Talk about reporting during wartime, both domestically and internationally. John good afternoon and welcome. Im john darnton, the curator of the george polk awards. It is my pleasure to announce the winners for the most outstanding works of journalism in 2019. I would like to express my gratitude to long island university, the sponsor, and in particular, dr. Kimberly klein, liu president , for her unflagging support. I want to thank my friend and colleague ralph engelman, our faculty coordinator. As many of you know, our awards were established in 1949 to commemorate george polk. The cbs correspondent assassinated the year before during the greek civil war. We are now in our 71st year, having bestowed as of today 3125 prizes. In keeping with his legacy, our judges honor reporters whenever possible and not just their news organizations. We seek out those who are dogged in their investigations, resourceful in their tactics, and intrepid in overcoming the odds, whether it is sending dispatches from a battlefield or exposing corruption at city hall. We like stories that hold power to account, that reveal things that deserve to be revealed, and that carry an impact. This year, we received 561 submissions. Internationally, many of them dealt with the big stories. Wars in syria, afghanistan, and libya. The uprising in hong kong, chinas repression of the uighurs, the spread of ebola in the congo, environmental disasters, political chaos in latin america. Domestically, reporters were drawn to write about wildfires and floods, police brutality, inhumane prison conditions, the breakdown in immigration enforcement, sexual assaults in religious institutions and elsewhere, vaping, opioid addiction, and the upheavals in the trump administration. This year, we saw an increasing number of team entries. News organizations have become adept at mounting coordinated efforts of specialists to dig deeper into the issues. We also saw more partnerships among News Companies and across different media platforms. These are all to the good, but interestingly, of our 15 winners, or than half are single reporters working more or less alone. It is an indication that the mantle of george polk, a loan lone journalist, has been taken up by a new generation. Enough talk. Here are the winners. The foreign reporting award goes to ahmed for illuminating the causes of homicidal violence in central america, brazil, and the caribbean. National reporting, low make real of the Houston Chronicle, for revealing the administrations continuing use of inhumane practices in dealing with refugees. Metropolitan reporting to the staff of newsday for its series, long island divided, documenting widespread discrimination against africanamericans in suburban housing. Local reporting to Brian Rosenthal of the New York Times for uncovering the scheme in which profiteers inflated the price of taxi medallions and sold them to drivers through exorbitant loans. International reporting to mark scheffler, maliki brown, and the visual Investigations Team of the New York Times for new techniques in forensic investigation. They proved, among other things, that russian pilots bombed hospitals and other civilian targets in syria. Financial reporting to noah heyer, kevin melby, and david of Bloomberg News for revealing that developers reaped profits by using a tax break intended to help poor areas called opportunity zones to instead construct highend luxury projects. Business reporting to dominic gaetz, mike baker, and lewis can of the Seattle Times for showing how boeing and the faa cut corners in approving deadly design changes to the 737 max jets. Environmental reporting to helen a of politico for establishing that the department of agriculture squashed its own research that would help farmers adapt to climate change. Military reporting to Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post for the afghanistan papers, a report on thousands of documents from u. S. Officials, acknowledging the 18 year war is a disaster. Justice reporting to lisa gardner of the Philadelphia Inquirer for exposing the physical abuse of boys at a wellknown reformatory school. Political reporting is shared by jan swain, jonathan charman, and dion leffler of the Wichita Eagle and Luke Broadwater and staff of the Baltimore Sun for revealing municipal corruption that led to the ouster of the s respective mayors. Magazine reporting to Lily Pressler for the dispossessed, an article in the new yorker showing how speculators in the south use legal loopholes to seize blackowned ancestral lands. Television reporting to john sud worth worth of bbc news for investigating camps in western china that detained and indoctrinate the Muslim Population of uighurs. Finally, a special award to Nicole Hannah jones of the New York Times and contributors for the 1619 product, which examined the role of slavery in u. S. History and its continuing effects in contemporary society. Congratulations to all the winners. Now we have, as a special event, a Panel Discussion on the difficulties of finding truth in war. Two of this years winners are on the panel, Craig Whitlock and mark scheffler. Craig joined the postin 1999 and covers the pentagon and National Security. Mark, a writer and reporter who turned to video, is now executive producer of visual investigations at the times. We are lucky to have as our moderator, sarah ellison, the Washington Post media writer. Sarah, over to you. Sarah thank you so much, john. And thank you to craig and mark for joining us. We are lucky to have you. I wanted to note that the name of todays panel, wartime lies, secrets, and crime, we are here in washington, where so little is bipartisan, it feels like this is one area where we can say that all sides of the political spectrum share in their ability to produce wartime secrets and lies. You both have explored that in your work. I want to start a little bit with specifics of your investigations and i will start with mark. John mentioned some of your investigations into russias bombing targets of syria. I want to know, how did that start . How did you come to that topic to begin with . Mark the russians have been active in syria for years. A lot of people have known that. It has been a bit of an open secret that they were involved in air and on the ground. The critical component was not that the russians were constantly stonewalling. There were a lot of rumors about what they were involved in when it came to hitting civilian targets. Our goal was to really find out, were the russians responsible for what the International Community would consider a war crime, bombing hospitals . It is almost impossible, because in a lot of these places in syria, everybody is either evacuated or they are petrified of providing any information about what is going on. Think weeam did not would even be able to find. Ulpability we had lots of videos of air attacks. We had lots of videos of aftermath. But really, the team kept pushing and trying to figure out, how do we find out it was the russians without having somebody on the inside telling us, or god forbid the United International defense or intelligence community. They were not willing to get into this area. Was,we ended up doing theres a Network Inside syria of Early Warning spotters, a group of people that basically take it upon themselves to try and eavesdrop and keep tabs on russian air activities. We were able to using them and other sources, able to get a russian pilot transmission. The russians transmit for a number of reasons on an open russian pilots transmit on an open channel, so we obtained that material that allowed us to zero in on russian culpability. Sarah those are audio recordings. Is that what you are talking about . Mark they are recordings between russian pilots and air traffic control, communicating sorties, communicating about their bombing runs. We had several russian translators helping us decode the language and terminology that they would use. We established patterns of russian activity, corroborated with visual evidence, eyewitness accounts, help us put this portrait together of russians hitting hospitals inside the country. It was a grueling task, you are going through hours and hours of pilot transmissions, then trying to geo locate locations with timings, log activities, it was grueling work. In the end, we were able to establish that russia was doing this. As far as we were concerned, conclusively. At the times and the post, we are not in the business of adjudicating things like this, determine guilt or innocence. We would not come out and say this is a war crime, but let me say, the International Community should have plenty of evidence to make that argument. Sarah craig, you started on the afghanistan papers with a limited question. I wonder if you can share with us what that was. Craig the series of the afghanistan papers, we got a tip. The tip was about general Michael Flynn, a retired army general, in 2016, he was gaining notoriety for campaigning for donald trump and appearing at chanting locklies her up about hillary clinton. We were doing background reporting on general flynn and how he had gotten involved with the trump campaign, but also his record in the military. The tip we got was that he had given a blistering interview about the war in afghanistan with an obscure federal agency called the special Inspector General for afghanistan reconstruction. I had covered the pentagon and terry and general flynn, while politically he was controversial, in the military he was this wellknown figure for speaking truth to power and he would be critical of people in his chain of command for military intelligence matters. I thought that could be interesting if he gave an interview about the war in afghanistan, we would like to know what he said. We went to the Inspector General and said, we would like to have a transcript of the interview and thought it was a straightforward request. At first, the agency said sure, should not be a problem. We will get back to you soon. Then they started delaying and hiding things and donald trump got elected and Michael Flynn was named National Security advisor. We got word that our request was denied, they were not going to give this material about general flynn. We filed freedom of information act request, ultimately a lawsuit. We got the document and it was a blistering interview. General flynn was withering and his assessment of the war and in particular, the lack of progress the American People over the years. He said what the reality was on the ground was so different from what was being totally public, he said it was almost a crime. That got us interested. Of course general flynn was one of hundreds of people who had given similar interviews. We thought this could be an important story so we filed more requests and another lawsuit. It took three years, but ultimately we got all this Public Information available and posted it online for readers to see. We wrote a bunch of stories about it. Sarah can i ask you, from the time you got that original tip to when you obtained general flynns interview, you remember how long that took . Craig a year and a half. Sarah from that point, how did you learn there were other interviews out there . Craig we heard there were more, and the Inspector General was cagey about it, but finally acknowledged that there were hundreds more. We put a request in for those. We are pursuing these on two tracks. If we get the Michael Flynn one and when the lawsuit, the Inspector General will crop up the rest. We were wrong. We got the interview, but they double down and did not want to release the rest. We filed another lawsuit and they started trickling them out bit by bit. It took three years for them to release all the material. We are still in court to get more interviews and get the names of the people who were interviewed by the Inspector General. We were able to identify 100 people who had given interviews like general flynn, but the majority of them, the Inspector General redacted the names, did not want to make them public, we are in court and we are optimistic we will win. We think it is important that people who are in charge of the work, people who played a key role, if they were critical about the strategy and how the American People are not told the truth, the public deserves to know, there is Public Interest in knowing who those people are so they can judge for themselves the merits of what they say. Sarah i want to open this to both of you. Craig first. The Inspector General, one of the last things you did before publication was you had an interview with the Inspector General on camera. He allowed you to bring a video into his office. The way he approached at interview i would love for do to describe that and also, the broader question is, once you have your initial piece of documentary evidence, you have an interview, or you have a video, what is your process of approaching the actual story . Craig mark has a more complex response probably. For us, it is straightforward. Anybody whose name we are going to publish, we need to get comment from them in advance of publication and verify the facts we are going to report, active them a chance to respond. Particularly for people who may not want to talk, may not like what we are reporting, we were up front with the Inspector General in advance of publication. We would say, i told him and his staff, here is what we are planning to report. They were reluctant to talk because there is ongoing education with our lawsuit still pending. I went back to him multiple times and said, we are getting close to publication, this is your last chance. We would like to get your response to a whole array of questions. He decided to go on camera and we included that as part of our coverage. Sarah could you characterize for everyone the difference between that interview and what the same Inspector General told congress after publication . Craig one of the main questions i had for him, why are you withholding this material from the American Public . Why did it take three years for you to release these interviews in which people who are in charge of the war admitted that the war was a failure, they did not know what they were doing, the strategy was illconceived, many of them did not know who the enemy was, and we are talking about commanding generals. Some pretty eyeopening comments. How could you as Inspector General whose job it is to hold people accountable, how could you keep that from the public . We did not get a straight answer except he said, in some regards it was not his job, he was not supposed to deal with questions of strategy and policy. He was all over the map. It is important to emphasize, everything we did obtain is Public Information. Both from the court and the Inspector General himself. These were not leaked to us. We went the oldfashioned way under the law. This is Public Information. When the Inspector General testified before congress, he took a different tone sarah i wish we had the video. Craig at the same time, he is complaining that the pentagon and other arms of the government are keeping secret this critical information about the war, which is true, but he himself is complicit in that because he withheld information as well. Sarah correct me if i am wrong, he says there is an incentive to lie. Craig he said what was clear from the interviews that we obtained was that there is a theme that american officials were repeatedly lying about the lack of progress in the war. He said there was an incentive to lie because they all wanted to dress it up as a rosy progress, things are on the right track. In a way, he was making our case for us, saying that what we uncovered and were able to bring to light, according to him, showed without a doubt that the government of multiple administrations was blind to the American People about how the war was going. Sarah and he had not share that characterization with you prior to publication . Craig in our interview with us, he said he acknowledged that he told us he had said, this shows the American People had been lied to. He was not emphasizing at the same way, that is one of the ironies. As our stories came out, i wonder if he felt liberated to say he is critical of how the war has been handled and how they government has not been forthcoming. Sarah mark, you may have a more complicated response, because when you are reporting on a foreign government, there are not the same kinds of official avenues. But what was your interaction with the Russian Military as you were reporting that investigation . Mark it was minimal. Down any that even remotely suggests they are involved in this activity. And they do so, at least in the case of our work, in a way that suggests almost nihilisti