It can be so difficult to get people to think about systemic institutional problems. It is easier just to see the actions of one or two people and say, "That's wrong!"

Investigative journalism and reporting has become much more dangerous. This is especially true for journalists and sources in National Security - but it has been getting pretty bad for beat reporters and small outlets doing local reporting, too.

I lived a few miles outside of a tiny town in central Oklahoma. I would often run amok though the fields of wheat, the patches of trees, along the railroad tracks, and on red dirt roads. This had a profound effect on my view of the world - vast, open-ended, full of opportunity, and ready for exploration.

I think it's actually kind of sweet how there is a reciprocal effect that our stories can have on each other.

As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan.

I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.

There are very few distinctions between el bueno and el malo en la prisión militar. Instead of the good and the bad, there is the boring and la repetición - the repetitive. The routine is as endless as it is numbing.