Douglas Farah is a national security and terror finance consultant and a frequent guest lecturer to the U.S military and intelligence community. He is a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center and an adjunct fellow in the Americas Program at CSIS. He worked for two decades as a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter, mostly for the Washington Post, covering armed conflicts, drug trafficking and organized crime in Latin America and West Africa. As West Africa bureau chief of the Washington Post in 2001, he broke the story of al Qaeda’s ties to the “blood diamond” trade.

He is the author of “Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror” (Broadway 2004) and his writings have appeared in The New Republic, Foreign Policy Magazine, Men’s Vogue, Mother Jones, The Financial Times, The American Journalism Review, The Washington Post Magazine and other publications. He won the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for a series on death squads in El Salvador and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for his coverage of Latin America.

Stephen Braun was based in Washington for the Associated Press, where he has worked as a national investigative reporter and as AP’s National Security Editor. Previously, he was a national correspondent based in Washington for the Los Angeles Times. He shared in the Times’ 1991 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Los Angeles riots and a 2002 Overseas Press Club international reporting award for “Inside al Qaeda,” a series of stories about the rise of the terror group. His reportage has ranged from presidential politics and investigations to foreign and domestic terrorism, and he has covered many landmark American news stories of the past two decades, including the Sept. 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina and five national elections.

As a Times national correspondent from 1993 to 2008, Braun covered national affairs and the Midwest from Chicago, then transferred to Washington, where his work included national politics, international investigations and national affairs. Before joining the Times national staff, he worked on the paper’s metropolitan desk in Los Angeles as an editor and staff writer. He also reported at the Detroit Free Press, Philadelphia Daily News and Baltimore News American, where he was a Pulitzer finalist in 1981. A 1975 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he has written for Foreign Policy Magazine, Men’s Vogue, Rolling Stone, the Washington Monthly and Los Angeles Times Magazine.