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Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg - Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. Author of the book Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, Goldberg also writes the magazine's advice column.
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Before joining The Atlantic in 2007, Goldberg was a Middle East correspondent, and the Washington correspondent, for The New Yorker. Previously, he served as a correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. He has also written for the Jewish Daily Forward, and was a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.

His book Prisoners was hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, The Progressive, Washingtonian magazine, and Playboy. Goldberg rthe recipient of the 2003 National Magazine Award for Reporting for his coverage of Islamic terrorism. He is also the winner of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists prize for best international investigative journalist; the Overseas Press Club award for best human-rights reporting; and the Abraham Cahan Prize in Journalism. He is also the recipient of 2005's Anti-Defamation League Daniel Pearl Prize.

In 2001, Goldberg was appointed the Syrkin Fellow in Letters of the Jerusalem Foundation, and in 2002 he became a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
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A Continent's Chaos

By Jeffrey Goldberg

May 21 2000, 12:00 PM ET Comment

"What is it that Americans call Africa?" asked the president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, looking up from his bowl of Rice Krispies. "A basket case?" The president was amused by the idiom, and a smile momentarily crossed his face. It was a bright morning in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, and the presidential peacocks, strutting outside Obasanjo's villa, were screeching in the heat.

Obasanjo, who is a former general, a former political prisoner and, for the past year, the democratically elected president of Africa's biggest country, let the smile fade as he asked: "And why is it a basket case? How did it come to be this basket case?"

We were talking about Sierra Leone. More to the point, we were talking about blame. Whom do we blame for everything that has gone wrong in Sierra Leone? Certainly not Nigeria: Nigeria spent billions of its own dollars, and sacrificed the lives of hundreds of its soldiers, trying to keep the peace.

Could it be the United States?
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