Majeed Babar is a former fixer/journalist/photojournalist from Pakistan. He has worked with renowned journalists and photographers from the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, BBC, NPR, and others. He has won numerous awards for his work and was part of the 2002 New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning squad for their coverage in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. Babar was forced to flee Pakistan because of threats to his life and is now based in New York.

Bob Dietz is Asia Program Director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. Since 1977, Dietz has worked as a journalist in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States.

In 1988, he was awarded a William Benton Fellowship for Broadcast Journalists at the University of Chicago, studying international relations. He later served as interim general manager for a start-up PBS station in Philadelphia, before working for the newly launched CNN International in Atlanta. In 1995, Dietz moved to Hong Kong and after seven years as an editor at Asiaweek, he returned to the United States and worked with the World Health Organization, handling media relations and risk communication during the SARS and avian influenza outbreaks.

Micah Garen, photographer and documentary filmmaker, and his Iraqi interpreter Amir Doshi, were kidnapped and held hostage for ten days in Southern Iraq in 2004. Their harrowing abduction and survival in captivity, as well as the extraordinary grassroots efforts of family, friends, colleagues to win their eventual release is documented in Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carleton's memoir American Hostage, published by Simon & Schuster in 2005.

Ayub Nuri is an Iraqi journalist. He was Baghdad correspondent for London-based Global Radio News. He covered the war in 2003 and the subsequent insurgency, including the sectarian violence. He has reported from Iraq for Public Radio International in Boston and BBC World Service of London. His editorials have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. He has regularly contributed articles to openDemocracy and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Recently he won the award of the year from the Foreign Press Association in New York and the Baker Award for the best magazine story, focused on the life and work of Iraqi fixers.

George Packer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since May 2003 and has published several books, most recently The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. Packer was awarded two Overseas Press Club awards for his work in 2003, one for his Iraq coverage and the other for his reporting on the civil war in Sierra Leone. Packer, a 2001-2002 Guggenheim Fellow, has contributed articles, essays, and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics, and literature to The New York Times Magazine, Dissent, Mother Jones, Harper's, and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Columbia. Packer was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. After graduating from Yale in 1982, he served in the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Lisa Ramaci is the widow of Steven Vincent, the freelance journalist and author of In the Red Zone: A Journey into the Soul of Iraq, who was kidnapped and murdered in Basra, Iraq in August 2005. She is the founder of the Steven Vincent Foundation, set up to honor the memory of her husband, and to acknowledge the vital and courageous work performed by local journalists and other media workers.

For the past 18 months she has been working to bring Vincent's translator Noor al Khal, who was kidnapped with him and shot three times, but who survived, to the United States for resettlement. This past January she testified in front of Senator Edward Kennedy's Judiciary Committee on the Iraq refugee crisis. She has called attention to the issue on radio programs for American Public Media and BBC Radio, in Marie Claire magazine, and most recently, on NOW with David Brancaccio. A native New Yorker, she lives in Manhattan.