The Hillman Foundation has announced the winners of their 2009 awards (hillmanfoundation.org/pages/honorees/2009.html) and the honorees give us a special peek into a special world, including among them:

* Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake for the blog post "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month" [1]. As it turns out, the 183 is each instance of water being poured, and not individual sessions; see this. She not only won an award, she got the brass ring, twice: "Just last month, Marcy Wheeler made the front page of the New York Times after she became the first person to notice that a newly-released Justice Department memo revealed that Khalid Sheik Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times in one month. Last year, Wheeler’s groundbreaking investigative work on the CIA leak case also made the front page of the Times."

* Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo, makers of the pro-illegal immigration PBS documentary "Made in L.A."

* Last but not least in our minds, far-left illegal immigration supporter Nina Bernstein for the New York Times article "Deaths in Immigrant Detention".

The judges were: Rose Marie Arce (CNN producer), photographer Susan Meiselas, Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker (pictured right), Harold Meyerson of TAPPED, and Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation.

[1] emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/18/
khalid-sheikh-mohammed-was-waterboarded-183-times-in-one-month