Terry Gross

Brian De Palma's films include the horror classic Carrie, the crime epics Scarface and The Untouchables, and the first Mission: Impossible film.

His latest release, Redacted, is a fictional take on a real incident — in which U.S. soldiers who raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl in Iraq. It has strong echoes of his Vietnam War drama Casualties of War.

In a new book, two British investigative journalists dig into the story of Pakistan's clandestine nuclear network — and America's role not just in condoning its ally's nuclear ambitions, but aiding them.

Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark are senior correspondents for the Guardian newspaper; both previously worked for the Sunday Times of London.

Their book is titled Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons.

Author Robert Kuttner writes in The Squandering of America that many of the economic policies and regulations established during the New Deal have since been replaced by a more business-friendly free market system. Kuttner is the founder and co-editor of The American Prospect.

Political columnist Katha Pollitt gets personal in a new collection of essays. Learning To Drive and Other Life Stories covers a range of topics, from Web-stalking a cheating boyfriend to what she learned about her parents using the Freedom of Information Act.

The rapper MF Grimm, whose real name is Percy Carey, has written a graphic memoir entitled Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm. He spoke to Terry Gross about his story.

Arrests and protests have followed last week's declaration of martial law in Pakistan, where President Pervez Musharraf has ousted the chief justice and cracked down on dissent

Journalist Ahmed Rashid, a regular guest on Fresh Air, tells Terry Gross that Musharraf's latest gambit could encourage more civil strife — and greater territorial gains by the Taliban.

Rashid reports on Pakistan and Islamic fundamentalism for several Western newspapers. He's also the author of the best-selling book Taliban.

Aliens in America producers David Guarascio and Moses Port and writer Sameer Gardezi talk about their new sitcom. The story follows a young Muslim student from Pakistan on a foreign exchange program living with a Christian family in Wisconsin.

Guarascio and Port worked together previously on Just Shoot Me! and Mad About You.

The show airs Monday nights on The CW.

In his effort to decode the human genome, scientist J. Craig Venter volunteered his own DNA to be analyzed and made publicly available. His autobiography, A Life Decoded — My Genome: My Life details his side of the complicated and bureaucratic race to sequence the human genome.

Venter's early work to decode the genome through private research company Celera Genomics earned him both praise and criticism. His team competed with the National Institutes of Health publicly funded effort, the Human Genome Project.

Clive Stafford Smith is one of just a few people who've had independent access to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. He's a human rights lawyer representing dozens of the prisoners held there, and he says countless innocent men have been held at Gitmo for years with no meaningful review of the accusations against them. Many of them, he says, have suffered terrible abuse.

In Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay, Smith details the abuses and absurdities of life inside the legal black hole of the prison camp.

Earlier on today's Fresh Air, we heard from Clive Stafford Smith. He's a defense attorney who charges in a new book that numerous innocent men have been held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo for years with no meaningful review of the accusations against them.

For a different perspective, we're speaking with Capt. Pat McCarthy, the U.S. government's lead counsel in Guantanamo.