Susan Adelman is a feminist, activist and philanthropist. She serves on the boards of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the ACLU Foundation and has been active in Code Pink for more than 10 years. She also served on the board of the Venice Family Clinic. She is president of the Lucy and Isadore B. Adelman Foundation.
Robert Alvarez is an author and senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, focusing on nuclear disarmament, environmental and energy policies. After a stint as one of the Senate’s primary staff experts on the U.S. nuclear weapons program, Alvarez between 1993 and 1999 served as a senior policy advisor to the Energy Secretary and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and Environment. In that post, he coordinated the effort to enact nuclear worker compensation legislation and led teams in North Korea to establish control of nuclear weapons materials. In the 1970s, he helped organize a successful lawsuit on behalf of the family of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear worker and union activist who was killed under mysterious circumstances.
Keane Bhatt is a Washington-based activist and writer. He has worked in the United States and Latin America on a variety of campaigns related to community development and social justice. His analyses and opinions have appeared in a wide range of outlets, including NPR.org, The Nation, The St. Petersburg Times, CNN En Español and Al Jazeera.
William Binney is a former high-level National Security Agency intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement after 30 years, blew the whistle on NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W. Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home in 2007. Even before Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had access to telecommunications companies’ domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 to 20 trillion communications. The Snowden disclosures confirmed many of the surveillance dangers Binney — without the benefit of documents — had been warning about under both the Bush and Obama administrations.
William Black, a leading authority on white-collar crime and public finance, is associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His high-level experience includes: litigation director, Federal Home Loan Bank Board; deputy director, Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation; senior vice president/general counsel, Federal Home Loan Bank-San Francisco; senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision; deputy director, National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. He is author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One, and recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives. He served as an expert for the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae’s former senior management.
Pratap Chatterjee is executive director of CorpWatch and a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper. He is an investigative journalist and producer whose work has been published by the Financial Times, Channel Four TV, Inter Press Service, The Independent, The New Republic, ProPublica, The Village Voice and “Democracy Now!” among many others. He is the author of Halliburton’s Army, Iraq Inc.: A Profitable Occupation and The Earth Brokers. Chatterjee serves on the boards of Amnesty International USA and Corporate Europe Observatory.
Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at In These Times and CultureStrike and a columnist for Colorlines.com. Her work has also appeared on AlterNet and in The American Prospect, Colorlines, Dissent, Ms. Magazine, The Nation and The Progressive, among other outlets. She co-produces the community radio program Asia Pacific Forum on WBAI Radio in New York City. She has reported from China and Palestine and co-produced a public radio program on Asian Americans and the diaspora.
Andrew Cockburn, the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, is an authority on national security and the military. He has written numerous articles and books, his most recent being Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy. He has produced documentary films, principally in partnership with Leslie Cockburn. His film “The Red Army,” produced for PBS in 1981, was the first in-depth report on the serious deficiencies of Soviet military power and won a Peabody Award. He has also reported extensively on the Middle East, including a 1991 documentary on the after-effects of the first Gulf war. He has written for National Geographic, the Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, CounterPunch and The New York Times.
Jeff Cohen is a media critic, writer and journalism professor who founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986. He is the founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media and is endowed chair/associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College. For years, he was a regular commentator on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC discussing issues of media and politics. Cohen was senior producer of MSNBC’s Phil Donahue show until its cancellation on the eve of the Iraq war. He has written investigative articles and features for numerous publications including Rolling Stone, The Nation and Mother Jones. He is the author or co-author of five books, including his latest, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor of law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, a former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. She has contributed online commentary to websites such as Truthout, CommonDreams, Counterpunch and Z Net. She has also done commentary for the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR and Pacifica Radio. Cohn has authored or co-authored several books, including: Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent; Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law; and The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse.
Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, as senior policy analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, became a whistleblower when the EPA ignored her complaints about a U.S. company harming the environment and human health in its vanadium mining in South Africa. Denied promotion, she sued and won a jury verdict finding EPA guilty of discrimination. Coleman-Adebayo is a founder of the No FEAR Coalition and EPA Employees Against Racism. Under her leadership No FEAR organized a grassroots campaign that won passage of the “Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act.” Coleman-Adebayo serves on the board of directors of the National Whistleblower Center and was inducted into the Project on Government Oversight’s Hall of Fame. She is an editor and columnist for the Black Agenda Report.
Thomas Drake is a former senior executive at the National Security Agency where he blew the whistle on massive multi-billion dollar fraud, waste and the widespread violations of the rights of citizens through secret mass surveillance programs after 9/11. As retaliation and reprisal, the Obama Administration indicted Drake in 2010 as the first whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg charged with espionage, and Drake faced 35 years in prison, turning him into an Enemy of the State for his oath to defend the Constitution. In 2011, the government’s case against him collapsed and he went free in a plea deal. He is the recipient of the 2011 Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize, and a joint recipient with Jesselyn Radack of the 2011 Sam Adams Associates Integrity in Intelligence Award and the 2012 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award. He is now dedicated to the defense of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Daniel Ellsberg was a former U.S. military analyst who served in Vietnam, worked at the RAND Corporation, and then risked decades in prison to release the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and other newspapers in 1971 — thereby adding impetus to the movement to end the Vietnam War. Although Ellsberg faced espionage and other felony charges, the case against him was dismissed because of egregious misconduct by the Nixon administration. Ellsberg was a strong supporter of modern-day NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and convicted Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In 2006, Ellsberg received the Right Livelihood Award (the “alternative Nobel Prize”), and in 2012 became a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of the bestselling Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. In her most recent book, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America, she examines the post-9/11 outpouring in the media, popular culture and political life. Faludi’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Nation, among other publications.
Glen Ford, a longtime radio host and commentator, is co-founder and executive editor of the online Black Agenda Report, which provides “news, commentary and analysis from the black left.” Ford has been a persistent critic of President Obama’s domestic and foreign policies and a strong supporter of government whistleblowers. In 1977, Ford co-launched, produced and hosted “America’s Black Forum,” the first nationally syndicated African-American news interview program on commercial television. In 1987, Ford started “Rap It Up,” the first nationally syndicated hip-hop music show, broadcast on 65 stations. He is also the author of The Big Lie: An Analysis of U.S. Media Coverage of the Grenada Invasion.
Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and broadcaster, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau with Peter Jennings. He has covered most Middle East and Balkan wars since the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Artillery fire wounded him in 1976, when he won the Overseas Press Club Award. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a freelance writer in Paris, Tuscany, Venice and London. He has also published books, including The Deserters, short stories, essays and articles in the United States and Europe. He is a founder member of the Committee in Defence of WikiLeaks’ Right to Publish and a sponsor of the Anything to Say? statue in honor of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
James Goodale is a leading First Amendment lawyer, former general counsel/vice chairman of The New York Times, and later partner in Debevoise & Plimpton. He has represented the Times in all four of its cases to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, most famously winning a landmark right-to-publish victory in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. Goodale has written more than 200 articles on media law and press freedom for The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Daily Beast and other outlets. He has taught for more than 30 years at Yale, New York University, and Fordham law schools. He is author of Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles.
Kevin Alexander Gray is a longtime community and political campaign organizer and writer whose books include The Decline of Black Politics — From Malcolm X to Barack Obama, and Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics. Gray served as a national board member of the American Civil Liberties Union for four years; is a past eight-term president of the South Carolina ACLU affiliate; is an advisory board member of the Drug Policy Reform Coalition; was the South Carolina coordinator for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign; was a founding member of the National Rainbow Coalition in 1986. He has written for The Progressive, Counterpunch, The Black Agenda Report, and The Nation, among others.
Katharine Gun is a former translator for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence agency. In 2003, she leaked to the Observer newspaper a top-secret memorandum concerning a National Security Agency operation to bug the United Nations offices of six countries regarded as swing votes that could determine whether the U.N. Security Council approved the invasion of Iraq. After the Observer article appeared, Gun confessed to her GCHQ superiors and was subsequently charged with violating the Official Secrets Act. The case was dropped after the prosecution declined to offer any evidence. For her whistleblowing, Gun was given the 2003 Sam Adams award by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. Daniel Ellsberg called Katharine Gun’s leak “the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen.” He added: “No one else — including myself — has ever done what Gun did: tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it.”
Arun Gupta is a regular contributor to The Progressive, In These Times and The Guardian, and covered the Occupy Wall Street movement nationwide for Salon. He co-founded the Indypendent newspaper and The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the newspaper that emerged during the 2011-12 protests. For The Guardian, he has written on a number of topics, including FBI repression against digital transparency advocates and anarchists. He is on the board of the Defending Dissent Foundation and is working on a book about the social construction of taste.
Matthew Hoh, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, previously directed the Afghanistan Study Group, a collection of foreign and public policy experts and professionals advocating for a change in U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Prior to that, Hoh served with the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq and on U.S. Embassy teams in both Afghanistan and Iraq. During his service in Afghanistan, five months into his year-long contract in 2009, he resigned and became the highest-ranking U.S. official to publicly renounce U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Hoh was awarded The Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling in 2010.
Janine Jackson is program director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and producer/co-host of its syndicated radio show CounterSpin. She contributes frequently to FAIR’s magazine Extra!, and co-edited The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s. She has appeared on ABC’s “Nightline” and CNN Headline News, among other outlets, and has testified to the Senate Communications Subcommittee on budget reauthorization for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her articles have appeared in various publications including In These Times and the United Auto Workers Solidarity magazine, and in books including Civil Rights Since 1787 and Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism.
Dahr Jamail was one of the few unembedded American journalists to report extensively from Iraq during the 2003 invasion of that country. He spent eight months in Iraq between 2003 and 2005, and presented his stories on his website, entitled Dahr Jamail’s MidEast Dispatches. Jamail was a reporter for Truthout from 2008 to 2011, later worked as a correspondent for Al Jazeera, and is now on special assignment for Truthout. He has been a frequent guest on “Democracy Now!” Jamail is the author of two books — Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, and The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the recipient of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.
Nicholas Johnson — who was named one of the most influential people in American legal history in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law in 2009 — is perhaps best known for his 1966-1973 term as a dissenting commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, during which he was featured on Rolling Stone’s cover and published his influential book, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set. After leaving the FCC, Johnson headed a Washington-based media reform group, hosted a PBS program, wrote a nationally syndicated column, consulted with numerous countries on media matters, and lectured at hundreds of colleges. In 2008-2009 alone, Johnson published four books. He currently teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law.
Linda Jue is editor/executive director of the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, a public interest investigative reporting center based in San Francisco. She was also a founding co-editor, with Barbara Ehrenreich, of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Previously, Linda directed national journalism programs as associate director of the Independent Press Association. She was an associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting, an editor at San Francisco Focus magazine and a correspondent for C-SPAN. Her work has appeared in San Francisco Focus, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Toronto Globe and Mail, GEO, MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, PBS’ Frontline and other outlets. She has won two Thomas Moore Storke International Journalism Awards and a Maggie for excellence in feature writing.
Hugh Kaufman is senior policy analyst at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. In his 40-plus years at EPA, he has been a public whistleblowing critic of many agency actions under both Republican and Democratic administrations, including the decision to use the dispersant Corexit on oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico after BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010. Before that, Kaufman exposed the agency’s efforts to hide information about health risks from air pollution for responders at the World Trade Center site after the 2001 terrorist attacks. He initiated the idea of Superfund and helped write all federal laws regulating the treatment, storage, disposal and remediation of solid and hazardous waste.
Margaret Kimberley is a New York based writer and activist on peace and justice issues. She is an editor and senior columnist for Black Agenda Report, and was for four years the weekly columnist for Black Commentator. Her work has also appeared in The Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Defender, and on web sites including AlterNet, CounterPunch and Buzzflash. Kimberley is a member of the War Resisters League speakers bureau.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News. At the CIA, he was involved in critical counterterrorism missions following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and he led a CIA team in the March 2002 raid and capture of Abu Zubaydah, then thought to be al-Qaeda’s third-ranking official. Following his return to CIA Headquarters, Kiriakou refused to be trained in so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In 2007, he appeared in an ABC News interview, during which he became the first CIA officer to confirm that the CIA waterboarded detainees, and he labeled waterboarding as “torture.” Kiriakou’s interview revealed that this practice was official U.S. policy and had been approved personally by the President. The Justice Department began investigating Kiriakou immediately after his media appearance. Five years later, he was charged with multiple felonies resulting from his whistleblowing. Eventually, in order to avoid a trial that could have resulted in separation from his wife and five children for up to 45 years, he opted to plead guilty to one count of a reduced charge in exchange for a 30-month sentence. He served 23 months. He is now an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Gavin MacFadyen was a long term investigative producer in British television. He founded the Centre for Investigative Journalism in 2003 at City University and now at Goldsmiths, the University of London. CIJ brought data journalism, sophisticated internet research and security solutions, forensic accounting, covert recording and cross-border collaborations to 1100 journalists in 36 countries. MacFadyen helped establish the Bureau of Investigative Journalism whose Drones and Iraq War Logs investigations won Amnesty International awards; he co-founded The Whistler, a leading UK whistleblower support and defense group; and in December 2014, he launched the inaugural Logan Symposium on Surveillance, Secrecy and Censorship to begin an alliance of journalists and hactivists in defense of social justice, personal and press freedom and accountability.
Chase Madar is a human rights attorney and member of the National Lawyers Guild in New York, where he specializes in youth law, LGBT law and disability law. He is author of the recent book The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the WikiLeaks Whistleblower. He reviews and reports for the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, TomDispatch, The American Conservative magazine, CounterPunch, Al Jazeera and The Times Literary Supplement.
Rania Masri is a human rights activist, environmental scientist, university professor and writer. Since 2005, she has been chair of the Environmental Sciences Department at the University of Balamand in Lebanon. Before then, Masri directed the Southern Peace Research and Education Center at the Institute for Southern Studies in North Carolina. She has been active against the U.S. war efforts in the Middle East. Since May 2013, she has been representing a growing coalition of North Carolina social justice organizations against war.
Robert McChesney is among the most widely read and honored communication scholars in the world today. He is Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Communication Department, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 2002 he co-founded Free Press, a national media reform organization, and served as its president until 2008; he remains on its board of directors. McChesney has written or edited 27 books. His most recent are Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America (with John Nichols) and Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Away from Democracy. His 2002 book Rich Media, Poor Democracy was awarded the ICA Fellows Book Award. He received (with John Nichols) the Newspaper Guild’s 2010 Herbert Block Freedom Award.
Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst turned political activist and speaker, chaired the National Intelligence Estimates in the 1980s. He prepared the daily briefs for presidents from John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush. For his CIA service he received the Intelligence Commendation Medal, which he returned in 2006 in protest of the CIA’s involvement in torture. In 2003, he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an organization committed to analyzing and criticizing the use of intelligence. McGovern was one of four American whistleblowers who met with Edward Snowden in Russia in 2013 to present Snowden with an award for integrity in intelligence for providing NSA documents to the press.
Gwendolyn Mink is an independent scholar based in Washington, D.C. Her academic and advocacy work focuses on poverty policy, equality law, gender issues and American politics. A political scientist, she was on the faculty at the University of California-Santa Cruz from 1980-2001 and at Smith College from 2001-2007. Her books include The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942 and Welfare’s End. She also co-edited The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History and Poverty: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, and Policy.
Maegan Ortiz is a Los Angeles-based independent media maker, freelance writer and organizer, who contributes to a number of media outlets, including El Diario la Prensa, Make/shift, Latina, the New York Daily News and The American Prospect. For the last six years she has written on Latino politics and culture on VivirLatino.com and for more than 10 years has written on her personal blog. As a performance artist and poet she has been featured at the PANIC! series in New York, Poetas en Nueva York colectivo, Clemente Soto Velez theater, Agueybana bookstore, el Museo del Barrio, Woodlawn Cemetery and on the Make/shift RecLAmations tour in Los Angeles and New York.
Robert Parry is an investigative journalist who broke many of the Iran-Contra scandal stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, including articles on the Central Intelligence Agency manual provided to the Nicaraguan Contras and on CIA/Contras cocaine trafficking in the United States. He is editor and regular writer on U.S. foreign and military policy issues for Consortiumnews.com, which he founded in 1995 as the Internet’s first investigative magazine. Parry was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984. He has written several books, most recently America’s Stolen Narrative: From Washington and Madison to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes to Obama.
Sharmini Peries is a journalist and executive producer at The Real News Network. She harnesses the power of research and policy institutions, independent media, social movements, universities, and academics to form strategic partnerships for innovative programming at TRNN. Prior to joining TRNN, she served as the executive director of The International Freedom of Expression Exchange, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, the Royal Commission on Systemic Racism in the Criminal Justice System, the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants and managed the Human Rights Code Review Task Force in Ontario. Peries also worked as Economic and Trade Advisor to President Chavez and the government of Venezuela from 2003-2007. She has an MA and PhD (EBD) from York University (Canada).
Todd Pierce is an attorney and a retired U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps Officer. He served as a military defense counsel before the Military Commissions on teams representing three Guantanamo clients. He remains involved with Guantanamo related issues as counsel on a Guantanamo case currently before the appellate courts as well as consulting on related human rights cases. He writes as a critic of U.S. foreign and national security policy, regularly contributing to Consortiumnews.com, antiwar.com, and mondoweiss.net, and other media. He is a member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is also the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut. His books include Arab Spring, Libyan Winter; Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today; Karma of Brown Folk; Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting;The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Prashad writes for Frontline and The Hindu. In addition, his writings can be found in the websites Newsclick and CounterPunch, as well as in the magazine Himal.
Nomi Prins is a journalist, author and speaker who previously worked on Wall Street as a Goldman Sachs managing director, following stints at Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Chase Manhattan. She is currently a senior fellow at the nonpartisan public policy think-tank Demos. Her book All the Presidents’ Bankers was published in Spring 2014. She also authored It Takes a Pillage, which predicted the current financial crisis and was chosen a Best Book of 2004 by The Economist, Barron’s and Library Journal. Prins has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV programs nationally and internationally, and has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Truthdig, Fortune, The Guardian and The Nation.
Michael Ratner served as legal adviser to ExposeFacts.org. He was president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, based in Berlin. Ratner was an attorney for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He was co-counsel representing Guantanamo Bay detainees in the U.S. Supreme Court where, in June 2004, the court decided his clients have the right to test the legality of their detentions in court. Ratner was president of the National Lawyers Guild and the author of numerous books and articles, including The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book and Guantanamo: What the World Should Know.
Coleen Rowley, an attorney and former FBI special agent and division counsel whose May 2002 memo to the FBI Director exposed some of the agency’s pre-9/11 failures, was one of three whistleblowers named as Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. In February 2003, Rowley again wrote to the FBI Director questioning him and other Bush administration officials about the reliability of supposed evidence being used to justify the impending U.S invasion of Iraq. Under sharp criticism for her comments, Rowley stepped down from her legal position to go back to being an FBI Special Agent. She retired from the FBI in 2004 after 24 years with the agency.
Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based investigative journalist who is the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence. Over the past 35 years, his work has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including The Nation, Salon, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, The Progressive, Foreign Policy in Focus and Asia Times. He appears frequently on the radio as a commentator on intelligence, contracting, foreign policy, East Asia and North and South Korea. He has been interviewed on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” “Democracy Now!” and many other outlets.
Fernando Andres Torres is a short-story writer, poet and journalist, currently contributing to various San Francisco Bay Area media including El Mensajero, San Francisco Bay Guardian, La Voz de Richmond and Radio Bilingue. He is associate editor and U.S. correspondent for the web magazine Dilemas.cl. Under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, Torres joined the Chilean resistance. In 1975 he was arrested by the regime’s secret police. While imprisoned, he recited poetry and handwrote messages with quotes about optimism and hope to pass among fellow prisoners. After being expelled and exiled, he continued to write poetry and short stories. Torres is currently writing a book of short stories based on his experiences as a political prisoner.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department, spent a year in Iraq. Following his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, the Department of State began proceedings against him. Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren instead retired from the State Department on his own terms. Van Buren’s commentary has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, The Nation, TomDispatch, Antiwar.com, American Conservative Magazine, Mother Jones, Michael Moore.com, Le Monde, FireDogLake and more. His latest book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, is a gritty look at the end of the American Dream.
Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including the Guardian, Salon, and the Progressive, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and live-blogged the Scooter Libby trial. She is best known for weedy analysis of legal documents on counterterrorism programs. She won the 2009 Hillman Award for blog journalism.
J. Kirk Wiebe is a retired National Security Agency whistleblower who worked at the agency for over 32 years. During his tenure there, he received the Director CIA’s Meritorious Unit Award and the NSA’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award – that Agency’s second highest distinction – for work against foreign strategic weapons systems. Wiebe’s colleague William Binney developed the ThinThread information processing system that, arguably, could have detected and prevented the 9/11 terrorist attacks. NSA officials, though, ignored the program in favor of Trailblazer, a program that ended in total failure in 2005 with costs of billions of dollars. Wiebe, together with colleagues William Binney, Diane Roark (former HPSCI senior staffer), and Ed Loomis (former NSA computer systems analyst) blew the whistle on NSA mismanagement and waste of billions of dollars on Trailblazer in a complaint to the Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG), but to no avail. Post 9/11, the NSA used ThinThread to illegally spy on U.S. citizens’ communications. Unable to stay at NSA any longer in good conscience, Wiebe, along with colleagues Binney and Loomis retired in October 2001. Since retiring, Wiebe has made several key public disclosures regarding NSA’s massive surveillance program subverting the U.S. Constitution.
Ann Wright is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, a 29-year veteran of the Army and Army Reserves, and one of three State Department officials to publicly resign in protest of the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. As a State Department diplomat, Wright was stationed in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She is co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience. Wright was on the May 2010 Freedom Flotilla I, attacked by the Israeli military, and was an organizer for the U.S. boat to Gaza in the 2011 Freedom Flotilla II.
