Government & Politics

We talk with Brad Bird, who wrote and directed the Academy Award-winning film The Incredibles, about a suburban family with superpowers. The mix of average characters and extraordinary abilities has turned the animated characters into celebrities.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Sin City, starring Bruce Willis and directed by Robert Rodriguez and comic writer-artist Frank Miller.

Flynt Leverett is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. As Syria is prodded to withdraw its troops — and influence — from neighboring Lebanon, the region faces potentially drastic changes.

State Department representative Elizabeth Dibble is the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Dibble addresses the question of the U.S. State Department policy toward Syria and Lebanon.

Rami Khouri is Palestinian-Jordanian, with a U.S. citizenship. He is an internationally syndicated political columnist and the host of Encounter, a weekly current affairs talk show on Jordan Television. He also hosts a weekly radio program, and he spent the 2001 academic year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow. He was editor-in-chief for the Jordan Times newspaper for seven years. He often comments on Middle East issues for the BBC, NPR and CNN.

Criminal defense attorney Johnnie Cochran died Tuesday at age 67 of cancer, after having been diagnosed in 2003 with an inoperable brain tumor. In 1995, Cochran won O.J. Simpson a not-guilty verdict in the slayings of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Over the years, Cochran defended celebrities as well as lesser-known individuals. He represented football great Jim Brown, as well as rappers Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Sean Combs. (Originial airdate: 10/10/96)

Former Marine Capt. Brian Steidle has been in the Darfur region of Western Sudan monitoring the humanitarian crisis there for the African Union. Steidle says there's no doubt that Sudan is in the midst of genocide.

John Prendergast is Special Adviser to the President of the International Crisis Group. He has 20 years of experience attempting to resolve conflicts in Africa, and shaping U.S. foreign policy toward the region.

TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new season of The Shield. The critically acclaimed show is adding actress Glen Close to its cast of burly, often violent alpha males.

Journalist Hugh Miles is the author of Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera, the premier news channel in the Arabic-speaking world, plans to launch an English channel sometime in the next few months.

Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. For his book, Keefe researched the possibility that the United States has a planet-spanning surveillance network, known as Echelon. Keefe is a third-year student at Yale Law School and was a Marshall scholar and a 2003 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews A Changed Man, the new novel by Francine Prose.

In April, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins will receive the George Polk Award for War Reporting for "his riveting, first-hand account of an eight-day attack on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah." We talk with him about the rebuilding country and its recent elections.

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer gave daily briefings to the press from 2001 to 2003. He acted as the Bush administration's primary spokesperson during both 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq War.

In their new book, Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil they warn of the presence of Hezbollah militants in the United States. Diaz and Newman say the cells could potentially be more dangerous than al Qaeda.

Journalists Judith Miller and Matt Cooper discuss their court case, in which they face jail time for refusing to reveal their sources in an investigation into the leak of a CIA officer's name. Despite attorney Floyd Abrams's efforts, on Feb. 15, 2005, a federal appeals court upheld a ruling against the two.

Steve Chapman, whose twice-weekly column for The Chicago Tribune is syndicated to about 50 newspapers, says reporters should give details on their sources to investigators in the case of the leak of a CIA officer's name. In Chapman's Feb. 20, 2005, column on the Miller and Cooper case, he sides with the court, stating, "in this case, principle should yield to the need to protect agents who are serving their country."

Michael Tanner is director of Health and Welfare Studies at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. He launched the Project on Social Security Choice at the institute, which first looked at the possibility of turning the system into a private savings program. He supports Bush's Social Security plan.

Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. A professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, Paul Krugman opposes Bush's Social Security plan, and has written about it in his columns. He's also the author of Fuzzy Math, on the Bush tax cut.

Boyden Gray is the chairman and founder of the group Committee for Justice, formed to promote conservative judicial nominees. Gray was instrumental in getting Clarence Thomas appointed to the Supreme Court. Wednesday, we heard from Ralph Neas of the liberal group People for the American Way.