Dina Temple-Raston
Dina Temple-Raston is a correspondent on NPR's Investigations team focusing on breaking news stories and national security, technology and social justice.
Previously, Temple-Raston worked in NPR's programming department to create and host I'll Be Seeing You, a four-part series of radio specials for the network that focused on the technologies that watch us. Before that, she served as NPR's counter-terrorism correspondent for more than a decade, reporting from all over the world to cover deadly terror attacks, the evolution of ISIS and radicalization. While on leave from NPR in 2018, she independently executive produced and hosted a non-NPR podcast called What Were You Thinking, which looked at what the latest neuroscience can reveal about the adolescent decision-making process.
In 2014, she completed a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University where, as the first Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism, she studied the intersection of Big Data and intelligence.
Prior to joining NPR in 2007, Temple-Raston was a longtime foreign correspondent for Bloomberg News in China and served as Bloomberg's White House correspondent during the Clinton Administration. She has written four books, including The Jihad Next Door: Rough Justice in the Age of Terror, about the Lackawanna Six terrorism case, and A Death in Texas: A Story About Race, Murder and a Small Town's Struggle for Redemption, about the racially-motivated murder of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas, which won the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers prize. She is a regular reviewer of national security books for the Washington Post Book World, and also contributes to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Radiolab, the TLS and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others.
She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and she has an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Manhattanville College.
Temple-Raston was born in Belgium and her first language is French. She also speaks Mandarin and a smattering of Arabic.
-
Pakistan's isolated Swat Valley is ground zero for a quiet experiment by the Pakistani army: a little-known program aimed at re-educating thousands of young men who were taken in by the Taliban. Using international funds and a contingent of army officers, Pakistan is trying to turn would-be terrorists into law-abiding citizens. -
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith may be best known for his appearance in videos. He was sitting next to bin Laden when the al-Qaida leader took credit for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Ghaith may appear in a Manhattan court on Friday. -
The secret section of the prison is nestled in the crevice of a hill at Guantanamo Bay. It is considered so secret that that the only time outsiders see it is on approach to the airfield at the naval base. -
A pretrial hearing in the Sept. 11 case was suspended briefly last week to investigate allegations of eavesdropping. The commissions' chief prosecutor launched an investigation, and said no one was "listening, monitoring, recording" the proceedings. Defense attorneys seemed to take his word, which given the history of the commissions, is a baby step toward progress.
-
The brief courtroom session provided a glimpse of the accused plotters, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But the discussion focused on whether U.S. intelligence is listening to attorney-client conversations. -
Pretrial hearings resume Monday for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of helping plot the Sept. 11 attacks. There will be two competing narratives in the courtroom, however, with the prosecution focusing on the attacks, and the defense stressing the defendants' treatment after they were captured.
-
Humaira Bachal's father thought it was a waste of time for her to go to middle school. For years, she had to sneak out of the house to attend. When he found out, he was furious. Now, at 25, she runs a school serving more than 1,000 kids in a Karachi slum. -
Gangsters in Karachi are a little different from the American variety. They often control armed groups linked to political parties. Uzair Baloch is known as the don of Karachi's Lyari slum. But ask him if he's a gangster, and he'll laugh. He says he's a politician and a social worker. -
A Pakistani bill would allow intelligence and law enforcement agencies to tap phones, monitor Internet traffic, and follow people they suspect are terrorists. Security agencies in Pakistan already do this, but the new bill will give them the legal cover to do so. -
A Pakistani man who went to London to sell fish has become an unlikely YouTube music star, thanks to the catchy song he made up to lure customers. The video for the song, "One Pound Fish," became a Web hit, and even brought him a record deal.
