Laila, Layla, Leila, Lejla or Leyla (Arabic: ليلى‎) is an internationally-used Arabic feminine given name originating in the Semitic languages. The name is derived from the tri-consonantal root: ל-י-ל (Lamedh-Yodh-Lamedh) L-Y-L (ليل, a root shared with the Hebrew name לילה which transliterated, sounds Laila) and means "Night"; over time it has been taken to mean "Born at Night," "Dark-haired Beauty" or "Dark Beauty." Another version of this name in English is "Lilith."

The 7th century Arab poet Qays addressed romantic poems to a woman called Layla. The story of Qays and Layla or Layla and Majnun became a popular romance in the medieval Arab World and Persia, and use of the name spread accordingly; it gained popularity further afield in the Muslim World, among the Turkic peoples and in the Balkans and India. It has also acquired a following among Jews and in the English-speaking world, especially after the 1970 hit song "Layla" by Derek and the Dominos, the title of which was inspired by the medieval story.

Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award."

He first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.

Jeremy Scahill (born c. 1974) is an American investigative journalist and author whose work focuses on the use of private military companies. He is the author of the best-selling book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, winner of a George Polk Book Award. He also serves as a correspondent for the U.S. radio and TV program Democracy Now!. Scahill is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and a frequent contributor to The Nation.

Scahill is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Scahill started his career as an unpaid intern at Democracy Now!. While there he learned the technical side of radio, and learned "journalism as a trade, rather than an academic study."

He campaigned vigorously against US policy towards Cuba, arguing that the Helms-Burton Act "discards ... sovereignty ... and attempts to supersede International law with US law" and "creates a legal framework authorizing financial and military support for armed subversion of a sovereign nation".

Scahill and colleague Amy Goodman were co-recipients of the 1998 Polk Award for their radio documentary "Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship", which investigated the Chevron Corporation's role in the killing of two Nigerian environmental activists. Scahill has written extensively on national security issues and the military-industrial complex. His work appears frequently in Commondreams, Truthout, Huffington Post, Alternet, CounterPunch, and many other news sites.

Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies. His most recent book is The World As It Is (2011).

Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A quotation from the book was used as the opening title quotation in the film The Hurt Locker (2009). The quotation reads: "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."

Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years (1990–2005).