Truth Politics & Power: National Security Council
Truth Politics & Power is a weekly series where host Neal Conan engages with historians, journalists, scholars, poets and even comedians to explore the context and meaning of the Trump era.
President Trump is delegating more authority over National Security to the generals who lead the National Security Council and the Pentagon. In this episode:Â how the National Security Council makes decisions, how it meshes with the President and his Cabinet, and the vast differences between the two generals he has appointed as National Security Advisors.
Airs Saturday, July 1 at 10pm on AM820
Guests:
Dana Priest won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting for her coverage of black site prisons and the government’s counter intelligence program. Priest covers intelligence and national security for the Washington Post. She’s covered the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo and has traveled with Army Special Forces around the world. She’s the co-author, with William M. Arkin, of Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State and the author of The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military.
William Wechsler is a counterterrorism and special operations expert at the Center for American Progress, where he’s a senior fellow. Previously, he served several secretaries of defense, most recently as deputy assistant secretary for special operations and combating terrorism. Early this year, he and Kori Schake co-authored a paper, Process Makes Perfect: Best Practices in the Art of National Security Policymaking, in which they spoke with former national security advisors about national security decision making.
Loren Dejonge Schulman is the Deputy Director of Studies and the Leon E. Panetta Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where she works on national security and defense strategy and reform issues. She held several positions in the Obama Administration, most recently as Senior Advisor to National Security Advisor Susan Rice.
