Government & Politics

Journalist Elizabeth Neuffer is the Foreign Affairs/U.N. Correspondent for The Boston Globe. She recently returned from Iran and was in Iraq earlier this year. She has also reported on the war on terrorism from Afghanistan. She's also the author of the book, The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda, about the war crimes tribunals and the efforts of victims to find justice.

Staff writer for The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch. He wrote a recent profile in the magazine about U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and the United Nations. Gourevitch is the author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and his most recent book, A Cold Case.

William Taubman is a Political Science Professor at Amherst College and an expert on Russia. He has written many books on the Soviet Union. His latest is a biography of the Russian ruler Nikita Khrushchev who led the country after Stalin’s death and attempted to de-Stalinize the country. It’s called “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era” (W.W. Norton). Taubman will also discuss Russia’s recent veto of the Security Council resolution on Iraq and Russia’s relationship with Saddam Hussein.

Former New York Times Balkans Bureau Chief and Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Hedges. He's covered war zones in Central America, the Middle East, and the Balkans for over 20 years. He'll talk about the mindset of being at war. Hedges is also the author of the book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. (Public Affairs).

Michael Ignatieff is Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and the Director of the Carr Center of Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. He has traveled to Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Afghanistan. He discusses his reluctant support of a war on Iraq, and his concerns.

Pulitzer prize winning journalist Thomas Powers. His new book is “Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda” (New York Review Books). POWERS wrote about Iraq after the war in the New York Times article, “The Man Who Would Be President” (Sunday, 3/16/03). He writes, “What then happens to Iraq’s 23 million people, its oil and its relations with its neighbors will remain the personal responsibility of Mr. Bush and his successors in the White House until one of them chooses to surrender it.”

His new book is Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage. During the Cold War, a small group of scientists, engineers, businessmen and government officials developed spy planes and spy satellites to collect information about Soviet arms. Taubman is the deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times. He has reported on national security and intelligence issues for over 20 years.

James Bennet, Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, will tell us about the current state of affairs between Israelis and Palestinians, and the impact war would have on the region.

He's the creator and producer of NBC's new series Mr. Sterling, about a freshman senator on Capitol Hill. O'Donnell was a writer and producer for the first two seasons of NBC's The West Wing. Before his television career, O'Donnell was in politics himself. He was Democratic chief of staff of the United States Senate Committee on Finance from 1993 to 1995. Prior to that he was senior advisor to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan D-NY from 1989 to 1992. Currently O'Donnell is also senior political analyst for MSNBC.

He served on the front line in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. He's written the new memoir, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. Journalist Mark Bowden (author of Black Hawk Down) writes of the memoir, "Jarhead is some kind of classic, a bracing memoir of the 1991 Persian Gulf War that will go down with the best books ever written about military life." Swofford attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient.

His new book is What Liberal Media? The Truth about Bias and the News. While most critics of the media say reporters are too liberal, Alterman contends the opposite is true, and that the bulk of reporting is quite conservative. Alterman currently writes for The Nation and the Altercation weblog. He's been a contributing editor or writer for Worth, Rolling Stone, Elle, Mother Jones, World Policy Journal and The Sunday Express (London).

When she was 10 years old, her father, a doctor and advocate for democracy in Sierra Leone, was executed for treason. As an adult, Forna returned to Sierra Leone to investigate the circumstances surrounding her father's death. Her memoir is The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest. Forna is a broadcast journalist living in London.

He is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. His twice-weekly column on economic policy is published in The Washington Times and Detroit News and is nationally syndicated. He was deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department, from September 1988 to January 1993. In 1987 and 1988, Bartlett was a senior policy analyst in the Office of Policy Development at the White House. Before that, he was a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

He is a professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research is mainly in the areas of international trade and finance. He is one of the founders of an economic postulation called the "new trade theory." Krugman has also written and edited many books. His most recent is Fuzzy Math, on the Bush tax cut.

They cover the military for The Washington Post. They'll discuss military preparedness for the war with Iraq. They collaborated on the special report "Unrivaled Military Feels Strains of Unending War: For U.S. Forces, a Technological Revolution and a Constant Call to Do More." In it they said, "The more capable the U.S. military has become, the more it has been asked to do, and now strains are beginning to show."

Lake County State's Attorney Mike Waller, who served on former Illinois Gov. George Ryan's commission to evaluate capital punishment.

Lawyer, former federal prosecutor and best-selling novelist Scott Turow. Last month, before leaving office, Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of all inmates on the state's Death Row. Turow served on the governor's commission to evaluate capital punishment. Turow's latest book is Reversible Errors.

Nicholas Kristof, editorial columnist for The New York Times, discusses the North Korea crisis. He has covered North and South Korea off and on since 1986. He's served as the Times bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. He was co-recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his coverage of the Chinese crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square. In a column which appeared in the Times on February 4, 2003, he wrote, "The North Korean nuclear crisis is far more perilous than many people realize.

He has just returned from several weeks in Afghanistan. His book, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, is now out in paperback. He's also the author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. Rashid is a correspondent for The Far Eastern Economic Review and The Daily Telegraph, reporting on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

The author of 25th Hour. His book, about a former drug dealer in New York City out on the town on the eve of being sent to a penitentiary. It's the basis of the new Spike Lee film of the same name.