The Banquet was held on Monday, June 4th 2007
at the Phoenix Park Hotel
Mikey Weinstein with Award Recepient Lt. Colonel James E. Parco
Christopher Hedges with Awards Presenter Mikey Weinstein
About the Award Recepients
Lt. Colonel James E. Parco graduated from the US Air Force Academy in 1991 with military distinction and a bachelors degree in economics. In addition to his Air Force tours of duty, he also served several years in the Clinton Administration on the National Security Council working with White House Situation Support Staff. In the mid-1990s, he joined the Department of Management at the Air Force Academy teaching business management courses to the cadets as well as freefall parachuting with the 98th Flying Training Squadron.
He earned his MBA from the College of William and Mary and his doctorate from the University of Arizona studying experimental economics under Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith.
During the first phases of the Iraqi War in 2002, he was assigned to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel where he served as the cognizant administrative contracting officer for the Defense Contract Management Agency.
Throughout his career, Dr. Parco has been a champion of the US Constitution. As a mentor to thousands of cadets at the Air Force Academy, he has earned the reputation as the advocate for everyone's religious rights while in uniform. He asserts that while in uniform, the "shared religion" must be patriotism, particularly for the officer corps, in order to foster the necessary inclusive and respectful environment where "everyone on the team gets special treatment."
Dr. Parco is a general partner with RSC Consulting Group and widely published in the fields of economics, management, game theory and operations research. He resides in Colorado with his wife (and high-school sweetheart), Pam, along with their two daughters.
Christopher Hedges graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut in 1975. He has a B.A. in English Literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where he studied under James Luther Adams.
In 1983, Hedges began his career reporting on the conflict in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America.
He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia followed by the war in Kosovo. Later, he joined the investigative team of The New York Times, based in Paris, and covered terrorism.
He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the academic year of 1998-1999, and spent a year studying classics. He speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows Latin and ancient Greek. He has written for numerous publications including The Nation, Foreign Affairs, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Mother Jones, New Humanist and Truthdig where he currently writes a bi-weekly column.
Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism and has been on The New York Times best seller list. He received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.
Hedges states that his outlook is influenced by moral writers and ethicists such as George Orwell, Samuel Johnson, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti and theologians such as William Stringfellow, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Abraham Heschel, and Reinhold Niebuhr.
Hedges has two children, Thomas and Noëlle. He lives in New Jersey.
