Iraq & Afganistan Wars

Stuart Bowen is the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. His office has just released its seventh Quarterly Report to Congress. The report documents how $30 billion set aside for Iraqi reconstruction was spent — and how to prevent waste and fraud. Bowen has served in the post since October 2004. Formerly, he served in the White House and was a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Patton Boggs LLP. Bowen's ties to Bush go back to the early 1990s, when he worked in the Texas governor's office. Bowen was also an intelligence officer in the U.S.

Writers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon are the co-authors of The Next Attack: The Failure Of The War On Terror and a Strategy For Getting it Right. The book criticizes the Bush administration's responses to the terror attacks of Sept 11, 2001.

A need for foreign workers in Iraq -- and the flood of American dollars into the country -- have created a labor network that critics call misleading, illegal and even dangerous. Chicago Tribune correspondent Cam Simpson retraced the fatal journey of 12 men from Nepal.

Army National Guardsman Jason Christopher Hartley. While serving in Iraq, Hartley kept a blog of his experiences until his commanders forced him to shut it down. He’s now back from Iraq, and has a new memoir, “Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq” (HarperCollins).

New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins has been covering Iraq... thoroughly. In April he received the George Polk Award for War Reporting for his riveting, first-hand account of an eight-day attack on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah.

Anthony Shadid's new book is Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War. Shadid is the Baghdad correspondent for The Washington Post. The book culls stories from Shadid's many visits to Iraq over the past eight years.

Kayla Williams is a former U.S. Army soldier who served in the Middle East as an Arabic interpreter. She recounts her decision to enlist and her experiences during the Iraq war in a new memoir, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army. Williams was a sergeant in a military intelligence company of the 101st Airborne Division.

Dr. Francis DuFrayne is a gastroenterologist in his 50s at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He is also a captain in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He recently returned from a six-month tour of duty in Iraq, where he was called up to treat wounded soldiers. While he was in Iraq, his son was also serving there in the Marines.

Francis DuFrayne, Jr., is a captain in the Marine Corps reserve. He is the son of Dr. Francis DuFrayne. He is now a research associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., after his service in Iraq.

British journalist Michael Smith writes about defense issues for the Sunday Times of London. He's the journalist to whom the so-called Downing Street memo was leaked. The memo -- the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting of Britain's War Cabinet -- reveals that President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair began the war on the Iraq before Bush received congressional approval and before a U.N. vote.

Jack Coughlin, a gunnery sergeant in the Marines, is the author of the new book Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper. He grew up in a wealthy Boston suburb and joined the Marines at age 19, spending the next 20 years behind the scope of a long-range rifle as a sniper. He has more than 60 confirmed kills, 38 of which took place during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Dr. Chester Buckenmaier is chief of the Regional Anesthesia and Pain Management Initiative at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He is developing a procedure known as regional anesthesia, to manage the severe pain that many wounded soldiers experience. Buckenmaier spent time in Iraq working in a battlefield hospital, where he pioneered the technique, and is using it at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

In April, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins will receive the George Polk Award for War Reporting for "his riveting, first-hand account of an eight-day attack on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah." We talk with him about the rebuilding country and its recent elections.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid is a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Daily Telegraph, reporting on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia . He is also author of Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia and the bestseller, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.

Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch. He says the Justice Department's decision not to have the Geneva Conventions apply to Taliban and al Qaeda detainees has opened the door to the abuse of prisoners elsewhere.

John Yoo is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel of the Dept. of Justice. He wrote some of the memos in the new book The Torture Papers, including some pertaining to the Geneva Conventions and the definition of torture. He signed off on the memo denying prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conventions to al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Yoo is currently a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley.

A new book compiles U.S. memos and reports on the interrogation and treatment of detainees in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib was edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel.

New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins recently accompanied the Marines of Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines for eight days in November as they took over Fallujah.

Anderson writes the Letters from Baghdad column for The New Yorker magazine. His new book is The Fall of Baghdad. Anderson's conversations with people in Iraq, including an artist, a driver and a plastic surgeon, as well as his travels around the country, formed the basis of his new book.

Hersh's reporting in The New Yorker broke the story of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. His new book is Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. He won a Pulitzer prize 35 years ago when he first reported the story of the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam.