edward klein former editor of "the new york times" magazine argues against a clinton presidency in unlikable. media matter founder david brok runs a super pac supporting presidential campaign says there's a right-wing plot to derail hillary clinton in his book killing the messenger. several of these books have been discussed on book tv and you can find them on our website, booktv.org. >> we have a very special program this evening. not one but three very fine authors, all journalists, all seasoned in war reporters. they've written memoirs and here

to discuss their experiences in afghanistan, syria and other conflict zones. first, at my far right is janine dye giovanni, since then she's reported on turmoil and conflict in the middle east and beyond. the morning they came for us, she chronical it is war in syria by using seven different perspectives she provides picture of a nation as experienced by its citizens. among them a nun, doctor, and a student.

next to janine is cristina lamb, chief correspondent for the sunday times. like janine, cristina's instruction began in late 1980's in pakistan and afghanistan. her journalism has since taken her far and wide including assignments in brazil, south africa, similar back way and iraq but since the 9/11 attacks she's spent quite a bit of time in afghanistan. she wrote i am malala and her book highlight it is errors and miscalculations made by the united states and allies in the war in afghanistan.

our third author is kim barker whose book taliban about reporter in afghanistan and pakistan, served as the basis for the recent movie whiskey tango foxtrot starring tina fay. after joining the chicago tribune in 2001 she ended up going abroad and spent five years from 2004-2009 as the south asia bureau chief based in new delhi. times review of her book called it both hilarious and heroin, two contrasting adjectives but also sum up the frequently mixed experience of war reporting.

moderating discussion by this impressive groups of panelists will be mary jordan, herself with a prize-winning journalist, mary was abroad for 14 years, tokyo, méxico city and london and currently covering the presidential campaign. [laughter] >> you need that foreign experience. [laughter] >> she told me as we were walking in that she just interviewed donald trump today so you might want to ask her about that. anyway, we are sort of getting off track, aren't we? [laughter] >> mary's most recent book which she cowrote with her husband kevin sullivan also at the washington post is titled hope, memoir of survival in cleveland in chronical the kid napping and torment of two of the women held

captive in a home in cleveland by eriel castro, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome me in joining our panel. [applause] >> i really feel like i'm having dinner at three five-star restaurants tonight. we are sure going to have a fun time. [inaudible] >> it's a testament to working. it's a testament to all the work that you have done. i'm very proud to be up here. so i want to ask first before we get into other things, how did this happen?

you know, other kids grow up and they want to run facebook. [laughter] >> why did you wanting to -- [inaudible] >> yeah, well i never wanted to be a journalists, i was an am deck emand i was doing my master's degree when in compared literature in russian and french literature which is completely different and i wanted to be a professor and write novels possibly and literary criticism and one day i saw photograph of israeli soldier burying a palestinian teenager alive and the article was called human rights lawyer who was a jewish holocaust survivor. i flew to israel. she took me under her wing and i feel like i went to a door that never -- i could never go back

again and i basically couldn't finish my ph.d. you have an obligation and i was just taunted as injustice and i could as a journalist have some kind of impact by doing this and then the war in bosnia came and that was a whole other -- that opened a whole other scenario for my colleagues and i. [inaudible] >> cristina, so did you grow up knowing that you were going to end up -- 28 years, for 28 years you had been in afghanistan and pakistan. quite amazing. >> no, i mean, i never set out to be war correspondent. i always we wanted to write. i loved writing and i wanted to have adventures but basically i became a war correspondent as a result of an invitation to a

wedding and what happened was i started after i left the university i worked as an intern at the financial times in london. one day i was supposed to be going to lunch and last minute he couldn't go and he said why don't you go to this lunch so i went to the lunch, sat next to somebody who was general for the pakistan party and he asked me if i would like to interview who was living in london at the time. of course, i said, yes. and the day that i went to interview her was the day that she announced engagement. it was full of flowers and we got very well. particularly men, i think. she then went back to pakistan. i went to work as a trainee for

a british company and was doing kind of shows and things like that. when they came home from work and there was absolutely beautiful gold and striped invitation on my door mat and, of course, i went and it was just amazing. it was like something out of arabian nights. if you've ever been to south asian wedding, they go for a long time and colorful and eat evening after the ceremony events, discussion about how to take pakistan and all of her colleagues were people that had been tear-gassed and tortured and the most interesting was finding my way home after losing train in london. i was fascinated and came back to london and said that i was going to live in pakistan and everybody i went to talk to, we

are not interested in pakistan. general has been there for years, nothing is going to change but we are interested in afghanistan because the russians are there, so why don't you go and cover that, so being 21 at the time i agreed and the last story i ever did was a man who -- looks like it was going forward when it was going backwards. i don't think it was great lost to british tv. >> we will go back to israeli because you went onto many places but kim, tell us how you -- your story is equally different from these two about how you got in. >> i always knew i wanted to be a journalist, ever since i took journalism class and i thought what a great con, you know, the whole idea that i could get a class and pull my friends out of class and ask questions and write about it, it just seemed like to greatest job in the world. so i never thought about being a foreign correspondent, though,

we didn't travel anywhere. my parents, i grew up not the richest person in the world and we never went to canada or méxico, we always stayed local to wyoming and montana, after 9/11 happened though, i was at the chicago tribune and other people volunteering to go and you would see like the desks sort of empty out and this person would go try it and i kind of felt, not that i wanted to be a war correspondent but that i wanted to see if i could cover the biggest story of the world. and i didn't know that i would end up following in love with it and staying for so long, but i did -- i did actually volunteer for going overseas when i heard they were going to try to send women overseas because we hadn't tried out a lot of women. i went out with a female friend and we we wanted to cover 9/11, we count it had number of men sent out and the number of women and it was 11 men and one woman.

so i wanted to prove that a woman could do it. i was trying to figure out how to distinguish from female reporters when i heard they were looking to send more women overseas. and i don't speak any foreign languages, i hadn't even been to europe but i went in with the biggest argument i had which was i introduced myself and i said hello, i'm kim barker, i'm a metro reporter, i'm single and i'm childless and therefore i'm expandable. yeah. i did say that. [laughter] he laughed and he said i will two anywhere you want to send me and he was just like get ready to go to pakistan and i called my parents and said i'm going to pakistan. they said, no you're not, why on earth would anybody send you to pakistan. turns out they were wrong and i went four months later. >> when i get posted to tokyo i called my mother and it was a big deal. at the time in the 90's, oh no, what did you do wrong at work. [laughter]

>> let me read you something that kim wrote in her book and you'll get a flavor for how she writes. afghanistan felt more like home than anywhere else in the region. i knew why, afghanistan sounded, seemed familiar, it had jagged blue and purple mountains and bearded men with pickup trucks with guns and hate for the government. [laughter] >> it was like montana. just on different drugs. [laughter] >> so let's go back to you for a second, kim, and, you know, it is -- at one point she's talking in the book, the phone rings, the taliban calls at the wrong time, how do you balance kind of beheadings request stand-up comedy? [laughter] >> this is on c-span and you just asked me the hardest

question i have ever gotten. i mean, i think any journalist, it's just like when you're a police officer, an emergency room doctor, you know, anybody who has to go through trauma, anybody who grows up in afghanistan or pakistan, you use dark comedy to deal with horrible things. just because you're in a war zone, just because people are being killed doesn't mean that you stop living your life and that people stop having the small moments and laughter, i think, is a healer and a way to bring people together. and i guess it's also because my dad brought me up watching mash, we didn't go to church every week, we had to watch mash. i hate that show. you know, this war actually lasted a couple of years and the show lasted 25, you know. but, you know, and it's also like i read the first one of -- i really loved and i was just -- i sort of like, i think, you know absorbed the whole idea of

dark comedy being a good way to talk about war and talk about what's happened over there and i think there used to be a tradition over that, you know, until there was no more draft and then like once the draft stopped it's this whole idea that now that everybody doesn't know somebody that goes to war, you can't make jokes, you can't talk about how people really live over there. it's all this sort of reverence for the idea of war and that everybody is fighting all of the time and it's just not factual. >> i thought you did a brilliant job, through humor you could picture you there and yet you were giving us so much information and i think that's why the reviews have been through the roofs so congratulations. of course, the movie that was just made, so what's tina fay like? >> she's serious. i think i'm actually funnier. just kidding. [laughter] >> tina is incredibly generous.

i didn't spend a lot of time before they ended up filming the movie. the ones that like to take a character and make it their own. you don't want to spend any time with that person. we just had a long lunch which i remember complaining about high heels really, we complained a lot about high heels and she told me a story that i told was really funny and i was proud of me i couldn't remember what the story was, i told something that told tina fay laugh but i don't know what it was. when i was onset she was kind to my and she -- and during the whole process every single time that she was on a late night show she would mention my name and my book, the original title by name and so i think my publisher was thinking that the movie that has hear face on the cover would end up eclipsing the taliban shuffle but because she mentioned it so much taliban

shuffle started selling in amazon. i can't say enough things about her. she's been generous to me and very much a supporter of women and i really benefited from that. >> well, let's go back, you know, there used to be that there were not that many car correspondents that were female. but right now the washington post actually has quite a few and a lot of people do too and melissa rubin just won and let's talk about how being a woman in the war zone affects reporting? >> well, when i started 25 years ago there were very, very few women and the women that were in the field, in my case in the middle east weren't very friendly to other women. i think it was because it was so competitive, it was so male, it was so driven that there was a great sense of competition. i think now it's radically changed but i do think -- i've

been asked this question over and over again, do men and women report in different ways, i think it's very individual. what i do i'm a human rights reporter. i go into the field and spend a long time with people or on a certain story, i don't -- i'm a terrible scoop reporter or sensationalized reporter. but i need to spend a long time and i think that we are talking articlier about the war on bosnia, bosnia was the watershed moment that changed reporting in our -- in our generation, i think, it was basically our generation vietnam and it was the time when a small group of us were very, very committed to affecting policy and we felt that we were not going to let this genocide happen on our watch and we stuck it out, we lived surge siege with the people, we were sniped, we were

stafferred, we didn't have food, we didn't have water. yet we did something that we were proud of, inch that was in the war and covered the war feels like it changed their lives forever and style of reporting. we feel committed. that's why i want to drive syria home right now. it's a slow-motion genocide. the world must pay attention to it. now i live in paris and coming to america for the past two weeks on this book tour, i'm really amazed by how little attention is getting, that, you know, it's -- there are people being slaughtered, the hospital where i work, the only pediatrician was killed. the first responders, the bravest people in the world, we are not the bravest people in the world. they go out and dig people out of the rubble, five of them were

killed, the gynecologist who deliver it is babies was killed. yes, el, i think europe traditionally there's more interest -- well, this is an election year for america and i do understand that but i think syria seems to remote but so did bosnia and then there was a genocide of 8,000 men and boys and we said that it would never happen again and it's happening now. >> she spends a lot of time with different people and you kind of can't -- really horrible things that happened. but back to the question, cristina, if you want to pick it up about do women bring something to correspondents specially war zones that you wouldn't get otherwise. there's been lots of talk about women or different -- at the peacemaking table are they different or do they bring something, is there a reason we need diversity in the war

correspondent. >> women and men report quite differently on war. i think male tend to focus much more on the actual fighting with bang, bang, if you'd like. i covered war for 28 years but i can tell the difference between incoming and outcoming but i can't really tell you what kind of weapons are being fired where. what i focus on are the people behind lines, the people that are living the war because actually when you see war on tv, when you see syria or places on tv, it likes like everything is fighting, when you actually go to the countries there are millions of people still living their lives trying to educate they -- their children and those tend to be the women. women focus on that more and i spent most of my career in the middle east and a lot of

countries it's impossible for male reporters to go into the women's corridors so actually i'm getting access to both sides in a way that a lot of my male colleagues are not. >> my husband kevin sullivan spent a lot of time in war countries. he was saying that in some places the coffee shop the women or on one side and the men on the other and he felt cut off from a lot of the women. so it's clearlien upside specially in muslim countries to report there. what are the downsides, are there downsides, kim? >> you know, you get this question all of the time. identify never reported as a man so it's difficult for me to sort of -- [laughter] >> i feel somehow you could. you've got to be really careful with what you're doing, you

know, and there's been books like emergency sex. yeah, right. [laughter] >> so and you really couldn't live like that as a woman because -- >> i know there's a follow up but i don't know what to do with the emergency part of this. >> no, no, it's a book. >> i thought it was something -- >> no, nothing actually that happens. it's a book that came out that wrote a lot about this. what i was saying a woman over there, you had to be protective of reputation, you always had to be careful who you were going out with and what time you were coming home because you were working with afghans a lot of the time and therefore i felt like you had obligation to refute the idea of being this western loose woman and that would come up and it comes up for all of us where you think

you're being friendly and then you start getting phone calls in the middle of the night and you can't turn phones off and they're calling ramadan, it's 4:00 in the morning and it's like i love you and you're like, thanks but i need some sleep, you couldn't turn your phone off and so irritations like that, irritations of being grabbed in public, you know, i write a lot about the fact that -- i mean, i'm tall, 5'10 and i punched a lot of guys and i would start punching them and that was dangerous. he was the guy that would get in trouble for that and found out -- you know, grabbing happened equally in india and pakistan so i don't like it -- >> how did they react to the punch? >> they didn't like it. [laughter] >> they ran away. >> yeah. >> okay. >> then there was all this stuff

with, you know, it's funni -- funny i had the guys on twitter, this is really unprofessional because all of the hitting on you stuff was probably off the record, it was off the record. i don't think you're allowed to be off the record when you're hitting on somebody, i don't, do i don't. i think that's on the record and felt like writing about that sort of stuff shows the level of, you know, i'm going to pretend to be the sort of very religious man in public but behind the scenes i think this is okay to behave this way with women. [inaudible] >> that's the moment. i mean, everyone always says the difference between men and women, i always resented when they tried to say women cover orphanages and hospitals because i've done a lot of front war stuff too. i have done a lot of military

work. but the moment that really changes for me personally was when i had a child and that just drew the line completely because i know my male colleagues have children and some of them use to say now you're entering the club where you're going to read bedtime stories by satellite phone but this is a risk saying this but for women it's very different because we carry the child and we give birth an extraordinary bond and i will never forget when my son was six month's old my old paper the times which is not the most sensible to women, my editor deliberate rattily sent me back to iraq where i had been living for two years covering sudan and the invasion and the war and i was still breast feeding and i didn't wanting to, they used the clause in my contract to send me, we have a war reporter that we go to war.

i said there's no where that says i'm a war reporter. i'm a correspondent, i'm a senior correspondent, send me to paris or brussels or something and i went my foreign desk was quite a macho little scene and the guy who is running the office said to me, he wanted me to do something incredibly dangerous the first day that i got there and would have amounted about two lines in a story that was being fed in from washington and i said, no. and i heard him on the phone cackling to some of his friends going, janini lost her nerve now that she had a baby, but it was so awful but really -- i remember get tong phone and calling my husband and crying and crying, but that's a good thing, isn't it a good thing that you lost your nerve and afraid, you're supposed to be afraid, you can't be the last person in the middle of bombs flying, you've got to kind of feel like a human being. but it was hard.

>> after you had your baby, what changed? did you stop doing certain things? >> i think for me it was very personal because i very much felt suddenly, before that i had worked in africa for years and years and i was very happy to embed with malitias in sierra león. i didn't want to get injured. >> you've just been in syria several times so -- >> i know, it's a really conflicting thing because as he got older i realized that my -- this sounds selfish and people think i'm irresponsible and i wouldn't be able to argue with you about that, i feel that what i do is much more of a calling in a sense and i really believe in what i do and i think it's hugely important that there are reporters that bear witness to atrocities and human rights violations and without us and

eyes and ears on the ground, we don't get a view, a window into what's happening. do you know what's happening in alepa right now? you don't. i just felt that in some way i had to make this breach and it's been really hard. i can't say it's been easy. >> and story by story, cristina, why don't you pick that up because that happens to you all of the time, you balance work and life. it's one thing the balance, work life, family balance when you're an insurance person in pittsburgh, but if you're trying to manage risk and going to just about the world's most dangerous places, which all of you have been repeatedly, how do you balance. q. is this story worth it, you have a son too. >> yeah, it's very difficult. i obviously feel responsible if you're a mother. you have to think about that first. and ii didn't go to

close where i know i'm in crazy risk. one of the things you learn about the job is actually the most dangerous things that have ever happened to me being al beneficiaried or being in suicide bombs is often being in places that weren't supposed to be dangerous, so it's actually very difficult to -- to plan this and, look, we see these days you can be blown up in brussels, in paris, anywhere. so i'm much more careful where i go. you see a little bit differently because you meet mothers who are going through terrible things whose children are being attacked and you can identify with them much more than when you weren't a mother and it's

very hard sometimes to live with that. >> yesterday was mother's days and i tweeted to all mothers in war zone that are trying to keep families together because they are so impressive, women trying to raise children in the middle of war. >> i have friends at the state department who are all skyping from very dangerous places yesterday. so ms. expendable, ho dow you feel about -- [laughter] >> about danger? >> i was a chicken. i didn't need to have a kid to value my life. [laughter] >> i love the argument that you're supposed to somehow change when you have children as if your life is not important before that -- >> how important is your life? [laughter] >> very important to me. probably the most important thing to me. you know, and i have parents and i also more importantly had a fixer and a driver and, you know, for me after what happened

to amal, when his head was cut off after they were kidnapped him and italian journalists were kidnapped by the taliban and the journalists released and left al jamal behind and al jamal was killed, i was like we don't need to do those dangerous if you think it's dangerous, farook. those reporters are great, they're probably better reporters than i am. i was happy to go to jail and meet the taliban who had just been arrested. [laughter] >> because they had been arrested. and i was happy to have them come meet me inside cities and hotels because it was a string of times where friends of mine were like i'm going to meet the taliban and i was like, you're going to get kidnapped and it would happen. >> it is a case-by-case thing that we all have to deal with and it's a good point and if the story is the same when you can

talk to somebody behind bars it's very different, but if you want to be eyewitnesses, sometimes you can't go to jail. >> i think what's interesting is that for all of you different things trigger why you went there, then you got there and you got hooked. and i just want to read a passage from cristina's book that towards the end of her book is called war never leaves you and november 2014. of course, in the end i went back. i missed afghanistan with the your yearning that i could not explain. every day a yellow school bus came to collect my son just like in the american movies. i had a great job and wonderful friends, yet part of me was some

where else entirely dreaming of pips shining red as rubies. in my big american i had walk-wardrobe, each one with a memory. and you went from there about how you had to go back because it was just always in your senses, you missed sitting on the village floors drinking green tea and listening to fanatical stories after ancient feuds, i never remembered the bad bits. so is it that you -- right. is it like -- i mean, a lot of bad things happened, you lost friends, colleagues, people you knew and yet you kept going back. >> i think when you keep going to the same place over and over

again it's not a story, you know the people there. you don't think of it as an issue or you think about all of the people that you know there and what's happening to them and you want people to know about it. one of the things i feel very angry about at the moment is the way that people are accepting, politicians that the war in afghanistan is over because we declared it over a couple of years ago and, in fact, more people were killed in afghanistan than any year of the war and what makes me most angry is the situation of women there because you heb that when the taliban, the discussion was now we are going to make women free and laura bush and people gave radio addresses and talked about it and encouraged women in afghanistan that they would never otherwise done run for office, become security gods

doing all sorts of things which is good. but now we have just left those people behind and we are not protecting them and they stood up and have done things that were not traditional in their culture and now they're being targeted and not there to help them and i think we have a moral responsibility to do something about that, so i feel really passionately that we shouldn't forget. >> she writes images of this things and i was touched by one passage in janine's book. i was unable to cut his nails, it was visceral rather than rational reaction. i would pick up the tiny baby scissors and feel like though i

was wretch, i had a vision of an iraqi man i knew that had no fingernails. and then it goes on at length about this man who used to come to your office in iraq who had been tortured and all his fingernails taken off and how every time you saw your baby -- it's incredible and you -- like you started saying, you met these people and stayed close to them and wrote horrific things. what draws you -- i mean, syria right now is just about the most dangerous place on earth? we've all lost friends there. are you going to go back, janine? >> well, i feel very committed to it and i also feel that last week after hospital was bombed the attacks on medical workers, i find absolutely horrific and so i feel the need, and it's not -- it's interesting because i do have friends who would say are addicted to war and they clearly are addicted. they like the adrenaline and

taken out of their ordinary dade lives where we have to pay bills and drive kids to school and go to war zone and you live in the moment because you're trying to stay alive. but i don't think i was ever like that. i think for me it was much more about something martha said many years ago which was, you have one war that you fall in love with, the rest is responsibility, and i think bosnia did that to me and now syria, i have fallen in love again. do i feel very committed to it in the way that the people i've spent so much time with and a lot of what i do is i write about human right's violations, rape and torture which is very hard to report and the only way you could do it is by spending huge amounts of time with people and gaining their trust. you can't just fly in, get a quick story and get out. you need to sit on the floor with them for weeks, sometimes

-- i've spent months working with just one village of women, an entire village that had been raped. we did a very kind of quantitative research and gathering data. and it's heartbreaking, i once learned in the first day of class that if someone gets hit you can't pull the piece of whatever it is out of their body because they'll bleed to death, you to stanch and sustain it, you can't just go in and pull things out of them, you have to sit and you wait and you listen and gradually the story emerges or it might not. they might not want to talk to you. >> there's a saying a story about the girls in cleveland that had been held in the basement for ten years, it took a year before the youngest one would start talking. >> you just need patience. >> i'm sorry, we are going to go

for the audience for questions and i do want to -- if anybody has -- they can raise their hand and we have a mic. we have someone right here in the front. >> good evening, you mentioned earlier janine, reaction to your stories and the change that it could affect or not and bosnia had took before it forced the world to act and is that what it takes a huge incident like that or is the reporting being just ignored until that moment occurs? >> let's talk about the consequences intended or not of reporting. it's a good question. either intended or not. >> humanitarian intervention. we lived in bosnia and rwanda

and it was much more a time of empathy and compassion. i think we have a very different administration right now that -- i think most of us do right to affect policy in some way. that's our role essentially is to shine a light in the darkest corners. but whether or not we can do it and whether or not we can reach policy makers is kind of beyond -- beyond us. ultimately it's our goal, transitional justice to happen and accountability. i mean, that's the main thing i work for. i don't want these guys that rape and torture and kill and murder to go to have impunity. i want them to pay, i want them to end up in seeking or getting justice served to them. so i think that's the real reason. >> it's not towards policy makers, like in vietnam it was geared towards telling the public what was happening on the ground and enormous role that war correspondents have to let

-- even capitol hill that the public is. [inaudible] >> one of the problems now is we've had so many wars over the last few years of iraq, afghanistan, syria and libya, people are -- it's actually hard to shock people and people are tired of it all and, you know, i wish it would all go away. frankly afghanistan and the uk get no coverage because people and newspapers battling because there are so many wars going on and has become much more dangerous to cover them. two big changes since i i started out, one is technology, we can file stories from the top of the mountain and the middle of a desert. when i started out afghanistan didn't have a telephone system so i was going into afghanistan

for weeks and only being able to call back my stories when i went back to pakistan, even then there was no direct dialing, there was telex or dictate to go copy tapers in london which is quite difficult thing to do because you -- dictating a long story and you have got someone at the other end is there much more of this? [laughter] >> so that side has become a lot easier, the technology. the other side that's become much harder is that we've -- it's become much more dangerous. we've become targets in a way we weren't when i started out. i find it very frustrating that there are places that we can't go to and report from because it's become so dangerous and that -- it's something i never thought i would say ten or 20 years ago, i just can't go there because it's too dangerous. >> i think it's also the nature of the news business has changed

so much in the last 10 or 15 years as we have been doing to these wars and there's just so much information out there and it's not like people feel like they have to read the entire washington post or "the new york times" or the sunday times to get their news, they pick and choose what they want to read. so a lot of times you even have stories that are out there -- i mean when there was a controversy of bombings on days in europe and pakistan at the same time and there was people complaining that, you know, no one was covering the pakistany bombings the same way they were covering the ones in europe and it turns out that somebody said that stories were done and nobody read the stories that were done about bombings in pakistan because people don't care, you know, and that's the biggest challenge that we face right now is that everybody only wants to read stories that reinforce their own political believes and that cover areas that interest them and the way that the newspapers used to be and we are never going to go back there is you would read everything, you know.

>> except if the woman in the front row who reads everything. [laughter] >> hi, sorry. i actually lived in syria from 2009 to 2011, so janinie in particular to you -- should i repeat what i was saying? i'm a writer and editor and i lived in syria from 2009 to 2011 and i visited bosnia as well and i was interested if you can talk about the public's reaction to what was going on in bosnia at the time and if you see the reaction now more of a product of racism and if -- or if this was a matter more of geographic distance and that kind of separation and then equally what syria can learn from post war of

bosnia, i won't call it post peace bosnia, what kind of lessons we can learn from that? >> two really good questions but i will try. .. and juliet in bosnia, they ran away and got killed by a bridge and he wasn't interested because princess diana had done something and it didn't run the story and it was the icon of sarajevo. it was a real struggle and frustrating. we are going to keep pushing it and they would send me from london and say you will go six weeks and i wouldn't come home.

they couldn't find me and i would disappear and go and investigate the rape camps. it was hugely frustrating. your question about racism is so interesting because we felt we were being ignored. and 3 flights from london by plane. the rwandan genocide was breaking out in 1994. by the time i was sent there, it was may. it started in april. one of the reasons it was not only covered properly but the genocide was allowed to continue was because there were so few journalists there. i think it could have been

halted. i wrote a thesis about lessons learned from bosnia to the syrian war. let's hope and pray they don't partition syria. we see what it disaster bosnia is 25 years after dayton stopped the killing but contributes to the rise of nationalism, sectarianism that never existed before and i don't want to see that happen to syria. >> my question is how do you get to see in a war what you want. a government tour wasn't dangerous for them, how do you see both sides in a war, subject to huge personal items. >> you are only ever seeing what is going on, you can't ever see the general like i was saying a

few years ago, when you came back to write the story, you were pretty well informed. these days you are expected to write immediately and you can only genuinely report on where you are at one particular time what is going on elsewhere and the war in iraq, southern iraq to baghdad. i felt like i missed this by being there because everyone who watched it at home and saw those things on tv without knowing about it. i think it is dangerous to generalize about places when they can't see much more than they are seeing. there is a big debate about embedding with troops, that is the right thing to do and i used to be against that because i

thought you could go independent and the war in iraq, i was there and not attached to anybody, but your country's troops in these parts of the story. what they are showing also goes independently into rebel held areas or other areas and getting a much more balanced picture. it is difficult to do that and the things you going if they know you reported the fighters. >> what about what you embedded? >> those -- the unilateral stuff before. and 6 to 8, and elsewhere.

a week or two, i realized quickly, this guy said to me be sure to take your photographer with you. and implies -- take your photographer with you when you go to their at the base, you are not going to send me anywhere. if you think i will face an issue on the base going to the bathroom at night but i talked to a lot of folks in the military about this, do you send women out on more dangerous missions on the most dangerous area at that point and we might send you there but would not send you one more dangerous

patrols because we worry it is largely men the military will want to protect you and mail reporters or photographers feel it is up to them if they want to go. i can see the point. when i went out, talking about broken marriages, haven't seen their kids in so long, what it was like to have constant deployments, i wrote a story that after the story where guys kept telling me they were not locked and loaded, they got moved to a dangerous place and my story got blown up and losing his leg. i didn't find that out until after i came back. it would have made me pull my punches more because that is a danger when you are an embedded

that you will do stories, they are with them so much. when i was with them i tried to do the story that i see here. i won't worry about what likes me afterwords. i can't either when i found that out. >> what do you do about that? how do you deal with that? damascus to get to the regime side, to the new york times, actually to be honest at the beginning of the war i got 5 or 6, it is paranoid, not dangerous the way it is to go on the other side through turkey or lebanon but you are incredibly paranoid, with government minders, when you work in a regime and i was

just in iran, in egypt last week, a different danger that you are going to be taken away and put in prison or killed in a place where security services have absolutely no qualms about taking foreigners like the italian student who was killed in egypt and killing you, not in danger of bombs and sniping, it is quite spooky, in damascus, knowing i was being bugged and followed and every email was being led, very unnerving. >> a clever part of the book, talks about taking $100 taxi ride to beirut to damascus, in the reader's mind it was pretty close. across the border everything changes and pretty dangerous pretty quickly. >> it has been dangerous.

>> all of these books, amazing christina talks about people in the news and interviewed every single one that you guys have. wonderful personal touch and the way you describe things and to put yourself in, she is talking about boyfriends calling, would rather go to afghanistan, would rather go to afghanistan, you didn't name that guy but how did he take that? did you name him? >> didn't put his last name. >> we are still friends. i got by from everybody in the book. supposed to be the foil for america in this country that knew nothing about, supposed to come off as naïve and arrogant

and just like america does, farouk is supposed to be afghanistan who is in it in the beginning with the sense that i'm going to leave, to get as much money as we need. >> we brought up justice heller. when pilots are talking to each other, another when asked why and the answer is what else is there? the three of you know full well what else is there, there is no guarantee for a long life so the three of you, whether for that risk or frankly the apathy of your readers or editors, have you ever thought about stopping, this isn't worth it anymore, there is something else do or have you kept going? >> i stopped. i might go back and every day i

make the choice to stay here and it is a difficult choice to make because i miss being in afghanistan and pakistan and living in the middle of the story, having conversations at night about the future of countries and feeling you are seeing a country change and watching democracy get built. i miss that feeling. to see if i could live normal, as normal as any journalist, i am a metro reporter in new york. that is what i do. >> one of the argument in my book is we don't know how to end it anymore. i wish afghanistan would end so i could go there on holiday with my son and other places. you ask if i ever started shopping. when i had my son at 99, i

didn't think i was going to stop, other kind of books, i thought i would start, to research a book, my husband is portuguese, writing this book. i often wonder, if it hadn't been afghanistan, what i have gone back? in iraq, the same background but afghanistan because it was my best story and i cared so much about it, there was no way to go back, and i had forgotten the

russians left so there was no thought of not doing it. >> every day, what else i could do and in 2014 i wanted to work for the un for a year because i had to spend my entire career taking them to pieces. i just thought the refugee agency. on the syria crisis. i want to see from that perspective and gain more insight into going deeper with research and the year after that was given a fellowship from fletcher school, diplomacy, another degree in international law, if i was going to spend my life researching human rights i need to have a basis in law in which i gained from the field but needed to go deeper. i graduated in march, and i think all the time can you work

for a bank? can i work for morgan stanley, the british government, the french government, state department, addicted in the field but i do feel we have skills we have gained over the years that are important and vital and something we need to contribute at the same time to stay alive. i was in grozny where it fell to russian forces, the closest i have ever gotten to dying, my husband said the best journalist is the one who gets out live to tell the story, it is worth nothing if we get killed or remained, it is that constant -- we are not insane, not crazy, we have a role and do it well.

martha did it until she was well into her 90s. i don't want to be in my 90s but there is something we do that is quite noble. >> actually, you have fun too. kim describes it -- wouldn't keep going those places and less misery. a week ago i was at the most wonderful kurdish wedding on the border of turkey and syria, that met syria, had terrible stories, didn't know when they would see it again. they had fun that night. they made a lot of effort to enjoy the wedding and show their children kurdish dancing and music and you could forget the misery of what was happening in

less than an hour's drive away. and killed in pakistan, a good friend of mine, i thought how is pakistan to survive riots, people talk about it breaking up and apocalyptic stuff. i arrived and got taxidriver, taxidriver, and everything is bad so i said -- he said to me we have no disco. we have nothing in pakistan. >> it is true what they say. it is all about high highs and

low lows. when you come back after all these high highs you forget the low lows and for you guys and even myself we lost colleagues, lows are low but the highs are high and at some point you come back and are happy to do the middle but never like it is. >> [inaudible] >> particularly among women. you two exemplify that, rotter he, sisters in arms mentality that exists when one works

overseas. >> there are still quite a few women in the field doing this kind of work. it is important to stick up for each other and there is solidarity between us. at the beginning he didn't find that because i always found other women. and an upsetting thing as a woman correspondence, when other women attack you for what you do because of that. >> i wasn't meant toward, there weren't older women who supported me and i have interns all the time, young women, tried to make them -- i would never say to someone is it worth

becoming a journalist? i say yes absolutely. it is the greatest job in the world. >> watch the movie, friends of mine before the movie was coming out, is that based on me? i said no because you are not that pretty. also you are nice. we have a group of people in the audience who help each other, we would always make sure everybody was taken care of. i would do anything to help female reporters i sent over there but you are sort of you can call it whatever but in the zone where you will be friends for life, we barely met each

other over there but she was saying answers and that is what i usually say. between different news organizations in dangerous places people do bond together and it is a great question about solidarity because when you are out there, especially in this town there is a lot of competition. >> one last question. >> not sure how to ask this but i want to follow up on a couple points. why are we not paying more attention to what is going on in aleppo? so much of this conflict rolls off of this and it does. one reason i was looking forward

to it, collectively your experiences are amazing and they are but for those trying to keep up there are so many players and conflicts and external players, saudi arabia, it all seems pretty hopeless and i am curious, you said the highs and lows, where is the hope to somehow get sorted out, what is the sense of this? >> it is incredibly complicated, don't feel ignorant, i studied the middle east for 25 years, sit down and draw grass, put things on maps and identify who is fighting who, 1000 militias on the opposition on the syrian opposition and that is not even taking into the international players in russia, qatar, saudi,

iran, turkey, egypt, the us, wars do end when the players on the battlefield become exhausted. it is gearing up. i don't think syria will go into a syrian war, it will eventually come to an end in one way or another. i wish it would be sooner rather than later and don't have to wait for it to be 400,000 people dead because in 1992 we started calling out and had to wait until an end of 1995 when 8000 men and boys were killed, we don't want to wait for a genocide. president obama made a decision, tactical decision in 2013, did not want to get engaged in a middle eastern war because he was elected on a platform to get

out of wars, during that policy of nonchalance, a great cost was the rise of isis. they didn't come out of nowhere. it was the result of the failure in iraq and the result of our own policy of not paying enough attention. if i saw isis on the ground in 2012 why was the world so surprised when mosul finally fell? we have to have accountability as well because we allowed our compassion to become fatigue and that is a very dangerous thing, to become complacent. i really want people to be upset, i want them to be shook up. not easy to read but it is the truth. it is important that we digest it. >> decisions we care about, go

back to afghanistan and russians, defeating the russians in the cold war and didn't care how we did it and brought people from arab countries who were criminals, gangsters and encouraged them to come and fight, we were only interested in defeating the russians and this is one of the things i find, you keep seeing the same mistakes being made. look at afghanistan, iraq, libya. the easy thing is removing the regime. each one, we didn't have a plan. just to go back to your question it is complicated and we are on the same side that some countries in one place and different sides than other

places but the reason i keep doing this where you find hope is in the people. i am endlessly amazed in this situation, still keep focused on trying to educate children and was lucky to work -- he was so inspiring, risked her life to go to school, for the sake of the children to go to school so when you meet people like that and tell that story it makes it worth it. >> i don't think i could do this job if i didn't feel hope even for afghanistan and i give an entire speech about it and somebody will say should we pull everybody home? you have the wrong point. what you were saying is the same

thing, we have a chance and there have been improvements, the very fact of having cell phone coverage in afghanistan, having the internet there, tv stations, do reality tv shows where afghan women feel so empowered they will do that, this one woman on international women's day, i watched her performance and you were the greatest feminist i have ever seen. there were positive things happen and you hold onto those and the whole idea but if we walk away now and stability enough for the next generation to take over, would be the biggest mistake. we say the world is falling apart, look at 30 years ago, 6 years ago, you can go back generations, world war 2 was no picnic, we know more about it because of the internet and the news so i guess i would say

there is hope everyplace you are looking. >> it is a long important discussion about where america and britain in the western world go with syria, what their obligations are, a very special night to talk to three women, a look behind the news and the people, you guys have done an amazing job. as janine says, looking to shake things up, there are stories and i am grateful that tonight you helped us to know who you are a little bit and why you do and thank you.

[applause] >> booktv tapes hundred of other programs throughout the country all year long. here's a look at some of the events we are covering this week, the ford foundation in new york city where david roth, the service employees international union will discuss the movement to increase workers wages. in san francisco at the world affairs council, they will argue the financial practices that led to the economic crisis have spread to all-american businesses. law professor daniel hatcher reports on how state and local governments i'm is using federal funds that are intended to be