When word first emerged that Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, there were more than a few people asking: Who? But for those who knew her, the announcement was no surprise. In her home in Iran, Ebadi had earned a formidable reputation as a human rights lawyer determined to fight for women, children and political freedom. She once spent 23 days in solitary confinement for criticizing Iran’s leaders.

Ebadi is not out to make friends. Reformers want her to attack the mullahs. The clerics want her to stop talking about human rights. But she says she intends to keep working for ordinary people, and for them, she is a symbol of hope. The day after she received her Peace Prize: one Iranian newspaper featured a drawing of a Nobel medal emerging as a golden flower from a sea of thorns.

Guests:

Shirin Ebadi, Iranian lawyer, human rights activist and the winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize.

Warning: If you haven’t already blogged on, you might just miss the revolution. Blogs are those online journals covering everything from knitting to the inner workings of Wall Street. They are also the place where both insiders and outsiders meet to chew the latest political story over, and over, and over again. They are addictive, just ask all those 3 am web warriors in their stocking feet tapping away in the glow of their computer screens.

Blogs offer a constant rush of political opinion: the gloating, the jeering, and those knockout punches. But not everyone thinks bringing punditry to the people is a good thing. New Yorker writer George Packer argues that by blurring the line between journalism and pure rant, blogs may not be the best thing for democracy…so who writes for you?

Guests:

George Packer, writer for The New Yorker

David Odesnik, blogger

The American official who was asked to re-open Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison approved of the choice, saying it was “the only place we agreed as a team was truly closest to an American prison.” Lane McCotter was only referring to the mechanics of the prison complex, but in making the comparison, he inadvertently foreshadowed what some prison experts say are much more shameful similarities.

Prisoners stripped naked, forced into humiliating poses, and photographed. Physical abuse that exceeds the merely punitive, and tactics meant to degrade and terrify. This kind of treatment has also been documented in prisons from Connecticut to California. The only thing missing, say these critics, is a sense of national outrage, similar to that expressed over the abuse in Iraq. Links in a chain.

Guests:

Fox Butterfield, national correspondent, The New York Times

James Whitman, professor of comparative law, Yale Law School and author, “Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe”

Alan Elsner, national correspondent, Reuters, and author, “Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons”: Tom Hodgson, Bristol County Sheriff

Hollywood ushers in the summer blockbuster season this week with “Troy” a glittering, stars-in-sandals take on Homer’s Iliad. The big-budget film juices up the passion, jealousy, revenge, and honor in battle that have endured throughout 3000 years of Western history. There won’t be a pantheon of gods manipulating the humans here. But there will be Brad Pitt as Achilles, and that in itself is a guarantee that America is about to rediscover the glory of Troy.

But despite this big screen revival, some archaeologists suggest that the Trojan War may never have happened, that the angry Achilles may never have fought, and the city of Troy is something that lives more in myth.

Guests:

Brian Rose, archaeologist, professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati, featured in the “Conquering Troy” documentary on National Geographic Channel

Mary Lefkowitz, professor of classical studies at Wellesley College, specializing in Greek poetry and mythology, author of “Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn Form Myths.”

Guests:

TBA.

By now, the photographs of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison are all too familiar. Shot after shot of naked men in humiliating and disturbing positions, with American soldiers gloating in the foreground and background. Politicians and military leaders have lined up to condemn the pictures and the people who took them.

Last week, in testimony before Congress, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld apologized for the mistreatment of the prisoners and described what happened in Abu Ghraib as “fundamentally un-American.” But while people try to blame the abuse on a few bad soldiers, other say the scandal is challenging America to look in the mirror and ask how the war may be transforming it’s moral profile.

Guests:

Joel Turnipseed, served in the Marine Corps in the Persian Gulf War and author of the memoir “Baghdad Express”

John Hutson, president and dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire., and former judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy

U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT).

Fifty years ago, Americans were able to turn on their televisions and radios, and witness the first ever nationally televised congressional inquiry. The Army-McCarthy hearings lasted 36 days. They marked the end of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s preeminence, but there is historical value in studying McCarthy. He’s thought to have started a new strain of insidious partisanship that still exists today.

For the first time, ordinary Americans were able to see McCarthy bullying witnesses, and take in his smirking and the growing evidence of his alcoholism. During the hearings McCarthy exuded a righteous passion, decrying “the traitors” in a quavering voice. Looking back on the “Red scare” chapter in American history and the legacy of Senator Joe McCarthy

Guests:

Victor Navasky, Publisher, The Nation

John Earl Haynes, politicial historian at the Library of Congress

Norma Barzman, Hollywood writer blacklisted during McCarthyism.

Guests:

PLACEHOLDER

There’s a new twist in the debate over religious freedom in America. In several states, pharmacists have been fired for refusing to fill birth control prescriptions. They claim it’s a matter of religious belief and they should be protected accordingly. Now the question is moving from pharmacies, and doctor’s offices to a dozen state legislatures where “conscience laws” are being debated.

One such law recently passed the Michigan House of Representatives. It is called the Conscientious Objector Act and it allows health care workers to “opt out” of dispensing morning after pills, or performing organ transplants, or getting close to stem cell research, if these matters violate their personal religious beliefs.

Guests:

Chris Kolb, Michigan State Representative (D-Ann Arbor)

Dr. Michael Grodin, Medical Ethicist at Boston Medical Center

Karen Brauer, pharmacist

Teresa Collett, Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas.

Three weeks ago, President Bush stood beside Ariel Sharon and gave America’s blessing to the Israeli Prime Minister’s plan to keep some West Bank settlements, and deny Palestinian refugees the right of return to Israel. In the turbulent weeks since then, another Hamas leader was assassinated, and Sharon’s own Likud Party rejected his plan to withdraw from Gaza.

U.S. diplomats sent a letter scolding President Bush over his support for Sharon, saying that he has “proved that the U.S. is not an even-handed peace partner.” Alan Dershowitz says this criticism is part of a trend, wherein, as he puts it, the cacophony of unreasonable, double-standard and extreme condemnations of Israel drown out any criticism that is reasonable, comparable and contextual” America’s most famous defense attorney makes The Case for Israel.

Guests:

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law Professor and author of several books, including “The Case for Israel,” and “The Vanishing American Jew.”