Background Briefing: October 11, 2023
Israel’s Intelligence Failures and the Recriminations Soon to Come
We begin with the intelligence failures and recriminations soon to emerge once the Israeli military operation against Hamas is over, assuming the war does not widen. Joining us is Paul Pillar, who served for 30 years as an analyst at the CIA, in which his last position was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Previously, he served as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia and also headed the Assessments and Information Group of the DCI Counterterrorist Center. Paul Pillar is currently a professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University and a member of the Center for Peace and Security Studies, and he has a forthcoming article at The National Interest, out tomorrow, about the Hamas attack and its implication for intelligence failures.
The Religious Fanatic Who Stacked Our Judiciary Believes Catholics are under threat from “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who Leonard Leo calls “the progressive Ku Klux Klan,” describing his opponents as “not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of.”
Then we speak with Andy Kroll, a reporter for ProPublica covering voting, elections and other democracy issues. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for Rolling Stone and his reporting there about a series of cyberattacks on congressional campaigns helped lead to the indictment of a California political operative. Before that, he was a senior reporter at Mother Jones, where his work on self-dealing during the Trump presidency sparked multiple congressional investigations. He is the author of, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, and we discuss his report at ProPublica, “We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority” and how a religious fanatic who believes Catholics are under threat from “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” he calls “the progressive Ku Klux Klan,” describes his opponents as “not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of.”
Chaos With No New Speaker as a Block of Republican Members Want to Vote For McCarthy
Then finally, with the House in recess without voting for a new speaker following a closed-door ballot that had Steve Scalise at 113 votes to Jim (Gym) Jordan’s 99, we look into the rocky path ahead as many Republican members want to vote for the recently ousted Kevin McCarthy, thus throwing the election into chaos. Joining us is Paul Light, who is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at New York University and the founding principal investigator of the Global Center for Public Service. Previously, he served as the founding director of the Center for Public Service and director of the Governmental Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Thickening Government, The Tides of Reform, Government by Investigation: Presidents, Congress, and the Search for Answers, 1945-2012, and his latest book is The Government-Industrial Complex: Tracking the True Size of Government.