move in this environment which was nothing but checkpoints. you could not get from point a to point b without going through three or four checkpoints and at any checkpoint you can be arrested and deported and the equipment taken and he basically drove me around every back alley and street. we had to hide from the authorities and leaf the h hotel -- >> where did you stay? >> so we were staying at a hotel, but at a certain point, the regime came looking for us at the hotel while we were having breakfast, they were looking around for us. so hasan came and warned me that they were in the hotel, so we grabbed all of the stuff and we move moved to an aparttment building and when we were in the apartment building for a few days the police came to the apartment building looking for us when we weren't there, and we had to grab all of our stuff and pack it and moved to an abandoned office space.

and the regime tracks journalists and dissidents and anyone they need to monitor through the use of the mobile phones so we had to take the simm cards out of the mobiles and basically after march 25th or so, we were on the run from the government the whole time. >> and you were the only journalist there. >> journalists did come and go, and cnn came for a few days and then lost interest. i mean, different channels did come and go and we are the only channel that stayed. we came early from the minute that the revolution started and then we just didn't basically leave until the crackdown was so deep and complete that it wasn't possible to work anymore. >> chris, you have been, spent much of the past year in libya and afghanistan, both. i'm interested especially in libya, because among other things you went into the rebel-held port called miz rsra

and can you tell us how you got there, and did you have an escape plan at this point to get out, and what is the situation like there covering the rebels in kind of a, with the khadafy forces all around? >> well, misrata was surrounded by three sides and the fourth side was by water. and so the only way in was by boat and when the boats started going, we got on one. we went in for not quite a week, and it was a full-on siege. the people in misrata had started with literally swords and stones and sometimes swords they had made with sheets of metal and welding torches. and by the time we got there, they had captured some weapons from the khadafy forces and they had figured out unlike many libyans, they had figured out

how the fight and perhaps because of the circumstances such that it was truly fight or die, because they had nowhere to run. a lot of the libyan fighters we would contact would fight and run away, but here, they didn't have that al teternative. they had sort of through the school of experience begun to not just stop the khadafy forces to penetrate the city, but when we were there to turn them back. you could not tell that because it is in retrospect that i am saying it. the city was randomly shelled by the khadafy forces and the streets you could not step in because of the snipers and the people were essentially alone h and very few journalists getting the story out. we did a week and left and other journalists came in, and then chris hondros and tim was killed, and then we left, but i said, this is the kind of story

that you live your whole life for, and so we went back in. three or four journalists there. >> is it true that you had a disg disguise that you would have used? >> well, there was no way to rely on the ships to get you out. the ships were getting shelled as they came into the port, and there was some fishing boats and tugboats doing smuggling, and it was not known to the extent when they would come in. and it had a high tide at the bay, so sometimes not a lot of ships for many days, and the city was strewn along the coastline and not deep city, but the port was at the far east and we were at the far west. so if the road got cut, there is no reaching the port anyhow, so i did decide that i am reasonably fit, and understanding that if the road is going to get cut, they are

not going to surrender, but i will just change into local clothes. i did not think that the city would fall and be entirely rolled up. i thought that the particular group of rebels there would continue to fight. we were right about that. they turned out to be some of the toughest rebels in libya. i thought that if the door gets sort of closed behind us, we will stay. >> sara, jerry sandusky, when did you first hear of that and how long for you the pin it down -- and i don't know, how many sources did you have say for the first story which ran, i think in march, march 31st? >> i first heard about it right after i graduated from penn state as a student. i had been a part-time reporter for the small paper of the "centre daily times" and there were 7 1/2 reporters and i was the half. when i graduated they had a full time position for me, but they

were going to split up the, because they weren't sure i was quite ready for it, and i in the meantime, until they found somebody to take the other half, i could have this beat until we find something. you know. i wanted to really prove to them that i could have the entire be beat. it consumed my entire life. i was really trying to create a source base that was like my main focus which is to build a good source base and that, i figured, would be the best way to get to the bosses to prove i could do this. i got into the habit of asking people after every conversation no matter what it was, i would say, what else is going on? what else is going on? what else should i be working on right now and a lot of time it

led to my trash pickup is irregular or my son's soccer coach does not play him enough. this is ridiculous stuff and small town pennsylvania. but occasionally it led to something good, and it was probably 10:00 or 11:00 at night and i was working on a story unrelated and i asked the source, what else is going on and he said, well, actually, jerry sandusky has been accused of molesting a child from his charity. to be honest with you, he was ten years out of retirement from the football program, and what he was mostly known for was the charity and not penn state football. i vaguely remember jotting it down on a -- his name on a sticky note and on the screen saying i will google him tomorrow, because it was late at night. now that is how i first heard

about it. >> and could i ask, was that a police officer or somebody who is knowledgeable about the grand jury or can't you say? >> no, i really wouldn't, and i don't want to. it is interesting because that person called me back six weeks later and said, hey, you nknow that thing i told you about, it turned out to be nothing. >> ultimate confirmation. >> and really. i could not get anywhere for a good period of time, and just brick walls and brick walls and it was not until a couple of months later at the annual golf event for the charity, and he is gone. jerry sandusky is always a huge figure there, and i asked why he is not there, and they said family issues. he is not here this year. and i asked somebody else, and they said, oh, he has health

problems, and so, that was really when the story took off at that point. how many sources? it took -- i think that we counted at one point somewhere around 25 people i talked to, and some of them for just one or two minor details and others for five or six different interviews. we only had one person who gave -- not a reaction, but a substantive on the record, and so we set a high record for how many unnamed sources we were going the need before we went on it. we landed on five independent people we felt would not know each other otherwise. >> so you were confident by the time of the -- >> i slept fine the night before. i really did, which is saying something for my personalty.

also, a strange takeaway from this is that i was teaching a journalism class at penn state, and this thing breaks at 9:00 a.m., and i got on the road and drove four hours up to state college. and when i left my class jerry sandusky had put out a statement through his attorney saying that the facts are correct that i have been abused and we took a deep breath. >> are there people within who dissent on the policies? say weapons of mass destruction in iraq who are willing to talk off of the record or are these people that you have cultivated and known for years who trust you? what is the motive? >> this this case, one of the

sources was somebody who i had formed a bond with eight years earlier and you never throw out a phone number, and one that served the trust that way. it has become much harder in washington when you are writing about national security to get people to talk to you, because of the kinds of prosecutions of people who are sources which is what whistle-blowers often are. i have had a number of sources who have been investigated by the fbi and the legal term is it chills things, and boy, that is a metaphor and it is for real when you are a reporter, you cannot get people on the phone s suddenly, because they are aware that the phone calls are being monitored and the e-mail is being monitored and they may be prosecuted just for talking to us.

so, it has been increasingly difficult to do some of these things so you figure out ways to meet people. there's a, i haven't yet gone to underground garage like woodward and bernstein, but i have gone to bad restaurants that nobody i know would ever bh that i would run into. and i have had people over to my house and in fact, i had tom drake over to my house at one point when i had him talking to me. he was so wound up that he started at 9:00 a.m., and leaving at 9:00 p.m., and my dau daughter was cowering and she said, is he okay? he looked a little bit nuts. but people when they are going to be prosecuted for something that could put them away for life does have a bug eyed look.

it is good you didn't have doubt. i had one moment of doubt in the story when i interviewed the officials in the nsa trying to knock the story down and wanted to kill it. there was one especially effective official, a woman who basically said, and she didn't say that drake was a liar, she just said, gosh, i feel so bad for him. he's just not well. and she went into this whole thing about, you know, he has got family problems, and it is a recurrence in his life and this sort of thing and by the time i was leaving i thought, maybe he is not sturdy. i started, and i really worried, because it was a rational phenomenal for a while, but later the lawyer and the

colleagues that were on his side i needed to confirm his story with all kinds of details, but that insidious that i feel so bad for him was tough. >> and of course, the major charges against him were dropped. >> that is inkrcredible. i can't take credit for it, but the -- it was unbelievable to see that case just unravel. i think that the judge didn't buy it. and so it went from espionage charges and, you know, 35er yoors po -- 35 years to him pleading to a misdemeanor to get this thing over. he refused to plea bargain all of the way through this thing, and he said he absolutely would not plead to something he did not do no matter what, and even was warning him to cut a deal. at some point he was on the

phone with me crying literally and one of the things as a reporter, you don't want to become a participant in the story and he was saying, what should i do? and i could not likely give an opinion on this thing, but anyway, it was incredibly gratifying to see this case exposed for fraud it was. >> where is he now? do you know? >> yes, he was a computer expert at nsa and he works at the local apple store, and i am really bad at computer things, and i feel so lucky that i have someone for life now that i can call for help. >> mei, your choice sources and i'm thinking of the doctor at the hospital, and some of them paid a price. >> yes, so almost every single source we had was arrested and tortured with like maybe one or two exceptions only. like every person that spoke to us was arrested and tortured.

can you imagine the chill that puts on things. nobody wants to talk to you after they see that everybody who did talk to you before is in prison and having their face shoved in a toilet and beaten until they are black and blue all over their body and forced to drink urine, et cetera, et cetera, and stuff that makes you stay scarred for life and makes you question if you should have ever stood up to ask for democracy or asked anything. so basically what we had to do after that chill kind of settled on bahrain was that we had to drive around to people's houses unannounced, and i would not call people on the phones, because they were monitored. and hasan would drive me to people's houses without calling them first and i would go in covered and my camera in a bag and offer to talk to them with a silhouette interview or filming

only their hands or even just get the information without recording anything. telling them we will change your voice. and even some people were so scared that they were afraid their hands would be recognized or the silhouettes or the furniture in the house would be recognized. people were so afraid, but there were some brave people who were so, so determined to get the truth out there that they willing to take risks and continue to talk to us even after all of that. >> were some of the workers at the hospital including the doctors and nurses also tortured because they talked to you? >> yes. yes. the doctors, the nurses, medical staff. there was one medical staff person who wasn't arrested, but he was tortured. i never actually called him. he was always calling me continuously, and people had a need to get the truth out there,

because jazeera was the only channel that was always there, and people felt like nobody was paying attention to their story, and they felt really alone that the world had paid a lot of attention to egypt and tunisia and at that point paying a lot of of attention to libya, but somehow bahrain was not registering and it did not mat her ah -- matter and it did not exist. so at one point this man who was a worker at the hospital was taken down to the morgue by the riot police and the army and he was beaten and tortured and forced to lick the soldier's boots and beaten until he bled from the ears and the nose, and they do a lot of sexual mutilation. and he said they were doing this, and he wanted to talk to

me. i said, please, do not, sms. and so they said you have been talking to a journalist, and that is the main theme of his torture, and myself and hasan were saying, please, stop doing this. other people would say, please do not ever talk to me again and pray for me. >> sounds incredible. >> yes. >> chris, do you think that the fact that you are a former marine captain helps you in situations that you deal with the military and do they seem to trust you more because of that or what is your secret? i know you walk a lot of trails with guys living their kind of life as they do day in, day out, and does that help you to get a sense of what it is like?

>> being a rm fformer marine an former infantry officer, i used to lead patrols and so it does cut both ways. it does help, but it also hurts, because people often expect you the enjoy and circulate the prevailing narrative even when the prevailing thenarrative ist is false. sometimes on patrols you see things that are much differently than they should be happening, but as a journalist, you cannot speak up and redirect the patrol, so it does not matter -- >> even if it is going into a dangerous situation, and the hunch is that you are a journalist and you are not there to lead the patrol. the patrol is on a military level perhaps an essential thing, but on the human level, it is a terrible thing. i mean, it is armed and people moving over ground often against other armed people. at any moment any of the people or those caught in the middle can be killed, and you don't

want to influence that, but you are there to document it. it can be difficult and lead to a lot of soul searching. i had a hunch that something was not right, and i did not speak up beforehand, and the person was shot through the spine. i did not speak up -- >> and you thought that it was a sniper? >> well, some particular military. >> rob:s -- military reasons that you take contact at certain range ranges, and this patrol had put themselves on the wrong side of the canal and a threat on the other side of the canal and they should have been over on that side f they took some fire from that side they could have moved through it whereas otherwise with the canal, they would have had to stay there in the wide open. i almost said something like, are you sure you don't want to be that way, because we could go this way and it is smarter, but they didn't and the guy got shot. but if i had said something and gone the other way, and that

person got shot, then the casualty would have been on me, and i never could have gone out again. and this is true with the not just the mill ir itary but the libyans as well. everybody wanted to celebrate the uprising, but militarily, they were indiscriminant and dangerous and the commanders were staying a way back from the front, and the young libyans were getting killed foolishly and they were killing foolishly, and firing into the cities indiscrimina indiscriminate, and they didn't have the firepower of khadafy, but this is not a popular narrative at all, but it needed to be told, and many times my sources weren't sources in the traditional sense. they were my own experiences, and i would put myself in the middle of the situation, and collect the debris and identify the weapons and who they were being used by abreport what the facts showed without going to someone to confirm it, because i had been there.

>> did they know that you were reporting or writing if it was critical? >> in many cases, they did, but i would not try to write a story that sort of redefined libyan war for you in one sitting. i thought that my job was to write a chip by chip account of what was happening moving incrementally. and if i had a good day, you got the know more about the war and it was more like a creeping tide and not one big wave. at the end off that, what we were reporting was a lot different than the prevailing narrative. >> one of the prevailing native is that the u.n. bombing was meticulous and not leading to the civilian casualties -- >> well, it is not lead ing ing many civilian casualties, but it was that it was led to zero casualties was patently false. >> what did you do in that

situatio situation? >> there is a few different steps to that, and one is that they dropped a bomb right beside me and denied it. that was a helpful experience to see their statements on something i had had an intimate experience with. they tried to say it did not happen and gave a bunch of statements of what they did bomb and that was not true. there was another occasion where they bombed a group of the anti-khadafy fighters we knew and killed 13 of them and they denied that. they denied that for six or seven months and issued the statements saying that we have gone back to look at this closely, and that is why we are delaying the answer to you, and the facts are that we did not bomb a building that day. and i did not go out that day and it was a contested ground and i waited and collected a ul of the bomb debris and identified it and traced it back to nato. >> you wrote a long memo, did yont u? >> yes. we found, and i spent a lot of time going to different sites documenting who was killed and

gathering death certificates and retrieving bomb debris from the rebel, and doing a basic crater analysis and forensic analysis and bagging it up and taking it to the sources to figure out where it had been manufactured and making very clear it was only in the nato inventory and making sure it was not in the khadafy inventory and in the end we had 27 pages of facts and memos and pictures with the whole raft of supporting documents that i offered was a boxload, but nato was not interested in receiving them. they did not ask for them, but we offered them. we presented it to them and gave them several weeks to reply. to answer to provide some exculpatory information and point out any errors. ultimately they got on the phone, but they did not contest. >> did that change the policy at all? >> well, it is hard to tell,

because nato is a very up usual umbrella organization that stands for on the surface transparency, civilian control of the military, and yet when you go the nato the say, we want to talk about this particular event there is a particular game that is played of the anonymity whereby each country that participates in nato can participate but not on the operational level, so you don't know which country dropped that pom unle bomb unless you walk it back. so most of the americans don't know that the danes bombed some civilians and when you go to nato they say you have to talk to the host and the participating nations about this and when you talk to them, you have to talk to nato and the loop goes nowhere and at the end of the day, it was clear to establish that while the

campaign was mostly precise that there were a number of mistakes and there seems to be a pretty high degree of curiosity exploring how it happened. >> is it true that you discovered a cluster of spanish ammunitions that had not been used in war? >> there is a type of spanish cluster bomb that it is the only war it had been used in and nobody knew it had been sold to the khadafy forces. when i went into misrata, i was confronted with the debris, and you don't want to say that there was possibly a spanish mission, and there were a number of casualties and you could observe them being used. so i gathered up the debris. i have friends who work in the community that disables bombs and disables the ordnance,

unused ordnance and i sent it to them. i did not feel necessary to spend them to the military. former guys in the military and they were able to go into the publications they have and make an overnight identification of what exactly this was. then we were able to establish that notwithstanding that khadafy said not cluster munitions, but in the cluster of this town, and they later denied it, but i found the export licenses i was able to show that they had been in fact transferred into libya. >> sara, your story appeared in march. at the end of march and not widely picked up. why do you think that is? >> i mean i tried not to guess

to the answer of that question, but i probably will anyway. the things that i heard from the other reporters was that because our story was 95% sourced with information that was not named, there was a good degree of skepticism it was correct. you know, what baffle d me abou that is that even after jerry sandusky said that the facts were correct, but that he was innocent, there were a lot of reporters within pennsylvania and major news organizations within penn stawho said if we h that story, we would not have run that story, because you have ruined that guy's life if he is not charged. our response was that we didn't say he was