Government & Politics

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Dirty Pretty Things, directed by Stephen Frears.

His work is part of the new Time Magazine book, 21 Days to Baghdad: The Inside Story of How America Won the War Against Iraq. Morris is a contract photographer for Time, and has documented more than 18 foreign conflicts. He has documented drug-related violence in Colombia, guerilla fighting in Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf war. Morris has won many photojournalism awards during his career.

He covers the economy for The New York Times. He recently returned from Iraq, where he wrote about a number of things, including the country's economy.

Singer wrote the new book, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. Over the last decade, private companies have provided tactical support, advice, training, security and even intelligence to the military. In the recent war against Iraq, private military employees handled everything from feeding and housing U.S. troops to maintaining sophisticated weapons like the B-2 stealth bomber. The practice raises troubling ethical questions.

Journalist James Bennet of The New York Times. He's been in the Middle East covering how the crisis there is affecting both Israelis and Palestinians.

Ted Conover is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. He went to Guantanamo Bay to report on the detention of suspected jihadists and terrorists there. He has written about it in the June 29th edition of The New York Times Magazine, "In the Land of Guantanamo." Previously, Conover spent a year as a prison guard inside New York State's infamous Sing Sing prison to experience first hand the conditions within a prison. He wrote about it in his book, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing.

Performance artist, writer and theater director Rhodessa Jones is co-artistic director of the San Franciso performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is also founder and director of the "Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women," a performance workshop for women in prison in which she helps them develop and stage works based on their own stories. Jones' solo performance works include Hot Flashes, Power Surges, and Private Summers, and Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women.

In his recent columns he has been writing about the intelligence officers who disclosed to him that the Bush administration exaggerated the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war. Kristof recently returned from Iraq.

He responds to concerns about conflict of interest in awarding military contracts to private companies. Pawlik explains how the Army Corps of Engineers gave contracts to put out oil fires in Iraq to Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former Secretary of Defense, was the CEO of Halliburton before he became vice president.

He's the founder and executive director of the Center for Public Integrity. It's a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization in Washington, D.C., similar to an investigative journalism outfit but without time and space constraints. Its mission is to expose corruption and power abuse by governments, corporations and individuals. For 11 years, Lewis was an investigative reporter at ABC News, and also worked at CBS on 60 Minutes. His work at the Center for Public Integrity has been widely praised.

In her new memoir, Living History, she writes about growing up in the 1950s, her life in the White House, the Senate, and her husband's sex scandal.

Ricks covers the military for The Washington Post. Ricks recently returned from Iraq where he was semi-embedded with troops in Baghdad.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Capturing the Friedmans, a new documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a family torn apart by charges of pedophilia and child molestation.

He was recently abducted and expelled from Zimbabwe by government authorities. He had been The Guardian's Zimbabwe correspondent, and was the last foreign journalist allowed to file from the country.

She was the founding executive director of the Harvard University Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She's written for U.S. News and World Report, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist and The New Yorker. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

An expert on energy and the Middle East, he is a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, Ibrahim was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and Tehran bureau chief. He also covered energy for The Wall Street Journal. He is currently working on a book about oil and war.

Orizio is the author of the book Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators. He interviewed deposed dictators who have not apologized for their crimes and weren't rehabilitated. They were Uganda's Idi Amin, Haiti's "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Ethiopia's Mengistu and others. The interview is conducted by Fresh Air guest host Dave Davies.

Journalist Joyce Davis is deputy foreign editor at Knight Ridder newspapers and former Mideast editor at NPR. She's the author of Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East. Davis conducted interviews with Islamic scholars to try to understand the teachings about martyrdom and how those teachings had been twisted by extremists. She also conducted interviews in the Middle East with the families of both martyrs and victims.

Novelist David Benioff is the author of 25th Hour, about a drug dealer who has one day left on the outside before beginning his seven-year prison sentence. It's the basis of the Spike Lee film of the same name, starring Edward Norton.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg on cultures that are missing words. The Oxford dictionary of quotations published its list of the top sayings of 2002. George W. Bush was quoted as saying to Tony Blair, "The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur." The British Prime minister denied that Bush said it, but the story is plausible because people are always saying similar things about other cultures.