Mark Danner, professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, specializing in foreign affairs. Danner spoke out extensively about the Iraq War, debating war supporters including Christopher Hitchens, David Frum & William Kristol. He authored the 2006 book “The Secret Way to War: the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History,” and “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror,” which won the 2004 Madeline Dane Ross Prize. He also won three Overseas Press Awards, the National Magazine Award, an Emmy and a 1999 MacArthur Fellowship.

Greg Mitchell is the editor of Editor & Publisher, and an award-winning columnist at the E&P web site. His new book, his ninth, is "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq." Previous books explored infamous political campaigns (Nixon-Douglas in 1950 and Upton Sinclair's race for governor of California in 1934), and he co-authored two books with Robert Jay Lifton on the atomic bombings of Japan and on capital punishment. His articles have appeared in dozens of leading magazines and newspapers and he blogs regularly at DailyKos and other sites.

Ari Melber (www.arimelber.com) is the Net movement correspondent for The Nation magazine, columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at Personal Democracy Forum. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the U.S. Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 Kerry Presidential Campaign. Melber has spoken at each Netroots Nation since its 2006 founding. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber appears on national television and radio, including NBC, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and FOX News. He received a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a J.D. from Cornell Law School.

Joan McCarter is a contributing editor at Daily Kos and director of the Kos Fellowship Program. McCarter has combined her experience as a former congressional staffer and campaign director to write about politics and policy from a netroots perspective.

Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, based at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where she was the founding executive director [1998-2002]. She is the recent author of Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Penguin Press, 2008), a biography of the UN envoy killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2003. Her book "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (New Republic Books) was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.