Art Bell interviews Robert Young Pelton, author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places, who shifted from marketing (including early work with Steve Jobs) to war-zone exploration after realizing life’s fragility—like his near-fatal plane crash in Borneo or surviving a Taliban ambush by posing as a student. Pelton warns privatized warfare (70,000 contractors in Iraq) signals state collapse and criticizes U.S. overreaction post-9/11, calling it a "cleansing" blunder akin to Saddam’s fall triggering chaos. He dismisses 9/11 conspiracy theories but confirms intelligence agencies ignored WMD evidence, citing Bush Jr.’s misguided assumptions. Ultimately, Pelton’s travels reveal civilization’s fragility and the dangers of insularity, urging Americans to confront domestic issues before global interventions. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippine Islands, the Philippine nation, Manila.
Hi, everybody.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be in, whatever time zone you're residing in, every single one of them, covered by this amazing program called Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
It is a pleasure and honor to be escorting you through the balance of the weekend.
Sure was fun being here for Open Lines last night.
And toward that end, by the way, if you would like to begin lining up for Open Lines right now, that's what we're going to have this hour.
So feel free, if you have your appropriate number jotted down, to call it and begin lining up, and we'll probably get you on the air this hour.
Let us take a quick look at the normally and never-to-be disappointing depressing news.
President Bush hails troops as Iraq war is reviewed.
President Bush marked Veterans Day by praising U.S. troops who have fought oppression around the world, yet spoke only briefly about Iraq, where U.S. commanders are re-evaluating strategy.
Speaking three days after announcing the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush hailed members of the armed services past, present, and future for their dedication and bravery.
So basically, that's pretty good, I guess, as far as world news goes until you get to the second story.
In Iraq, Sunni gunmen ambushed a convoy of minibuses Saturday night at get this, a fake checkpoint.
That's a way to do it, a fake checkpoint on the dangerous highway south of Baghdad.
It resulted in the killing of 10 Shiite passengers and the kidnapping of about 50 across the country.
At least 52 other people were killed in violence or were found dead.
Five of those decapitated.
Iraqi soldiers decapitated, boy.
Police said the mass kidnappings and the killing was near the volatile town of Latifah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad in the so-called triangle of death.
So I don't know how you rack it up here, but no matter how you look at it, it seems as though the news out of Iraq just gets worse and worse.
Democrats now look to sustain majority.
It's the question Democrats would rather not ask in their moment of celebration.
Are there new majorities in the House and Senate sustainable?
What if the war in Iraq is over by 2008?
Or what if it is still being waged despite Democratic pledges to change the course?
What if voter apathy toward President Bush is irrelevant in two years?
After all, he will be on his way out.
Tough questions, I guess, for the Democrats.
Guess who's back in power in Nicaragua?
Daniel Ortega.
Daniel Ortega returns to Nicaragua's presidency, a shadow of the fiery revolutionary who in Cold War times vowed an endless fight against the U.S. government, determined to overthrow him, balding, now weakened by heart trouble and often appearing almost docile, he now preaches reconciliation, stability, promises to maintain close ties with the U.S., as well as the veterans of the Canta Army that had trained and armed against him.
Well, once burned, twice shy, I guess, in his case.
LaShawan Harris took her three children on a train from Oakland.
This is one of those stories that causes you not to want to read the world news.
She took her three children on a train from Oakland into San Francisco October 19th, 2005.
She bought the little boys hot dogs, and they walked along Fisherman's Wharf.
Then Harris undressed the three boys, ages 16 months, 2 and 6, and proceeded to drop them one at a time over the low railing into the chilly San Francisco Bay.
Please say she knew they couldn't swim.
She thought she was sending them to heaven.
God had commanded her to sacrifice her three boys, she said, her most precious possessions.
Harris later told psychiatrists, passerbys at the time, who actually saw all this, said she seemed dazed, in fact, disoriented.
The United Nations vetoed a U.N. Security Council draft resolution Saturday that sought to condemn an Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and demand Israeli troops pull out of the territory.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the Arab-backed draft resolution was biased against Israel and politically motivated.
But of course.
The death threat came on a simple white flyer, many of them blowing down the streets at dawn.
A group calling itself Friends of Muhammad accused a local Palestinian Christian of selling mobile phones carrying offensive sketches of the Muslim prophet.
The message went on to curse all Arab Christians and the Pope still struggling to calm Muslim outrage over his remarks about Islam.
For $5, not much, residents of one of the city's hardest-hit neighborhoods received three tennis balls Saturday and then a chance to vent 15 months of frustration at the slow pace of rebuilding since Hurricane Katrina.
The object of their annoyance sat perched atop a dunk tank, Bob Josephson, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs in Louisiana for the reviled and much lampooned Federal Emergency Management Agency's handling of what occurred in Louisiana.
You've got to give him credit, I guess, for that.
He sat in a chair, sold them on the cheap a few baseballs or whatever that could be thrown that would end up dunking him in the water.
I bet they had a blast.
We'll look at some of the rest of the news in a moment.
By the way, at the top of the hour, this is going to be, I think, a very interesting show.
We're going to take a little Side trip here, and we're going to be interviewing a man who has written a book about.
Well, his name is Robert Young Pelton, and he's written a number of books about the world's most dangerous places and his adventures.
And it's kind of interesting because I live in one of the world's most dangerous places.
It's probably somewhere down the list, not toward the top of the list, but it is to be discussed as I look at the list of questions.
So there you have it.
We'll see how dangerous it is where I live.
British and American scientists, now I know I have a lot of blind listeners, listeners who cannot see.
British and American scientists have restored vision in blind mice by transplanting light-sensitive cells into their eyes in a breakthrough that could lead to new treatments of human eye disease.
The mice suffered from eye damage called photoreceptor loss.
Now, that occurs in macular degeneration, the leading cause of sight loss in the elderly and other eye disorders.
But instead of using stem cells, which could form into any eye cell, the scientists this time transplanted cells that had reached a latter stage of development toward becoming photoreceptor cells.
We have shown for the first time that it is possible to transplant photoreceptors, according to Dr. Robert McLaren, a scientist and eye surgeon at Moorfield's Eye Hospital in London.
These cells are lost in some of the more common causes of blindness.
So a lot of you out there should be sitting straight up at this one.
The scientists believe further research could lead to the first human retinal cell transplants for people with blinding diseases within a decade.
It's always too far away, isn't it?
Everybody's looking for instant cures.
It's always too far.
Now here's a story that should rock back any environmentalist.
It really should rock you back.
It's from the BBC News, and the headline is, only 50 years left for sea fish.
Environmental correspondent BBC News website.
There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if the current trends continue, according to a major scientific study.
Stocks have collapsed in nearly a third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is now accelerating.
Writing in the journal Science, the very well-respected journal Science, the international team of researchers says fishery decline is closely tied to a broader loss of marine biodiversity, but a greater use of protected areas could safeguard existing stocks if we do something.
The way we use the oceans is that we hope and we assume there will always be another species to exploit after we've completely gone through the last one, right?
What we're highlighting is that there is a finite number of stocks.
We've gone through about a third of them now, and we're going to get through the rest.
So they're saying in 50 years, folks, no more fish.
Think about that a little bit.
In 50 years, no more fish.
Now, perhaps a number of you will not be around in 50 years.
I'm certainly in that group.
And so you might say, well, who cares?
But for your children and their children and the world as we all hope it goes on, you would want to be able to tap the ocean for food.
And if you can't, I'm not exactly sure how mankind could continue.
So there's a flash for you.
50 years, trend continues, no more fish.
No more fish.
Let's go to the lines.
First time caller line, Richard in New York.
You are on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hey, Art, couple of things.
First of all, with the that scares the hell out of me.
I'm in your category.
I'm not going to be around.
Well, I don't know.
Hopefully I'll be around.
But, you know, if the fish are gone, that would mean the oceans are kind of dead, right?
And in another 50 years, it's going to be like living on a different planet.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
And there's a question I wanted to ask you, but before I do, very quickly, are you still struggling with changing centigrade to Fahrenheit and Fahrenheit to centigrade?
Anyway, what I wanted to ask you is last night I was listening to your Open Line show, and I had to go to sleep because I had to get up early this morning.
But you made a comment, and I said, surely I couldn't have understood this right, something about to the effect that us pulling out of Vietnam traumatized most of Americans, or something like that?
I agree with you on one ground, and that is if we were not willing to win it, then continuing to throw American young bodies into something that was just a half-assed attempt to win, yeah, we were better off pulling out.
Look, the whole thing was traumatic, as you point out, and I can see that the war itself, of course, was traumatic.
But the loss and the fact that we lost really didn't sink in with the American people for a number of years.
And when it did, it was very traumatic.
And there was no relief of that until basically we won the First Iraq War.
It was quick, clean, and we were out.
Of course, now we're back.
But for a short time after that first victory, it's as though the veil of failure from Vietnam had been lifted.
Now we're in Iraq, and all that's left at this point is how we end it.
And again, I say in Vietnam, we could have won.
We had the power to win.
We just weren't willing to use it.
And the tragedy of it is that we were willing to continue to throw young American bodies into a half-assed effort to win, to end up with something less than a loss, which, of course, as he pointed out, we did not.
Wild Guard line, David in San Diego, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
Hey, I got a solution for the...
And what that is, though, a couple weeks ago, they had a guy on the show that postulated that the Sun has calved off planets in pairs, and that's what's created Uranus-Neptune pair, Saturn, Jupiter pair, you know, Mars and Earth and Venus.
But anyways, what we're seeing on those new systems that we're signed, they were saying that they were finding these huge planets super close in.
Well, what we're seeing is the formation of planetary systems.
These are the Jupiter and Saturn planets popping right up.
And also, the reason we don't win wars anymore is the Caesar syndrome, is because after World War II, so many military commanders came home and became politicians and won everything that the civilians, well, they said, well, we can't have these heroes coming home and taking our positions.
I was working on the first amplifier that I ever had, a radio amateur amplifier.
It was for the hands out there, a pair of 813s, and they'll know what those are.
And some of the older hands will anyway.
And it was on an open chassis.
You know, it wasn't closed.
And I was working away on it, and I came into contact with the plate, the top of the tube, that plate.
And I came in contact with that and the chassis, and that put 2,500 volts at, I can't recall, but it was, oh, I don't know, a couple of amps at least, maybe an amp and a half through my body.
and that should have been enough to kill me, but luckily it threw me all the way across the room, plastered me up against the wall like in a cartoon, locked my jaw open, and I couldn't move for a long time.
And then, as I mentioned back then, and I say again now, it took about 30 minutes to get my jaw unlocked.
But I live in a relatively safe place, or at least I think I do until I get my guest at the top of the hour, and he'll probably tell me something else.
Well, I was in a remote Eskimo village, and you posted my picture on your website years ago with some mammoth tusks, and I buy tusks and stuff from the remote.
Well, this village, and I was talking to a lady, and it used to be a wonderful village.
Everybody hunted and got along.
And I said, what happened?
You know, because people are on drugs and they're not hunting anymore.
And she called it the Curse of the Iputac, where in their yard they buried up an ancient, they dug up an ancient burial of this really strange culture that kind of seemed like it came from another planet or something.
But they had elaborate, you know, death masks and all kinds of stuff where most of the Eskimos used to put their dead out on the ice, and this culture didn't.
But she said ever since then that all these weird things had happened, the village was fighting with each other, nobody's hunting.
And it was an interesting story.
I just was curious if you, you know, I heard some of you.
And I take trips, and we've got just a fascinating culture and just wonderful people.
We have almost 300 villages, and most of them at one time were 80% subsistence, and they moved around a lot.
When they built the schools in the 50s, they all settled in, and they required more government help.
And there's all different degrees of problems, but I trace it all back to the demoralizing effects of socialism, where you give people something and help them out, and they don't have to do anything for it.
Well, I know, but to see areas where there was virtual permanent ice turning into virtual permanent ocean, in fact, ocean that can be navigated by ships is pretty scary.
I mean, I don't think we're supposed to see these kinds of changes in one lifetime.
unidentified
Well, I don't know.
You know, I kind of deal in fossils and stuff, and we find things that, you know, there were dinosaurs here.
There's been climate changes.
I think that we probably have, and I kind of look at it from a biblical perspective that man has gone about things in the wrong way, and it says in the Bible that the earth will even suffer for it, and I think that's what's happening.
I wonder if you've heard about a new bit of technology that's being developed in Italy, I believe it is, where they're taking radioactive waste and they've encapsulated it inside of molten copper.
And by doing so, they've accelerated the rate at which the radioactive waste decays.
There was also a several years ago, I saw a Good Morning America episode in which they had this machine that would take the worst of it, plutonium, and they were able to virtually make it almost harmless in this machine.
I can't recall any more facts about it.
It was a long time ago.
But there are several schemes out there like this, and we still seem bent, I guess, on going ahead and putting it in Yucca Mountain, which, by the way, has earthquake faults.
unidentified
Right.
That's not too good.
I wonder, too, secondarily, if they encapsulate this radioactive waste inside a lump of molten copper, what if they were to, let's say, not just encapsulated inside a lump, but inside a casting, such that at the end of the period of radioactive decay, that that particular casting will become some sort of new alloy?
I just wanted to kind of talk about the concept that people are always talking about winning wars, especially from the point when you think of when you have international bankers who are arming both sides.
You know, we talk about World War II being such a noble war.
And, you know, we had Standard Oil selling oil to Germany and such.
In other words, you know, the weapons of mass destruction, despite the emails I'll get, were not there.
And we have perhaps reasonable objectives in going into Iraq.
I think they are reasonable.
We need some sort of base situation there.
I think we could stabilize the Middle East ultimately if we have bases there.
I think we could prevent Iran from spreading what otherwise it's going to spread.
And of course, the oil.
There are a lot of reasons for being there, none of which we stated.
unidentified
Yeah, well, if those were really the reasons why the powers that be were initiating things like this, because when you just see all the ineptitude, and these are not stupid people, these generals and whatever, they're not stupid people.
I think if they wanted to win something, if the government wanted to win, the resources would be there and something positive would be happening.
It just seems like when you have chaos on top of chaos, that that seems to be what the goal they want.
Well, I could not agree with you more, and that's what we have at the moment there, is chaos.
So there were probably solid reasons for having this war, but they were reasons that we could not state.
Traditionally, the United States has only gone to war when somebody has hit us, right?
Well, you can't really make the case that 9-11 was a reason to go into Iraq.
Even the president has not tried to make that case.
So that wasn't it.
Nobody really shot at us from Iraq.
So why did we begin the war with Iraq?
The Second War is what I'm now referring to.
And I think all the reasons I just talked about, strategic reasons, having bases there, and no doubt The oil and just the geographic influence that we can have.
All of these are good, solid reasons for being there.
Now, the only real reason that we stated was what a bad guy Saddam Hussein was.
But, you know, that's not enough of a reason, my God.
If that was enough of a reason, then we'd be to war with Somalia, because that's run by warlords.
We'd have been to war when the slaughter was going on in Cambodia, because that was ever so much worse than anything Saddam ever did.
Even with the gassing of the Kurds, what went on in Cambodia was much more deserving of U.S. intervention if we're going to intervene in a country because of the wrongdoings internally in that country.
If that's a reason, then there are many, many, many countries that would have justified the U.S. going in and stopping whatever was going on, or perhaps Angola, where beheadings would make the number of beheadings in Iraq look like nothing.
So that was the best reason we could publicly come up with, and it wasn't much of a reason at all.
But now that we're there, I am a person who says, we ought to go ahead and finish the job.
From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
Indeed, here I am.
This is going to be an interesting interview.
Robert Young Pelton, coming up in a moment, has been the inspiration and the role model for a new generation of intellectual warriors, adventurers.
He's an author, journalist, filmmaker, photographer, adventurer, explorer, expert philosopher, passionate advocate for truth and discovery.
He is a former marketing strategist.
Now there's a change in careers for you.
Product developer and CEO for his own company.
His journeys and expedition, accomplished actually during his time off, turned from a hobby to a career when he created the annual now updated Robert Young Pelton's World's Most Dangerous Places.
And I suppose that would have to change annually, following soon after by his humorous survival guide, Come Back Alive, and his autobiography, The Adventurist.
Robert is executive producer and host of his own series of highly rated specials for the Discovery and Travel Channel.
He's also been featured speaker at the TED Conference, that's TED, TED Conference, trained Navy SEALs in survival, participated in the secret special forces training, invited to speak at West Point, and motivates young people to do meaningful things with their short time on this earth.
Indeed, we all have a very short time on this earth.
So in a moment, here's a man who can tell you, I suppose, a dangerous way to live that short time.
I'm Art Bell.
Well, once again, Robert Young Pelton's books say as much about what we're going to be talking about as anything else.
The Adventurist, Come Back Alive, the World's Most Dangerous Places, and Licensed to Kill Hired Guns in the War on Terror.
Well, when I was about 40, a number of my mentors, including my father, were in their mid-50s and older and had died suddenly from a variety of things, Lou Gehrig's disease, cancer, and things like that.
And I always treasured my sort of two weeks or month off.
And I suddenly realized that if I didn't do the thing that I really enjoyed doing, I wasn't going to do it.
So I sort of made an abrupt change and began to be a professional adventurer, which is kind of a laughable career choice.
You know, there's not many ads in the paper for adventurers.
So I had to basically go forward and do what I wanted to do, which was to explore the world's most dangerous places.
I used to go to places in Africa and Borneo, and I did the Camel Trophy, which is an event where a number of nations compete by driving Land Rovers through jungles.
And I soon found that expeditions were quite dull because when you got to these places, there were some tribes and some trees and rocks, but there was nothing really challenging to get there.
And then my friends, who included journalists, said, you know, really the most inaccessible places on earth are war zones.
And so I began going into places like Algeria to meet the GIA, which at the time was a very bloodthirsty group.
They had actually sent me facts saying that come to our country and we'll cut your throat.
And they wanted to kill all journalists and writers.
And I began to set up interviews.
So one of the first interviews I set up was with the Taliban, who had just been created with a Turkish journalist friend of mine.
And I just began to sort of track down terrorist groups and hang out with them and understand what they did.
Well, I can understand the life of a journalist can be a very, very dangerous one.
That's reflected here where I am in the Philippines, and we'll talk about that.
So I can imagine that it would be better not to go as a journalist, but to go sort of as a private citizen, just to kind of hang out with, for example, the television.
I just cannot imagine how they would accept you without extreme suspicion.
At least a journalist, you know, has an excuse for trying to posy up to a group like that.
But you wouldn't have that exactly, would you?
So how do you posy up to them without them slitting your throat?
Well, you have to remember, in the beginning of my career, nobody knew who I was, and there was no such thing as Google, and people had to judge me sort of on what they looked at me and figured out what I had to do.
So when I first met with the Talibs, I spent quite a bit of time in Pakistan, along the border with Afghanistan in the early, mid-90s, tracking down this group.
And I found their headquarters, which was inside Pakistan in a refugee camp.
And when I walked in the door, they were a little surprised.
But when they asked me why I was there, I said in Arabic, Anna Talib, which means I'm a student.
In other words, I'm here to learn.
And they were quite taken back by that.
They thought that was, I guess, something they wanted to pursue.
And when I told them that I wanted to set up an interview with their leaders, which included Mulla Omar at the time, they said, no, we don't do that.
And then I said to them, well, then you're like the women hiding behind the burqa.
And they kind of rocked back on their heels.
But they understood what I was talking about.
And so they had a special shura, which is a meeting in Kandahar, and they passed a fatwa saying that, yes, we would be allowed to film them.
The interesting thing is Mullah Omar, there's been a myth that he's never been interviewed, was actually interviewed.
But when the Turkish crew, who were Muslim, of course, showed up with the camera, one of the things that we told him is that in my country, you look somebody in the eye and you can tell if they're telling the truth or not.
He said, the path to my heart is not through my eyes, it's through my voice.
So you can record my voice, but you can't film my face.
Now, he has one eye zone shut.
He's quite embarrassed about that.
So we recorded interviews with all the leadership of the Taliban back in 1995.
Yeah, I mean, we use the word Taliban to describe what I would call a conservative Pashtun elements in the South.
But at that time, there was warlordism everywhere in Afghanistan, and particularly along the border in the South.
And people made their money by stopping convoys and then either charging bribes or pillaging or raping or doing whatever they wanted to do to the people that passed.
And the Talibs at that time rose up and began to move from town to town to town.
Now, naturally, they were supported by Pakistan, but they were welcomed by the Afghans until they got to Kabul.
And, you know, Kabul is a very cosmopolitan place, and there was also some ethnic problems because the Taliban were Pashtun and sort of a weird cult.
They weren't traditional Pashtuns, but the Pashtuns that had grown up in Pakistan.
When they got into Kabul, they began to crack down on what they thought the excesses of the westernized Afghans in Kabul were doing.
They got into a sort of a shouting match with the UN and the other NGO organizations about them living in mansions, and things began to fall apart.
When they got into the north, they became very brutal and started killing people.
So they basically ran out of steam about the time that September 11th came about.
They were really hurting because they'd been strangled money-wise, and they were really not welcome in the north.
But the south still is strongly conservative and still views the Taliban as the correct way to sort of clean up the excesses and influence of the West.
Well, a lot of people don't know that the Taliban is actually a Pakistani movement.
If you look at a map of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and you look at that border, the Duran line, it runs right smack through the Pashtun ethnic groups.
Pakistan is terrified that if it loses control or the support of the Pashtun elements, it then becomes a very small Punjabi state.
So they are very eager to control and to gain favor amongst the Pashtun elements.
Most of the people we killed after 9-11 in Afghanistan, and I was with a special forces team at that time, were Pakistanis.
They were killed 500 at a time, 600 at a time, 300 at a time, because they were left behind and the Afghans all went home.
What you're seeing now is a number of Pakistani jihadis going into the southern part of Afghanistan and supporting some of the more radical Pashtun elements.
In 1996, I was down the road from him in a place called Jalalabad when he was in Tora Bora.
And he moved around, and everybody knew where he was.
These days, there's really only one place he can be, and that is under the protection of the Pakistani ISI, which is their intelligence services, somewhere in the tribal areas, in an area between Chitral, which is the northern part, and sort of down south towards Miramshah and Quetta.
For example, Mullah Omar, who is still wanted by U.S. forces, lives openly in Quetta, which is a southern Pakistani town.
Mullah Dadla, who's the head of the military, moves between Quetta and Uruzgan province, where he's from.
So there's a very concerted effort by the Pakistanis to keep foreigners out of Quetta because of the number of Talibs that are there.
I am, of course, very much aware, and of course, Pakistan has The bomb.
In your opinion, Robert, is there any chance that one of these bombs that Pakistan has can make its way one way or the other into the hands of the Taliban?
Well, the Taliban have a hard time shooting AK-47s.
I don't know how successful they would be with a nuclear weapon.
If you know anything about nuclear weapons, they don't have a big red button like in James Bond that you push and they blow up.
Plus, there's really nowhere to use it.
If the Talibs were to be successful, it's really through a hearts and minds campaign by being sympathetic to the people and supporting them against what they consider to be outside elements.
The Pakistanis' use of missiles, in other words, the nuclear warheads that are on these short-range missiles, is really the deterrent to India's use of missiles.
And they have parades where they take big paper-maché missiles and parade them around the streets and sort of wave their fists at India, and India does the same thing.
We always look at the problem being in Afghanistan, but actually the problem is between India and Pakistan.
And the whole concept of jihadis, in other words, training foreigners to go fight in a foreign country, began in Pakistan in their war in Kashmir against India.
And Osama bin Laden just tapped into that concept during the Soviet war with Afghanistan.
And of course, we pumped in 3 billion, and the Saudis pumped in 3 billion.
And we created this sort of hardcore, heavy-duty machine of training people to go fight and die in another person's country.
Well, having been inside Afghanistan before 9-11 and having a very good knowledge of the Taliban and knowing most of the commanders, it was kind of humorous to me because before 9-11, they had exactly two operating jet aircraft fighters.
They had two Sukhois that they used to fly out of Kabul to bomb Mossud's people.
They had a number of Antonov transport planes, and that was it.
And they had a few tanks here and there.
But when we, you know, quotation mark, wiped out the Talibs, all they did is go back home.
So in the first stage of the war, the first two to four weeks of the war, there were some initial airstrikes.
The Afghans consisted of southern Pashtuns who had been airlifted into Kunduz, the northern part, and local people who had been forced or paid to fight for the Taliban.
As soon as the Taliban began retreating, these Afghans became our friends, and the Talibs melted into the south.
Now, today what you're seeing are essentially young, unemployed Pakistanis and Pashtuns fighting a low insurgency, low-level insurgency against NATO forces and ISAF forces.
It's not really a war that we would see it.
But if you remember how the British were attacked in Afghanistan in the 1700s, these are basically hit-and-run attacks.
But it obviously creates instability.
Most of the funding for that comes from the opium business, which is essentially a Pakistani-run business.
Well, 9-11, there were no Afghans, of course, and there were no Iraqis, and there were no Pakistanis.
What these were were educated, middle-class Arabs who had planned for months to learn how to fly planes and to destroy strategic targets in the U.S. Exactly.
There's no linkage to the Taliban other than the camps that were allowed to run in the host area, which is along the border there between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But they didn't get any flight training in Afghanistan, and they didn't really get any funding from Afghanistan.
That came through groups that were based in Pakistan using money from the Gulf region.
So you couldn't really draw a direct line from Afghanistan to 9-11.
Yeah, when I say the Saudis, you remember the Wahhabis are not just Saudis.
They're conservative businessmen and groups and mosques in the Middle East that support, called them liberation campaigns or jihadis who go to fight in places like Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, so on and so forth.
How do you take a young unemployed person and put them in a camp and twist them and turn them until they're willing to strap bombs to their bodies and blow themselves up?
Robert Young Pelton is my guest, and he's going to be talking to us about the most dangerous places in the world.
And on the list is the country I'm in right now.
We'll get to that shortly.
But I've always, and I think many of us have been curious about what could bring any really young person to the point that they'd strap explosives on their body and with the little red button walk into a populated place and push it.
From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
Danger is a very interesting thing.
It really is.
Have you ever been hunting?
Have you ever gone deer hunting?
Well, generally in the last few seconds before you squeeze a trigger with a deer in your sights, the deer suddenly lifts its head and it knows.
Somehow, some way, it knows.
Even if it can't smell you and it can't see you, it can sense you.
It can sense the danger.
And in the last possible second, usually too late, its head lifts.
And given another second, and the fact that, of course, a bullet travels very quickly, the deer usually loses.
But given another second, that deer would bolt.
It knew, it knows it's about to be shot.
Now, how it knows that, we don't know.
It's some sort of instinct.
Humans have it too, although I must say that we've probably all allowed it to sort of slip away one way or another.
I suspect Robert Young Pelton has stayed alive by nurturing the exact instinct that I was just talking about.
In a moment, we'll cover that and more.
The End Robert, did I describe that instinct appropriately?
And when I think of the times that I've run into misfortune, it's always because I haven't been in the war zone.
And when I was in Uganda, some young kid from an Islamic group put a bomb under my table, and a number of people were killed that night.
I was hit by a car in Peru while I was waiting for one of my contacts to come from a drug lab.
And I was kidnapped in Colombia because I was writing a story about hiking and camping because people were considering me to be too tweaked, and I should back off and do more mundane stories.
I wasn't really thinking that I was in a dangerous place, and I was just focused on enjoying myself.
And I truly believe that humans have two types of operational modes.
You know, we have our sort of day-to-day head in the clouds, sort of living in a bubble world.
And then we have our sort of animal instinct world, where every sense is sharpened and our mind is clicking like a computer and we're making very real life and death situations.
This comes from the BBC headline, Dateline Manila.
Journalism can be a dangerous occupation in the Philippines where there has been a spade of murders arousing international concern.
This person writes about reporter Pablo Hernandez, a columnist for a newspaper here in Manila.
And he would tap away on a manual typewriter in his office with an Ingram machine pistol on his desk and a .45 on his hip.
He often wore a bulletproof vest to work.
He had good reason to be wary.
He's been getting death threats for years over his stories about corruption and smuggling here in the Philippines.
He survived a knife attack, traded shots with gunmen on a motorcycle.
International media groups say the Philippines is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists.
Barely a week or even a day goes by without activists being shot.
The nine or more murders thus far this year, most for reporting on crime and political graft, compare with 10 killings in all of last year.
Nearly 1,000 left-wing activists, community workers, lawyers, and journalists have gone missing or been murdered since President Gloria Royo came to power in 2001.
Her government denies any official military sanction for the killings and has promised action.
There's been very little forthcoming.
And of course, we just recently had a coup plot put down here in the Philippines.
Most of the plotters are now in jail.
But as it goes, Robert, how dangerous is the Philippines?
One was how openly the rebel and Islamic groups operate.
The second thing is how many people the police murder.
And I spent some time with various groups there.
And I spent some time with the police.
And one of the police officers was sort of relaxing with us.
And I asked him how many people he'd shot.
And it was just sort of a passing conversation.
He said, officially or unofficially?
And I said, well, I don't know, unofficially.
He said, about seven or eight.
And I said, well, who did you shoot?
Gangsters, businessmen, criminals.
And I said, well, how many people have you shot officially?
And he said, I don't know, 20, something like that.
And I tried to determine what he was telling me.
And what he was telling me is that the Manila police specialize in extrajudicial killings.
They do it for money.
They do it because they're frustrated and they can't get some bigwig into a court.
But more importantly, they're for hire.
And there is nothing safer than hiring a policeman to kill a journalist because you're going to call the police up and say, oh, my God, somebody's been killed.
Well, guess who's going to come and try to investigate that murder?
Sure.
And so I was disturbed by that.
But then as I moved around the countryside and I saw how many weapons were in the possession, how many different groups and how many people and how many sort of ad hoc policemen there were that also operated as guerrillas, I almost thought it was humorous that everybody was involved in some kind of violent occupation on the side.
When you go down south, the violence has a purpose.
It is ethnic groups operating under Islamic political banners, MILF, Abu Sayyaf, MNLF, against what they consider to be Christian occupation of what they call Bang Samara, which is the Muslim homeland.
When you get into the big cities, you're talking about criminality.
And you're talking about people saying, hey, this guy wrote something about me.
Here's 200 bucks.
Make them go away.
That's a completely different concept.
And as you go further north, you get into the more of the communist-sponsored insurgencies, which are against rich landowners and injustice and stuff like that.
But I found Manila to be quite frightening because you didn't quite know who your enemies were.
Well, when I was with Hashim Salamat, or Salamat Hashim, depending on what you want to call him, he's dead now.
He said this war has been going on for 400 years.
I'm sure it's going to go on for another 400 years.
It's really the situation down there is that you've got a group of Muslims who want to retain their identity and their control of the land, and you've got population expansion that's taking that away, so that creates friction.
I don't see any sort of happy, clean solution to it because there's always some aggrieved ethnic group that feels it has to pick up a gun.
They had a peaceful solution for a while there, but then they didn't include everybody, and that's when the MILF sprang up.
When you go further south, into the islands, in Sulu, Tawi-Tawi, and all those, then you've got Abu Sayyaf, and Abu Sayyaf are basically thugs.
We call them pirates or whatever, but they're guys that make money by doing criminal things.
They got banded together when they went and kidnapped a bunch of folks off of Sepad and a bunch of divers in Malaysia, and Libya handed them millions of dollars, and that's what funded their emergence, but they were basically wiped out by U.S. Special Forces and Navy SEALs.
I guess my attitude is that I pretty much, Robert, understand how things work here.
And what you do is you sort of, I guess you either work within the structure that exists or you don't do very well.
And that is to say that if you have to pay a little extra to get something done, that's just the way things are done here.
Now, my attitude about danger has always pretty much been, you know, I think you're much more likely to be killed here by a jeepney speeding along than you are by a policeman or, you know, a communist or kidnapped or something like that.
And I could be wrong, but that's always been my attitude.
The single most dangerous experience we had, we were down there filming a show, and we had a driver who called himself Hardcore, and Hardcore made his money by pretending to be a cop and pulling people over with his 45 and then demanding money from them.
And then what happened is he got cranked up one night and wanted to kill my film crew.
It's one thing to deal with a terrorist, another to deal with a criminal, but if somebody is so hopped up that he can't even think straight, then you've got a problem.
So I managed to negotiate the bullets out of his gun by paying for them and then speeding him on his way.
Oh, these are the friendliest people in the world.
The Filipino people are just absolutely wonderful.
I don't know who you would compare them to.
With all of this and with all of the poverty, and of course there's abject poverty here in the Philippines, they are just the happiest people, and I don't know why.
Well, before all of this, before you got into all these dangerous travels that you've done, you work in marketing, and you apparently had something to do with the launch of the Macintosh.
Yeah, my job was to essentially design, create and launch products.
And Stephen Jobs had hired a firm I worked with to launch the Lisa, which people might have forgotten about, but it was the $10,000 early version of the Mac.
And that product failed miserably.
And then when the Mac came out, he asked for me and I helped him launch the Mac.
People might find a bit of trivia funny here, but Stephen Jobs believed that the early Macintosh was what we call the iPod.
In other words, he thought that every university student would throw it in their backpack and listen to music and record things.
And so it took a long time for his vision to come true.
I wanted to find this tribe that was dying out in the center of Borneo.
And you know, Borneo is a big place.
It's a large island.
I tried to charter a plane, and so I went from airport to airport and finally found this oil company plane, which I found out later they weren't supposed to actually lease to me, but I paid them $10,000 to take me into this remote central area.
And I found out after we'd gone through a major storm that the pilots had never actually flown there.
We were running out of gas, and one of the pilots saw a clearing in the jungle.
And if you know what Borneo is like, it's just jungle as far as you can see.
And I remember sort of looking out the window, sort of groggy and dazed after we hit, and seeing a man wander up and cut one of the pieces of bamboo and collecting the fuel leaking off the wings.
And he had absolutely no interest in looking inside the cockpit to see if anyone was still alive.
And then we thought, oh my God, what if he lights a cigarette?
We're all going to go.
So anyways, we had landed apparently on what was a soccer field or something.
And one of the tribal chieftains came up and was very angry at us because we didn't have permission to land there.
He'd never seen a plane there, and he'd never seen him land.
But he tried to find us, which I thought was rather humorous.
So we had to take canoes out of there.
But never rent a plane that doesn't have enough fuel, is all I can say.
But I ought to say this, that when I first did it, I have to say it was probably a little bit of an egotistical challenge.
Can it be done?
And, you know, from a business standpoint, I'm used to challenges and overcoming them.
And then when I got to these places and I was struck by the impact of what was going on there, I felt I had to document it because there was nobody else there.
And then I became a writer strictly to document what I saw in these places.
And I wrote a book called The World's Most Dangerous Places, which is essentially a travel guide to war zones, which people thought was a joke.
But I was desperately serious about wanting other people to go into these places and to see and experience what people are going through.
And then I began to do documentaries and a TV series.
And now I think I've created sort of an entire generation of people that says, you know, if I'm going to be a human being and make decisions about the world, I need to see things with my own eyes.
And does that take bravery?
No, because when I get there, there's little old ladies and children.
Yesterday, we were having sort of a general discussion about a lot of things on the air.
And one of the things I said, and I've maintained all my life, now I was in the Air Force and here in Southeast Asia during the rough time.
Anyway, what I said is that I think we would be a very, very different country, Robert, if as a birthright of every American citizen, we would get, after the age of 21, a round-trip ticket to some third world country,
somewhere, perhaps the country of their choice, but some third world country, somewhere, if every American had an opportunity to go and see what it was like somewhere else, they would come back with a completely different attitude.
And I think America would be a very different place.
Well, you're hitting on something that's actually more fundamental.
In tribal cultures, remember I did a lot of expeditions and spent a lot of time with what we would call primitive people.
There was a thing called walkabout or dream quest that a young man, in order to transition from child to man, had to go test himself, whether it was killing a lion to be a Maasai warrior or whether it was just taking nothing and wandering into the woods.
We've lost that.
So we don't appreciate what we have.
And the whole purpose of this sort of transition was to test yourself and to send you out to learn about the world, to learn about your limitations and to explore other areas.
Our culture really doesn't have that anymore.
And that is probably one of the biggest losses we've had.
And yes, you're right, that we have no excuse not to learn more about this world.
Because before 9-11, I was a freak of nature.
I mean, people would say, well, why are you going to Afghanistan?
I mean, nobody goes to Afghanistan.
And I said, because what happens there affects us here.
And they'd say, yeah, whatever.
On 9-12, my website was among the top 10 websites in the world.
And it blew my mind.
But I was the only guy that had information On Osama bin Laden and the Taliban available for people to see and read for free.
So I felt what I had to do was important from that point on.
I mean, we had a draft, and so a lot of young men got snapped up and sent off to some third world location many times.
But now, of course, you have to volunteer for all that.
Robert Young Pelton is my guest.
We're at a breakpoint.
This is coast to coast AM raging through the nighttime.
Robert Young Pelton has been to the most dangerous places in the world.
We'll continue talking about that in a few moments.
Now, there's a board op who knows how to pick a song for a moment.
You'll know when the bullet hits the bone.
How you doing, everybody?
Robert Young Pelton is my guest.
He's written a number of books, done documentaries and so forth on dangerous places in the world and how to go be an adventurer and get back and come back alive if you do it.
He's a fascinating individual, and we'll get right back to him.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
By the way, just kind of a side note here.
Thank you for all the inquiries about my wife.
Her name is Irene, technically.
It's spelled, however, A-I-R-Y-N.
And that name was bestowed upon her by a German priest who decided that if they wanted her name to be Irene, that was fine.
But he was going to spell it the way he wanted to spell it, and he dictated the way it was spelled.
So it's A-I-R-Y-N.
And she's having some spotting in, let's see, four or five more days.
She'll be exactly eight weeks pregnant.
She's having some spotting, but she's back on medication again, and hopefully things will be all right.
But we're keeping an extremely close eye on it.
Now, during the break, I went in and talked to her about the subject we're talking about on the air right now, and I said, Robert Young Pelton said, well, in Manila, which is where I'm located, if you want somebody killed, a couple hundred bucks and the right cop and you get them killed.
And she said, well, yeah, that's right.
That's exactly right.
That's how it's done.
So there you go, Robert.
She, you know, just offhandedly said, yeah, that's how you do it.
I have an attitude about danger, I guess, that's in some ways like yours.
I just, look, let me try this out on you and see if you agree.
There are places in the United States and there are cities in the U.S. that are, in their own way, almost every bit as dangerous, and you're as likely to get killed in parts of some inner cities as you are here or anywhere else.
Yeah, I mean, danger is always relative, and a lot of it has to do with your comfort and understanding of the situation.
And obviously, anybody who's traveling in a bubble that doesn't know the difference between New Orleans at 4 in the morning and the Vatican at midday is going to get mugged somewhere somehow.
And one thing that's fascinating to me is that you can read all the books you want about survival and dangers and whatever.
But unless you understand situational awareness, unless you read people, unless you talk to people and understand what's going on, pay attention to things, you'll never get out of that bubble.
Well, I mentioned this before the break, and I am convinced that if, as a birthright, everybody had a round-trip ticket to some third-world country, we would have such a completely different attitude in the U.S. about world affairs.
Now, there was a day in the U.S. where young men on a fairly regular basis were, you know, drafted and sent heavens knows where, but at least somewhere out of the U.S., they got to see a different culture and they understood things that would give them a completely different attitude about the U.S. Now you've got a volunteer to go.
And so, as you pointed out, we've lost something that's very important, I think, to survival.
And maybe you can articulate what it is we've lost.
Well, I think it's very comfortable living in the United States of America.
And we think we know things because we watch television, we read books.
But when you say, well, that's an elephant, you know what an elephant looks like.
Yeah, have you ever touched an elephant?
Have you ever been in the middle of the savanna and watched elephants walk by?
There's a huge difference between experiencing things and reading about things.
When people think about foreign cultures, when we vote about Iraq and when we make decisions on war and foreign policy, a few of us have the opportunity to actually go there and discuss what our country looks like from the outside.
And that I think is a very sobering education when you sit in a foreign country and then they explain to you how they view the United States.
We don't realize that a lot of the world gets our garbage.
They watch Baywatch or Dallas Reruns.
I know.
They think Britney Spears and Paris Hilton represent the finest of our females.
Well, I think I went into Grozny in December of 1999 just as the Russians were surrounding the city, and I went with two Americans who went there to fight.
One was killed and didn't come back, and one did come back.
And I did it because nobody else would do it.
And I also had a very negative image of Chechens.
And I was in Afghanistan, and my cameraman had been in the first war, and he said, no, the Chechens are some of the most interesting people you ever meet.
They're very loyal.
They'll defend you with their life.
And I said, oh, you're kidding me.
Come on, Chechens.
They're evil thieving bandits or whatever.
He said, no, go there.
So when the war began, I decided I was going to go there.
I ended up being one of the only two Westerners inside the city during the siege.
I was with the rebels, and they counted about 6,000 impacts an hour hitting the city of Grozny.
And these were missiles, Scud missiles.
They were ergon rockets, artillery, you name it.
And I remember one thing is I slept above ground, and every morning there'd be a few houses missing around us.
And when I walked down the streets, people would cheer.
And I thought, why are you clapping?
Why are you calling out to me?
And it's because I was there.
And it showed the Russians that we weren't afraid.
And people would walk, do their shopping while they were being bombed.
And I thought, wow, what a concept.
I was later on, I was told by my host that I had to leave immediately.
I went to another city, and I was surrounded.
I had to pass right in front of the advancing Russian army.
I was surrounded again.
We tried to escape.
The car broke.
We had to walk back across the Russian front lines again and be bombed for a day.
And then finally, we escaped.
And I didn't realize that I was the only person there, the only outsider there.
But I wasn't that proud of that because I had watched the Russians drop bombs on top of old Russian women that had blown up apartment buildings full of blind people.
And I was sort of saddened and angered by the war.
And as far as I know, I was the only person that went operational with U.S. Special Forces because I was with General Dostum, who was a warlord that ran one of the campaigns up there.
In Iraq, they flipped it around and said, well, we use a Stockholm syndrome.
We'll actually stick the journalists in the Humvees, make them dependent upon soldiers, and they'll bond with them, and they will become one of us, which was a very successful topic.
And nobody really questioned the concept of WMDs, even though the UN had been there for 10 years looking for these things, and people like Scott Ritter said, no, there's no such thing.
We were hornswoggled, I guess is a good term.
And now we're sort of feeling a little guilty and kind of like we were taken.
And so you can see how media management of wars is very important now.
And you saw the journalists yelling, we're rolling into Baghdad, we're kicking their ass, we're doing this, we're doing that.
If you watched Al Jazeera or any of the Arab networks, and you saw the results of all that high-tech munitions, it didn't seem that glamorous.
But we were drawn in by the whole cinematic glory of the whole thing.
And I actually did a documentary with Danny Schechter called Weapons of Mass Deception because I like to brag to people.
I've never been embedded, but I like to brag that I was embedded with the media for a month in a hotel, and I filmed all the weird conversations.
They had set up a channel called Best of the Bombs, which means that if you had a good image of something blowing up, you fed it to this cable network so they could do a stand-up and then pull one of these bomb shots.
They were told to take their cameras off of tripods to make it look all action-y so that you could feel you were there.
This turns kind of political, but what, I mean, we've just had a big national election in which basically the American people, I think, said, we don't like Iraq.
That's pretty much what this election was about, I guess.
Well, I kind of liken it to I was at a party once and this drunk came in and started fondling all the women and they came to me because I'm a big guy and they say, can you get rid of him?
So I picked the guy up and I threw him on his head.
And of course he got knocked unconscious and he started moaning and they all looked at me and said, oh, you're such a mean bully.
Why did you do that?
You know, we have remorse now.
We like, why do we do this?
Iraq never threatened us, and now we're the sort of brutal oppressor.
We punished the Bush administration for doing what they did.
You know, there wasn't a presidential election, but we made it very clear that we weren't happy.
But we still have a mess on our hands.
I was in Iraq in July, and the Iraqis are fleeing now.
There are thousands of Iraqis trapped on the border between Syria and Iraq, trying to just escape the violence of Iraqi on Iraqi.
We've created a failed state.
I think the most honest thing we can do is to look at what we've done.
Now, the Baker report may give us that.
I don't know.
But I think at some point we have to come clean and say, what have we done to this country and how do we fix it?
And if we don't want to fix it, we need to get out of there and let either they fix themselves or the international community step in.
Well, right now, if you go outside of the green zone or any U.S. military base, you have a lot of killings on a daily basis between different factions.
We are not involved in that.
We don't prevent that.
We don't stop that.
What we do prevent is the wholesale movement of large groups.
In other words, it would escalate dramatically.
But we're not leaving Iraq.
We have four permanent bases there.
So if anything, we're just going to stay inside those bases.
What will happen is that things will heat up.
A lot more people will die.
And then things will calm down as basically they correct for years of Saddams forcing people to live in certain places.
We can't stop what's about to happen.
We can only be bystanders.
And if our young men want to get killed by snipers and roadside bombs and whatever, I think that's a big mistake.
We need to let what's going to happen in Iraq happen.
No, most people don't realize that the safest form of government is a brutal dictatorship.
The most lethal form of government is an emerging democracy.
You saw this in Russia, of course.
When you take the pressure off, all of a sudden, boom, everybody's free to do whatever they want.
Years, if not decades, sometimes centuries, of simmering hatred and rivalries explode into sort of this bizarre, chaotic sense of killing.
And then all of a sudden, things shape up.
In Iraq, there's plenty more shaping to do.
I mean, the Ottomans went in there and realized that these are three different groups of people.
Let's leave them alone and run their own areas.
You have Kurdistan in the north, which is a very safe, prosperous area.
But as soon as they declare that they're an independent state, Turkey will try to invade them.
You've got the Sunni middle, which is actually an arc that goes from Beirut all the way into Baghdad.
And those are the cities of Fallujah, Ramadi, and the very lethal areas.
And then you've got the Shia South, which is a very poor area, which is a very porous border between Iran, which are Persians, and of course the Arab South.
Those are three completely different problems.
You can't mash them all together and try to fix them at once.
You know, are you pessimistic about the human rights?
I mean, there are a lot of people, particularly who call this program, who are always talking about some great change of the human spirit that will occur somewhere along the line.
I don't hold out that hope.
I think we're a basic warrior people.
The United States is a warrior country, and so are most other countries, from my point of view.
If you look at the early tribal structure of humans, we had buffers.
In other words, we had certain resources that would allow a tribe to live in a certain area.
When they bumped into another tribe, they either worked with them or they fought.
It's as simple as that.
And now that the world is exploding, if you look at the population growth of the world and the amount of resources we have, there is going to be conflict, whether it's fighting over water, whether it's Fighting over grazing land or money or oil, we are all coming to a very ugly part of human history.
I mean, if you do your math, if you take the Maghreb, for example, which is the Arab crescent that goes from the north of Africa around to the Middle East, and you count how many young, unemployed Arab males there are in that region and what the future holds for them, it is not a pretty picture.
If you take all of Africa and figure out where it's going population-wise and resource-wise, it's not going anywhere.
One thing I've found that's very fascinating is that people involved in violent events or things that are just traumatic refuse to believe what their eyes are showing them.
You know, I was in my bathrobe watching the planes go into the towers, and who would have guessed that these towers would have fallen down and so on and so forth, but it happened.
So what people have done is they've either accepted that or they've launched into this bizarre sort of conspiracy world.
It is literally one of the most controversial topics.
Not so much 9-11, but the number of people that have various and sundry conspiracy concepts about it.
But it doesn't take away from the fact that it happened.
And that's what people forget, is that it did happen, and it's something that we have to deal with.
You know, but the bottom line is that it happened.
I mean, everything that occurred was videotaped, documented, investigated, and so on and so forth.
And I think we need to get over that.
But one thing that's very interesting that people might forget is that the core of terrorism is to do things that are unthinkable and unbelievable and so random and so sort of strangely misdirected that they're unbelievable.
And that's where the shock comes from.
You know, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we got that because they were trying to destroy our fleet in the Pacific.
When 12 seemingly random people flew planes into the World Trade Center and in the Pentagon, we didn't get that.
Like, who are these people?
Why are they doing that?
Why did so many people die?
So on and so forth.
I tend to think we overreacted.
Instead of dealing with this as a criminal event, like Oklahoma and Timothy McVeigh, we actually acted like putting a mouse in a tent with an elephant in it.
We brought the tent down on ourselves.
We caused more damage by our reaction than the actual event.
But the world's classic military blunders are caused by people thinking they have to do something.
You know, Osama bin Laden had fought the Russians for years, and what they used to do is they used to ambush a small group of Russian soldiers, knowing full well that helicopters would come and tanks and more people.
And then that was the real ambush.
And all I'm saying is anybody phoned me and said, what happened here?
I said, well, this is what they've been trying to do for years.
They're trying to do something so devastating that we overreact and we come to them because they can't come to us.
He was unwelcome in the Jalalabad area of Afghanistan.
He and his homies used to drive down the street in their Taliban trucks, we called them, you know, the Toyota Hiluxes.
And they didn't like him.
They were a bunch of criminals that were hiding out and sort of supporting bin Laden.
He ingratiated himself with Moa Omar, mostly because of money and support.
Today, you'll find that he's a figurehead, but he's not what's driving the insurgency in Iraq, and he's not what's driving these various insurgencies around the world.
If you go down to what they call Bank Samora, if you go down to Mindanao and you talk to the MILF and you say, you know, how does Osama bin Laden figure in your terrorist activity or battle or whatever, they'll say he doesn't.
I think what I'm starting to learn now is that I pretty much have used up all my nine lives, and when I spin the Wheel of Fortune, almost everything turns up double zero.
So what I'd like to do is focus on teaching other people and motivating other people to do what I've done, which is to get out their form opinions on their own and keep them safe and then allow them to come back and distribute their message.
And so I focus more on, like my newest book, for example, is about a phenomena which I was quite concerned about, which is the privatization of warfare.
I have a website, which is Come Back Alive, which people share tips about how to move around in dangerous places.
I do training.
I'm starting a private intelligence company in Iraq.
I mean, I'm involved in a bunch of things that don't just require getting bombed and shot at.
I don't know why, because Pakistan loses every time.
But they seem to use it as a tool to take attention away from their own problems, much like we did in this country, where when somebody tries to overthrow the government of Pakistan, they say, oh, look, India, look, they're coming to get us.
Let's go attack them.
And everybody goes, oh, yes, that's a much bigger problem.
I don't ever see India wanting to occupy Pakistan.
I don't know what Pakistan would do with India if it did win.
Yeah, I mean, there is an entire generation of photojournalists and writers and everything who use my book.
I mean, the president of CNN used to hand out my guide, World's Most Dangerous Places, to people.
What I'm finding, and this is not scientific research, it's just people that contact me, is that the new generation, kids between the ages of 18, let's say, and 25, is sick and tired of this entire cocooning concept of getting their information from television and internet and whatever.
They want to experience life.
They want to test themselves.
They want to go out past the boundaries.
We are not so much afraid of what we used to call war zones anymore because they're not really battle zones.
They're just areas that have danger.
And by picking up a book like mine, you suddenly realize that, yes, there are safe places and there are dangerous places.
For example, if you said I'd like to go down to visit Tawi-Tawi, because you have regional expertise or knowledge, you could do it.
But somebody getting off a plane from New York would be terrified to go into southern Philippines.
They'll speak the nation's language, and they might speak English or another, you know, like an international language.
You are much more cosmopolitan.
A place like Europe, when you look at the street scenes, you see people from all colors, all nations.
You see restaurants from all different parts of the world.
It used to be said that the British and the Americans are the only people that speak English everywhere in the world, even though they can't understand what people are saying back to them.
We don't need to travel around the world.
You know, America is big enough and powerful enough and interesting enough.
We could spend the rest of our lives just traveling inside this country.
Other countries have to travel across borders because they're tiny countries and they have to do trade.
So I think we're unique that we live on an island, you know, surrounded by Mexico and Canada, and we don't need to travel.
Well, when I say propagandized, I mean if you look at the news in other countries, in Britain or, for example, here where I am in the Philippines or in China, the news is almost entirely different than it is in America.
And so when I say propagandized, I mean we get certain information, and certain information is simply left out about what's going on in the rest of the world.
I mean, we're monochromatic, we're sort of monolithic in our view of information.
When you said propaganda, what I mean is that when we see a story about something that happened in a foreign country, it has to be translated so that Americans understand it.
That's true.
In foreign countries, they watch multiple channels from multiple countries.
You know, it's a simple example.
We're involved in a war in Iraq.
When I was in Amman, Jordan, they had two TVs on in the bar.
They had the American channels on one, and they had Al Jazeera and the Arab channels on the other.
On one channel, you saw brave American troops firing tanks and things like that.
And on the other one, you saw the small children with the tops of their heads blown off dying live on camera.
I mean, I know from just traveling in my limited lifespan the differences between the countries I've been to.
I've seen them go from sort of colorful, interesting places to desperate, hopeless places.
And things don't usually go better.
In other words, once a country has been decimated and its flora and fauna scraped to the girth and shanty towns built, they don't turn back into rainforests.
So what I see is the constant degradation of the planet.
If you were going to live anywhere outside the United States, or perhaps rephrase, if you had to live anywhere outside the U.S., Robert, in all your travels, where would that be?
Everything is fresh and new, and you don't have that sort of old world sense of people taking a crap in the same place for 800 years.
They're also very open-minded, and they're also very isolated from the rest of the world, so they tend to be more interested by what's going on around them.
I lived in Australia for six months and it's a fantastic place, but I always felt I was floating on an island somewhere.
Well, one of the things that I really wanted to talk about was now that I've gained this sort of experience by being in over three dozen wars and being with all these rebel groups and whatever, I tend to focus my attention now on weird developments or sort of strange subsets that are fighting wars.
And my current book, which is called License to Kill Hired Guns in the War on Terror, came about because a number of people that I know that were fighting wars told me they became contractors.
And these are South African mercenaries, these are U.S. Special Forces soldiers, even LA cops.
And I spent the last three years traveling around the world to Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, trying to get inside, which I did, I think, rather well, this phenomena of hired guns.
And right now we have 70,000 hired guns in Iraq, about half of them Iraqi and half of them expats.
If the state can't control violence or doesn't have a monopoly on the use of lethal force and it becomes privatized, then the state no longer is in charge.
So the rise of private militias, hiring hitmen, criminal groups, you name it, is a sign that something's wrong.
I mean, when you look at New Orleans, the state failed.
You had a disaster.
You had a government set up organization that was supposed to deal with it.
People took the law into their own hands.
Within days, they had over 400 private contractors providing security to private citizens.
And one of the weirdest things was watching mercenaries guarding FEMA against its own people because of the number of irate people who were angry and frustrated that FEMA wasn't doing their job.
Well, they hired Blackwater to guard them against the people they're supposed to serve.
And that's a bizarre development in American politics.
In other words, everything that goes into your grocery store, everything that you need to eat, medicines, whatever, doesn't sit in stockpiles somewhere.
It comes from a centralized warehouse.
Look at the riots in L.A. in the mid-90s.
We went from a nice, fat, rich city to Beirut within minutes.
Look at Katrina.
The things that were supposed to work stopped working.
Look at places like Iraq.
Now, you may not call Iraq civilized, but before the war, it was a very dull, boring place in which it had huge freeways and nice big buildings.
It devolved into rioting chaos within days.
So civilization is not as thick a crust as we like to think it is.
That maybe violence is the cleansing part of overthrowing corrupt old regimes and bringing new life and allowing poor people or people that are repressed to come to the forefront.
I mean, I'm not an expert on this, but I notice it over and over again as I travel around the world.
Yeah, what happened is that under the Ottomans, they had three sort of governates, if you want to call them that.
The British, as they did in Saudi Arabia, figured they needed to extract the oil, so they combined these three groups together to essentially create a streamlined way to pull the oil out of the country.
unidentified
Yeah, that's good.
But I figured I think we ought to go back to that, you know, because people evidently can't get along.
I went with two Americans who went to fight, and I was there ostensibly to take somebody's wife out of the country, but she had already left, so I stayed with the rebels in Grozny.
unidentified
Yeah, I don't have much admiration for them, especially after what happened in Bislan.
Because I was a subcontractor for Raytheon and Hughes before Raytheon became Hughes, which makes it a question.
My question is, all the genre about Pakistan and India having the nuclear bomb is basically a genre that America has put out through the news and through the worldwide media to make us believe that those nations actually own those bombs.
Well, one of the humorous things about the whole concept of weapons of mass destruction is that, yes, there it is.
Yes, they have it.
Yes, they're a rogue nation, and yes, they're threatening America, and we do nothing about it.
And that's not to say that something is not happening covertly as we speak.
But Iraq didn't have it.
They weren't threatening us, and yet we chose to go in there.
So I thought it was a joke.
I was in Afghanistan.
I came back, and they said they're going to invade Iraq.
I thought they were just sort of posturing.
I didn't realize it actually was going to happen until I met a woman who drank too much, and she was a load master for the Air Force, and she says, yeah, we're palletizing for Iraq right now.
Well, the transitional period, you know, from a brutal dictatorship to a sort of full democracy is usually through socialism.
You know, Iraq was socialized.
It was a quasi-secular nation.
What should have happened is we should have kept all the bureaucratic people in place.
We should have kept the money flowing to the military, to the public servants, so that we didn't have thousands of unemployed young males on the street.
I used to publish about 50 books a year about very dull, boring places.
And I found that that was a very dull, boring thing to do because with the advent of the Internet and cheap airfares, it's actually cheaper just to go there.
You know, you can rent a car just about any world.
You can stay in a chain hotel, eat the McDonald's, buy a Starbucks.
The world is actually a very safe and easy place to navigate these days.
I was just wondering, in regards to your comments before about how we're comfortable here in the U.S., which I totally agree with you on, and what our country looks like from the outside to other people.
What can we do here in the country on a home front basis as far as changing that perception here?
We are probably the most privileged nation on earth.
It starts with learning about other cultures.
It can be something as silly as eating in a foreign restaurant or learning a different language or watching one of those wacky cable channels that you don't understand.
It's really an effort to just expand your awareness of the world.
The other thing is to study history.
I've always found that history provides most of the answers that we're looking for in something that happened 100 years ago, 20 years ago, or even 1,000 years ago.
I'd say if we could replace Paris Hilton with a history teacher, our country would be a lot better off.
It's an extremely wealthy country up there with Equatorial Guinea in terms of per capita wealth because of the oil there.
They tax the bejesus out of the people there, and it's a very mono-sort of lithic society.
But they're also very concerned about world events.
And the standard of living is very high.
It's very expensive.
But it's sort of a little oasis.
I mean, they don't really have any problems there.
And I don't know.
It's an interesting place to learn about the world because things are so good there.
unidentified
My ancestry is of Norwegian, so I was just kind of curious because I've never been there.
Secondly, and this is a bit of a touchier question, again I was talking to the screener and she thought it was a very touchy subject and I'll be very as light as I can, but it's regarding race.
You said lack of money is a big cause of shootings and violence.
And you have to look at the rap world, the NFL, and basketball.
Well, you know, one thing that you do learn is to be sensitive to race.
And one thing that blew me away is that I can go to a place like Liberia, which is an English-speaking country with a, you know, looks like an American flag.
And I was there during the war in 2002.
And they actually sing those songs while they shoot people.
In other words, the songs that kids sing here are actually very real over there.
And then you suddenly realize that that goes even deeper to sort of a tribal thing, and that people are different.
And those differences can divide people very quickly when there's a lot of stress.
And one thing I was amazed about is that we don't really have any tribes over here.
And people try not to describe people as sort of, well, he's from here, he's from there.
But you see it around the world where people break into their sort of tribal structures.
On that note, we'll have to break, but boy, are you exactly right.
It's ditto here.
We'll be right back.
I think one of my favorite lines tonight was loading up B-52s with $100 bills and then carpet bombing.
That really is one of my favorites.
In a moment, I'll tell you something that actually makes me very, very angry about the Philippines, country in which I now live.
Stay right where you are.
The Filipino people may be some of the happiest people in the entire world.
And when I say that, I sincerely mean it.
They are just a very, very happy people.
They will offer you a smile, a low, you know, just very, very happy people.
However, most of the young people here have as a goal to leave the country.
Not that they want to leave the country.
It's that they have to leave the country to make any money.
There's no jobs.
Now, the Philippines is a very well-educated country, extremely well-educated.
There are nurses.
We turn out nurses from the Philippines like you wouldn't believe.
We export nurses to the rest of the world and doctors to America and to other countries.
The educational level is really quite good.
My own wife is a school teacher.
She graduated, and then to have any possibility of teaching, she would have had to go to a very mountainous area on Mindanao and work her way toward the cities, which would have taken many, many years.
But there are so many young people here with a high educational level that end up working at the equivalent of McDonald's, Jollibee's, or a job of that sort.
So the main drive here for young people, Robert, is to leave the country and then send money home.
It's so sad.
This should be a booming economy, and I can't figure out why it's not, except for corruption.
Well, it's not just that, but I mean, there are many countries like Mexico and Pakistan that has this diaspora, these people that have to go outside to make money, simply because they get paid more money than they do inside the country.
And, you know, for years, Russia used to have an overeducated population that didn't have jobs.
You know, can somebody invest in the Philippines and create jobs that keeps those people there?
I don't know, because I think the future of the world is this sort of nomadic population of what they call them, guest workers or whatever you want to call them, flows to where the jobs pay the most.
If you go to Baghdad where they're building a new American embassy, it's not being built by Americans.
It's been built by people coming from multiplicity of nations simply because they're cheap and they're effective.
Clearly, it is commonly accepted that our government invaded Iraq with motives far more powerful than weapons of mass destruction.
So my question is, Saddam Hussein has now lost power, lost wealth, lost his sons, his freedom, slept in a hidey hole, and is now in prison waiting to die by hanging.
So I'm sure he's had plenty of time to think about that and think what he would have done differently had he to do that over again.
And suppose just for a minute, that he did have it to do over again, and suppose he just gave carte launch to the inspectors to look anywhere they wanted for weapons of mass destruction.
So our government now has put us in this huge debt and lost a lot of lives.
So clearly they had a strong motive for going in.
So if they did get carte launch to go in and look at these weapons and they were not there, I'm wondering what excuse do you think they would have come up with to invade Iraq?
One of the things I did was look for weapons of mass destruction.
They were a collection of rockets that had chemical tips on them that I was told by a guy who was planning escape routes.
What I did find out is the UN did go anywhere they wanted to with very sophisticated equipment.
We had people like Scott Ritter who were actually infiltrators in that UN mission as intelligence agents, and also the Mossad feeding intelligence directly back to the intelligence agencies in each country.
We knew there was no weapons of mass destruction.
We knew exactly what was going on in Iraq because we spent 10 years bombing it and flying over it and infiltrating it.
We had dozens of expats that fled Iraq sort of feeding us exaggerated information.
That's where it came from.
So the bottom line is we knew exactly what was going on in Iraq, but we chose to cherry-pick the bits and pieces that would put together a premise for war.
Well, I was never in the White House, and a number of very good books have been written about the planning that went to war.
And one of the things that knocked me back on my heels was Bob Woodward's first book, After 9-11, in which George Bush thought that the Iraqis had something to do with it.
I guess it was in the cards from the second that George Bush Jr. became president.
Here we go to another wildcard line, New York City.
AI, is it, or AL?
unidentified
Yeah, the last one.
Hey, Art, great program, Robert.
Really appreciate your work.
I'd like to ask my question and listen to your answer over the air.
The first part of the question deals with about three weeks ago, a woman Russian journalist who was, you had started to give us some greater insight into Chechnya.
And she was assassinated.
And there's been, I can't think of the number right now, but journalists in Russia, especially like the ones who try to give another view of Chechnya, are dying like flies.
The other part of the question is that, you know, I'd like to see somebody with your, the way you approach things to give us some other view on 9-11 because I'm not hateful about those who say, I don't believe my lion eyes,
but ART had on John Lear, who had, I don't remember how many thousand hours of flight time that he was a senior pilot and retired at that time, but he mentioned how difficult it would be for an experienced pilot to actually target and hit a building, not to mention all the other questions like I'm, you know, like how building seven came down, you know, and how even the first two towers came down, Class A buildings.
So I just want you to go in the direction with an open mind as to the scholars that have come together and people like David Griffin and many other others.
And the last part is that have you ever considered looking into the inner workings of like the Council on Foreign Relations, the TriLats, the Bilderbergers?
Because I think you could give us a really unique view on how things are really ruled.
And I love you, Art.
I love you now, Robert, and I'll listen over the air.
Well, first of all, they've never invited people like me to those cocktail parties, so I can't tell you anything about those commissions.
The second thing on 9-11, my instant reaction when I saw the planes fly in the building is that they finally did it.
If you remember, the Egyptians tried to do it earlier with a rider truck with explosives, and they thought one of the towers would fall over and knock the other one over.
It had been an ongoing fascination of the Egyptian, of the Brotherhood, to knock those towers down.
I don't think that it's worth adding speculation to something that's already happened.
I think what happened happened.
You can't prevent it from happening again.
All you can do is try to not overreact.
In other words, not cause more damage by going after people who aren't involved in that.
If you took a snapshot before 9-11, I, as an American citizen, could travel just about anywhere in the world and meet with any terrorist group and be on the ground and feel fairly comfortable.
After 9-11, it's almost physically impossible to be with a number of terrorist groups because they just assumed that you are the enemy now.
And we forgot that, that people like the Taliban were not anti-American.
They were actually very pro-American before 9-11.
And that the murders of journalists and the ability to keep people out of war zones, you mentioned Anna Polotskaya, is part of this new trend to keep normal citizens out of war zones so they can't form opinions outside of the media or the government.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's just common sense.
You may not have know that Anna Polotskaya was poisoned on the way to go to Bezlan.
She was going to negotiate with the people that were holding the children, and she was poisoned by the FSB or the Russian government, so she couldn't go there.
Andriy Babitsky, who was another famous Russian journalist who now has to live outside the country, was arrested and prevented from flying there so that the Russians could attack the school which led to the death of children.
One is that things aren't quite going the way that the U.S. government wants them to go.
If you look at Chavez and you look at Cuba being sort of independent for years, and you look at the rise of socialism in Latin America.
We can't just keep going in and invading and overthrowing governments.
At some point, the world is going to change without us.
When you look at China, you're looking at something that harks back to my comment about using dollars instead of bullets.
China is sitting back in the weeds watching us thrash around, expend our precious resources while they're basically building up capital and buying up most of the world's resources.
In 20 to 50 years, the biggest enemy we will have will be China, and they will have already outspent us.
Okay, Kathy in Fresno, California, you're on with Robert Young-Pelton.
unidentified
Good morning, gentlemen.
Do you feel, are they using any unconventional methods of finding the enemy, such as remote viewing or psychics, and then bring in the military forces?
And then, Robert, do you feel that since you know the area, is it possible to slowly bring home our soldiers, bring in humanitarians, such as the people that build homes and run businesses, and give these people the tools and the experience to rebuild their cities if there's anything left, and to build an infrastructure.
We could pay them with military money that we're paying our soldiers.
And I'm wondering if people would volunteer their time to do that type of work rather than go into a military situation.
Well, to answer your second question, you can't provide any kind of assistance without security.
I mean, NGOs, well-intentioned people are not going to go into a situation in which what they build gets blown up.
When I was there in July, I was with private security contractors with machine guns guarding gravel to build the police station.
We got hit every day, and everybody knew when that police station was built, it was going to be blown up with a car bomb in the first month of its being open.
They have to sort their own problems, and if I had buttons and I was in charge, I would simply ask all U.S. troops to leave.
And that's the fastest and cleanest way out of there.
When they have figured out their problems, I'd be happy to go back and work very industriously to rebuild that country.
But I'm not going to do it if I'm going to get killed.
My question is kind of unconventional, but do you think it's possible that maybe these guys that are sending the suicide bombers out to blow up these innocent people are possibly hypnotizing them to go out and doing it?
Because I cannot see why somebody would willingly do this.
I mean, typically a suicide bomber prepares himself by praying and sort of, I won't say chanting, but basically reciting the Quran.
He shaves, he dresses in white, he says goodbye to his family.
He is instructed on how to detonate the device or the car.
And then he is instructed on where to go and what to look for.
Typically, these guys, as they blow themselves up, because when I was in Baghdad doing this, you could actually tell the people that were suicide bombers because they were sort of in a trance.
They were fixated.
And once they detonated this button, of course, they never knew what hit them.
I think people would find that a very shocking entry into the world of privatized warfare.
And you will see the future when you read that book.
And it's three years of my life on the ground with mercenaries, with contractors, with CIA contractors, and trying to understand where warfare is going.
Yes, but I have to stop myself because as soon as I pick up a gun and I start joining a cause, I can no longer be of service to people because then I'm just a partisan.