Special Investigative Report

Have lawmakers helped themselves while helping the country? After the nation's financial crisis led Congress to unprecedented economic intervention, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post began an investigation that pierced the secrecy of the deeply flawed financial disclosure system that governs the 535 men and women who draft the nation's laws. Members of Congress directed millions of dollars to infrastructure projects near their residences and businesses, in some cases paving roads in front of their houses. They made major trades in the stocks of companies pressing them for legislation. They wrote laws favoring industries in which they were invested. They sponsored bills on which their own family members were paid to lobby. All of it is legal under the rules Congress has written for itself. Democracy Inc. shows the consequences of this system.

The Pulitzer Prize-nominated examination of the United States drone campaign, and U.S. counterterrorism policies. On January 30, 2013, President Barack Obama acknowledged publicly what most Americans already knew: The U.S. government was operating a covert drone campaign in Pakistan. Even as Obama maintained policy was for judicious actions only, his own administration was drawing up secret plans to institutionalize targeted killings in U.S. counter-terrorism policy. The scope of those plans remained hidden until The Washington Post published a three-part series as reporters Craig Whitlock, Greg Miller, Karen DeYoung, and Julie Tate explored how the use of drones moved from a temporary means to kill terrorists to a permanent weapon of war. Collected together for the first time, ?THE PERMANENT WAR is the result of a year of investigative reporting on the who, what, and how behind the targeted killing policies that will from the core of American counter-terrorism efforts for years to come.