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Lecture to explore the secrets about Afghanistan’s prisons

October 27, 2010

Marmian Grimes

Nancy Tarnai
907-474-5042
10/27/10

Willy Stern may be a flak-jacket wearing, war-zone journalist but when interviewed Tuesday he was transporting his children to and from after-school activities outside Nashville, Tenn. “I’m just a suburban dad doing the ballet shuffle,” he said.

Billed as the “only journalist to have been inside these facilities,” Stern said his portrayal is not political at all. “It’s not win or lose or right or wrong. It’s just journalism. This is what I saw.”

Through connections he made in Iraq, Stern was invited to visit the Afghan prisons, then policies changed and no other journalists were allowed to do what he had done. “I happened to be the guy who got in,” he said.

“It’s a fascinating story,” he said, explaining that the U.S. has paid $60 million to build state-of-the-art prisons much more comfortable than the accommodations for U.S. soldiers who guard the facilities.

The lecture is Thursday, Nov. 4 at 6 p.m. at UAF’s Schaible Auditorium. The event is hosted by the UA Geography Program and UAF Student Services. While in town, Stern is also going to speak to UAF journalism and geography students, public school officials, UAF Chancellor Brian Rogers and others.

No stranger to Alaska, Stern has been guiding canoeists on the rivers of the Brooks Range for over 20 years. Last summer he spent three weeks around Wild Lake and Walker Lake. “I am passionate about northern Alaska,” he said. “I find any excuse I can to visit your neck of the woods.”

Last February he was in Nome teaching a one-credit, week-long investigations course at the UAF Northwest �þ�����Ƶ.

Asked how he merges travel, including trips to war zones, with family life, Stern said his wife Ann Shapiro is the hero. “She is a wonderful and flexible wife who tolerates my passions,” he said.

Melding the wildly divergent aspects of his life is a constant struggle, he explained. A former staff writer at Forbes and Business Week, Stern is the recipient of many national journalism awards. In the course of his reporting, he has been harassed, threatened, followed, arrested and even thrown out of one country. He has taught at Williams �þ�����Ƶ, Colorado �þ�����Ƶ, Carleton �þ�����Ƶ and Vanderbilt University Law School. He has reported from the slums of Soweto in South Africa to the Icelandic ice fields, from the boardrooms of Tokyo to the battlefields of Iraq, from the complex pathways of Ramallah in the West Bank to the wilds of Alaska’s North Slope, from the secret prisons of war-ravaged Afghanistan to an uninhabited island in the Canadian Arctic, from Chile’s remote Easter Island to the bayous of southern Louisiana, from the Nicaraguan jungle to New Zealand’s southern Alps and many points in between.

His plainspoken speaking style has engaged audiences around the world. Stern’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, The Chicago Tribune and The New Republic. Stern holds degrees from Williams �þ�����Ƶ and Harvard University.