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.
-
Thousands of pages of secret military reports obtained by The New York Times and shared with NPR put a name, a history and a face on some of the hundreds of men held at the detention camp. -
Civil liberties groups are looking to challenge the U.S. government's right to target an American citizen on the grounds that he's a terrorist. Anwar al-Awlaki is a cleric living in Yemen. He is also an American citizen. And the U.S. has argued that it has the legal right to strike and kill him.
-
The Obama administration is close to a decision to try the self-described mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in a military court. That would mark a major switch in policy. Late last year, the Justice Department announced Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four others would be tried in civilian court in New York City. The administration says no decision has been made yet.
-
The Colorado shuttle driver accused of training with al-Qaida and plotting to bomb transportation targets in New York pleaded guilty Monday to conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. The FBI arrested Najibullah Zazi last fall and said he was planning an attack on the New York subway.
-
The FBI announced Friday that it has formally closed one of its most controversial investigations: the inquiry into the 2001 anthrax attacks. They say that an Army researcher, Bruce Ivins, mailed envelopes with the toxin to politicians and news organizations, adding that he acted alone.
-
FBI agents are interviewing five young Muslim-American men being held in Pakistan. They suspect the men may have been trying to join forces fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
-
David Coleman Headley was charged Monday with helping to plan the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, India. Headley is the Chicago man who was arrested in October in connection with a plot to attack a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammmed. This new charge makes Headley the first American implicated in the Mumbai attacks, which killed 166 people.
-
NPR has learned a federal grand jury in Minneapolis unsealed a roster of indictments Monday charging a handful of men with recruiting young Somali-Americans to fight for a terrorist organization in Somalia. Law enforcement officials revealed details of a more than yearlong investigation into the disappearance of some two dozen young Somalis from the Twin Cities area.
-
Five Sept. 11 suspects, including the alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be brought to the U.S. to stand trial, the Justice Department will announce Friday. NPR has learned that Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that the suspects should be tried in the Southern District of New York.
-
The man at the center of a major terrorism investigation appears in a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, Tuesday. Najibullah Zazi has been accused of conspiring to build and detonate explosives inside the United States. More arrests could come by the end of the week. Meanwhile, investigators are looking into terrorism plots in Texas and Illinois.
