About

Leila Barghouty is an award-winning investigative journalist, writer, and visuals editor specializing in high-volume visual-first FOIA investigations, and building open-source databases with previously unreleased law enforcement, military and detention data and forensic archival material. She is currently a senior news producer at The Washington Post.

For several years, she was a member of the small press corps reporting from the war court in Guantanamo Bay on the CIA’s alleged torture program in the 9/11 case. Since then, she has served as a researcher and analyst on projects involving other cases of alleged torture based on SERE training and the role of consent in detention. She drafted and negotiated over 3,000 freedom of information requests on police misconduct and use-of-force with the California Reporting Project and thousands more requests with other police watchdog projects at Stanford University. Her public records investigations into policing in the U.S. have prompted procedural change and litigation in departments across the country. Some of these data can be explored at The Open Policing Project and in Nature Human Behavior.

Apart from Gitmo, she has reported from the Ukraine-Poland border on combat injuries during the Russian invasion, from Iraq on the aftermath of airstrikes against the Islamic State, from Syrian refugee camps in the EU at the height of the migrant crisis, and from jails and prisons across the U.S. South.

She is currently a juris doctor candidate for 2026 at the Syracuse University College of Law, where she is enrolled in the Institute for Security Policy and Law’s advanced study program for national security and counterterrorism law. She holds a master’s from Stanford University in data journalism and a bachelor’s from the University of Michigan.

Leila is a recipient of an IWMF reporting grant, The Transatlantic Media Fellowship, the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, the inaugural PERIPLUS Collective Fellowship, and has worked on several Emmy Award winning and nominated series and films. She is an active member of the Writers Guild of America, East.

Her first job involved linear editing with 3/4 inch U-Matic tape.

RECENT WORK

The Washington Post: As war rages on in Ukraine, volunteer paramedics evacuate the injured

The Washington Post: How the St. Javelin meme raised a million dollars for Ukraine