Deep in the North Carolina woods, the men trained at night for what they called "seek out and destroy" missions.

They fought each other in hand-to-hand combat, running drills at a bucolic encampment near Fort Bragg. Glenn Miller, an ex-Green Beret, ran the place. Wiry and mustached, the Vietnam veteran paced its grounds in fatigues.

My investigation “Destroyed” uncovered that police nationwide trashed rape kits – most never tested for DNA – in at least 400 sex crime cases before the statutes of limitations expired or when there was no time limit to prosecute. The destruction followed flawed and incomplete investigations and, in some cases, violated the law.

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Employees of one of the world’s most powerful Casino owners told me he abused and threatened them.

Advocates for sexual assault survivors have long reported stories of hospitals turning away victims who are then forced to make hours-long trips in rural areas for treatment – if they make the trips at all. As a result, survivors and their efforts to seek criminal prosecution suffer.

While the physical and emotional toll of rape is enormous, so, too, are the financial costs. I spoke with survivors who, because of their attacks, lost days from work, or found themselves unable to work again. Some described how their rape led them to drop out of college, setting them back years in pursuing their education and delaying their entry into the workforce. Others had to relocate after being assaulted in their homes.

The former Army soldier told me that in the 12 years since she was taken hostage in Iraq, she had never sought therapy to reckon with that trauma. She’s paid for that in many ways, including suffering constant nightmares. The men come for her every night. They chase her through the woods. The crunching of the earth beneath her boots drowns out her pounding breath. She turns but can’t see their faces. Before they grab her, she wakes up.

Three years after the Army private was thrown in solitary confinement for leaking secret government documents, I spoke with Manning’s friends and acquaintances. They said he’s the type that can’t resist getting involved if he perceives an injustice and he has a tendency to spark confrontation with authority figures.

This profile was written as the regime of Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad killed thousands of innocent men, women and children and political opponents. Before the Syrian war, al-Assad’s posh wife Asma presented herself as a modern woman who cared about human rights and bettering the lives of Syrian children. When they needed her defense the most, she wasn’t there.

I profiled “Big Al,” a 20-something Syrian blogger trying to survive the war.

Julian Assange was constantly uprooted as a child. His parents were in the movie business and on the run from a cult. A computer geek who sharpened his skills at 16 years-old on a Commodore 64, Assange was driven by a need to challenge authority.

I wrote this story in the early days of the Syrian war after hearing people at a party complain that they didn’t understand what the war was about or why they should care. Sometimes story ideas are obvious.

Jason Puracal, a Peace Corp veteran, was working as a real estate agent in San Juan del Sur when he was framed for money laundering and international drug trafficking, his attorney said. Desperately underweight and sick in a violent and filthy prison, Puracal’s defense raced to free him.

Victoria Sanford and other interviewers of war crime victims absorb what psychiatrists call secondary trauma. A better word, perhaps, is found in the Mayan culture. "Susto" is what the women Sanford was interviewing called it when they noticed her struggling. She had "fright sickness.”

A quick-turn story following a source’s tip that WikiLeaks planned to dump 400,000 secret documents related to the Iraq war. The documents turned out to be much bleaker portrait of the conflict than officials in had Washington portrayed.

I got an exclusive first interview with Adrian Lamo, the hacker to whom Bradley Manning confessed. U.S. Army Private Manning stole government documents that revealed secret information about U.S. war strategy and reached out to Lamo, a rockstar in the hacker world, to ask Lamo what he should do with the information. Lamo went to the FBI. "I went to the right authorities, because it seemed incomprehensible that someone could leak that massive amount of data and not have it endanger human life," Lamo said. "If I had acted for my own comfort and convenience and sat on my hands with that information, and I had endangered national security ... I would have been the worst kind of coward."

This investigation began with a tip from a South Florida source that a Broward County school teacher who had been convicted of sexually molesting a seventh-grade student had convinced a judge to let him avoid going to prison. The sex offender then moved not far from his victim’s home. I uncovered that the judge erred in granting this arrangement – there had been no legal precedent for it -- and the Broward Sheriff’s Office, charged with monitoring the sex offender’s whereabouts, appeared to have no record of where he was at times.