At the next MCC Transylvania Lectures event, Todd Bensman and Julius Strauss, both former war correspondents, will discuss the roots of the 9/11 attacks on the US, examining the subsequent years, which encompass the Iraq War, the Afghan War, the Shia–Sunni conflict, and the enduring turmoil in the Middle East.

Todd Bensman is an investigative author, two-time National Press Club award winner, a former journalist of 23 years. He currently serves as the Texas-based Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). He frequently reports from the southern border, traveling widely inside Mexico and in Central America. For nearly a decade prior to joining CIS in August 2018, Bensman led counterterrorism intelligence for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division and its multi-agency fusion center. Before his homeland security service, he worked as a reporter for more than two decades. During the early 1990s, he reported on the Gulf War, later he went on to cover Eastern Europe from Prague, to include the war of Transnistria, and spent a year covering warfare in Bosnia, where he provided frequent dispatches from the siege of Sarajevo at the height of hostilities.

Julius Strauss served for 15 years as a war correspondent. From 1996 to 2000 he was a correspondent for The Daily Telegraph in the Balkans, worked in Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq from 2000 to 2004, and as a Moscow correspondent from 2002 to 2005. He was also present at the 2004 Beslan school siege. In 2006, he gave up journalism and moved to the Canadian wilderness, working as a wildlife activist and running a bear lodge. He has now returned to try and make sense of the war in Ukraine, and what is happening in Russia and the Balkans.

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