Mark Benjamin

Mark Benjamin is an award-winning investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C. and a contributing writer at TIME. Since 2001, Benjamin has focused on national security issues with an emphasis on the plight of returning veterans and detainee abuse. Benjamin exposed the burial scandal at Arlington National Cemetery through a yearlong investigation. He was hailed for exploring problems caring for veterans at Walter Reed starting in early 2005 and also obtained the Army’s entire Abu Ghraib investigative files. Benjamin is the winner of a Raymond Clapper Memorial Award for the best reporting from Washington, a Fourth Estate Award from the American Legion, a Mental Health Media Award from the National Mental Health Association, an Outstanding Media Coverage Award from the National Gulf War Resource Center, a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism, and was twice a finalist for the Online News Association’s Online Journalism Awards. He previously worked at Salon.com and UPI. He can be reached at Mark_Benjamin@columnist.timemagazine.com

Articles from Contributor

Sort by  

Cutting through War Fatigue with the Power of Ink

TIME’s photo blog, LightBox, has published a stunning series of photographs of tattoos troops get to commemorate their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. That kind of body art is a little-noticed trend among the small percentage of Americans serving in the military. In fact, TIME did it to help shine some light on the growing [...]

Gaddafi Alive — Then Dead

Al Jazeera has posted new footage of the Libyan dictator who appears to be alive and in rebel hands. Later footage shows him dead on the street. This raises obvious questions about how, exactly, he died. Warning: the video is graphic and disturbing.

Iranians May Have Consulted Three Stooges Script in Terror Plot

How stupid are the Iranians? If the allegations by the United States are true, they hired a used car salesman in Texas to knock of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, and they also introduced the used car salesman to members of the Quds force like it was a cocktail party. The main character [...]

Over 700,000 New Vets Seek Health Care, Half with Mental Problems

Nearly three-quarters of a million veterans back from Iraq and Afghanistan who are now out of the military have sought medical care from the government, and more than half of those service members suffer from a mental health condition, including post-traumatic stress disorder. These are among the stunning numbers in a new report compiled by [...]

In Sudan, 3,000 Troops, Heavy Armor, Choppers Headed South

Bad news. Hovering over Sudan, George Clooney’s spy satellites have detected a massive column of roughly 3,000 troops, tanks, artillery, and helicopters moving from northern Sudan traveling south toward the rebel stronghold of Kurmuk in the Blue Nile border area. This is very, very bad. It suggests the strong possibility that the battles and corresponding [...]

Michelle Obama’s Veterans’ Initiative: Meat or Just Sizzle?

First Lady Michelle Obama bounded energetically onto a stage set up last April at a Sears distribution facility in Columbus, Ohio. Shiny black and red lawn tractors stood stacked in storage crates up to the warehouse ceiling behind her, a backdrop intimating hearty manufacturing jobs and bucolic suburban lawns. Two days earlier, the first lady [...]

U.S. Staging 40 Night Raids in Afghanistan Every Night

Counter-insurgency is so 2007. Everybody knows that Republicans and Democrats have quietly agreed that flooding some dusty foreign land with U.S. troops is too expensive, and we can’t stomach the casualties any longer. All the cool kids are into counter-terrorism now. (Note to think tanks: It’s no longer hip to tell reporters things like, “We [...]

24-Hour News Cycle Means Follies No Longer Have to be at 5 O’Clock

The Taliban on Sunday drove a massive truck bomb into a U.S. combat outpost in the central-east province of Wardak, killing two Afghans and wounding 77 U.S. service members. CNN reported that, “Investigators are looking at the possibility that insurgents originally planned to use the bomb against a high-profile target in Kabul around the 10th [...]

GOP Debate Shows Freedom Fries are Long Gone

The GOP has been demonstrably hawkish for decades. Part of this is philosophical, but acting tough has also been reliable currency in the Republican Party for years. It’s interesting what 10 years of war will do. Politicians know which way the wind blows, and America is war-weary — ten-years-of-war weary. They are sick of the [...]

The Pentagon’s Shiny New Death Trap

Some government anti-terrorism officials worry that the shiny new Defense Department office complex just south of the Pentagon, the Mark Center, is a death trap. The massive, two-tower center is the new home for 6,400 employees of the Washington Headquarters Service, located about 3 miles south of the Pentagon. It’s part of BRAC and employees [...]