 2003 (profile).
Photo: NBC/Norman Ng

Priest's book about the military's expanding responsibility and influence, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military, was published in 2003 by W. W. Norton & Co. It won the prestigious New York Public Library Bernstein Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Priest, a UCSC alumna (Merrill '81), has worked at the Post for 18 years. She was the Pentagon correspondent for seven years and then wrote exclusively about the military as an investigative reporter. She covered the invasion of Panama (1989), reported from Iraq in late 1990 just before the war began, reported on the 1999 Kosovo war from air bases in Europe, on the Special Forces in Afghanistan in 2001, and with the secretary of defense in Iraq in 2003.

She has written extensively about the military's four regional commanders, traveled widely with Army Special Forces in Asia, Africa, and South America, and reported with Army peacekeeping units deployed in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Priest has written extensively on the intelligence lapses that led up to the attacks of September 11, the failure of prewar intelligence in Iraq, the government's covert war against suspected terrorists around the world, and the interrogation scandal at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

In 2001, Priest was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing grant and was a guest scholar in residence at the U.S. Institute of Peace. The same year, she won the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the National Defense for her series "The Proconsuls: A Four-Star Foreign Policy?" and the State Department's Excellence in Journalism Award for the same series. She was the guest speaker and host for a four-part speaking series on the U.S. Military and Foreign Policy for the State Department's "Secretary's Open Forum."

Priest lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children. She appears regularly on NBC's Meet The Press, Hardball, and MSNBC as well as contributing regularly to NBC Nightly News.
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This event is sponsored by CGIRS, the Global Information Internship Program, College Nine, and the Center for Justice, Tolerance and Community.

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