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.
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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. -
The sad truth about Karachi in 2012 was that whatever your religion, business affiliation, or political party, someone was willing to kill you for it. The murder rate in Pakistan's largest city and commercial hub hit an all time high last year. -
The terrorist network has been testing a new strategy: trying to capture territory and win over citizens by governing them and providing social services. The group failed in Iraq, but is still trying in Somalia, Yemen and, most recently, in the northern deserts of Mali. -
There is more information on the story of the al-Qaida plot to bomb an airplane heading to the United States. It turns out, the man who was supposed to be the bomber was working for an intelligence service.
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The White House and FBI have confirmed al-Qaida attempted to target a plane bound for the United States. All indications are the plan was conceived by al-Qaida's arm in Yemen. But officials say the plot was foiled before it was any threat to the public.
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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has admitted to masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, but he and his alleged co-conspirators could plead not guilty in a military courtroom Saturday. That could mean a public airing of how he was treated in U.S. custody — details the government would rather not talk about. -
In recent years, U.S. officials were working from the premise that independent groups like al-Qaida were most likely to carry out terrorist attacks. But now it appears that the focus is less on al-Qaida and more on the prospect of state-sponsored terrorism. -
The trial of five men accused of helping plan the Sept. 11 attacks is scheduled to begin early in 2012 at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The case will test a new system of justice reserved for suspected terrorists, and experts say the trial could make or break the military commission system. -
A young Somali-American blew himself up in Somalia last week. The bomber was one of the dozens of young Somalis from the Minneapolis area who traveled to Somalia to join an al-Qaida affiliated group. In Columbus, Ohio, which has the second- largest Somali community in America, there is concern that young Somalis might also travel to join the terror group. That's one reason Columbus police are stepping up efforts to establish ties with the Somali community.
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Hundreds of secret documents show that military and counterterrorism analysts sometimes found it difficult to determine whether those held in the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay were truly dangerous.
