Award-Winning Investigative Reporter Headlines ABA Law and National Security Event

WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 24, 2011 — Dana Priest, investigative reporter for the Washington Post, will speak at the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Law and National Security breakfast program March 3 at the University Club in Washington, D.C., from 8 – 9 a.m. She will talk about the relationship between the media and the national security world, including secrecy in the government, disclosures of classified information by the media, WikiLeaks, the Post and leak prosecutions.

Priest has written extensively on the CIA’s covert counterterrorism operations around the world, the agency’s secret rendition and detention practices, the intelligence lapses involving the 9/11 plot and the failure of pre-war intelligence in Iraq. Her widely acclaimed 2003 book about the military’s expanding responsibility and influence, “The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military,” earned the New York Public Library Bernstein Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction. She most recently was named the winner of the 2010 George Polk Award for National Reporting for her four-part series with William M. Arkin on the national security buildup in America since 9/11.

Priest was the Post’s intelligence reporter for three years and its Pentagon correspondent for seven years before that. She covered the invasion of Panama (1989), reported from Iraq (1990), covered the Kosovo war (1999), and has traveled widely with Army Special Forces in Asia, Africa and South America, and with Army infantry units on peacekeeping duty in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan
She is a board member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and holds a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Who:
Dana Priest
Investigative Reporter, Washington Post

What:
Standing Committee on Law and National Security Breakfast Program
Sponsored by the ABA Standing Committee on Law & National Security

When:
March 3, 8 – 9 a.m.

Where:

University Club
1135 16th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C.

For media credentialing, please contact Alexandra Buller at Alexandra.Buller@Americanbar.org. There is no charge for media to attend this event.

With nearly 400,000 members, the American Bar Association is the largest voluntary professional membership organization in the world.  As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education, and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law.

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