New York ? A reporter and photographer from the Chicago Tribune won the George Polk Award for International Reporting for exposing a human trafficking network that supplied cheap and sometimes forced labor to the rebuilding effort in Iraq.

Journalists from The Washington Post and ABC News also won Polk Awards for their reporting on the CIA’s secret prisons, alleged abuse of detainees and waste in the U.S. effort to rebuild Afghanistan.

The Times-Picayune, of New Orleans, will receive the Polk Award for Metropolitan Reporting, for its coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, despite the loss of its presses, its offices and most of its subscribers.

The 14 awards, announced by Long Island University, are to be presented at a ceremony in New York on April 19. Considered among the top prizes in U.S. journalism, the awards memorialize a CBS correspondent killed while covering the Greek civil war in 1948.

“The caliber of work produced by this year’s Polk Award winners reminds us that investigative journalism is vital to our democracy and society,” said University President David J. Steinberg.

Tribune reporter Cam Simpson and photographer Jose More traveled around the world to investigate the massacre of 12 Nepalese men in Iraq. They discovered that workers from poor South Asian countries were allegedly being tricked or coerced into working on U.S. defense projects run by a subsidiary of Halliburton.

Dana Priest of The Washington Post will be awarded the Polk Award for National Reporting for revealing the existence of the secret CIA detention facilities.

ABC News reporters Brian Ross and Richard Esposito won the Polk Award for Television Reporting for their dispatches on CIA interrogation methods, including one that simulates drowning.

The George Polk Career Award will be presented to Frederick Wiseman, a documentarian whose dozens of films included “Titicut Follies,” a 1967 examination of the treatment of patients at a Massachusetts psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.

Other winners include:

¢Washington Post reporters Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, for reporting on problems in the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan.

¢New York Times commentator Frank Rich, for essays including “The God Racket, from DeMille to DeLay” and “Enron: Patron Saint of Bush’s Fake News.”

¢New York Times medical business reporter Barry Meier, for exposing the failure of the Guidant Corp. and the Food and Drug Administration to publicize a deadly defect in a heart implant device.

¢Jerry Mitchell, of The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., for unearthing new information that led prosecutors to revive the case of three civil rights activists slain in 1964.

¢David Evans, Michael Smith and Liz Willen of Bloomberg News, for reporting on clinical trials that recruited people to take part in medical studies without fully disclosing potential risks.

¢San Diego Union-Tribune writer Dean Calbreath, and Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer of Copley News Service, for their reporting on U.S. Rep. Randy Cunningham, who later pleaded guilty to accepting $2.4 million in bribes.

¢Adam Clay Thompson, senior writer for The San Francisco Bay Guardian, for a series on poor living conditions in public housing.

¢Independent radio producer JoAnn Mar, for a one-hour documentary on the privatization of the prison system and its effect on public policy.

¢Author Victor S. Navasky, for his memoir “A Matter of Opinion.”