Biography
Richard Miniter is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Losing bin Laden and
Shadow War, and is an internationally recognized expert on terrorism.
He has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal
and The Christian Science Monitor, as well as leading magazines including The Atlantic Monthly,
The New Republic and Reader's Digest. His published work has been featured in policy and
political magazines including The American Enterprise, National Review, Reason, and Policy
Review, among others. In addition, his articles have appeared in newspapers throughout Europe,
Asia and Australia.
After graduating from Vassar College in 1990, Miniter worked for the American Spectator, became a policy analyst
at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and was a senior writer at Insight, a magazine published by the Washington Times.
From 1996 to 2000, Miniter reported for newspapers and magazines on assignment from Western Europe, subSaharan
Africa, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia. He traveled with rebels into war zones in Uganda, Sudan and
Burma and along smugglers' routes in Laos, Thailand and Cambodia.
Hired by renowned Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley in 2000, Miniter was sent to Brussels as an editorial page writer
at The Wall Street Journal Europe and editor of its weekly "Business Europe" column. He also wrote a weekly column, "The
Visible Hand," for The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com. This column was cited by Forbes, Slate, and others.
While at the Journal, Random House published Miniter's first book, The Myth of Market Share.
The book argues that market share does not tend to generate aboveaverage profits. Executives
should not pursue mergers based on size alone and regulators should not bother to stop them.
The Myth of Market Share has been translated into Chinese, Hebrew, German, Japanese, Italian,
and Spanish. The Washington Post said it was a "must read for business executives."
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Miniter left the Journal to join the investigative reporting
team of the Sunday Times (of London), Britain's largest quality paper. Miniter cowrote
a fourpart series, "The Road to Ground Zero." The series won first prize by the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
In early 2002, Miniter was contracted to write a book that became Losing bin Laden. He would
spend the next 18 months reporting from Khartoum, Cairo, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Paris
and Washington to offer an authoritative account of the bin Laden menace during the Clinton
years. It became a New York Times bestseller, peaking at no. 9 in September 2003. Losing bin
Laden was cited on NBC's "Meet the Press" by host Tim Russert. The book was also praised in
columns by George F. Will, Steve Forbes and Robert Novak.
Miniter's next book was drawn from ontheground reporting in Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt, Sudan,
Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines. Shadow War: The Untold Story of How America is
Winning the War on Terror became his second New York Times bestseller, debuting at no.7.
Miniter's latest book is entitled Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on
Terror. Based on exclusive interviews and official documents, the book challenges many widelyheld
notions: that Bin Laden was trained or financed by the CIA in the 1980s, that Halliburton
profiteered in Iraq, that profiling Arabs at airports would stop terrorism, and that the U.S.Mexico
border is an open door for Al Qaeda.
MEDIA APPEARANCES
Miniter appears regularly on television and radio to discuss alQaeda and global terrorism. He
has appeared on every major American cable news network including CNN, CSpan, Fox News
and MSNBC—nearly 200 times in the past three years. He has been featured on "Late Edition
with Wolf Blitzer," "The O'Reilly Factor," "Hannity & Colmes," and "Special Report with Brit Hume," among others.
He has been a featured guest on more 1000 talk radio shows, including almost every top ten
program, from Rush Limbaugh to Laura Ingraham. He has often appeared on overseas television
networks including ABC (Australia), Al Jazeera (Qatar), CBC (Canada), ITV and SkyNews (U.K),
LBC (Lebanon), and RAI (Italy), and radio programs in Australia, Belgium, France, Ireland, and Italy.
PUBLIC SPEAKING
A widely sought speaker, Miniter has given speeches across America, Europe and Asia,
addressing audiences of executives, students, judges, lawyers and government officials. He has
delivered speeches on terrorism at the Royal Military College in Brussels, at the Conservative
Political Action Committee in Washington, at the World Journalism Institute in New York, a
business summit in Singapore and the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club.
EDUCATION
Miniter graduated from Vassar College with a degree in philosophy in 1990. His thesis was on the
German classical liberal Wilhelm von Humboldt's "The Limits of State Action," the work that
inspired John Stuart Mill to write "On Liberty."
