Syria and other conflict zones. First that i far right is janin di giovanni, newsweeks middle east editor and contributing editor at vanity fair. At the start of her journalistic career, janine covered the first intifada in the 1960s good since then, she has reported on turmoil in civil conflicts throughout the middle east and beyond. In her latest book, the morning they came for us, she chronicles the root series in seven different if she provides a vivid picture of a ravaged nation experienced by citizens. Among them, a nun, dr. , musician and student. Their stories convey realities from the pervasive spoke to the hunger, to return of such previously vanquished diseases as typhus and polio. Next to janine is someone, chief correspondent for the sunday times. Christinas introduction to conflict reporting also came in the late 1980s, but in pakistan and afghanistan. Her journalism has since taken her far and wide including assignment in brazil, south africa, zimbabwe and iraq. The 9 11 attacks, she has spent quite a bit of time in afghanistan. She cowrote i am a law love and her new book, farewell kabul, highlights the errors and miscalculations made by the United States and allies in the war in afghanistan and argues that the world has been left more, not less dangerous since 9 11. Our third author is cam barker, whose book the taliban and shuffle about her reporting in afghanistan and pakistan served as the basis for the recent movie whiskey tango foxtrot, starring tina fay. Kims first reported jobs were papers in indiana and Washington State after joining the Chicago Tribune in 2001, she ended up going abroad and spent five years in 20042009 as the south asia bureau chief based in new delhi and islamabad. She now writes for the New York Times. A times review of her book called it both hilarious and harrowing, two contrasting adjectives that also sum up the frequently mixed experience of war reporting. Moderating discussion by this Impressive Group of panelists will be mary jordan. Herself a pulitzer prizewinning journalist with the Washington Post, mary was based abroad for 14 years in tokyo, mexico city and london and she is currently covering the president ial campaign. You need that foreign experience. [laughter] she told me as we were walking in the she just interviewed donald trump today. You might want to ask about that. Anyway, we are sort of heading off track, arent we . Marries most recent book, which she cowrote with her husband, Kevin Sullivan, also at the Washington Post is titled hope, the memoir into cleveland and chronicled the torment of the women held captive in a home in cleveland by ariel castro. It is a gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our panel. [applause] i really feel like i had dinner at three different nights star restaurants tonight. Its impossible to do justice to the careers of these three women, but we are sure going to have fun trying. [inaudible] the estimate to brookings. As a testament to love the work that youve done im very proud. Im going to ask first before we get into other things how did this happen . Others want to run facebook. Why did you want to go forward . Well, i never wanted to be a journalist. I was an academic and i was doing my masters degree in comparative literature in russian and french literature, completely different. I wanted to be a professor in right novels and literary criticism. One day i saw a photograph of an israeli soldier buried in a teenager alive with a bulldozer of sand and the article was about a human rights lawyer who was a jewish holocaust survivor, who was one of the few israeli lawyers than defending palestinian and military court. And it was providence. I flew to israel. I matter. She took me under her wing and i feel like i went through a door that i could never go back again and never finished my phd. She said to me if you have the ability to give a voice to people who do not have a voice, you do not have an obligation. This is haunted by injustice and that i could as a journalist have some condos in pass. The war in bosnia came and that opened a whole other scenario for my colleagues and i could did you grow up knowing . [inaudible] i always want to write. I want to have adventures, but basically i became as a result of an invitation to a wedding and what happened after i left the university of work has been in turn. One day they went to the south asian politicians and couldnt go. He said why didnt you go to this once, so i went and sat next to somebody who is secretarygeneral of the pakistan people and he asked me if i would like to interview that began monday in an exile at the time. I said yes. The day that i went was the day that she announced her engagement so the department was full of dallas. She was very good at turning particularly men. She went back to pakistan. I went to work as a trainee for a British Tv Company that they were doing shows in things like that. One day i came home from work and there was this absolutely beautiful old inscribed indication and it was to benefit weddings in pakistan. Of course i went. It was just the most amazing introduction to pakistan. It was like something out of arabian nights. They go for a very long time. Theyre very colorful and each evening after the ceremonial event, there were discussiodiscussio ns about how to take on pakistans military and all of her colleagues were people who had been tear gassed, imprisoned in the most dangerous thing i ever had to deal with was finding my way home after missing the last train in london. I was fascinated that came back and then im going to live in pakistan and everybody went to talk to, other foreign entities that were not interested in pakistan and nothings going to change. But we are interested in afghanistan because why dont you go and cover that . So being 21 i agreed and the last story i ever did as a man who turned his car back to france like it is Going Forward when it was going backward. I dont think it was a great loss to british tv. We will go back to israeli because he went on to many other places. Tell us how your story is equally different from these two. I always knew i wanted to be a journalist. Ever since i took a journalism class and i thought, what a great column. The whole idea that i could get out of class until my friends out of class and ask questions and write about it just seemed like the greatest job in the world. So id never thought about being a Foreign Correspondent. We didnt travel anywhere. I grew up not the richest person in the world whenever he fared went to canada coronet. We said local to wyoming and montana. After 9 11 i was the Chicago Tribune and there were other people volunteering to go and be with the these desks sort of an yacht added this person would go try it. I kind of felt not that i want to be aware correspondent, busy as i could could cover the biggest story in the world. I didnt know that i would end up falling in love with it and end up staying for so long. But i did actually volunteer for going overseas when i heard that they were going to try to send my women overseas because we havent tried out a lot of women. At one point i went out with a female friend and i both wanted to cover 9 11 and we counted the number of men who had been sent out the number one in 10 to 17 men and one woman. I wanted to also true that a woman could do it. I was trying to figure out how i could distinguish myself from the other female volunteers when i heard they were looking to send my women overseas. I dont speak any foreign languages. I hadnt even been to europe. I went in with the biggest argument i had, which was i introduced myself and that im cam barker, mr. Reporter. I am single and childless and therefore i am expendable. I did say that. He laughed and i said i go anywhere you want to send me. He was like youre ready to go to pakistan. I called my parents that im going to pakistan. Why on earth would anyone send you to pakistan. Turns out they were wrong. I work for a month later. When i got posted first to tokyo, i called my mother and it was a big deal. My mom does so now, what did you do wrong. But they reduce something camera to do a bit of flavor for how she writes. Afghanistan felt more like home than anywhere else in the region. I knew why. Afghanistan seemed familiar. It had jagged blue and purple mountains, big skies and bearded men in pickup trucks stocked with god and hate for the government. It was like montana. [laughter] just on different drugs. Lets go back for a second. At one point shes talking in the book, the phone rings. Taliban calls that the wrong time. How do you balance kind that he had to stand up comedy . This is on cspan. Just ask me the question weve ever gotten. I think any journalist, just like when youre a police officer, emergency room doctor. Anybody has to go trauma. Use dark comedy to deal with horrible things. Just because youre in a war zone and people are being killed doesnt mean you stop living your life and people stop having small moments. Laughter is a way to bring people together. I guess its also because my dad really propping up watching m a s h. We didnt go to church every week. I was like i hate that show. The war that lasted a couple years of the worst lasting 25. Its almost like i read one of the first authors i read this Kurt Vonnegut and absurd the whole idea of dark comedy being a good way to talk about lawyer and there used to be a tradition until there is no more draft and once the draft staff the draft staff comment like this whole idea now that everybody doesnt know his going to war, you cant make jokes. You cant talk about how people really live over there. It is all this reverence for the idea of war and everybody fighting all the time, which is just not factual. Through humor and was like you could picture you there and get your giving us so much information. I think thats why the reviews have been through the roof about your book. I have have to ask, what with tina fey like . She is serious. I think im actually funnier. No, im kidding. Tina is really incredibly generous. I didnt spend a lot of time with her, but they ended up filming the movie because i think there are two kinds of actors. The ones who like to spend a lot of time with somebody and inhabit them and the ones who like to take a character and make it their own, almost like you dont want to spend any time with that person. We just had a long lunch, which i remember complaining about high heels really. And then she told me a story that was really funny and is proud of myself that i couldnt remember for the life of me with the story of ice. I said something that made tina fey laughed and i dont member what it buys. Im sad she was really kind to me. During the whole process, every single time she was on a latenight show, she would mention my name and my book, the original title by name. I think my publisher was thinking the movie that has her face on the cover and its called whiskey tango foxtrot would end up eclipsing the taliban shuffle because of the movie. Because she mentioned it so much, it started selling on all the time on amazon. I cant say enough nice things about her. Shes a very large supporter of women and i really benefited from that. Lets go back. It used to be there were not that many were correspondent that were female. Right now the Washington Post has quite a few and a lot of other people do too. Melissa rubin, pulitzer for the New York Times covering afghan women. It is very different. Lets talk about how the woman in a war zone affects reporting. [inaudible] there are very few women and the women in the field, in my case in the middle east were very friendly to other women. I think because of the soap additives, so mail, so driven that there was a great sent to competition. I think now its radically changed. Ive asked this question over and over again demanded women report in different ways . Its very in visual. Im a human rights reporter. I go in the field i spend a lot time with people, and im a terrible script reporter or sensationalist reporter. Im not good at going and getting finding the mother of the last great in sierra leone or Something Like that. I need to spend a long time. We were talking earlier about the war in bosnia. Bosnia was the watershed on at the changed reporting in our generation. Basically our generations vietnam. It is a time when a small group of us were very, very committed to effective policy and we thought we were not going to let this genocide happened on our watch and we stuck it out. We lived in sarajevo during the siege that the people. We were sniped, shelled, starved, didnt have food, didnt have water. Yet we did something that im very proud of and i feel like everyone in that war and that war and covered that war feels that a change their lives forever and their style of reporting. We all felt very committed. Thats why you want to drive syria home right now that its a slowmotion genocide, very similar to sarajevo that we were calling out must be stopped, the world must Pay Attention to it. Now i live in paris and coming to america for the past two weeks on the spoke to her, im amazed by how little attention its getting. There are people being slaughtered. And a lot the last week hospital where i work, alcoas Hospital Committee on the pediatrician was killed. The first responders, the waythomas were the bravest people in the world. We are not the bravest people in the world. They are. They did people out of the rubble. Five of them were killed. The gynecologist who delivers the babys bliss killed in aleppo. Youre traditionally has more interest. I do understand that, but i else that ink cereus seems so remote, but so did half the and there is a genocide of 8000 men and boys. They said it would never happen again and its happening now. Lets get back to some of the atrocities because jeannine spoke is just harrowing. She spent a lot of time with different people and indelible images of really horrible things that happened. Back to the question about two women bring something to correspondents, especially that you wouldnt get otherwise . Theres been lots of talk about women. Are they different are they untrendy debris sent david and the were correspondent . Yeah, women and men report quite differently. No reporters focused much more on the actual fight, the bang bang if you like. I can tell a difference between incoming and outgoing, but i cant really tell you very well what kind of weapons are being fired. What i focus on is the people behind the lines, the people who are living the war. When you see one on tv, it looks like everything is fighting. When you actually go to the country as commander in millions of people still living their lives, trying to educate their children, trying to feed them and protect them and is generally tend to be the women. Women focus on map war. I spent most of my career in the middle east and in most countries impossible for male reporters to go in to the womens quarter. So i am getting access to gravesite in a way a lot of my male colleagues or not. My husband, Kevin Sullivan spent a lot of a lot of time in four countries. Even the coffee shop, the women are ones that come in and on the other and of course he felt cut off from a lot of the women. It is clearly an upside to have women reporters there. What are the downsides . Are there downsides . You know, you get this question all the time. Ive never reported as a man so its difficult. I feel somehow you could. [laughter] its difficult for me to say but different. Sure, there are downsides because, you know, when you are living over there, youve got to be careful with what you are doing. Its been books written like emergency sex. During wanted me to talk about that. You really couldnt live like that if they wanted because you have to be really careful. The emergency part it is a book. It has nothing to do with anything else. Nothing actually that happens. You dont have to worry about it. A book that came out. You have to be really protective of their reputation in a way i dont think milk journalists had to. You always have to be careful who you are going out with, what time you came home because you were working with afghans a lot of the time and you had to make sure they wanted to protect you. Therefore you must have this obligation to refute the idea of being this western buddhist woman. Outcome up a lot of times. It came up in pakistan, india and afghanistan. All of us where you think youre being friendly to people and then you start getting phone calls in the middle of the night. You can turn your phone off because your editor is my call. They call during ramadan at 4 00 in the morning. Its like i love you. You are like things but i need some sleep. You couldnt turn your phone off. Its irritations like that. Irritations have been grabbed in public. I read a lot about the fact. Im tall. Im fivefoot 10 and i didnt punch out a lot of guys because they got your two dead and i would just start punching them. That was dangerous. Obviously my guy didnt like that because he would get in trouble for that. I found out that grab it happened equally in so i dont like it. How did they react to the punch . They did like it. [laughter] manages ran away . Yeah. And then there was funny. The Prime Minister of pakistan by admin iphone. All of us have had similar experiences. After the book came out, this is really unprofessional. I dont think youre allowed to be off the record when you are hitting on somebody. I think that is on the record. I also felt that writing about that stuff shows up be a very religious man in public. Behind the scenes, this is okay to behave this way with women. At the moment. Everyone says the difference, i was presented when they say women cover orphanages and hospitals and then cover war because ive done a lot of frontline staff. Im not interested in god, but ive done a lot of military work. The moment it really changes for me personally was when i had a child is not true to life completely because i know my male colleagues have children some of them is to say that you are entering the club where youre going to read bedtime stories by satellite phone. This is a risk saying this, but for women its very different because we carry the child, we give birth and there was this extraordinary bond. Ill never forget when my son was six old, my old paper, the times, which is not the most sensitive paper in the world to women, my editor liberal they sent me back to iraq where he had been living for two years covering saddam and the invasion and the water. I was still breastfeeding and i didnt want to go and beg them not to send me that they use their claws in my contract to send me. They said weve got a war reporter that will g