Background Briefing: September 11, 2023

Why Can’t Biden and the Pentagon Control Elon Musk From Helping His Pal Putin?

We begin with Secretary of State Blinken’s inability to answer a question on CNN’s “State of the Union” about Elon Musk preventing Ukraine from attacking the Russian Black Sea fleet to stop it from firing Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian civilian targets saying “I can’t speak to a specific episode.” Joining us to discuss why the Biden administration and the Pentagon seem to have no control over Musk who appears to admire Putin and could be passing on Ukraine’s most vital secrets to the Kremlin is Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He previously served in the Pentagon and White House under the George W. Bush administration, first as special assistant to the principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy and then as assistant to the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism at the National Security Council.

 

Ariel Dorfman on the 50th Anniversary of the Coup Against Allende

Then on this 50th anniversary of the coup against Chile’s president Salvador Allende which led to the torture, murder and disappearance of over 40,000 Chileans, we speak with Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than a hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels Widows and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. A prominent human rights activist, he worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende’s chief of staff in the final months before the September 11, 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He is an Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University, and his latest book, just out, is The Suicide Museum: A Novel and he has an article in the New York Times, “I Watched a Democracy Die. I Don’t Want to Do It Again” and another at The New York Review of Books, “Defending Allende.”

 

On the 22nd Anniversary of 9/11 the Senate Homeland Security Committee Wants an Unredacted Report on Saudi Arabia’s Role in the Attack

Then finally on this 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Wall Street, the Pentagon and the attempt to destroy the U.S. Capitol, we speak about the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s efforts to get an unredacted report on Saudi Arabia’s role in the attack with Philip Shenon, the bestselling author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.  A former reporter for the New York Times for more than 20 years, as a Washington correspondent for the New York Times, he covered the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the State Department, and, as a foreign correspondent, he reported from more than sixty countries and several warzones. His latest book is A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination.