November 20 - Dunces in Charge of Intelligence?; What is the Head of the NSA Up To?; How Facebook's Fake News Helped Trump

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Donald Trump’s national security team now taking shape scraped from the bottom of the barrel since most of the Republican cream at the top signed a letter protesting Trump and given his vindictive and punitive nature, are now out in the cold. We will examine the Benghazi-bashing Tea Party ideologue to head up the CIA, Putin’s favorite American general heading the National Security Council, and an admiral about to be fired as head of the NSA who met with Trump last Thursday to artlessly make a deal the details of which are open to speculation. CIA veteran Robert Baer, the author of four New York Times bestsellers, who is currently the national security affairs analyst at CNN, joins us to discuss a team of dunces in charge of intelligence at a time when tensions between the two nuclear powers are on the rise and sober professionals are needed to deal with a paranoid kleptocrat in the Kremlin who could soon be facing off against an unstable amateur in the White House with a surplus of ego and a deficit of knowledge.

Part 2

Then we look further into the frightening line-up of crusaders and petty partisans, incompetents and ideologues, at the front line of the nation’s defense serving a Commander-in-Chief who will have 5 minutes to determine the fate of the world should a real or false nuclear attack warning come our way. James Bamford, an investigative journalist specializing in national security issues and author of “The Puzzle Palace” and “The Shadow Factory: Inside the Ultra-Secret NASA, from 9/11 to Spying on America”, joins us to discuss efforts to fire the head of the NSA who, as a serving admiral, was seriously out of line meeting with Trump to either save his job, get the job as the new DNI, or engage in something beyond the fevered imagination of conspiracy theorists.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with David Mindich, a Professor and former Chair of Media Studies & Digital Arts at St. Michael’s College. The author of “Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News” and “Just the Facts: How ‘Objectivity’ Came to Define American Journalism”, joins us to discuss the role of fake news in the election and how the Republicans pressured Facebook to turn editorial control of aggregating news over to algorithms that ended up helping Trump.