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Nov. 11, 2006 - Art Bell
02:39:17
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Robert Young Pelton - World's Most Dangerous Places
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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 soldier's decapitated boy.
Police said the mass kidnappings and the killing was near the volatile town of Latifa, 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?
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 Contra Army that had trained and armed against him.
Well, once burned, twice shy, I guess, in his case.
LaShawn 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 19, 2005.
She bought the little boys hot dogs.
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.
Police 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 UN 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 five dollars, 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 and 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.
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, and 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.
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 Moorfields 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 seafish.
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, A national 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.
Hey Art, couple of things.
First of all, 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 if the fish are gone, that would mean the oceans are kind of dead, right?
Kind of dead, yeah.
Yeah, well, I think the largest proportion of the oxygen replenishment for the planet comes from algae from the surface of the ocean.
I don't know whether most people know that.
It's not the trees.
No, it's the algae.
Right.
And if the fish are gone, then it's safe to assume the algae are gone.
If the algae are gone, then the oxygen is gone.
We're all in big trouble.
That's exactly correct.
The whole thing is just a disastrous mess, buddy, and in another 50 years, it's going to be like living on a different planet.
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?
Not really.
I mean, you know, you can put centigrade or Fahrenheit into Google and you'll get a real quick conversion chart.
Did anybody ever tell you about the add 40, subtract 40 method?
They did.
Okay, so you know about that.
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?
Yes, I said that, yes.
Our losing the war, what I really said was, our losing the war in Vietnam, and it's widely, I think, accepted that we lost the war in Vietnam, was a trauma for Americans.
Yes.
America had never lost a war, sir.
Yeah, but, you know, the trauma for Americans was being there in the first place.
I mean, it put father against son.
Every war is a trauma.
What's that?
Every war is a trauma.
Yeah, but that was, that really put a wedge in this country.
Like, I can't remember anything like that.
No, I was there.
I know about the wedge.
I know all about it.
You know, we could have won that war.
No, no, no.
Wait a minute.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
We could have won that war.
We'd still be fighting it today with that kind of an attitude.
No, that's not true.
We had the power, and not the will, to win that war, sir.
When you look at where the enemy was coming from, it wasn't just North Vietnam.
It was China.
It was like we would have had to defeat Practically most of the Communists to win that war.
It just wasn't going to happen.
It wasn't going to happen.
Well, you and I can't, I guess, can't... We can't refight the war.
But the fact of the matter is, what I said was accurate.
That we were traumatized by losing that war.
And I don't think you can be in denial about that.
I don't deny that the war itself was a horrible trauma.
So I'm with you on that.
But we did suffer a trauma by losing.
Well, I don't know.
I think pulling out was the right thing to do when we did it.
Probably a little bit too late if we pulled out a little bit earlier.
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.
You're right.
Yeah, that's where I'm coming from.
You're coming from the right place.
You're right.
I mean, the body bags came back.
This is nothing what's going on.
Man, I hear you.
Oh, I know.
Well, don't say it's nothing.
There's a lot of relatives of dead soldiers listening tonight.
It's not nothing.
When Americans are dying, it's something.
I mean, I saw what happened, Art.
I was drafted in during the Tet Offensive in the infantry in the Army.
Yeah, I joined instead.
People to this day ask me sometimes to talk.
I don't want to talk about it.
I don't want to talk about it.
There's nothing really nice I can say about the whole thing.
I know.
You're kind of proving my point.
There's nothing good you can say about it, and I don't know what good you can ever say about any war.
Maybe, you know, save perhaps the Second World War, where we stopped somebody trying to take over the world.
But I don't know that there's anything good you can say about Vietnam, and I don't know that there's really anything good you can say about Iraq either.
The only difference can be the way we end it.
Yeah, well, I will grant you this, that it was traumatic seeing, you know, the last of the troops being taken off the roof of the embassy, you know.
Sure was.
I can still remember that, you know, when we finally pulled out.
And the other people yelling, take me, that was a sad thing.
That was traumatic, very traumatic.
Thank you very much for the call.
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 ended.
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 Card Line, David in San Diego, you're on the air.
Hi Eric.
Hi.
I've got a solution for the, recently the astronomers have been, they've found, they've postulated they've found planetary systems around other stars.
Yeah.
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.
So, but anyways, what we're seeing on those new systems that were 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 off.
I mean, we're seeing these big planets because they're passing in front of the aforementioned stars.
And so, we're able now, with the very best telescopes, to see the sort of darkness or the little dark spot that's passing in front of these stars.
That's how we're locating them.
Yeah, we're seeing the formation of planetary systems as in our Jupiter and Saturn being cast off.
No, that's a theory.
And also, the reason we don't win wars anymore is the Caesar Syndrome.
It's because after World War II, so many military commanders came home and became politicians and won everything, that the civilians, well, they said, oh, we can't have these heroes coming home and taking our positions, so they make damn sure nobody wins wars anymore.
Huh.
I never considered it.
Yeah, I never considered it from that point of view.
Well, it's certainly true, isn't it?
I like Ike.
Well, where did Ike come from?
He came from the Second World War, a hero of the Second World War, and sailed right into the presidency.
So I'm not giving his argument specific weight, but he's certainly right about the heroes quickly becoming politicians.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
Well, hello, Mr. Bell.
Hello.
My name is John.
I live in Oregon.
Yes, John.
Not a lot of time to the bottom of the hour here, so let it rip.
Well, I have a ghost story for you.
Two winters ago, I was working graveyard at a gas station, and I was living with my uncle at the time, and I get a call about one in the morning.
And he was like, is there someone in your room?
And I said, no.
And he said it sounded like someone was thrashing it apart.
He didn't have the key, so he wasn't able to get in the room.
So I can hear him shouting, and, you know, hey, who's in there?
And I was totally alone at the gas station, totally freaking out.
And he hung up and called the cops, and they busted in there.
And there was... Very quickly, the music is under us.
Okay, so it turned out to be nada, nothing?
Nothing, but it sounded like someone was totally tearing it apart.
Well, that is weird.
Okay.
Again, I don't want to turn this into Ghost to Ghost.
I like to reserve the ghost stories for Ghost to Ghost AM, which is a yearly event.
Maybe we'll extend it next year into a couple of days.
People always have leftover ghost stories.
There's no question about it.
So, maybe next year we'll move it to a couple of days.
There are that many stories out there, after all.
Alright folks, we'll take a break and then more open lines on the way.
So if you know the numbers, dial now because after the break, they'll recite them very carefully and the lines will be very full.
I'm Art Bell.
Here I am.
I thought it was kind of funny.
During the break, they run promos for the newsletter and, you know, that sort of thing.
That's what I hear on this end as you're hearing commercials or whatever.
And one of them was, did the CIA really send people to live on other planets?
First time I've heard that one.
Can you imagine that?
We have the ability to send somebody to another planet.
Of course, it's a one-way ticket.
You go, but you don't come back.
It would be light years in the doing, perhaps even generations.
So, can you imagine that?
Packing up, sort of joining in with the CIA, And getting launched to another planet light years away.
You will not come back.
You will not know what you're going to get on the other end.
What kind of planet, habitable or not, you're going to run into.
And can you imagine getting picked for, volunteering for, or worse yet, getting drafted for, a mission to another planet?
I will have to read that story.
More open lines in a moment.
Actually I'm going to be very interested to see what our guest at the top of the hour has to say
about where I live, about here in the Philippines.
But he's an expert in the most dangerous places in the world.
I guess he's been to most of them and is quite an adventurer.
And I'm looking forward to this interview.
It should be very, very interesting.
Let's go to one of the wildcard lines and say, Ivan in Houston, you're on the air.
Hi.
I call or no, nevermind.
Sorry about that.
I wasn't sure about your opinion if we won or lost the war in Vietnam.
What do you think?
We lost it.
We lost it, yeah.
It makes me mad to hear people say that we never lost the war because it makes me think they're hypocrites of what they say.
Run that by me again, please.
I think they're hypocrites of what they say.
But when they say that, uh, sorry, go ahead.
When they say what?
That we lost and have never lost a war?
Yeah.
They're just wrong.
Yeah, they are.
I mean, you could clearly see the transformation from, uh, the movie Green Berets to, uh, scenes from Forrest Gump and other movies like that.
And I mean, I'm 17 and I've clearly, I want to be a history major.
But yeah, it just makes me mad of the thought of people saying we haven't lost the war.
Oh, well, that's just... Well, that's just ignorant.
We clearly lost the war.
You're only 17, huh?
Well...
Enjoy history and you're going to learn a great deal.
I wonder, you know, the whole subject of history is in itself a fascinating topic.
As a general rule, the victors in a war, and we are a warrior culture, we are a warrior people, the victors write the history.
Now, had, for example, the Nazis won the war, the history, the whole thing, Would be completely different.
The victors inevitably get the honor of writing the history.
And so if they want to bend it and shape it a little bit and make it sound much better for the victorious side, that's their option.
They won.
East of the Rockies, Greg in Ohio.
You're on the air.
Hey, it's Greg from Cincinnati.
How you doing, Art?
Good.
Good afternoon.
Listen, about 10 years ago, I was on the road and I turned on the radio and I caught you right in the middle of what you were saying.
You said that you had gotten a jolt of electricity that was so powerful that your jaw locked open for a half an hour.
That's correct.
And I want to know what in the world were you working on?
I was working on the first amplifier that I ever had, a radio amateur amplifier.
Uh-huh.
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 2500 volts 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.
It should have killed you then.
Yeah, it should have killed me.
Wow.
Hey, how's your personal safety?
Is that improved over there?
My personal safety, well, that's a different story.
That's always a problem.
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.
All right, you take care, Art.
You take care, too, sir, and thank you very, very much for the call.
Let's go west of the Rockies and say you're on the air all the way from Fairbanks, Alaska.
Chuck?
Yes, Art, how you doing?
I've talked to you in the past.
I was wondering, do you believe in curses?
And I have a reason to ask that question, but do you believe in them?
I think to some degree I do.
Yeah.
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... I remember you!
Yeah.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
Well, this village, and I was talking to a lady, and it used to be a wonderful village, and 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 Iputec, where in They dug up an ancient burial of this really strange culture that kind of seemed like it came from another planet or something.
They had elaborate death masks and all kinds of stuff.
Most Eskimos used to put their dead out on the ice.
This culture didn't, but she said ever since then that all these weird things had happened.
The village was fighting with each other and nobody was hunting.
It was an interesting story.
I just was curious.
You know, I heard some... No, I had never heard this particular story, Chuck, but I would like to ask you a sort of a broader question.
Sure.
About, you know, the natives in Alaska now.
I mean, there are hard times.
As you know, the climate is changing for them.
That's difficult.
They've always had a problem with alcohol, and now you're telling me some of them with drugs, and are things not going well for the natives?
It's a time of great change and I get to travel more than most.
Most people, you lived here at one time, you realize how little of the state you can see on the road system.
Oh, that's for sure.
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.
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.
It just never works.
It never, ever works.
And it's even worse.
The givers, whoever they are, are inevitably hated, eventually, for their act.
Exactly.
And you know, it was funny, because when I flew out of this village, I was on this small plane, I was talking to a gentleman, and I was saying, what happened?
And he said, you know, I think it was socialism.
And he said, well, we've always had socialism.
Because the people really take care of the elders.
And I said, but not this kind of socialism, where people give people something for nothing.
And I found out that he was the leader in the area, and he agreed with me.
He said, yeah, you know, you got a point.
But there are just some incredible people.
I want to talk a little bit about climate change.
One of my favorite villages is just in the middle of nowhere, and they've collected fossils for me for 20 years.
And they gather, still gather, over 80% of their food, you know, and they speak the language, the Yupik language.
But their village is washing away.
It's actually, they're in the process of moving it, and I don't, you know, a lot of it they used to build in places that probably aren't, you know, what we'd consider suitable, but there is, I get to see a lot more than most people, and there is definite, definite warming and climate change.
Some of it I kind of welcome.
I mean, let's see what is here right now.
It's nine below.
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.
Well, I don't know.
You know, I kind of deal with 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 got 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.
Well, you could be right.
I envy you being up there.
Fairbanks is, well, it's kind of like one of the last frontiers.
Is that fair to say?
It's an incredible place.
It's one of the few places where, in Alaska, you can carry a concealed gun without a permit.
You can, you know, we don't lock our doors.
There's crime here and stuff if you're in the wrong areas, but I can be at a wildlife reserve in five minutes or out hunting or doing things.
It's just, but it's just like anywhere.
You have to work hard and I really don't get out to enjoy it as much as I would like to, but I hitchhiked up here as a young man when I was 17 in 1971 from Arizona.
I fell in love with it and I made my home here as an artist and there are a lot of opportunities.
If you can't make it here, I think you should just shoot yourself.
There's always something for somebody to do if you don't mind working and you like the outdoors.
The winters are just incredible because the seasons are changing every day.
We're losing daylight.
It is cold in Fairbanks, Chuck.
Yep.
Alright, well good talking with you there where it's warm and maybe I'll come visit you someday.
Warm is putting it mildly.
Okay, thank you.
I recall the years that I spent in Anchorage, Alaska now, for about two weeks in Anchorage.
Inevitably, the thermometer would plunge to, oh, between 40 and 50 degrees below zero, and it would come sweeping in, and that's really cold, folks.
I mean, that's really cold.
And so, the only way I was able to live there was I plugged in everything.
I heated everything.
I plugged my car in.
That would heat the oil pan.
It would heat the interior of the car so that when snow hit it, it would melt.
You would heat the radiator.
In other words, wherever you would go, you would plug your car in, and if you didn't, the expectation for it starting would be very low indeed.
It was a pretty wild time, but I spent three years there, and so I definitely know what it's like.
Let's go to, oh I don't know, how about New York and Sean.
Hi Art.
I remember a few years ago you voicing your concerns about the proposal to turn Yucca Mountain into a radioactive waste depository.
That's correct.
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.
By how much?
Well, I believe at this point in time, the technology being in its infancy, they have managed to accelerate it by something like five times.
But they hope to, you know, as they develop the technology, they hope to Accelerated by a great deal, by very much.
I heard the story on the BBC and perhaps if you went to their website you might dig up the story.
I'll see what I can do.
That's a really interesting story.
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 just can't recall any more facts about it.
It was a long time ago.
Wow.
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.
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, um,
not just encapsulated inside a lump, but inside a a, like a casting, you know, such that at the end of the
period of radioactive decay, that that particular casting will become some sort
of new alloy.
Do you think that's possible?
Sean, I have absolutely no idea.
There's no way I could have any idea because I don't understand the theory behind encapsulating in molten copper in the first place.
I don't understand How copper acts upon radioactivity to accelerate its decay process in the first place.
So to answer anything further would be totally impossible.
But that's fascinating and I'll see what I can find out about it.
East of the Rockies, Mary Kay in New York City.
Oh, hi Art.
How are you doing tonight?
Just fine.
Good.
I just want to kind of talk about the concept that people are always talking about winning wars.
Yes.
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.
And it just kind of, you know... Yeah, but it was a noble war compared to what we've had since.
Oh yeah, compared to all day.
But it just seems like most wars are just started to start chaos.
You know, and usually as a smokescreen or something else.
It just kind of astounds me when I hear people talk about winning wars.
This war probably fits in that category.
In other words, the weapons of mass destruction, despite the emails I'll get, were not there.
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.
If those were really the reasons why the, um, you know, powers that be were initiating things like this, because, you know, when you just see the, you know, all the ineptitude, and these are not stupid people, you know, these generals and whatever, they're not stupid people.
I think if they wanted to win something, you know, if the government wanted to win, the resources would be there, and something positive would be happening.
You know, it just seems like when you have chaos on top of chaos, that that Seems to be what's the goal they want.
They want chaos.
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.
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 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 is 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 annually 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 T-E-D.
TED Conference.
Trained Navy SEALs in survival, participated in 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-Paltin'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 License to Kill Hired Guns in the War on Terror.
Robert Young-Pelton, welcome to the program.
Well, thank you, Art.
This is going to be a really interesting interview.
It's kind of a sidestep for me.
We spend a lot of time talking about Oh, I don't know, the unusual, the paranormal side of the world.
So this is a little bit of a sidestep, but a very interesting one for me, particularly where I am right now.
And we'll get to that.
What in the world made you go from the business you were in to the business you're in now?
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.
And where did you begin?
My very first trips were actually expeditions.
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 G.I.A., which at the time was a very bloodthirsty group.
They had actually sent me facts saying that uh... come to our country will cut your
throat may want to kill all journalists and writers
and i began to set up interviews so one of the first interviews i set up with the taliban who would
just just been created uh... with the turkish journalist friend of mine
and i just began to sort of track down terrorist groups and and hang out with
them understand what they did hang out with them
well i i'm not a journalist I've worked as a journalist three times.
Once for 60 Minutes, once for CNN, and once for ABC Investigative.
I find that the business of journalism restricts what you can do, the time you can spend in the field, and also the content.
So when you want to really understand something, I found that books and documentaries were much better a way to communicate what I'd found.
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 Taliban.
I just cannot imagine how they would accept you without extreme suspicion.
At least a journalist, you know, has an excuse for trying to cozy up to a group like that.
But you wouldn't have that, exactly, would you?
So how do you cozy 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 He 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, 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 Malo 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.
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 are Muslim, of course, showed up with the camera, one of the things that we told them 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 sound shut.
He's quite embarrassed about that.
So we recorded interviews with all the leadership of the Taliban back in 1995.
That's fascinating.
And if you recorded interviews with them in that year, were their goals markedly different then than they appear to be now?
Yeah, I mean, we use the word Taliban to describe what I would call a conservative posh tune 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's 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, it 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.
The south still is strongly conservative and still views the Taliban as the correct way
to sort of clean up the excesses and the influence of the west.
So there has been a gigantic change in them in these years.
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 the 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.
Is it your view, Robert, that that's where Osama still is on that border someplace?
Yeah, I spent some time looking for Osama.
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 US 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.
We're all very concerned.
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, 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 Pakistani's 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.
They have parades where they take big paper mache 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 three billion and the Saudis pumped in three billion.
And we created this sort of hard core heavy duty machine of training People to go fight and die in another person's country and that became the genesis of what formed 9-11.
Here's a question that I'm not sure you can answer.
I'm sure that our own government is struggling with this, but since all the pounding that we've done in Afghanistan post 9-11, how strong is the Taliban?
How much did we hurt them and what is their current state of readiness?
You know, 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 Masood'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-level insurgency against NATO forces and ISAF forces.
It's not really a war that we would see, 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, you make all this sound like amateur city, but on the other hand, if you look carefully and examine 9-11 carefully, it was anything but.
This was a well-planned, well-supplied, well-financed, well-done operation.
There's no other way to put it.
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 US.
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.
The Saudis?
You couldn't really draw a direct line from Afghanistan to 9-11.
The Saudis?
Money from the Saudis?
Yeah, when I say the Saudis, remember, the Wahhabis are not just Saudis.
They're conservative businessmen and groups and mosques in the Middle East that support, call them liberation campaigns or jihadis, Who go to fight in places like Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, and 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?
Well, Al-Qaeda is what we call it.
It's actually called the Ansar group in Afghanistan.
It's a cult.
You take an unemployed 18-year-old kid and you tell him great stories about bravery and fighting and battle and dying and going to heaven and that becomes a way for him to find honor and purpose.
They go to these camps and they are segregated from society.
They're inculcated with, not necessarily Islam, but sort of a radicalized form of religion.
They're trained to do things like fire weapons, make explosives, assault positions.
And there's a peer pressure.
You know, who wants to be the first to die?
Who wants to be the bravest?
And having been with jihadis many times, there's this weird cult-like feeling where they talk about when a jihadi dies, his body doesn't rot.
You can smell perfume coming from his mouth.
Every jihadi bows with a smile on his face.
Well, this is all cult thinking.
So that person then goes off to fight his war with a totally perverse view of survival.
Anybody who doesn't want to live Obviously, by nature, by definition, has been indoctrinated the wrong way.
They certainly are doing it successfully and with relatively large numbers of people.
Yeah, well, suicide bombing has been scientifically shown to be a result of occupation.
That when people lose hope, when they feel like they're powerless, they turn to immolation, suicide bombing, You saw this in India when the British were colonial powers.
You see it in Sri Lanka.
You see it in Chechnya.
When people lose hope, they tend to use themselves as weapons.
They're having more and more success with this.
I mean, they seem to have almost an endless supply of these young people who have, I don't know, I guess been taught that they have no hope.
I guess that's the way you do it, because there's always hope, and when you're 18, there's always lots of reason for hope, unless you're instructed very, very carefully that there is not.
Well, they only need a few hours to find a suicide bomber.
They've done studies in Gaza and places like that, and they can recruit and find somebody in one day to go kill themselves.
That's incredible.
All right.
Very good, Robert.
We're already at the first great point.
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.
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, someway, 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, It's head lifts, and given another second, and the fact that of course the 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.
Robert, did I describe that instinct appropriately?
Well, I think everybody has that instinct.
It's how you apply it.
When I think of the times that I've run into misfortune, it's always because I haven't been in the war zone.
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 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.
So in each one of those cases, your guard was down.
Right.
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 when 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. That's right.
Alright, let me read you something very quickly.
This comes from the BBC headline, Dateline Manila.
Journalism can be a dangerous occupation in the Philippines, where there has been a spate 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 bulletproof vests 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's 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 ten killings in all of last year.
Nearly a thousand left-wing activists, community workers, lawyers and journalists have gone missing or been murdered since President Gloria Arroyo 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?
It's very dangerous.
Two things blew me away about the Philippines.
One was how openly the rebel and Islamic groups operate.
The second thing is how many people the police murder.
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?
I said, well, I don't know, unofficially.
He said, about seven or eight.
And I said, well, who did you shoot?
Well, 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 big wig, you know, 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?
I'm 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 of 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.
Oh, weapons are everywhere here.
Yeah, and you see them in the restaurants when you go into a restaurant.
Oh, absolutely.
The guy who opens a door at a restaurant for you has a shotgun.
They have a little sign saying, check your pistols here, which nobody actually does.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
And just about, I don't want to say everybody carries because that's not true, but a lot of people do.
Now, most people think that danger in the Philippines is pretty much Reserved for the southern part, you know, Mininau and the southern parts of Mininau and that area where the terrorists hang out.
So, is there a degree of difference in danger between Luzon and on down south?
Yeah, there's a big difference.
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 Bank 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 him go away.
That's a completely different concept.
And as you go further north, you get into the more 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.
Was it somebody trying to rob you?
Was it somebody trying to shut you up?
So you didn't have a handle on it.
Well, that's true.
But traditionally, everybody thinks that the big danger is down south, and you're saying that's not necessarily so.
The Muslims, of course, would like to have Meninau for their own.
Do they have any chance at that, do you think?
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's 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 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, 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 Sappad 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.
Well, I don't know.
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 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.
No, you're absolutely right.
And don't forget, if people want to cut against the grain, they're going to bump into somebody who's not going to like them.
It's like Russia.
You don't sue people, you just hire a hitman for $200.
So the level of violence is easier to attain in the Philippines than, let's say, in other countries.
The other thing that I noticed in the Philippines was the use of what they call yaba or crank or meth.
That's all over.
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 deal 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.
uh... the bullets out of his gun paying for them and then uh...
people who are as a matter of fact uh... here in the philippines to uh...
get a driver's license which i have you are required to take
a test a drug test for uh...
uh... for math it's it's not much of a problem here
Is that to make sure you have it in your system?
No, I don't know.
And I suppose there are ways around that.
But I took the test and there was a long line of people taking the test.
So it is now required here to take a test.
And I'm not sure why because even if you passed, if you've observed the driving habits here, it's almost like they're all on that anyway.
Yeah, it's an interesting place to move around in.
It certainly is.
But I enjoyed it.
I mean, the people have an interesting view of life, and they put up with all that.
And even someone, if he's pointing a gun at you, always has a sense of humor.
I always found that kind of odd and scary about the Philippines.
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, you know where Garbage Mountain is, and you know the people that live and work on there.
Sure.
I was shocked to see that they would stop and want their picture taken and then they would sort of welcome you over.
Oh, yes.
It's amazing.
And invite you to a meal, usually.
Interesting place.
Which you may or may not want to do.
Alright, 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.
Now that's something serious.
You really did that, huh?
Yeah, my job was to essentially design, create, and launch products, and Steven Jobs had hired a firm that 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.
Well, that happens a lot with visions.
They take a long time.
He was very much ahead of the rest of the world, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was far too ahead of the curve, as they say, in front of the technology and also the consumer base.
You've been through a lot.
You were in a plane crash?
Yeah, in Borneo.
In Borneo?
I wanted to find this tribe that was dying out in the center of Borneo.
And you know, Borneo's 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've 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's like, it's just jungle as far as you can see.
That's right.
So he went into this sort of emergency dive, and he'd earlier explained how he'd flown in Somalia, and that's how he used to land, full power, and then pull up just before he landed.
Except he miscalculated.
The landing field was actually a clearing on the side of a hill.
So we hit and then bounced and then what saved us is we went into a grove of timber bamboo, that very sort of large five, four inch tall timber.
Oh, yes.
And that cushioned our impact.
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 one land.
But he tried to fine 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.
No kidding.
What keeps you going through this danger?
I mean, is it the adrenaline factor?
Is that why you do it?
Why do you do it?
You must ask yourself this question.
Why?
Well, you know, I've never been bungee jumping.
I have no interest in thrill sports.
I don't get any thrill from what I do.
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 I can always leave, but they're stuck there, so I don't do it.
Yesterday we were having a 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.
What do you think?
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 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?
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.
Of course it was.
Well, we almost had that once in America.
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 break point.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Raging through the night time, 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.
Well 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, three more, 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, you know, 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.
You better sleep with one eye open, then.
I don't know.
I have an attitude about danger, I guess, that's in some ways like yours.
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 four in the morning and the Vatican at midday is going to get mugged somewhere, somehow.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
Some people never get out of that bubble, and one thing that's fascinating to me is You can read all the books you want about survival and dangers and whatever, but unless you understand situational awareness, unless you read people and unless you talk to people and understand what's going on and pay attention to things, you'll never get out of that bubble.
Mm-hmm.
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 savannah 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.
They think Britney Spears and Paris Hilton represent the finest of our females.
So we don't understand how people view us and it's a great education to go outside every once in a while.
Yes, I recall myself being in the middle of the savannah in Africa and coming on a group of elephants and one of them was a very young elephant and I remember our guide saying, look, we may be in trouble if they decide to charge us and they were very close.
The best thing we can do is all run in different directions and get behind a tree and at least most of us will survive.
And he said, I don't have to run that fast, I just have to run faster than you.
That's right.
So I've pretty well been around the world, as you have.
Now, I have not made war zones as my favorite destinations, as you have.
So you've gone a few notches further.
Well, let me educate you about today's realities.
A lot of people say, oh, well, you go to war zones.
I don't do that.
And I say, well, have you been to New York?
Have you been to Madrid?
Have you been to London?
I've been to Washington and people say, what do you mean?
I said, well, war comes to us now.
There's no front lines.
There's no big sign that says danger, war zone ahead.
You know, the shape and the feel of today's warfare is really more of urban terrorism.
It's not the old fashioned cavalry lining up against the other army and see who wins at the end of the battle.
Of all the things that you have done, what would you think was the most dangerous, or at least, inculcated in you, the greatest fear at that moment?
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.
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'll ever meet.
They're very loyal, they'll defend you with their life, and I said, oh, you're kidding me, come on, Chechens are evil, thieving bandits, 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 I counted about 6,000 impacts an hour hitting the city of Grozny.
And these were missiles, scud missiles, they were air gun 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?
Why are you clapping?
Why are you, you know, 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're being bombed.
And I thought, wow, you know, 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.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I guess you can come away with that particular feeling from nearly any war, including what's going on in Iraq right now.
This one was particularly unusual because There was such an effort to keep journalists out and to terrorize them and frighten them.
And when I got out, I started reading things that weren't true.
And I tried to correct those things.
And I realized that it was a lost cause because just one person being there was not going to reshape history.
No.
No, it's funny.
I was talking about victors getting to write the history the way they want, and that really is true, isn't it?
I mean, history is written by those who are generally victorious or the stronger of the two at the end.
Well, the war in Iraq is a good example.
The war in Afghanistan was a covert 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, A warlord that ran one of the campaigns up there.
In Iraq, they flipped it around and said, well, we use the 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 is a very successful topic.
I thought so too.
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.
Oh, I thought the embedded concept was brilliant.
Absolutely brilliant.
And that's really what it was.
It was a Stockholm Syndrome.
In other words, if you're with a platoon, for example, you go through a couple of firefights with them and you're part of them.
Right.
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 Beth 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.
They definitely scripted that war.
Oh, sure.
What about now, Robert?
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, and so where do you think all this is going?
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 said, 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 did 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 fix themselves or the international community step in.
If we were to just leave, Robert, what do you think would happen to Iraq?
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 Saddam's 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.
Is that civil war?
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 sunny 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.
Well, we left Somalia alone, and is Somalia now going essentially through what Iraq would go through if we simply stopped?
No, because Somalia survives on bananas, pearls, and a few goats here and there.
It was messed up when we arrived, and it was messed up when we left.
Nothing's really changed.
Iraq is actually a very affluent country.
You've got 25 million people, you've got plenty of oil to keep everybody in a nice government job.
There's no reason why Iraq can't be a nice, silly, socialist country like it was under Saddam Hussein.
It's when you let these people fight for that oil that you have the typical chaos that you see in the Middle East.
You know, people talk about a strong man coming back and telling the children to stop killing each other.
You know, that may be a solution.
You see that in Jordan, for example.
You see that in Iran.
You see that in Saudi Arabia.
Maybe it has to revert back to its sort of feudal origins.
But they have to decide that.
They have to live there.
The neighbors around them have to live next to them.
We can't do it from, you know, 8,000 miles away.
We really can't install democracy, can we?
Well, here's the joke.
If you want to start a democracy, you need to load up all the B-52s with $100 bills and start dropping them on people until they can afford democracy.
You know, democracy needs an affluent middle class.
It needs educated people who resolve problems with discussion instead of AK-47s.
Iraq is an educated country.
I mean, they have the ability to do whatever we do.
But the problem is there are a number of criminal and gangster elements within there that want to kick over the sort of years of stability there.
We didn't give the Iraqis the basic tools.
You know, we dropped them from a sort of poor socialist country into a failed state.
In Afghanistan, we did the opposite.
We actually lifted what was the poorest country on earth, so poor that they didn't even measure how poor it was, and we lifted their country up.
So we forgot that we lowered the standard of living in Iraq.
That's a new take on carpet bombing.
Very expensive carpet bombing, $100 bills.
Or maybe in the long run it's actually cheaper.
If you know what cruise missiles cost, then you know what smart bombs cost.
You're right, $100 bills might be cheaper.
Are you pessimistic about the human race?
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.
We're a warrior people.
Is that ever going to change, Robert?
Well, that's a basic concept of all humans.
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.
So, you expect it to get a lot worse before it could ever get any better?
Oh, absolutely.
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.
It really all comes down to the haves and particularly the have-nots, doesn't it?
Yes, it's what they call the Maslow Hierarchy.
When people don't have the basics in life, you know, food, shelter, comfort, safety, they start fighting.
Robert Young-Pelton is my guest.
I'm Art Bell from Manila in the Philippines.
We'll be right back.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.
All time zones covered by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
Robert Young-Pelton is my guest.
We're talking about war.
We're talking about dangerous places and travel.
He's done all of that.
We'll be back in a moment.
Once again, Robert Young Pelton.
Robert, how much does religion, how much of a part does religion play in worldwide conflict?
I think some places it's an excuse, and other places it actually is a fundamental reason why people can't get along.
And a lot of it goes back to long-standing grievances that people have had.
For example, in Iraq, you see the split between Shia and Sunni.
Sunnis believe that they're the true people of Islam, and that Shias are heretics.
And the Shias view themselves as sort of the put-upon members of Islam.
And then Shia, of course, is a very powerful group of followers all around the world.
It's not just in Iraq, of course.
So you have long-standing grievances that have nothing to do with what happened in 2003 when we went in there, but it gets boiled up.
It comes to sort of a breaking point when there's chaos.
Smitty, and I get these little computer messages as we do the program, in New York City says, what a bunch of BS tonight.
9-11 was an inside job.
Pull your head out.
You want to comment on this incredible movement that thinks we bombed our own buildings in the Pentagon?
One thing I found that's very fascinating is that people involved in violent events or things that are just traumatic Refused to believe what their eyes are showing them.
You know, I was in my bathroom 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.
Maybe that's a way of trying to avoid the reality of the fact that it really happened is to try to shift the blame.
I don't know what's brought this movement on the way it has, but it's actually grown to gigantic proportions.
And every time, of course, you bring it up on the radio, you'll get a million really nasty emails.
So, I know there are a lot of people out there who believe that the U.S.
did this to itself, and I just don't know what more to say about it, but obviously you don't think that was the case.
Well, a friend of mine wrote a book on this that debunks all the various myths.
He wrote it for Puppet Mechanics.
His name is David Dunbar, and he just doesn't believe the volume of hate mail.
I mean, just people who just seem to hate him for debunking all these different beliefs.
Oh, I believe it.
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 then 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 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.
I wonder though if the leadership of our country really had any choice.
They had to react in some big way to an event of that magnitude.
They had to.
Politically, they had to.
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, if 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.
How much real support is there for Osama Bin Laden now in the world?
Well, you might find this humorous.
In 1996, he was considered a thug.
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.
There were a bunch of criminals that were hiding out and sort of supporting Bin Laden.
He ingratiated himself with Mullah 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 Samar, 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 You know, terrorist activity or battle or whatever, they'll say he doesn't.
He doesn't, right.
You know, he's a brother, they call him.
You know, he's a Muslim and he has his own things, but we're fighting our own war here.
I know, that's certainly correct.
So, how old are you now?
I'm 51.
51.
You gonna keep doing this?
Yeah, I think up to a certain point.
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 there, form opinions on their own, and keep them safe, and allow them to come back and distribute their message.
So I focus more, 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'm involved in a bunch of things that don't just require getting bombed and shot at.
Somebody asks me, or asks me to ask you, how safe Hong Kong is.
I would respond, Hong Kong is very safe.
What about you?
Hong Kong's fine.
If you're afraid when you go there, stay home, because it's actually a very nice, touristy place.
It sure is.
A very safe city.
And what do you classify now, if you were to sort of make a list of the top 10 dangerous places to go in the world, what would it be like?
I think Iraq would be up there.
The central part of Iraq, Baghdad, number one dangerous place.
Number two dangerous place would be southern Afghanistan.
That is a place where they're deliberately hunting down foreigners or westerners and there's a high probability of your demise.
There are places like Somalia, which are dangerous, but not as dangerous.
You know, there's no sort of absolute rating, but places like Colombia are very dangerous for travelers.
There's also some very safe places there.
I mean, the list goes on.
There are suburbs in South Africa that are very dangerous, and there's very safe places in South Africa.
You know, in my book, I basically write about the 26 wars that we always seem to have going at any one time.
Are there that many going at any given time?
Well, this is a weird thing.
When I first began to write the book in 1993, I tried to figure out what's worth writing about.
And I figured, well, any place that you can go to that you might get killed would be dangerous.
And then I sort of focused on war zones.
And it was about 26.
Even though they change, there's still 26 war zones.
And I can't quite figure out, out of 220 or 250 countries and principalities, There's always about 10% embroiled in warfare.
Now, the interesting thing is there's actually the world does get safer.
In other words, there's more democracies.
There's less big wars.
I mean, when's the last time you saw the big war?
That's don't exist anymore.
So everything's boiling down to sort of small, simmering insurgencies and criminal activities and small wars.
It's true.
So is it your view that there will be no more big wars?
I think warfare has changed.
You know, what we considered war in, let's say, the 50s and the 60s was two armies facing off at each other that morphed into sort of a standoff war in which you had missiles pointed at someone, but you didn't actually dare go in there and start a war.
And then that morphed into the small dirty wars.
In other words, small tribal or ethnic groups banging away at other small tribal and ethnic groups.
And now it's even broken down even more, where you have small cells of people.
You know, you saw that news release about Britain saying they're tracking something like 30 cells or 30 plots.
None of those people are angry about the same thing.
It doesn't take much to disturb the fabric of society.
You know, one bomb in a subway, one assassinated leader.
So what you're going to see is sort of the de-evolution of state-sponsored warfare.
What about India and Pakistan?
Well, they go at it about every 15, 20 years.
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, and I don't know what Pakistan would do with India if it did win.
Nor do I, but they have much more dangerous weapons when the next 20 or 30 year cycle comes around.
Well, this is something that has never been done.
I mean, the only people that have unleashed nuclear weapons have been the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I don't ever see people getting into a nuclear war, because it is a zero-sum game.
Well, it is, but you can almost see that if India and Pakistan really got into it again, it could certainly come to the brink of that.
No, but what I'm saying is, let's say they did it.
Let's say they unleashed everything they had upon each other.
Does India really want to control Pakistan?
And does Pakistan want to have any part of India?
No.
Has just been a way for Pakistan to kick India in the shins.
But when you think about warfare these days, it usually leads to some kind of victory.
And the last thing you want to do is win a prize like Pakistan.
Or India.
Yeah, it's true.
Well, so you're going to lay back now and sort of lay down the map for other adventurers.
Have you noticed that you're succeeding?
In other words, are people picking up in your footsteps, using your literature, your books, and instructions to go and do what you have done?
Yeah, I mean, there's 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, 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.
Sure.
Here's a question for you, Robert.
I've said this over the years and it's probably a dangerous thing to say, I suppose, but the American people are as propagandized in their own way as people in the rest of the world.
Would you agree or disagree with that?
I disagree.
I mean, when I travel around the world, most people I meet in foreign countries, or what we call third world countries, speak at least three languages.
They'll speak their tribal language.
That's true.
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.
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.
I think we're unique that we live on an island, 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.
Well, because we're Amerocentric.
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 in in foreign countries they watch multiple channels from
multiple countries
uh... you know it's a simple example were involved in a war in iraq
uh... when i was in aman jordan had two tvs on the bar that had the uh...
american channels on one and they had aljazeera and arab channels on the other
on one channel you saw brave american troops firing tanks and things like that
and the other one you saw the small children with the tops their heads blown off dying line on
the camera Exactly.
We don't see that here.
We have exactly the same thing.
We get TV from China, from India, from just all over the place.
It's just amazing what you get on cable here as compared to any given cable network in the United States.
So that's absolutely true.
And propaganda doesn't necessarily mean that people are lying to us.
They're just simplifying things.
And or even just leaving them out.
Yeah.
So when I ask whether you're pessimistic about the future of the world, I guess you are to some degree.
You obviously think it's going to get much worse before it ever has a chance to get better.
Yeah.
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.
You now live in California, don't you?
Yes, I should talk.
I live in a very beautiful place.
If you were going to live anywhere outside the United States, or perhaps rephrased, if you had to live anywhere outside the U.S., Robert, in all your travels, where would that be?
There's two places that appeal to me.
One is Sydney, Australia, and even New Zealand if I had to take a second choice, and the west coast of British Columbia.
And I don't know what it is about those two places, but they are sort of pristine and very Simple in terms of the lifestyle.
That would have been my question.
Why?
Why, for example, Australia?
Well, Australia is an emerging economy.
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.
They're also very isolated from the rest of the world, so they tend to be more interested about 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.
Really?
Yeah, it's a great place.
I mean, I encourage everyone to go visit Australia and see what it's like to live on the other side of the world.
It's a pretty big island, so you sort of had island fever even there?
Oh yeah, yeah.
Everything that happened.
I mean, literally, they could drop a nuclear bomb on every major continent, except Australia, and it wouldn't matter.
It is a fascinating perspective to have.
I think there was a movie called On the Beach.
Remember that one?
I think Australia was very last to go, and I think the radiation finally made its way down to Australia, and that was the end of that.
But yes, indeed, Australia is a very, very interesting place, and not all that far, frankly, from where I am right now.
Yeah, well, what I find interesting is that We seem to be confused and concerned about things that happen thousands and thousands of miles away.
We need to focus on taking care of things that are wrong here.
When you live on an island, you notice the importance of taking care of your own backyard before you go fix somebody else's problem.
Boy, isn't that a fact.
The roads in the U.S., they're not what they once were.
Our infrastructure could use a little urban renewal.
All right, Robert Young-Pelton is my guest.
When we come back, your questions, and I imagine you have many for him.
Stay right where you are.
Indeed, here I am.
My guest is Robert Young-Pelton, and he writes about adventure.
He writes about going into dangerous places and coming back alive, so he's here to talk about it.
Now, a lot of Americans, many Americans, live very cocooned lives, and for many, that's all right.
For some of you, I know, you kind of have an urge, you can kind of feel a little bit of Robert Young-Pelton's I don't know, his spark for adventure, and perhaps you want to give it a try yourself.
So you may well have questions about something he's done, or something you would like to do.
You're really never too old to get out there and give it a shot, you know?
So there you've got it.
We're going to open up the lines.
If you have anything you'd like to ask, now would be the time.
And in a moment, well, we gave you the numbers, the portals to get in.
Robert Young-Pelton at your service.
Once again, Robert Young-Pelton.
Is there anything, Robert, that we have not touched on in the interview that really is important to get out before we go to the lines here?
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 or 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 They're 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.
And we're beginning to privatize warfare.
And I thought that was a fascinating development.
It is a fascinating development.
And I guess it's kind of like the accusations here of extra judicial killings.
I mean, how much difference is there?
Well, it means it's a failed state.
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.
That the state can't take care of it, so they send it to private contractors.
Or people hire their own people.
I mean, if 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.
That's a bizarre development in American politics.
How thin is the string that holds civilization together?
I mean, is New Orleans a good example of how really thin it is?
I mean, things can go to hell pretty quickly.
Yeah, we believe in just-in-time concept.
In other words, everything that goes into your grocery store, everything that you need to eat, medicines, whatever, doesn't sit in stockpile 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 in 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 we 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.
It's quite true.
Even if you look at here in the Philippines, there was Marcos.
Now, Marcos was widely regarded as a dictator, and he was a dictator, but you know, I'll tell you, he did a lot of good things for the Philippines.
He built a lot of infrastructure here in the Philippines and got things done.
Now, he did it in a dictatorial way, but when you talk to some Filipinos, they don't hate Marcos all that much.
We've got the Marcos Highway here, the Marcos Bridges.
We've got a lot of infrastructure that was built by Marcos.
But the problem is that brutal dictators, or strongmen if you want to call them that, stop change.
They repress the forward movement that has to happen at some time.
So as soon as they're gone, boom, all of a sudden that change happens rapidly.
It sure does.
And people who are not used to handling freedom can't handle it.
Right.
And so there's this period of time that you talked about a little while ago when everything just sort of goes to hell.
Well, think about it.
Maybe part of civilization is the yin and yang of peace and violence.
Perhaps so.
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.
Alright, let's go to line, see what people have.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Robert Young-Pelton.
Hi.
Hey, how you doing?
I got a quick two-part question here.
First of all, in Iraq, it's my understanding that it used to be divided up into three You know, countries or territories, one with the Sunnis, one with the Kurds, and an area with the Shiites, and I guess the British came in and developed a country of Iraq.
I'm wondering, is that true?
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.
Yeah, that's kind of what I figured.
I think we ought to go back to that, you know?
Because people evidently can't get along, you know?
That's like saying, let's have the Indians live in the plains and let's go live in the cities.
You can't go backwards in history, so what has happened is that people have mingled, things have changed.
Like any other country with problems, it's up to them to resolve.
Yes, for sure.
to do with or without our help and that's the problem is that we are
sort of sitting in the middle of a marital dispute you know we were getting
whacked you know as people try to kill each other one thing you'll find that you can never fix the country
you can help them but you can't fix them
yes for sure did you mention earlier that you were embedded with the church
rebels and i've never been embedded on
I don't think anybody would want to be embedded.
I thought, you know, as a reporter, or whatever, in the city... I was a traveler.
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.
Yeah, I don't have much admiration for them, especially after what happened in Beslan.
Well, don't forget, those were a mix of people.
But, you know, if we have another five hours, I'll tell you the history of Chechnya.
But the bottom line is the Chechens were an independent country, and Russia screwed them.
So they had to fight for what they could fight for.
Yeah, it was those poor kids that had a supper, you know.
Yeah.
It was horrible, but thank you much.
All right.
Thank you very much, Colin.
Take care.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Robert Young-Pelton.
Hi.
Hello, Art.
Howdy.
How are you doing?
Mr. Bill here.
I commend your screener, Gina, wonderful lady, and I've talked to you many times concerning EVPs, reverse doctrine, the doctrine of reversibility, and subliminal suggestion.
My statement and then my question for Robert is, Robert, I've been an avid listener of radio since 1970, late 70s, excuse
me, late 70s, all the 80s and the 90s, and radio and television.
And I always ask the questions that nobody ever seems to ask on all the programs and all the books.
Go ahead and ask one.
Because I was a subcontractor for Raytheon and Hughes before Raytheon became Hughes.
Okay, well go ahead and ask your 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 I'll have to admit, I've never physically seen them, but they're not bombs, they're missiles.
you're saying, caller, you're saying they don't have them?
No, they don't. Okay, alright, alright. Robert? I'll have to admit I've never physically seen them, but they're not
bombs, they're missiles, they're weaponized delivery systems with nuclear warheads on them. Now, would they work
when they hit their But they've had nuclear tests, and I think that's how we determine whether a country owns nuclear weapons or not.
And then we have monitored tests on both sides.
And of course there is the recent test by North Korea.
I guess the final word is in, and it was a nuclear device that went off, whatever the yield was, it was a nuclear device that went off.
We made an awful lot of noise, Robert, about what we would do if they did that, and they did, and we didn't do much of anything that I can see.
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 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 mean, 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 the A woman who drank too much, and she was a loadmaster for the Air Force, and she says, yeah, we're palatizing for Iraq right now.
And I thought, oh God.
Yeah, I too, I was so against our going into Iraq, and said so publicly again and again and again.
Now, since it was not weapons of mass destruction, I think we all know that now, why did we do it?
In the grand plan, and that is, the grand plan is to bring stability to the civilized world, there are rogue nations.
You know, North Korea is one of them.
We consider Iran a rogue nation, and Iraq was the other one.
These are people who have military powers who use them capriciously.
Because they had invaded Kuwait before, we assumed that Saddam was going to do something bizarre and strange.
And so, the policy in the Bush administration at the time was, let's get it over with.
Rather than wait for these guys to come to us, we're on a war footing, let's get it done.
We did win the war within a few days.
It was the peace we lost.
And that was just a lack of planning.
We assumed, because of Afghanistan, that people would rise up and cheer us.
Well, they did.
But they also believed that we were going to leave and let them get down to their business.
So, we should have declared victory and left.
Yeah, well, we stated we are here to find weapons of mass destruction, but the obvious thing we were doing was deposing Saddam Hussein.
You know, you can give people their freedom, but when you stay and you tell them how to use that freedom, it's not freedom anymore.
But, at the same time, you're saying, while they don't need Saddam Hussein, they need somebody with some degree of iron fist, like Saddam.
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.
All right.
Wild Card Line, Christina, hello.
You're on the air.
Hello Art, and I'm praying for you and Aaron.
Thank you.
Your little beings.
Anyway, good luck.
I will continue to pray.
Robert, I think you're very fascinating.
I could ask you a lot of questions, but how about, could you tell me something about the Safe Shelves?
The Safe Shelves?
One of my favorite places.
I want to go there.
We'll go.
To live!
It's an unusual place in that it's quite expensive, it has beautiful sort of granite topography, and if you see a lot of fashion shoes, take care.
But if you go to Prahlin, it's a place with no cars, a lot of very affluent French people lying half-naked, and it's quite nice for a vacation.
But there's absolutely nothing dangerous there.
See?
Perfect, huh?
There you go.
There's your answer.
I'm sure you're going to get a lot of that, and I'm sure your books serve up a lot of that.
Do you document, as well as documenting the dangerous places, Robert, do you document those that are not so dangerous and that are fun to go to?
Well, I used to own Fielding's Travel Guide.
They 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 anywhere.
You can stay in a chain hotel, eat in a McDonald's, buy a Starbucks.
The world is actually a very safe and easy place to navigate these days.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Robert Young Pelton.
Hi.
Hi, my name is Eric.
I talked to you before.
I really enjoyed the conversation tonight.
Yes, Eric.
Thank you very much.
I was just wondering in 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?
Good question.
You know, we have all the tools.
We're 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 a hundred years ago, twenty years ago, or even a thousand years ago.
I'd say if we could replace Paris Hilton with a history teacher, our country would be a lot better off.
Yeah, we are very infotainment oriented, aren't we?
Well, there's lessons to be learned that are being lost at a prodigious rate.
One of the things that bothered me a lot was the value of the wisdom of millions of people that have come before us.
And our focus is not necessarily on picking up that wisdom, it's on sort of trivializing The time we have to spend, like when you watch kids playing video games, I just wish they were sort of reading history books.
So do I. Keith in Hamilton, Ontario.
You're on with Robert Young-Pelton.
Hi.
How are you doing, sir?
I have two questions for you.
I talked to your screener, a very cool person, first, but the first question I want to ask is the UN voted Norway as the number one place to live.
What do you think of it?
I was just in Norway.
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 monolithic 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.
They don't really have any problems there.
I don't know.
It's an interesting place to learn about the world, because things are so good there.
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 light as I can, but it's regarding race.
You said lack of money is a big cause of shootings and violence.
And if you look at the rap world, the NFL and basketball, every day, they are in the news for a gun crime.
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, 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 always amazed about is that we don't really have any tribes over here And then people try not to describe people as sort of well He's from here even there, but you see it around the world where people break into their sort of tribal structures
Oh, isn't it?
It's true.
The other thing is, Americans don't realize how much their music and how much their motion pictures affect the rest of the world.
What is known about America is mainly known through music and through motion pictures, and we're the king of that world, aren't we?
Well, you know, when I was in Liberia, the top films are Schwarzenegger, Rambo, the violent films.
They're actually painted on the walls, and they're all bullet-parked from the number of battles that have been fought there.
The rap music takes on a completely different connotation.
Fighters wear Tupac Shakur t-shirts.
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, the 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... 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.
For years, Russia used to have an over-educated population that didn't have jobs.
Can somebody invest in the Philippines and create jobs that keep those people there?
I don't know, because I think the future of the world is this nomadic population of what they call guest workers, or whatever you want to call them, flows to where the jobs pay the most.
Baghdad where they're building a new American embassy. It's not being built by Americans.
It's been built by people coming from multiple multiplicity of nations simply because they're
cheap and they're effective and then they send them back and they're done.
So, and it just, it makes me angry.
There ought to be, you know, other Asian nations have made such progress.
If you look around the Asian rim, even China, of course, is just going full steam ahead at the moment.
Japan, South Korea, and on and on and on, really.
And the Philippines has been kind of left out in the cold, and so many young people here are just so well educated, and the only way to make money is to leave the country.
That's it.
Hi, thank you so much for taking my call.
Here's what I'm wondering.
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 blanche to the inspectors to look anywhere they wanted for weapons of mass destruction.
So our government now has Put us in this huge bet and lost a lot of lives.
So clearly, they had a strong motive for going in.
So, if they did get cart-launched to go in and loot these weapons, and they were not there, I'm wondering what excuse do you think they would have come up with to invade Iraq?
Kind of an interesting what-if, I'd say.
Yeah, but the what-if is actually true.
One of the things I did was look for weapons of mass destruction.
There 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 are actually infiltrated in that UN mission as intelligence agents and also the Mossad feeding intelligence directly back to the intelligence agencies in each country and 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, 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.
So, that was not the real premise for Warren.
Well, I was never in the White House, and a number of very good books had been written about the planning that went to Warren.
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.
Alright, here we go to another wildcard line.
New York City, AI is it or AL?
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, 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 lying eyes, but Art had on John Lear, who had, Art, 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 7 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, you know, how things are really ruled.
And I love you, Art.
I love you now, Robert.
And I'll listen over the air.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, that's a gigantic three-part question.
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.
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.
fascination of the Egyptian 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 assume 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 know that Anna Polotskaya was poisoned on the way to go to Beslan.
She was going to negotiate with the people that were holding the children, And she was poisoned by the FSB, the Russian government, so she couldn't go there.
Andrei Babitsky, who is 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.
All right.
East of the Rockies.
Your turn with Robert Young Pelton.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Robert.
This is John from Springfield, Illinois.
Yes, John.
I got a quick comment and two questions really quick.
Art, I hope your wife isn't eating those rotten eggs when she's pregnant with your pregnancy.
Those eggs, those aphrodisiacs.
They're called Balut, sir.
I'm sorry.
She's not eating those, is she?
Actually, they're not exactly rotten eggs.
They're just from a Western perspective.
They have a yuck factor.
Anyway, go right ahead.
Okay, my first question.
In Nicaragua, I want to see what your comment is about this Ortega winning the election.
You know, coming out of nowhere, could this be a new North Korea-Iran axis plot?
You know, I find it ironic Oliver North was backing the Ruiz guy that was going against him.
And my second question, I find it odd too, China is negotiating with Iraq for oil leases, offering to put like hundreds of millions of dollars into infrastructure.
What do you think about that?
Well, a couple of things.
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 and 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.
Oh, yes.
Have you been to China recently?
Never been to China, never wanted to go.
Oh, no kidding.
Well, I'm saving that for when I'm old and senile.
It's a very sobering, very sobering experience to travel up above Hong Kong into the new territories.
It will just scare the hell out of you.
The amount of industry going on up there will remind you of the industrial age of America times 50.
I mean, it's just frightening.
It's really frightening.
All right, well, we're so short on time.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hello, Art.
Pleasure to talk to you.
My question for Robert is, in his travels, has he ever come across modern-day pirates, and what type of experiences he had with that?
I went hunting pirates in the Sierra Leone, and yes, in the Philippines they have pirates.
It's kind of a glorified term for a thug on a boat, but pirates are quite common, and Not very nice people, but they do exist and they're easy to find.
Where did you find them here in the Philippines?
If you go down to Tawi-Tawi, you go to the islands, they're essentially pirates.
They use boats to attack people, but piracy in the Sulu archipelago is quite common.
Okay, Kathy in Fresno, California, you're on with Robert Young-Pelton.
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 Well, to answer your second question, you can't provide any kind of assistance without security.
and to uh... building infrastructure we could pay them with military money that we're paying our soldiers tonight
i'm wondering if people would volunteer their time to do that type of work rather than
going to a military situation
would they give their time well then
as your second question you can't provide any kind of assistance without
security i mean n g o's uh... well intention people are not going to go into a
situation in which what they build
gets blown up when i was in july we were i was with uh...
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 it 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
want to get killed the militaries in the in the middle of what they call reassessing
uh... the war i guess the goals of the war and uh... i wonder what you think
they'll come up with do you think the uh... will sort of do a vietnamization
of uh...
of iraq slowly turning it over while we're leaving is that where we're
headed no the military can do one of two things they can engage in a war which is
in other words against an enemy and right now they're in a counterinsurgency
which is a very debilitating war for traditional military Or they can choose to be peacekeepers.
Well, there's no peace to keep, so our military can't win something that is not winnable.
First, what meant no wild card line, I'm sorry.
Michael in Kentucky, you're on the air.
Yes, Art.
Very glad to get through.
I've been listening to you since 94, I guess.
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.
Yeah, the Western mind cannot grasp, Robert, how anybody is convinced to do that.
We just cannot in the West imagine that.
Well, it's quite easy.
Typically, a suicide bomber prepares himself by praying and sort of, I won't say chanting, but basically reciting the Koran.
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.
Okay.
I suppose let's go all the way to Canada and Vancouver.
You're on the air with Robert Young Pelton.
Hi.
Well, hi.
I had the chance to go to Google Video and I watched Terror Storm by Alex Jones.
I'm wondering if your guest would have any comments about Well, terrorism is a buzzword.
You know, it's like mercenaries used to describe something you don't like.
Shock and awe was terrorism in its most primitive and brutal form.
We engage in terrorism, our enemies engage in terrorism.
To call it a war on terrorism is kind of humorous because it is the very fact that we have this sort of nameless, faceless enemy which terrorizes us.
It's more appropriate To use other words that aren't just sort of empty, meaningless things.
So every nation engages in terrorist activities, they just don't call it that.
Robert, if somebody were to go out and buy one of your books, and you've got some really good ones here, what right now would you recommend to them?
Where's a good place to start?
Well, go to Amazon and buy License to Kill.
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.
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.
And to me, it's one of my best books ever.
Were you ever, Robert, at a point where you could have been drawn in instead of being an observer and visitor, instead being a participant?
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.
Indeed.
All right.
Listen, buddy, thank you very, very much for being here.
It was my pleasure to finally talk to you and be on the show with you.
Extremely educational for me, and I'm sure for many out there.
You take care, and we'll do it again one day.
Thank you very much.
All right, there you have it, folks.
Robert Young Pelton.
Tomorrow night, we're going to move toward one of my, no, my favorite subject.
It's all about time travel.
Ron Mallett will be here.
And all I can tell you is, any time we're talking about time travel, and I'm involved, it's going to have to be good.
That'll be tomorrow night on Coast to Coast AM.
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