Officials in the U.S. military, from the Pentagon on down, tried to thwart L.A. Times reporters who uncovered deaths and possible torture of detainees in Afghanistan. One of the reporters, Craig Pyes, is now a CIR Senior Correspondent.

The article appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Nieman Reports, a quarterly magazine about journalism published by the Nieman Foundation, as part of a collection of articles written by U.S., British, Pakistani and Afghan journalists about their experiences in reporting from Afghanistan. The magazine was published in late March.

Read the original reports by Kevin Sack and Craig Pyes for the LA Times and The Crimes of War Project.

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Craig is a correspondent for the Center for Investigative Reporting, and specializes in international investigations.

He shared a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting at the New York Times for stories on the threat of Al Qaeda prior to 9/11, and was a member of the small New York Times team that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for articles about the corrosive effects of drug corruption in Mexico.

Among other awards, Pyes has won the Overseas Press Club “Hal Boyle Award” for reporting from abroad, the Los Angeles Times staff award for best investigative reporting, an E.H. Shaffer award for exposing abuses by prison mental health authorities in New Mexico that were a cause of a bloody prison riot, and the U.S. Latin American Studies Association award for best coverage of Latin American affairs for the only inside look at Salvadoran death squads while they were still operating. The findings were validated years later by the United Nations Truth Commission report. In 2002, Pyes was also a finalist for Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for a Los Angeles Times team series on terrorism.

Pyes has worked as an off-air investigative producer on projects for CBS Sixty Minutes, NBC Dateline, and ABC Primetime Live. He is the former co-Director of CIR's Human Rights Project. Before that, he was a staff investigative reporter for the Albuquerque Journal.