War on terrorism

Civil rights lawyer Joseph Margulies' new book is Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. Margulies has represented several prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, and he believes that current U.S. policy is a legal and ethical disaster. He says that few new prisoners are arriving at Guantanamo, but the population at Bagram prison in Afghanistan is growing rapidly.

Sen. Joe Biden has been in the spotlight lately because of his work on two panels: the Judiciary Committee, which questioned new Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and the Foreign Relations Committee, on which Biden is the top Democrat.

In December, New York Times and Eric Lichtblau broke the news that the Bush administration had authorized a domestic eavesdropping program. Risen's new book is State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.

Writers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon are the co-authors of The Next Attack: The Failure Of The War On Terror and a Strategy For Getting it Right. The book criticizes the Bush administration's responses to the terror attacks of Sept 11, 2001.

Helen Thomas has been covering the White House for 62 years. She gives us an inside look at the White House Press Room and comments on the recent scandals surrounding the Valerie Plame name leak and the possible involvement of White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

Cass Sunstein, the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School, comments on Tuesday night's Supreme Court nomination of John G. Roberts. Early in his career, Sunstein clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Former Army sergeant Erik Saar and journalist Viveca Novak, a correspondent for Time magazine have collaborated on the new book, Inside the Wire. Saar spent six months at the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from December 2002 to June 2003. He was a military intelligence linguist, translating Arabic for guards and interrogators. During that time, he saw female guards use sexual interrogation tactics on detainees as well as other disturbing practices.

Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch. He says the Justice Department's decision not to have the Geneva Conventions apply to Taliban and al Qaeda detainees has opened the door to the abuse of prisoners elsewhere.

John Yoo is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel of the Dept. of Justice. He wrote some of the memos in the new book The Torture Papers, including some pertaining to the Geneva Conventions and the definition of torture. He signed off on the memo denying prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conventions to al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Yoo is currently a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley.

Chicago is considered to be a Democratic city, yet The Chicago Tribune is endorsing President Bush. The paper received thousands of letters and e-mails in response. From the Tribune we speak with editorial page editor Bruce Dold, and letters editor Dodie Hofstetter.