Dana Priest

In 2007, Americans were shocked to discover the conditions in outpatient facilities of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Hundreds of wounded veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were living in dilapidated buildings, infested with cockroaches, rodents and black mold. The reporter who brought the scandal to light was The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning national security correspondent Dana Priest. Within weeks of her expose, the Secretary of the Army and the Commander of Walter Reed had been fired, and the Army's Surgeon General had resigned. In her 20 years at the Post, Dana Priest has traveled with Special Forces units in Asia, Africa, and South America, and covered U.S. military actions in Panama, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. She has been attacked from both ends of the political spectrum, by those who believe her reporting undermines national security and by those who fault her for not taking a public position on the stories she covers. Since 2001, she has depicted the transformation of the CIA into what she calls a "paramilitary" organization. "I'm not saying it's right or wrong," she says, "but I sure want to describe it to you." She has written on the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and on the intelligence failures that preceded both September 11 and the war in Iraq. Her reporting disclosed the controversial Justice Department memo that authorized enhanced interrogation techniques such as "water boarding" for suspected terrorists. In a November 2005 front page story, Priest revealed the existence of secret "black site" prisons, run jointly by the CIA and the security services of other countries, including some suspected of supporting terror activities themselves. In 2006, she received the Pulitzer Prize "for her persistent, painstaking reports" on these and other controversial features of the government's counterterrorism campaign. "The government would like us to stop reporting on these issues," she has said, but she insists on the necessity of "a vibrant national security press corps that's willing to delve into them."