August 16 – Are We Getting Our Money’s Worth Out of Our Intelligence Agencies?; The Illusion of Perfect Warfare

Full Program

Part 1

Today we look into the subject of our national security in terms of whether we are getting our money’s worth from our intelligence community after we have thrown billions at them following their clear failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. We will replay a recent interview I did with James Bamford on August the fourth to get a critical assessment of why the CIA and the NSA missed 9/11 even though they had a lot of information at the time which was not shared or acted upon. An investigative journalist specializing in national security issues, James Bamford is the author of the best-sellers “Body of Secrets”, “The Puzzle Palace” and “The Shadow Factory: Inside the Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to Spying on America” and we discuss his article at Foreign Policy “Missed Calls: Is the NSA lying about its Failure to Prevent 9/11?”

Part 2

Then we examine the other dominant component of national security, our military hardware and the Military Industrial Complex that makes it, along with the software that supports it, in particular the intellectual underpinning of our military and security policies that are often dictated by technological capability rather than strategic thinking. One of America’s premier military experts, William Arkin, who co-authored the land mark “Top Secret America” investigation and the national best-seller of the same name, joins us to discuss his latest book “Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare” and how our security is undermined by our impulse to gather too much data and that by using drones to avoid putting our troops in danger, we put the rest of us more danger. We recently spoke on July 30^th.