Iraq & Afganistan Wars

The name is a pseudonym, which combines the Arabic and Latin words for peace. Pax's web log is still going on today. Peter Maass of the online magazine Slate said Pax was "the Anne Frank of this war ... and its Elvis. Pax's diary entries have been collected in book form in the forthcoming The Baghdad Blog.

Katz is the features editor at the Guardian in London. He traced and verified the identity of the Baghdad blogger, who created an Internet diary about life in Iraq a few months before the recent war began.

A talk with foreign correspondent Elizabeth Rubin. Rubin writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly. She has reported from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Iraq.

From May of this year until September, he was in Iraq helping with the reconstruction of the Iraqi police, forming a special enforcement and investigations team, developing informants and arresting individuals on the coalition forces wanted list (those whose faces showed up on the most-wanted deck of cards). Shubbar was born and raised in Baghdad, and fled the country in 1981.

Sennott covered the war in Iraq, but not as an imbedded reporter. He talks about his recent return to Iraq and also discusses the relationship between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are about to meet in London. Sennott is the London bureau chief for The Boston Globe. Sennott is also the author of the book The Body and The Blood: The Holy Land's Christians At the Turn of a New Millennium.

We catch up with him about the latest news from Iraq. He's in the United States for just one day, and then he goes back to Baghdad. Burns has won several Pulitzer Prizes for his overseas war reports.

Journalist Vernon Loeb covers the military for The Washington Post. He just returned from five weeks in Iraq. He discusses the situation there and the capture of Saddam Hussein.

John Sifton serves as Afghanistan researcher with Human Rights Watch. His articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine and the International Herald Tribune. Since 2001, he has made nine trips to Afghanistan. Sifton is also an attorney.

In this week's New York Times Magazine cover story (Sunday, Jan. 11) he writes about Maj. John Nagl, a professor at West Point and a counterinsurgency expert who is putting into practice for the first time his theories about counterinsurgency. He is in Iraq with a tank battalion in the Sunni Triangle.

Coll is managing editor of The Washington Post. His new book is Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Coll previously covered Afghanistan for the Post and was the paper's South Asia bureau chief between 1989 and 1992. He won the Pulitzer in 1990 for explanatory journalism.

Engel was the only American television correspondent who was in Baghdad before, during and after the war. On the next Fresh Air, Engel talks about how he bribed officials, woke to gunfire and witnessed atrocities of battle. His new book is A Fist in the Hornet's Nest.

He's now the area security manager for KBR, a division of Halliburton, a private military firm. Vargas has been stationed in Tikrit, Iraq, for the past year. He talks about the capture of Saddam Hussein, which took place in Tikrit. Vargas is a retired Command Sergeant Major of the U.S. Special Forces. He's written the foreword to the new book Hunting Down Saddam: the Inside Story of the Search and Capture, by Robin Moore.

In his new book, Disarming Iraq, Blix writes about what happened in the months leading up to the war in Iraq last year. Blix, formerly the head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, has been named chairman of the newly formed International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which began its work in January 2004.

Cole is an authority on modern Islamic movements. He is professor of modern Middle East and South Asia history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book is Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi`ite Islam. The book collects some of his work on the history of the Shiite branch of Islam in modern Iraq, Iran and the Persian Gulf region.

Woodward's new book Plan of Attack is a behind-the-scenes look at how and why the Bush administration decided to wage war in Iraq. Woodward interviewed more than 70 government officials for the book, including President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Woodward is the author of a number of best-selling books, including Bush at War and his first, All the President's Men, written in 1974 with Carl Bernstein about Watergate.

Shadid is Islamic affairs correspondent for The Washington Post. For more than a year now he has reported from Baghdad and has just returned to the United States. He just received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Before working for the Post, Shadid was a correspondent at The Boston Globe's Washington bureau. He spent nine years with The Associated Press, five of them in Cairo. He is the author of Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam.

Singer, an analyst at The Brookings Institution, is the author of the book Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. He'll discuss the use of private military contractors in Iraq, especially in light of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison where civilian military contractors were involved in interrogations. Singer is an Olin Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and coordinator of the Brookings Project on U.S. Policy Towards the Islamic World.

Wilson is a former career diplomat, serving from 1976 to 1998. He had diplomatic posts throughout Africa and was ambassador to Gabon. Wilson was the acting ambassador to Baghdad when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. President George W. Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union address, stated that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But in February 2002 Wilson investigated reports of Iraq's attempt to buy uranium from Niger, and found no evidence of such an attempt.

In addition to editing The Weekly Standard, Kristol chairs the neo-conservative group called Project for the New American Century. Kristol is also one of the architects of the blueprint for regime change found in the document Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources For A New Century. He advocated regime change in Iraq before Sept. 11.

Bamford is the former investigative producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. He's the author of the bestsellers Body of Secrets and The Puzzle Palace. He's also written investigative cover stories for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. His new book is A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies.