The Justice Department recommended yesterday that Attorney General Eric Holder re-open and examine cases of alleged abuse of suspected al-Qaeda members.  The abuse allegedly took place in secret CIA prisons during former President George W. Bush's administration. To go over the details, we have Vijay Padmanabhan, visiting assistant professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York City, and Mark Danner, author of the book “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror.”

Read the Inspector General's report on interrogations (via NYTimes)

While newspapers and magazines have lined their pages with details of Bernie Madoff's deceit, the literary world is still trying to cash in on the embezzlement drama. The sixth book on the life and times of the convicted Ponzi schemer hits bookstores today.

The book was penned by Sheryl Weinstein, former CEO of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, and one of Madoff’s investors. We speak to Motoko Rich, who covers the publishing industry for The New York Times, along with author and journalist Erin Arvedlund, whose book “Too Good to be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff” just came out this month.

Today, preliminary results come in from last week's hotly-contested presidential election in Afghanistan. Both leading candidates, current President Hamid Karzai and leading challenger Abdullah Abdullah, have claimed victory by margins large enough to avoid a run-off election.  For a look at the potential impact the early results could have both there and in the U.S., we talk to Christine Fair, professor at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, who is just back from Afghanistan as an election monitor; and Martin Patience, BBC correspondent in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Ever since it was founded eight years ago, Wikipedia has declared itself "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." But soon, not everyone will be able to edit every article. Starting in a few weeks, the Wikimedia Foundation will require changes made to entries about living people be approved a new class of experienced editors.  The move aims to curb abuse by vandals... but it complicates Wikipedia's wide-open ethos. We speak to Noam Cohen, who writes the "Link by Link" column for The New York Times.

Read Cohen's article on the changes ahead for the online encyclopedia, "Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People"

In an attempt to slow the spread of HIV, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might begin recommending circumcisions for all infant boys. The announcement comes out of this week's National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta. The CDC likely won't release a formal draft of the proposal for another four to six months, but speculation on it already has emotions flaring.

For more on the debate, we are joined by Dana Goldstein, public health reporter and associate editor for The American Prospect magazine; and Dr. Roy Gulick, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Attorney General Eric Holder will appoint federal prosecutor John Durham to investigate alleged prisoner abuses at CIA prisons during the Bush administration.  Durham has a long reputation as a no-nonsense, under-the-radar prosecutor who’s gone after career criminals and corrupt government officials for decades.

For more on this elusive figure, we talk to Durham’s old boss Kevin O'Connor, former U.S. Attorney for the State of Connecticut. And for more on the ramifications of the decision to investigate the CIA's interrogation techniques, we turn to New York Times Reporter Scott Shane.

When the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff says that the situation in Afghanistan is "deteriorating," that's not a good sign. That's exactly what Admiral Mike Mullen said on Sunday, unfortunately, going on to say that the Taliban has gotten "more sophisticated." For a military analysis of America's loosening grip on stability in Afghanistan, we talk with retired U.S. Army Colonel Paul Hughes. He is currently the senior program officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

This morning, President Obama will nominate Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to a second term.  The President will do so during an appearance at Oak Bluffs School on Martha’s Vineyard, where the First Family is vacationing this week. Joining us to talk about Bernanke's performance during the current economic crisis is our friend Dan Gross, columnist at Newsweek and Slate and author of the book "Dumb Money," as well as Richard Bove, banking equities analyst and a Vice President at Rochdale Securities.

Michael Jackson died of a fatal drug overdose including the anesthetic Propofol, according to court documents unsealed on Monday. Jackson's death will now reportedly be treated as a homicide. To shed light on the latest news, we speak with Allison Samuels, national correspondent for Newsweek magazine; she has been following the Jackson case since his death two months ago.

President Obama may soon face a new obstacle to his plan to reform health care: a growing pool of budgetary red ink. The White House Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office will release new estimates today on the size of the U.S. deficit.  Both agencies are expected to say the deficit will reach $9 trillion over the next decade, which is a $2 trillion increase from previous projections. We speak with Linda Bilmes, Harvard professor of public finance and co-author, with Joseph Stiglitz, of the book "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

The average doctor visit lasts just 17 minutes, according to online medical journal Medscape.  Plans for health care reform aim to allow doctors to spend more time with patients, but until then, doctors recommend getting the most out of even short visits. They say it doesn't make sense to leave anything out. Dr. Charles Mouton is professor of community health and family practice at Howard University, and he gives us some advice on how to break the silence and talk to your doctor most effectively.

As part of our week-long series of health care roundtables, we’re talking with young people. They're coveted by health insurers, but with low salaries and high resilience, they’re often the least likely to buy in. We hear from Savlan Hauser, an architect in Oakland, California who has been buying her own catastrophic health insurance plan for the last three years; Nik Bonovich, a freelance journalist in Sacramento, California, who’s been buying premium health insurance since February; and Golnar Adili, who's been going without health care coverage for the past three years.

Click here to access the other round tables in this series

For more on the guests from today's roundtable continue reading...

We get reactions to the preliminary Afghan election results due in this morning. Joining us to talk about Afghan responses to the news is Charlie Sennott, executive editor of GlobalPost.

A panel convened by President Obama to study the H1N1 flu, or "swine flu," presented a report Monday with a "plausible scenario" in which as many as 90,000 people could die of the flu this fall.  To help understand this prediction, we're joined by Dr. Richard Wenzel, chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University and former President of the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

With only 10 percent of ballots in, the Afghan election commission says President Hamid Karzai and top challenger Abdullah Abdullah each have about 40 percent of the vote; Karzai holds a slight lead. If neither candidate gets a majority, there will be a runoff vote.