Charles Faddis, retired CIA officer, warns ISIS’s rapid rise stems from U.S. intelligence failures and Sunni-Shia tensions in Iraq, where Ba’athists and disenfranchised Sunnis joined extremist ranks. He calls the Iran nuclear deal a "terrible idea," citing $100B sanctions relief, uninspected military sites, and Russia’s role in uranium enrichment, while dismissing China’s South China Sea expansion as underreported. Biological warfare tops WMD threats due to ISIS’s apocalyptic mindset, though Pakistan’s instability and Saudi interest in nukes pose risks. Faddis urges political solutions over ground troops, criticizing media silence on Arctic militarization and U.S. concessions to adversaries. Bell’s campaign pivots on distrust of government, echoing themes of systemic collapse amid callers’ existential questions about intuition and time. [Automatically generated summary]
So I know that, you know, a lot of you are new, and you're going to have to excuse me for this, but I'm going to roll over a few of the basics because men are joining in droves.
It's unbelievable.
Thank you all so much.
And thank Kelos for great sound.
Joe Talbot, great guy right here in Peru.
I want to thank Keith Rowland, my webmaster of, you know, Keith, one of these years, you're going to have to tell me how many years it's been.
I don't even know.
Dr. J is my producer.
He's just a great guy, lines people up for me.
Like tonight, for example, we're going to talk to a spy.
Charles Fattis.
We're going to talk to a spy.
C-I-A.
Well, retired, but spy.
I want to thank all of you.
I want to thank the Belgab website for so much support.
The StreamGuys, oh, StreamGuys, I'll thank you.
You know, maybe it's throwing another month.
Lasvegas.net.
They get the internet here, and they get it from here to there, so forth.
And our new, one more, Peter Eberhardt, I want to thank you too.
He's our sales guy up in Anchorage.
And then I want to roll over the rules.
There are only two of them, really.
No bad language.
We don't need bad language.
And only one call per show.
That's it.
Those are the rules.
No bad language, one call per show.
And now, the way to call, I know it's tiresome if you already know how to call, but really the cool way to do it, if you've got an Apple product or you've got an Android or whatever, if you put Skype on it, you can call us and you'll sound like a million dollars.
Or you can call from your computer on Skype.
You'll sound like a million dollars if you have a headset mic.
So please use one if calling on a computer.
So put Skype on your phone or your tablet, whatever.
If it's a tablet, then you have to kind of walk into the mic part of the tablet.
We have two ways for you to get in.
North America calls at MITD 51.
That's Midnight in the Desert 51.
M-I-T-D.
All you need is the initials, 51.
And then, you know, set it up like you're going to call me, but you don't really have to.
And then it'll be in your list, and you can call it any time.
And then overseas, that means everybody outside North America calls M-I-T-D 55, M-I-T-D55.
Important things to go over.
When you do call on a phone and you're using Skype, boy, does it sound good.
Really, really good.
Okay, Charles will be with us at the bottom of the hour.
I've got a couple things I want to go over.
I've got the Darone Blues.
I mean, I've got Drone Blues tonight.
I have a DJI drone.
I got one of the early ones.
That's wonderful.
It does exactly what it's supposed to do, takes high-definition video and everything, and is just awesome.
And me and a ham operator, of course, I toyed around with it a little bit for additional range.
But I've got the drone blues tonight.
Now, not as much as this leader of the Corazon group has in Syria.
They flew a drone silently above his head, and I'm sure he never knew what hit him.
That's one of our big drones.
And so he's gone.
He was an important leader in Corazon in Syria.
So bye-bye.
I don't think you ever hear them.
I don't think you ever hear the drone.
I don't think you ever hear the missile that comes from it.
You just cease to exist.
I still got the drone blues.
And I have the drone blues because all day today, CNN was showing some guy, oh man, he put a semi-automatic handgun on a drone.
And he was firing it.
And the drone, of course, was GPS controlled.
So it took the recoil, went right back to where it was, fired another shot, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
We're going to get new laws.
Already the FAA is descending on us drone people.
But, I mean, now the guy with a gun, sheesh.
So I've really got the drone blues, but as I mentioned, not as much as our friend from Coruscant Group.
He's really got the blues.
So drones are a thing.
What else to say about it?
They're a thing.
I'm just afraid that they're going to make laws eventually.
We've got laws for everything, right?
So we're going to have severe drone laws.
I'm sure of it.
Briefly, mayors around the world, mayors that is, declared Tuesday to be climate change day, sort of.
I mean, they said climate change is real.
What happened is the Vatican invited all of these mayors to sort of proclaim that climate change is real, man-made, and we have got to do something about it.
Then there's Donald Trump.
This is actually what I want to talk to you about.
I'm Not, you know, I'm not a real political person, but I can't stop myself.
Early on, let me just level with you.
Early on, when the Donald began what he's doing, I called my 2B producer at the time and I said, Dr. Jay, you have got to get me the Donald.
I really want the Donald.
Not necessarily because I'm going to vote for him, but because he's a really interesting guy and really rich.
That's what he says, right?
I'm really rich.
$10 billion?
He's rich.
Anyway, he's a very interesting guy.
I think that, I really do.
I think he's interesting.
In fact, I may have a couple people five times comment on it here on the show.
He may well not be somebody I'm going to vote for, or you never know, maybe I will, but, oh, God, it's incredible.
What's going on is just too incredible not to comment on.
Here's a copy of the ABC Washington Post poll.
Now, this is unbelievable.
I mean, even after the gigantic shot leveled at McCain, even after that, listen to this.
Trump leads the pack and not by a little.
Actually, after he took the shot at McCain, it went up.
People are going, ah, Trump, come on, that's not important.
It is.
It is important.
Why?
Well, because, in my opinion, and you can either be with me on this or not, there's only one way to explain it.
Because he is a wild man.
There's no question, a wild man.
Here's what I think.
For years and years and years, at every election that we all trudge through, there are candidates out there saying, we've got to take America back, right?
We've got to take America back.
And it never really amounts to much.
No matter who we elect, we pretty much get the same America, whether you vote Republican or Democrat.
Yeah, there's a little difference, but we pretty much get the same America, and people are fed up.
And then I don't mean just a little bit fed up.
I mean really fed up.
So what accounts for Donald Trump's 24% being so far ahead of Scott Walker at 13%?
So, I mean, he's really out ahead now, even after the shot fired at Senator McCain.
In my opinion, the American people are very close to being so fed up, they're ready to burn it all down.
I really mean that.
I think they're ready to burn it all down.
I don't mean rioting.
God save us from something like that.
But I mean, politically, burn it all down.
They're ready.
I mean, they're so fed up with people from the right, people from the left, and then new boss, same as the old boss, right?
So they're fed up.
And I've never seen the American people this fed up.
It's the only thing that can account for Trump at 24%, for Trump at 24% after he goes after McCain.
No matter what you think about that, the fact that he is still rising in the polls, in my opinion, can only mean that people are ready to burn it all down, that we are at some kind of, I don't know, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore and I'm going to vote for Donald.
So I would love to interview the Donald, but of course now he's such big news that I don't know that I'm going to get that opportunity.
But if anybody knows the Donald, I would dearly love to talk to him.
I surely would.
I was asking back before he was even getting going.
I thought he was interesting.
So, yeah, I think we're at a really important, interesting place right now in America.
And I don't think that we've ever been here before that I know about.
How about the rest of you?
Do you ever recall a moment like this?
Do you ever recall a time when Americans were so on the edge that they're ready to vote for somebody who has said the things that Donald has said?
Candidate Trump.
Even talking about not allowing him into the debates.
How do you not allow somebody who leads the Republican PAC into the debates?
Every president we've had lately, they always say, oh, you know, there's going to be martial law, and the president will never leave, and he'll just stay there.
But, you know, with the Donalds, you know, that's actually a legitimate question.
Or no wrong.
unidentified
Well, anyway, I know you is having suggestions the other night.
But to me, it says that the American people are so incredibly fed up that, you know, they're ready for this.
unidentified
I agree.
I think the ironic thing of it is, and hopefully people will, you know, as the race continues and people start to dig into the details, he's really flipped on every issue you can name out there.
On immigration, he supported amnesty.
Now he's absolutely against illegal immigration.
A few years ago, he wanted amnesty.
In 2006, he supported...
You know, he could do flips and flops, and I don't think it matters at all.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Well, I would love to listen to you interview him.
Maybe we could arrange a Trump Hillary debate on Midnight in the Desert.
But again, to me, it says the American people, if they're accepting this, and the polls say they are, have got to be so fed up, they're just ready to set it all on fire.
unidentified
That might be the case.
Secondary about the drones.
Yes.
Previous rulings from the ATF about electronic triggers that may be used on drones, on the homemade drones.
They are legal.
However, there's some concern about them being altered in which they would fire multiple times per press or per pull.
Well, the guy had a semi-automatic on it, and he was firing, and you could see the drone absorb the recoil, and then the GPS put it right back in position to fire again.
That's potentially.
I don't know.
We're going to get new Laws out of it.
I know it.
unidentified
Yeah, and that's the one thing that kind of concerns me.
We already have the framework in place.
We already have the regulations in place.
We don't need more laws.
We don't need more regulations.
Ah, but, brother, I'm telling you, here they come.
And if you'd like to learn a little more about Donald's comments about John McCain, I suggest you look up the book, An Enormous Crime, by former South Carolina Congressman Bill Hendon, which details how the Treaty of Hanoi ended the Vietnam War, and the United States promised to pay a gazillion dollars to North Vietnam to rebuild the infrastructure.
So in good faith, they released half of the 600 POWs and said you'll get the other 300 back when you pay the reparations.
But they've never been paid to this day.
And satellite photos, when Hendon wrote the book about 10 years ago, showed the walking K symbol in the rice fields.
Okay, and all this has what to do with the Donald.
unidentified
Well, what you're going to do in that book, you're going to find transcripts and testimony from the congressional hearings with John McCain, chaired by John McCain, blocking every effort to get the POW MIAs back.
He's laid all that out, and there are people who say that his comments were in some way justified, that he hasn't done enough, you know, for POWs and all the rest of it.
But I'm telling you, what's going on is amazing.
Charles Fattis coming up.
He may have comments on this.
I'm Mark Bell.
unidentified
I'm Mark Bell.
For dark matter news, I'm real ash grabbing the planet you would have seen the comet on a collision course with the comet universal collision correctly.
10,000 mile wide electrical disturbances are all over the world.
Last night on midnight in the desert, while speaking with Graham Hancock about possible past comet strikes on Earth, Art mentioned all the internet chatter about something headed towards us from space with a possible September impact.
Both NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have been preparing for a global catastrophe.
NASA has launched its hypothetical asteroid impact scenario while FEMA has begun stockpiling on emergency supplies.
Is an asteroid Armageddon just around the corner?
In a YouTube video, author Lynn Liaz shares about a phone call with her friend who was given inside information about a 2.5-mile-wide comet, which is expected to hit the Earth between September 15th through the 28th, 2015.
She says that almost a year ago, the Foreign Minister of France three times publicly announced at a White House press conference a 500-day countdown to climate chaos, which will end on September 24th, 2015.
She says they know what is coming and they've already told you, adding that chaos will erupt on this planet in September 2015.
You can watch the full video at artbell.com.
This is Dark Matter News.
The conspiracy theories grew wilder as the massive military exercise grew closer.
Some said food riots and martial law were coming to the United States.
Dissidents would be assassinated.
Walmart stores turned into prison camps.
Foreign troops brought in to help.
Jade Helm began last week, but so far no one has seemed to have seen any of the troops or the out-of-town conspiracy theorists who vowed to watch their every move.
Closures of up to six Walmart stores around the country seem to add credence to these theories.
Walmart claims that the stores have been closed for plumbing problems.
However, several months after the closures, necessary permitting has not been applied for from the local municipalities.
The timing of the closures and lack of real disclosure from Walmart hasn't helped the paranoia.
Then the governor of Texas added to this paranoia by ordering the state's National Guard to monitor a weeks-long special operations training exercise called Jade Helm 15 involving 1,200 troops in seven states.
Some people reportedly buried their guns so government troops couldn't take them away.
Others stockpiled ammunition and supplies.
A group called Counter Jade Helm helped organize quasi-militias to keep track of troop movements.
But while the wildest theories like how the government is building re-education camps for Christians, libertarians, and other enemies of the state may seem outlandish, the underlying fear is widespread.
Some 60% of Americans see the government as a threat to individual liberty, according to a poll conducted by Ras Musin in May.
The Army spent months trying to reassure people that the public would experience little disruption to their normal lives aside from a slight increase in vehicle traffic and the limited use of military aircraft and its associated noise.
Efforts to create a realistic exercise by having some troops conduct suspicious activity while dressed as civilians and a map that labeled Texas and Utah as hostile territory played into the fears of people convinced the government is out to get them.
Gary Franci of the online Next News Network ominously warned his viewers, this is by far the greatest public conditioning exercise in American history.
Martial law may not happen this summer, Franci intoned, but some say that when the time comes, troops will be ready and trained to take over your town.
For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
unidentified
For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
You think that people would have had enough of silly love soul.
But look around me and I see it is so.
Some people wanna feel the worm with silly love songs.
What's wrong with that?
Wanna take a ride from the high desert and the great American Southwest.
This is Midnight in the Desert, exclusively on the Dark Matter Digital Network.
Coming up now, when do you ever hear a retired CIA, you won't like the term spy, but spy.
Charles S. Status is a 20-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine service.
That's a better word, right?
Clandestine.
He served throughout the Near East, South Asia, Southern Europe, conducted operations against rogue states, WMD smuggling networks, and the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations.
So we can speak about a lot tonight.
Took the first CIA team into Iraq in 2002 in advance of the invasion of Iraq.
He retired in 2008 as the head of the CIA's WMD terrorism unit.
Since his retirement, Mattis has written extensively.
He is the author of three works of nonfiction, three novels, and dozens of articles and opinion pieces.
He lives near Annapolis, Maryland, and continues to consult from the intelligence community.
Prior to joining the CIA, he was a combat arms officer in the U.S. Army and a trial attorney.
He's been married for 34 years.
Congrats on that.
And has four children.
When he's not working or writing.
He sails, makes wine and beer, travels, and reads extensively.
He describes himself politically as a libertarian.
Congratulations, me too, with a small L. He believes government has a vital role to play, but that it's too big, too intrusive, and too efficient.
He wants to cut the size of government, trim the size of the budget, and free the American people to pursue their own destinies.
You know, before we launch into what we're about to launch into, Charles, I'm sure I kind of made sure that you heard my rant at the beginning of the program about Trump.
You know, I've really thought and thought and thought, thought and thought about this.
How can his poll numbers be this high?
Even after the, you know, the shot over the bow, actually, midsection at McCain, I figured he'd drop like a rock, but no, he went up.
Well, I have to say, because I was listening to your comments, and I think you and I are on the same wavelength.
I mean, I'll throw out the caveat up front so nobody misunderstands that, you know, I don't agree with everything he says, particularly what he said about Senator McCain.
But I think it is absolutely a measure of the fact that the American people are fed up with business as usual.
They're fed up with politicians who won't answer a question with a straight answer.
They're really hungry for change, and they're hungry for somebody who just actually tells them what he thinks.
And I think that's, you know, they're saying that loudly and clearly by expressing their support for him.
Whether they will ultimately vote for him or not as president is another matter.
But, you know, at this point, they're saying, hey, the rest of you need to pay attention.
This is the kind of thing we want to hear, at least honesty.
Well, I mean, there are at least two sides to that.
I mean, one is what's driving the growth of ISIS, and the other is the issue of, are we collecting enough intelligence and are we getting the picture that we need?
I mean, so, you know, just as kind of a preamble on both, we're not collecting the intelligence that we need.
Well, we were looking, but not looking closely enough, not looking frequently enough, not looking intensely enough, however you want to characterize that.
Clearly not collecting the information we needed to collect.
But there's another side to this, which is their capacity to grow is driven by fundamental issues in Iraq and Syria and also by American policy.
I mean, they're growing out of this thing that we call ISIS is growing out of fissures in Iraq, which is kind of an artificial country, and basically out of this Shia-Sunni divide.
So if you're a Sunni Arab in Iraq, you may or may not like ISIS, and you may or may not wish they'd go away, but you certainly are not happy with the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, and you don't feel like that represents you, and you definitely want to resist them.
And if you're pushed to the wall in your choices between the Shia or siding with Sunni Arabs, even if they're ISIS, you're probably going to go in the direction of ISIS.
In fact, one of the things that, just to throw this out, then go whichever direction you want to go, one of the things that people don't talk about at all in the news is that actually there are a substantial number of individuals cooperating with ISIS and not just cooperating like as individuals, but as organizations in numbers who were formerly associated with the Bafist regime, in other words, with Saddam Hussein.
I mean, you have guys that have a history of being completely secular individuals with no real radical jihadist background who are in league with ISIS, with radical Islamists, because their common enemy is the Shia that is this government.
There's obviously something the average American does not understand about ISIS, the appeal of ISIS.
They, you know, I don't know, they chop off people's heads, they kill people, they overrun towns and just slaughter immense numbers of people.
You know, it doesn't seem like a really appealing organization.
So there is something we're missing about the appeal there of ISIS, that they're able to gather so many so quickly who are so obviously actually dedicated to fighting.
Well, they are drawing a lot of energy from what I was just talking about.
I mean, what you have is a nation of Iraq which didn't exist Historically, this is a creation of the Brits post-World War I. And we've cobbled together areas that never existed as a country.
So you have a very large number of Sunni Arabs.
The Sunni-Shia split, you know, is the major divide in Islam.
It's like Catholics and Protestants, except it's not like Catholics and Protestants today.
It's like Catholics and Protestants in 1200 AD, you know, when you burn cities to the ground over the fact that, and slaughter everybody over the fact that you're the wrong breed of Christian.
And you have a very large minority of Sunni Arabs in Iraq who now feel they are at the mercy of a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad.
So their inclination is to band together.
And then, you know, even if you're not inclined outright, though, to support ISIS, the fact that they are so brutal and that the cost of resisting them is so huge is that unless you really have something to fight for, you're really going to think twice about standing up to them.
And the choice that effectively Sunni Arabs have right now is this.
You can either go with ISIS or you can fight on behalf of the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad.
And the reward for fighting for the government is that when it's all over, ISIS is gone, but you still get to be dominated by the Shia, which you regard as unthinkable, unsatisfactory.
I mean, as it stands right now, Iraq does not really functionally exist as a nation state.
The Kurds in the north are all but independent.
The western portion of Iraq, this whole area that I'm talking about filled with Sunni Arabs, is basically almost all of it under the control of ISIS.
So what's left under the control of the national government is whatever that breaks out to, probably 50% of the land mass of Iraq.
And so it doesn't exist now.
Is it going back together?
I don't know.
I have said for some time that it is possible that Humpty Dumpty has fallen and it's not going back together again.
And every day that goes by, the more we allow this situation to continue to exist, the more likely that is the case, that it will never go back together.
The best I could say right now is that it is possible that we may be maintaining the status quo right now.
That's about the best I could say.
It is possible that we are losing.
We are definitely not winning.
We definitely do not have them on the run.
And the current strategy, such as it is, is not going to defeat them.
I wrote an op-ed piece a couple of weeks ago, and my basic premise was it may be time for us to begin to start contemplating the fact that ISIS is not going to go away, that we are actually going to be left with, if we don't get our act together, be left with a radical Islamic terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East.
Something, you know, I mean, that will actually be a nation-state committed to our destruction and sort of perpetual war with the West if we don't get our act together and get rid of these guys now.
And every time that somebody announces that they're losing territory, you know, within a week or so, we hear that they've taken another city.
They are increasingly staging really large attacks inside of Baghdad and on the periphery of Baghdad.
Huge, huge car bomb attacks and other attacks.
No, they're not losing strength, and we're not driving them back, and we won't with this strategy.
And by the way, there's nobody, no military, no body of military men who sat down with the President of the United States and said, hey, here's a strategy.
We think this is the plan.
Let's just bomb them and that'll win the war.
That's not true.
That did not happen.
You know, this is driven the other way around.
Political decisions are made about what we're willing to do, and then the military is told to implement it.
But shouldn't there be some analyst from your old organization who would sit down with the president and say, Mr. President, I understand your political difficulty.
However, if we continue on the present course, we're going to end up with a nation-state dedicated to our destruction in the Middle East.
Should be and are people who tell presidents all the time the reality of world situations, and then presidents make their own decisions as to whether they feel like listening or whether they don't.
You know, We've been doing that in regard to Iraq for some time, long before this president was up there.
People back home who decide what intel reports they will pay attention to and which ones they won't.
No, that's, I mean, I was going to amplify, but quite frankly, that's plenty clear.
We most certainly did not.
And I can remember my deputy and I sitting there many, many, many months into that adventure, looking at each other and saying, you know, they keep talking about this stuff.
And they were talking about it before we ever got here.
But there was nobody here then.
And we haven't picked up any sources since we got here.
So that Iraq somehow would that the whole region would be in a better place or there would not have been bad developments, I don't think follows necessarily.
We're talking about the Middle East.
And let's not forget that, and this is not intended as an excuse for the WMD issue or anything, but Saddam Hussein was a monster.
I'm the guy that just finished saying that if we're not careful, we're going to have a permanent terrorist state in the Middle East.
You know, Saddam was a monster of epic proportions.
I spent a lot of time with the Kurds in northern Iraq.
You know, there are entire towns, sizable towns, that were gassed to death by Saddam Hussein.
I was up there for a year.
Our base, as we built it up, you know, all of the ladies who cooked for us and cleaned and so forth were all Kurdish women, and they did that work.
They were all either the daughters, wives, whatever, of men who had been rounded up in what's called the Anfal campaign, which means anvil, where Saddam basically would go into towns and take every Kurdish male, 12 and above, and just line them up in front of mass graves, machine gun them, and bulldoze them into the ground in their towns.
Hopefully ISIS doesn't get any stronger and that equation changes.
That's one of the reasons we're here tonight because I've never seen I was about to say I've never seen anything so horrible, but we have the Nazis, of course, and as you just mentioned, Saddam was pretty awful himself.
So the world has always had unbelievable things going on.
Maybe ISIS just manages better PR for their awfulness.
Well, ISIS uses as a very, very deliberate tactic the PR, the publication, the social media, whatever we want to call it, the broadcast of these atrocities.
You know, they are consciously looking all the time in a very deliberate, horribly sick fashion for more gruesome, terrifying ways to kill people, and then they want everyone to see it.
Now, I'm going to pull myself away from the zone itself and come to Europe and the United States.
Frankly, when I see somebody get their head cut off, not that I watch those because I don't, or I see people mowed down, shot in the back of the head one after another, it doesn't encourage me to even remotely think about, go ahead and join that group.
So, in other words, there's no way to really understand the attraction of this kind of PR.
I can understand it, again, locally because of the fear involved.
But in terms of recruiting Americans or Europeans to go and do something awful like shooting soldiers or shooting up a, you know, I don't know, a shopping mall or whatever it is or encouraging people to do, I just don't get it, and I guess you don't either.
Well, I mean, ultimately, the basis for this is obviously that you have accepted this ideology so completely that you believe that anything is justified.
You know, there are no limits.
And if you go back to sort of the early days of when al-Qaeda was standing up and really beginning to take the first steps in the direction of mass casualties, suicide attacks, and then things like this, there was actually a lot of discussion in Islamic theological circles about can we justify this, you know, and a lot of argument.
And amongst mainstream Muslim scholars, there remains a lot of argument about that.
I mean, not much argument, you know, clear consensus that no, you cannot possibly justify it.
But by this point, there's this whole jihadist mentality that, yeah, basically we're on the side of God and therefore anything we choose to do is justified because from their viewpoint, they're fighting pure evil.
Our president, whenever he speaks about this, and frankly, most other politicians, except maybe the Donald, strike out and make it very clear that we are not at war with Islam, that we are at war with these very radicalized people calling themselves ISIL or ISIS, whatever.
Now, here comes a real sensitive one for you, Charles.
How much unvocalized sympathy do you suspect there might be inside the larger Islam community worldwide for what's going on?
I think that what you're witnessing, I mean, here's, we're not at war with Islam.
We are at war with a certain group, a certain, what's the right Word, a certain sect, a certain strain of thought within Islam that I think is basically trying to hijack this entire faith and drag it off into their own crazy vision of the seventh century.
And I don't think at all that the vast majority of Muslims have any sympathy for that.
I mean, in the course of my career, I ran a lot of operations where people were killed, and I mean killed on our side, fighting against the crazies.
95% of those guys were Muslims on our side, you know, fighting against this kind of ideology.
I was really actually worried about your answer to that.
So thank you.
There's not any change that you can see going on in that as this wears on and on and on and on.
You know, I understand how it works.
I mean, as we kill people with drone strikes or whatever it is we're going to do to kill them, there are relatives of those people who then become our enemies.
I know how it works.
And so the longer it goes on, it seems to me the more people will hate us.
Well, there's certainly that danger, and there's certainly going to be a reaction in some situations.
And the other thing is this, even if we're not just talking about religion, and this is not necessarily an argument for or against drone strikes, I'm just pointing this out.
If you're living in a nation in which another country, the United States, is routinely operating drones in your airspace without the permission of your country, potentially, and carrying out at its discretion attacks inside that country where people are being blown up and killed, whether you are sympathetic to the people being killed or not, that's got to probably rub you really the wrong way.
I mean, if somebody was operating drones over Kansas from another nation, making decisions about people to hit, we would probably react pretty strongly to it.
Now, again, I'm not saying whether that, I mean, it may be in fact that in some situations we don't have any choice, that we don't have a cooperating government, there's a threat on the ground, and this is the mechanism we have.
All I'm saying is when you choose that mechanism, you have to accept the fact that you're going to, even people that are not on the side of the bad guys are going to have good reasons why they may not really like the fact that you are making drone strikes in their territory without their permission.
And if a 12-year-old sees his dad get killed, then we've probably got somebody who's going to be thinking about buttons they can push when the time is right to get revenge.
And you're also going to face the fact, again, this is a reality, it goes with the territory.
The enemy is going to do everything they can to make propaganda value out of every strike.
So maybe there was a strike and civilians were killed because there's no such thing as a war without unintended consequences, except in the movies, I guess.
But maybe nobody was killed except militants, except targets that we knew were there.
But by the time the ISIS or the Taliban is done portraying that strike, you know, they're going to bill it as you just blew up a nursery school.
You just killed, you know, a family on their way to the mosque.
They are going to absolutely sell it locally as, oh my God, here's another example of American brutality.
All these people were just sitting around and doing nothing and they never hurt anyone and they were all murdered by the Americans.
And you can't stop that.
That's just going to happen every time you attack.
If you were in a position and you could be the one advising the president, or even better yet, you could simply implement policies that would win, policies that would get rid of eventually ISIS, what would you think we should be doing?
ISIS draws its strength from this fissure in the nation of Iraq, assuming we're going to consider that Iraq still exists between Sunnis and Shias.
You need to give Sunni Arabs something to fight for other than for a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad.
What is that?
Well, I would submit to you probably something like the autonomy that the Kurds have in the north, which is not really technically an independent state, but a tremendous amount of control over their own affairs and, big issue, their own defense forces, their own capacity to guarantee that Baghdad will not come push them around.
If you provided that kind of alternative to Sunnis in western Iraq so that they could oppose ISIS and fight for something other than going back under the thumb of Baghdad, I suspect that you would find there are plenty of people that with the right support would be happy to fight for an alternative to the crazy Islamic State of ISIS.
But you've got to give them something to fight for.
I'll tell you what I think we don't want to do is you don't want to start putting American ground troops there, conventional forces, I mean, and put us right back in the middle of this ongoing war where they're fighting ISIS on one hand while you've got Shia militias running around.
We do not want to do that.
I mean, special forces, intelligence officers, fine.
You do not want to start putting armored divisions and infantry divisions back on the ground in Iraq in the midst of this mess.
Were you surprised when whatever Iraqi forces did exist that we supposedly had trained and armed and financed turned tail and just split when ISIS came?
I mean, because again, these guys have nothing to fight for.
I mean, you have these crazy legions of ISIS coming.
You know that they're fanatics, and you know what the price you're going to pay and your family is going to pay if you fight and lose is.
It's going to be hideous.
And you're supposed to stand up to these guys and risk all of that on behalf of a government that you don't believe in, that frankly you think is oppressing you.
And increasingly, Sunni Arabs would tell you it's a puppet state of Tehran.
There's no way.
No, you're going to put down your weapon and you're going to go home.
That's what you're going to do.
You're opting out.
At a minimum, if you don't join ISIS and you don't help the government, you're going to go home and sit this one out and wait to see who wins this thing.
So no, it doesn't surprise me.
They're going to melt away.
They're going to continue to melt away.
We're training a whole new army.
Why are we training a whole new army?
We just spent, I think, $26 billion in nine years training an army that gave its weapons to ISIS and ran away as soon as the fighting started.
Why do we think this is going to be different this time around?
Kind of, I don't know, kind of approaching because I don't see the road to victory.
No boots on the ground.
Strike's only doing so much.
Maybe not much.
Tough call.
My guest is Charles Fattis, retired CIAI Mark Bell, and this is Midnight in the Desert.
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Midnight in the Desert
Midnight in the Desert
Midnight in the Desert Midnight in the Desert Midnight in the Desert I gave you love I bought the green I made it to the top I gave you all I have to give Why did it have to stop You're blowing off sky What's set in the dark stays in the dark Call Midnight in the Desert at
Again, note those numbers, but don't call them just quite yet.
Charles Status is my guest.
We're talking about, well, we've been talking about ISIS, and I'm going to move it away from ISIS a little bit, I think, because it's sort of depressing in a way.
Because I just don't see our way clear to a victory.
Hopefully that'll happen.
We just concluded an agreement with Iran.
And apparently they're saying, we promise not to make a nuclear weapon.
And in return for that, we're going to give them money, I guess.
Allow them trade, selling oil, all kinds of goodies, go their way in return for we promise we won't make a nuke.
Number one, in your position as a, not an analyst, but if you were an analyst, have we made a good deal or have we made a bad deal?
You know, anytime we talk weapons of mass destruction, which for good or for worse, I've worked with for a lot of years, we could get lost in a lot of technical stuff.
But just to break this down, I mean, first of all, even if it was effective, even if they actually intended to abide by this, handing them, what is it, $100 billion in frozen assets that they're going to get, opening them up to trade, allowing them to now import the most advanced weapons they want from all over the world, and they'll be flush with cash to buy it.
All of this is a horrifying prospect.
I mean, we're worried about ISIS.
If we don't defeat ISIS and ISIS grows up, it'll look like Iran.
That's what Iran is.
Iran is a militant, radical, Islamic, anti-American state, armed to the teeth, and now we're handing them $100 billion and going to let them restart their economy, and we're going to let them go forth and buy weapons from everybody on the planet.
Terrible idea.
That's one.
Two is, no, they have no intention whatsoever of abiding by this treaty, and there are loopholes in the treaty big enough to drive a nuclear missile through.
I mean, a huge element of this, which is that the President of the United States apparently really wants to conclude what he believes are these historic agreements that are somehow supposed to be fundamentally altering the nature of our relationships with the countries around the world.
So, for instance, he's clearly focused on we've got to renew relations with Cuba.
He really thinks we need to have a new era with Iran.
And he kind of, I think, just basically wants to ignore the reality of this situation in pursuit of these things.
There's even actually a notch further than that.
When you listen to some of the administration officials and you read the things that they're saying, read the things that they're writing, what you hear is actually this idea that somehow they believe that Iran can be a force for good, for stability, a positive force in the region, which is so misguided.
I mean, the first time I heard that as a guy who's worked Iranian stuff for a long time, the first time I heard a whiff of that, I almost went into anaphylactic shock.
I found it so mind-boggling that anybody could have that conception of this current Iranian government.
But they apparently do believe that in the White House, at least some people, that the Iranians can be a positive force in the Middle East.
And of course, all of our traditional allies in the Middle East are horrified by all of this.
Well, I don't know if we've lost our minds, but the scope of what we're doing in our foreign policy in the Middle East, I mean, we're doing things all over the world that are crazy.
But what is happening with our foreign policy in the Middle East right now is incredibly damaging.
And, you know, the average American doesn't have time to watch all of this.
You know, he, she, they're worried about paying the mortgage and the jobs and the kids and the stuff that real people are focused on.
And I think probably every day they just have to operate under the assumption that somebody's got their eye on it and they know what they're doing.
Military installations in Iran are not covered by the inspection regime under this deal.
The provisions that specifically apply to everything else do not include military installations.
And the Iranians, and there's a lot of dispute about what will happen when we want to inspect a military base.
Now, just as a matter of common sense, if you were trying to build a nuclear weapon for military use and you were trying to hide it, I think it would be fair to assume you would locate it on a military installation.
So saying that we're just kind of not going to address that issue, that's a huge deal.
Let's see.
The enriched uranium that they have, something like 98% of it has to be sent out of the country.
Not specified exactly where it's going to be sent, but the smart money says Russia is going to take it.
That means that we're going to take all this Iranian enriched uranium and give it to Vladimir Putin.
And then Vladimir Putin's good faith is the only thing that will stop it from being handed back to the Iranians.
So if that makes you sleep well at night, it doesn't make me sleep well at night.
What assurance is that?
That's none.
Last thing I'll hit.
They have spent years and ungodliest amounts of money on developing ballistic missiles that are of use militarily only for one thing, to carry a nuclear weapon.
There's no other payload that you can put on them for a lot of reasons that I won't go into here that makes any sense militarily.
From the beginning of the negotiations, they stated as a precondition that they would not even discuss getting rid of those missiles.
Now, why would you want to retain this incredibly expensive delivery capability if you did not intend at some point to actually finish building the weapon that goes on?
Scientists have proven a robot can show a glimmer of consciousness.
In an experiment, NAO bots were programmed to think two of them took dumbing pills to prevent them from speaking, while one had been given a placebo.
They all tried to respond to a question about which robots took the pills.
With one able to recognize its own voice and reason, it could speak.
While all of them tried to answer, only one was able to respond aloud by saying, I don't know.
It seemed to take a while to consider the question before standing up and answering.
The robot that spoke recognized its own voice and said, sorry, I know now.
I was able to prove that I was not given a dumbing pill.
Its response demonstrates a basic level of self-awareness, as well as good manners.
The test also shows that the robot Could understand a question as well as demonstrate reasoning and recognize its own voice.
The last visible feature of a suburban Pittsburgh mall that appeared in George Romero's 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead is being given a new life.
A small foot bridge from the Monroe Ball will be removed and taken to the Senator John Hines History Center in Pittsburgh.
Romero has said he chose a mall for much of the film's undead action to serve as social commentary on mindless commercialism.
The bridge will be packed up and moved on Wednesday.
This is Dark Matter News.
unidentified
One of the hardest things I had to live through was the one when Jared disappeared.
I was part of that circle that he counted, and I wasn't there for him.
The fact that hundreds and hundreds of people have gone in to national parks and forests, tried to enjoy our public lands, and disappeared or were killed, it's something that the public needs to know about.
A national park ranger told 30-year investigator and author David Paulides a troubling story.
Over his years of involvement with numerous search and rescue operations at several different national parks, he had detected a trend that he couldn't understand.
The ranger explained that during the first seven to ten days of a disappearance, that he would witness massive search and rescue activity and significant press coverage.
Following his initial week-long effort, there was almost always an immediate halt to the coverage, a discontinued search for the victims, and no explanation from the search authorities.
It bothered David enough that he began asking questions, yet he got no answers, so he conducted research.
What he discovered shocked him.
People of all ages have been disappearing from national parks and forests at an alarming rate, all under similar circumstances.
Victims' families are left without closure, and the Park Service refuses to follow up or keep any sort of national list or database of the missing people.
Thousands of missing people.
David's instincts told him that this was a story that needed to be told.
He devoted six years to investigating missing people in rural areas.
He believes that there's more to the story, and he's begun filming a feature film which he hopes will force the government to show their hand.
To tell the real story so that thousands of families can heal and thousands of other disappearances can be prevented.
He says they've interviewed experts, eyewitnesses, victims' families, and national park employees to ensure the real story is told in order to hold up a lens to reality and portray as accurate a depiction of the situation as possible.
unidentified
He called me and said, they're not telling you everything.
He has invested thousands of his own dollars to begin filming.
The story is so compelling that experts in search and rescue, investigative reporting, and a multiple Emmy-winning videographer have dedicated months of their time and talent without pay.
The missing 411 Kickstarter campaign has begun and now reaching more than 50% of their $100,000 goal.
The theories of the missing vary widely, from Bigfoot, serial killers, cults, alien abductions, to government conspiracy.
Whatever is happening in the national parks, David Palides intends to find out and expose it.
For Dark Matter News, I'm Leo Ashcraft.
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In the night, in the world, in the night, in the day, nothing matters.
In the night, something matters in the night.
No control.
Thank you.
Take a walk on the wild side of midnight from the Kingdom of Nive.
Well, you know, in the business of weapons of mass destruction, that sounds horrible even saying that, that there is such a thing as a business of weapons of mass destruction.
But in terms of people studying that and looking for it and preparing to try to stop it, they call biological weapons the poor man's nuclear weapon.
Chemical weapons are horrible, realistically very hard to kill thousands of people with them.
Nuclear weapons, not impossible to build, but very engineering-intensive, expensive.
Radiological weapons, realistically, dirty bombs.
Also a concern.
All these things are concerns, but not going to kill huge numbers of people.
Biological weapon potentially kills thousands, many thousands, depending on what it is and how successful you are.
That's the number one concern.
And I think every WMD expert you talk to who studies terrorist threats would tell you exactly the same thing.
I have heard it said, and I hate going back to ISIS, but I have heard it said that ISIS one of their central tenets of ISIS is to bring about Armageddon.
So there are elements of, in other words, when I say there, that they believe that they are basically at the end of times.
So there are elements to some thought in Islam, similar to some strains, you know, some elements of the Bible and some strains of Christianity that are focused on this idea.
And yeah, they actually, you know, they talk about specific towns in the Middle East that are referenced in scriptures, if you will.
Yeah, I mean, they believe they are in a battle at the end of time.
I think that there will be some sort of limited basing there.
We're never going to go back and recreate what we used to have at Subic Bay because to begin with, we just spent a lot of years and a lot of our money recreating a lot of that infrastructure on Guam and other places.
So we're not going to, I mean, the Filipinos kind of made that decision for right or for wrong that they wanted us out.
And once we left and spent all that money recreating things elsewhere, we're not going to go back and do it all over again.
Well, they're not having any impact on things like the South China Sea.
So, you know, they're not stopping the Chinese from what they're doing right now.
And I don't see, and where the Chinese threat goes and how we react to it, we'll see.
I mean, the Chinese are embarked, as you well know, on a very ambitious military expansion, and particularly in regard to naval forces, and they're developing a lot of capabilities that are specifically designed to defeat U.S. aircraft carriers and other things.
So they are moving from a defend their coastal waters stance to a be able to project power way offshore stance.
If we don't counter that, if we just allow that to continue, then at some point, no, the balance tips the other way.
Well, I started to say, of course, but then we seem to see all sorts of things going on these days that we thought we would never see.
I still have to think that if there was an overt Chinese attack on Taiwan, we would absolutely step in.
But, you know, right now, if I'm on the Chinese side of this thing, looking at the totality of American foreign policy worldwide, I'm thinking right now time is on my side.
I'm not thinking that I'm going to precipitate a crisis right now because we're allowing ourselves to be pushed around all over the globe.
And so everything's running in their favor, I guess, is what I'm saying.
So let's not precipitate a crisis now.
Let's just let things continue to go the direction they are.
With the exception of the size of our military, there are many who think that, you know, I don't want to say America's day is done, but America's time as, you know, being at the top of the world, how can I put this?
You know, the British had their time, and then the sun sort of set.
And I have to tell you that I absolutely fundamentally reject that notion.
I don't think that's true at all.
I don't think that's anywhere close to right.
We have issues we need to confront.
Probably the biggest ones are domestic issues, starting with spending, size of government, budget, all of these kinds of things.
I'm incredibly optimistic about the country and about the American people.
We have the capacity to get those things under control, and there's still no country on earth that has the energy, the drive that the United States has.
I mean, you unleash that potential, and I think you're looking at a new American century, not the sunset of anything.
I don't want to sound like some sort of commercial here, but you think about what people, Americans did, who are people who've come from all over the globe, right?
Every color, race, creed, and built this place from the ground up, from nothing, to the most dominant military, political, economic force the world has ever seen.
That energy and drive and imagination has not gone away.
Now, we need to confront problems.
We need to get the government out of the way in a lot of places and unleash that potential.
But there's a reason why people are still coming here from all over the planet, legally and illegally, to start over, because they recognize that immediately, that there's no better place on the planet to build something, to build a future.
Russia is entire economy basically is driven by the export of oil and natural gas.
And, you know, without that, they're Bulgaria with nuclear weapons.
There's a lot of oil and gas in the Arctic, and there's a lot of dispute over who owns it.
And the Russians are doing in the Arctic exactly what we just talked about the Chinese doing in the South China Sea.
They're moving forces in.
They're going to present us with a fait accompli.
They're going to be there.
They're going to have occupied it.
They're going to have forces there.
And then they're just going to look at us and say, you know, you can give us all the international court opinions you want, but the bottom line is we're not leaving.
In fact, here are just a couple other points to make it even worse.
U.S. Army is in the midst of a drawdown.
They're talking about another 45,000 troops they're going to cut.
On the chopping block for this next round of cuts are the Army Brigades that are in Alaska, which are actually the only forces of any size that we have anywhere close to the Arctic.
We're getting ready to cut them as the Russians are moving in.
In Norway, the Norwegians have a base built in northern Norway.
It was built at the height of the Cold War, built into the side of a mountain, like something out of a James Bond film.
You can drive submarines into this thing, everything.
So they decided they don't need it anymore.
They sold it off to a private entity, I think a Norwegian company.
That Norwegian company has now leased it to the Russians.
So the Russians actually have a military base on Norwegian soil from which they use this old Norwegian base to now project power into the Arctic.
Well, if you're going to go, you know, we could talk about that for hours, but if you're going to go into an area that is radical Islamic-controlled area, you're going to go up in the Northwest Frontier Province, you're going to go into an ISIS-controlled area, if you're really talking about putting officers, our people, on the ground operating in those areas, then you're talking about very high-risk operations, and the bottom line is you're going to get people killed, and you're going to get people captured.
Because there's no such thing as an op that's, you know, all ops go right.
They go wrong for a million reasons.
So it starts at the top.
It's a matter of political will.
If you want people to be that aggressive and push the envelope that hard, then the guy that sits in the White House has to give that directive.
He has to be willing to stand behind that.
When there's a CIA guy being executed by ISIS, when there are people being killed wrapped up in these places, he has to be willing to take those hits.
And that's not where we are right now.
You know, we want this, but we don't want to take enough risk to get it.
I mean, the average probably agent that we would attempt to put somewhere really has to recruit somebody else because he doesn't look like, well, he looks probably like just exactly what He is, and that'll get him killed.
I mean, you're not going to take the guy that looks like me and put him inside of a terrorist group in the sense that he's going to pose as a member of that group.
It doesn't mean he can't operate in that area and recruit people who are inside of that terrorist group to work for him.
But even being in that area to recruit those assets is going to put him, the CIA officer, at tremendous risk.
You're really going to be hanging out on the end of branches.
And trust me, there are plenty of guys in the outfit who are more than willing to do that tomorrow.
But somebody is going to have to stand up and say that they're politically standing behind that, taking the risk, you know, and that's not where we are.
When you get risk aversion, then everybody's going to draw back.
I got so frustrated at the whole damn ISIS thing that I said, why don't we offer a $5,000 reward for every ISIS body that somebody drags to a reception point in Iraq?
Well, I don't think that I would vote for putting out bounties to start with.
You'd probably have a lot of bodies showing up and then some question as to whether they were all ISIS guys.
But I think going back to what I was saying earlier, I mean, the fundamental idea that this fighting should be done and frankly can be done by the people that are already there as opposed to having to send American conventional forces is absolutely valid.
I mean, that is the answer.
You don't need 100,000 American troops.
What you need is special forces, intelligence officers, and the right political inducements to get people to side with us against ISIS.
I mean, that starts with the political strategy.
Offer those people on the ground something to fight for.
And then put with them the guys who know how to work in those environments.
And then if you're still providing air support, now you've got a winning combination.
Now basically you have what was the winning combination the first five months we went into Afghanistan that drove the Taliban from the field.
A few hundred Americans, Native allies, American air support, boom.
Well, as has been said by any number of people, the first thing is this, as long as this propaganda is being broadcast the way it is and we're in anything close to this posture, you're not going to ever stop every shot on goal.
I don't mean to turn this into by using a sports analogy to trivialize it.
The bottom line is some attacks will get through.
I don't think that the majority of them are unstoppable because in almost all of these cases, after the fact, we determined that there were, in fact, indications of what was going on with the individual who staged the attack, that he was radicalizing, that people around him saw this.
What we didn't have was an aggressive posture by intelligence law enforcement personnel to go out and get after these things while they're still at that stage.
And that's really fundamentally the answer.
You go nip it in the bud before it has a chance to develop.
You know, everybody asks me this question, and what I tell them is, look, I got out of the agency when I did, not because I had hit mandatory retirement or was forced out.
I, you know, passed up promotion and so forth.
I made a decision to get out, and really because I felt like there were a lot of things that needed to be talked about.
And there is a tension, obviously, between speaking out and being part of a clandestine organization.
So I made the decision to get out.
And I've been doing that for whatever it is now, six years, pushing seven.
And that has been very satisfying.
But in the end, it's not enough.
You know, in the end, there's this little voice in your head that says, you know, that's great, but you're still just recommending that somebody else should do something about all these problems.
And after a while, that voice in my head sort of transforms to, so either you should at some point shut up, or you should actually get off the sidelines and jump into the ring, so to speak.
And that, you know, after that, this is not a decision that comes to you in a flash of light.
It comes to, you know, you think about it over a period of years, actually.
But I decided, look, I think there are major problems.
The country's in trouble.
I'm tired of watching that, and I'm tired of just talking about it.
So no illusions that one guy goes to Congress and boom, you know, everything's fixed.
I am running for the GOP nomination, although as folks that have followed my writing and commentary over the years know, at various points I have been very critical of the Republican Party and its need to get its act together.
Well, I mean, fundamentally, I guess you don't have to pick one.
I mean, fundamentally, with all of the issues that are rattling around, I mean, I am a guy who thinks that the balance between government and the individual in this country is way out of whack.
You know, a government is too large, it's too intrusive, everything you said when you set this up at the beginning of the show.
And we need to get that under control.
We need to restore that balance.
And what is going to put us back on track and get the economy really moving and deal with those problems is not going to be a government program.
It's going to be the same thing that built this country to begin with, which is individuals.
The U.S. government did not create all of this.
It was the American people.
As I said, I have incredible faith in them.
We just need to get this balance back.
We need to get our spending under control of the size of government under coach.
That includes Skype Worldwide, MITD 55, Skype North America, MITD 51.
And I would only ask that you keep your questions relevant.
We have on our hands somebody who was in the CIA.
So if it's, you know, in that area, well, or in World Affairs, feel free.
Here we go.
Let's go to, I think, Seattle, Washington.
You're on midnight.
unidentified
Hi.
Yes, this is Leo from Seattle.
I'm really glad that you're back.
I wanted to ask your guest if he thinks that this Iran deal might actually be some misguided attempt to hurt Russia because with all the tension over Russia in the Ukraine, and they might be thinking that this deal, even though it'll allow Iran to strengthen itself, all this uranium oil hitting the market is going to cause the price of gas to plummet even further and hurt the Russian economy even worse.
Yeah, well, I'm not sure I can pull off the top of my head the exact count of American nuclear weapons, but obviously the two leading arsenals in the world are the Russians and the Americans, and they number easily into the thousands of warheads, and after that, the Chinese.
Countries, Britain, France obviously have nuclear weapons.
Israel is presumed to have nuclear weapons.
India has nuclear weapons.
The North Koreans at least have some capability.
Probably out Of all of these countries, the arsenal that most people are really worried about, if you're talking about danger, is Pakistan.
We haven't talked about because they are furiously building more nuclear weapons all the time.
And obviously, Pakistan has a lot of issues with stability and with violence and insurgency, and people really worry about Pakistan and the possibility of a nuclear warhead falling into the wrong hands.
Well, with the current government in Pakistan, I think that it is extremely unlikely that there's going to be anything where you have a sanctioned handover of a weapon.
Well, if they're going to sell nuclear weapons to somebody, they're probably going to sell nuclear weapons to the Saudis.
Because the Saudis are very, very concerned about this whole Iran deal.
And one of the options the Saudis have made very clear that they are considering is basically just buying a nuclear arsenal from the Pakistan.
In other words, they won't bother to develop their own weapons.
They'll just send a boatload of cash to Pakistan and they will get a turnkey nuclear force, probably with Pakistanis to operate it in the kingdom.
I mean, the danger in Pakistan is that somebody's going to steal it.
There's going to be an attack on a base.
Somebody's going to take a warhead, or you're going to have military or security personnel that are sympathetic to the insurgents who would grab a weapon and hand it over.
I mean, near term, that's what people really worry about.
When you talk about nuclear weapons, obviously, if there were a full exchange, we're cooked.
It's pretty well all done.
But what I do worry about is the possibility of a high-altitude burst that would essentially give off a magnetic pulse strong enough to kill most electronics within a certain region.
And a number of them exploded thusly could pretty well send us back to the Stone Age.
And, you know, if you're talking about airburst of nuclear weapons, yes, you're going to have that is a very real effect of the use of the weapon.
And the more technological, you know, the more dependent we become on technology, the more vulnerable we are to that.
I mean, at this point, You know, it's not, you're talking about your entire financial system, and really the command and control for everything in the country is susceptible to that.
Well, a lot of people are worried about it, and obviously, you know, for the same reasons why they're for the same reasons they're very worried about cyber attacks, because it's not just a matter of stealing people's credit cards or causing inconvenience.
You know, you're potentially talking about what happens if the banking system, if your bank electronic system no longer exists, effectively your money no longer exists.
You know, I've been on record for a long time that that doesn't necessarily mean that I support all of NSA's programs.
But when you fly off to communist China and then to Russia and sit there and lecture us on democracy and human rights, you know, you've kind of lost me.
Considering national security, I wanted to ask, considering hacking, sabotage, or an EMP, wouldn't our electrical grid be the most important thing to worry about with the possibility of wiping out literally millions?
And like you said, said in respect of the Stone Age.
Yeah, we didn't talk specifically about that, but absolutely vulnerable to everything that we talked about.
Also vulnerable just to plain old physical sabotage.
I mean, it's, you know, most of the grid is not hardened in any way.
The transformers and the transmission lines and everything else in the world are out there with effectively no security whatsoever.
What makes it even worse is if you're talking about big substations with very large transformers, a lot of those transformers are not made in the United States anymore.
And typically if you order them, we're talking like 18 months delivery time to replace them.
So you take out a component like that, you're not just talking about it's going to be a day or two until they truck in a new one unless they happen to have stockpiled spares.
You're potentially talking about causing problems that will persist for a very, very long time.
Going back to Saddam and Gaddafi, both of them wanted to change the oil trading currency, obviously, with Saddam from the dollar to the Euro and Gaddafi from the dollar to the dinar, which I'm sure you know, the gold-based currency.
I'm wondering how much of an effect that played, those two financial factors played in the toppling of those two dictators.
I guess the short answer would be I don't know of any indication at all that it played any role.
Now, I was directly involved in a lot of preparations for going into Iraq by virtue of the fact that I took the first team in and we were the only guys on the ground for a long time.
I really didn't play any role in Libya.
But I don't think either one of those things was driven by those kind of factors.
So the short answer in terms of people knowing where all their warheads are is no.
And that's no matter what anybody is a signatory to, unless you're talking about sometimes when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were exchanging, signing specific agreements, by and large, nobody's going to tell you exactly where their nuclear warheads are because that's just a matter of national security.
So in regard to Pakistan, no.
You're going to have to discover that by clandestine means, where they are.
I'm sure we would both agree the economic conditions in the United States have really deteriorated despite what the government has said.
And people with simple solutions like Donald Trump seem to be more easily looked at.
And you look at Jeremy and the rise of Hitler.
I'm not comparing the two, but I'm just saying people with simple solutions and right-wing solutions are looked at.
I'd like your guest to comment on that.
And the other thing is, I find the news in the United States, especially CNN, is totally slanted to the government viewpoint, especially when they put on specials like the Kennedy assassination with CIA pawns like Victor Bugliosi saying the old government single-shooter theory and stuff like that.
Okay, so I'm not going to go with a comparison of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.
But back to what you and I were talking about earlier, I do think that absolutely people are frustrated.
People are angry.
People are tired of politicians who don't seem to be able to even answer a direct question.
A guy who will actually say what he thinks, give you a direct answer, whether you agree with it or not, you actually understood what the answer was, is refreshing.
And I also think there's an element of people expressing support for him as a mechanism for saying, we're angry with the rest of you.
Now, whether you were once connected and then you remain connected or you sever and then become an unbiased news person or a biased one, I don't know, but I had heard that.
Well, I mean, the broader point that the caller was making that he finds CNN's viewpoint to be slanted in a particular way.
I mean, I find it to be slanted too.
I don't necessarily find it to be slanted toward the government, but toward their own viewpoint on a variety of things.
You know, actually, just the rules regarding American intelligence and American news organizations are, I mean, not that I'm in a position to go into them on the air, but are incredibly strict on prohibitions about any kind of interference with American news programs.
That's an outgrowth of the Vietnam era and Watergate and so forth.
So you say they don't interfere, but it does really seem as though, I mean, frankly, I think the American people are to some degree propagandized, as are people in the rest of the world.
Well, I certainly, I tell you, I mean, this is a slightly different tangent, but I certainly find that trying to keep up on what's going on in the world or really understand what's happening in the world by watching major American networks is a losing proposition.
I get up every morning and fire up my iPad, and I'm on 100 different news sites, most of them small, local, regional news sites all around the world.
And every morning I am finding hundreds of developments of great significance, like the Russians rolling into the Arctic.
Well, that isn't, that absolutely could be possible.
I don't know that by any stretch of the imagination.
But yes, at a minimum, they're now in a different world than they were before as far as they're concerned.
They're in a world, the Saudis are saying the same thing.
They're in a world where increasingly they have to think about managing their security without the reliance on the United States that they've been used to for decades.
Fallen angels came to Earth and using their own DNA and that of apes fashioned man to enslave in order to mine gold the fallen angels or aliens needed on their planet.
Out of this breeding came giants of whom God attempted to rid the Earth, considering them an abomination through the Great Flood.
So say several investigators, archaeologists, and theorists, using information not readily available to the public.
Some of this information includes the discovery of gold mines and miles of terraces found in South Africa, which date back thousands of years.
Anderson, Indiana, about 30 miles northeast of Indianapolis.
Always proud of its Indian heritage, the town celebrates the Delaware Indian tribe who founded the city first known as Andersontown.
However, most inhabitants still have no idea that long before Chief Anderson brought his tribe westward from Pennsylvania and Ohio, ancient giants inhabited the area.
When told about a late 1800s newspaper article telling of the discovery of six giant skeletons in the burial mounds, Micheline McWilliams, who has worked in the Mounds State Park for six years, said she had never heard such a story.
Were the skeletons the known mound builders who first settled the area almost exactly where the Delaware would set up camp?
Or were they some other race of giants?
To this day, none of the tourists to the mounds, its docets, or even the schoolchildren of Anderson, Indiana were taught about the giant skeletons or that the Smithsonian took the bones away, never to be displayed.
During the time of discovery, the Smithsonian was taking possession of nearly every giant skeleton found throughout the entire country, including the largest discovery of skeletons found in the Great Mound in Ohio.
Romania is tapping into the Dracula legend, offering concert goers free tickets in exchange for their blood.
The campaign is part of a push to increase blood donations in a country where only 1.7% of the people donate blood.
Mobile blood collection units will be set up in 42 Romanian cities for 10 days this month.
Donators in Bucharest will be eligible for free tickets to an electro dance music festival in the Transylvania city.
Transylvania is the home of the fictional blood-sucking Dracula featured in Brom Stoker's 1897 novel.
This is Dark Matter News.
Spontaneous human combustion.
It is the term of reported cases of the burning of a living or recently deceased human body without an apparent external source of ignition.
In addition to reported cases, examples of spontaneous human combustion appear in literature, and both types have been observed to share common characteristics regarding circumstances and remains of the victim.
A war veteran has recalled the horrifying moment his body suddenly burst into flames while he was sitting on the sofa.
Frank Banker, who served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, is the only known survivor of the unexplained phenomenon known as Spontaneous human combustion.
unidentified
The doctor was completely baffled and he said, looking at it, Frank, this burned from the inside out.
And he said, I've never ever seen anything like this.
There wasn't smoking, there were no flames around, there was no lights on, no microwaves.
All that was coming in was the sun from the far end of the house when this happened.
You know, I work in communications, and basically that means whatever you see come out of a politician's mouth that's somewhat formulated, you know, we would write.
And there's going to be a few questions that your guest is going to be posed with right off the bat.
And I never want to miss an opportunity to hard bomb right away.
I'm going to ask three easy ones.
Okay?
What's your position?
Pro-life, pro-choice.
What's your position on gun control?
And how do you feel about the new U.S. deal with Cuba?
I don't have any problem with reasonable gun control laws, you know.
But I don't really think that most of what we discuss in regard to gun control has much of anything to do with what's really happening in terms of gun violence.
It's a technique where if you ask someone a question about, you know, what was the color of a guy's shirt that gave you orders to do something, if he has that memory in his brain, there's what's called a T300 wave that goes off.
Well, listen, we're going to do open lines on every Friday.
And so we're going to have like three hours of total open lines.
Ask me anything you want then.
I mean, if you've got a really critical question, I'll do my best.
unidentified
Well, Mr. Faddis, I'm not going to bury my head in the sand, ignore everything that you've said, but other than our great potential, do you see anything hopeful or good on the horizon?
Look, I think that if you're looking at the United States of America, that there is all kinds of things to be hopeful about and optimistic about.
I mean, in a world that is increasingly chaotic, this is a country where, by and large, things are under control, where you have the rule of law, where there is order, where there's a banking system that functions.
If we were doing things right, this economy would be booming.
This is the kind of place that people from all over the world would be investing money and building new factories and building plants.
So I see all kinds of optimism.
You know, we just need to make the necessary changes to make that possible.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, one of the things I do as I'm already wandering around sort of in campaign mode is I spend a lot of time at fairs, festivals, public events, and one of the things I always ask people is what's their big concern in their lives?
And then I shut up and listen for a while.
And the number one answer is always the economy.
And it's the same thing.
It's the middle class.
And it's not just necessarily just unemployment.
It's, you know, you got a job, but it's not the job you used to have.
Main Street, Main Street, you know, maybe some people on the stock exchange are making a lot of money, but the average folks are running as hard as they can to stay in the same place.
Well, we've always been the ones that have had to take the lead in regard to the Iranians because the Europeans, left to their own devices, would just continue to do business with the Iranians.
We have always, it has always been the situation that we're the ones having to push everybody into imposing sanctions.
So naturally, we're going to end up in the position of leading any negotiations with them.
Regarding the Iranians having a nuclear weapon, I mean, look, this is a hostile, radical Islamic state.
I'm not talking about the Iranian people.
I'm talking about the theocracy that runs it.
They are Mohizbollah.
They are destabilizing governments all over the Middle East.
These guys are not a force for good.
And you give them a nuclear weapon, and it is a very, very bad thing.
Arlington, Texas, it's midnight and you're on the air.
unidentified
Yes, first I want to say welcome back, Art.
Thank you.
Charles, a question I wanted to bring up for you.
I'm sort of I deal on the cyber side of things.
And along with the information you were talking about with Russia, there had been a previous report.
Granted, we all know how things on the internet are, but there was a previous report that had come out that prior to when Putin sent 80,000 troops into the Arctic, that the group Cyber Burkut had intercepted a communication coming from the Equation Group out of Houston that supposedly they had found out,
supposedly Equation Group was writing all of England's nuclear missile telemetries, and Putin had stated that those telemetries were all pointed at Russia.
So his reaction to it was basically a show of force moving troops into the Arctic.
We also know that there's this back and forth between all of our cyber side, whether it's Equation Group, whether it's the Chinese and their PLA hackers and so on.
But then also, Cyber Burkut also released this past week that they had supposedly hacked one of John McCain's staffer cell phones and posted a video showing that one of the ISIS executions were staged and showing it.
And it correlates with an arrest that had happened four months ago from a group called Final Solutions Program.
There are a lot of news sources, smaller regional sites that are producing a tremendous amount of coverage from inside ISIS-controlled territory and painting a very clear graphic picture of what's going on.
And no, not staged.
I mean, what you see is as horrible as it really is.
Well, my comments are not so much that we should not be involved and we should not have anybody there as they are, that we should not reintroduce conventional ground forces, particularly in the current situation.
Because what we have right now is fundamentally a political problem that is tearing this country apart.
And if we put American troops back in the middle of that, they're inevitably going to be forced to take the side of the Baghdad government against Sunni Arabs.
And as far as the Sunni Arabs are concerned, frankly, they're going to be fighting on the same side with the Iranians.
We are going to be in the middle of this political struggle with our guys on the ground.
And that's not the answer.
I don't think it's fair to our troops.
I don't think it'll resolve the situation.
No question, our guys can go find ISIS in the field of battle and defeat them handily.
That's the decision.
When you're all done doing that, you're still going to have a bunch of guys stuck in the middle of a political mess in an unstable situation.
And I don't think that's the answer.
And I don't think it's fair to our people to put them back in that situation where they're getting shot at from both sides.
unidentified
I understand.
And so I don't think any of us would ever want to be caught up in, dare I say, another Vietnam.
Well, I suppose to that extent I do, but the thing is that what's missing from his approach is any strategy.
In other words, air power alone and not confronting the political issues and not putting our special forces personnel on the ground lashed up with tribal units.
All of these things are critical.
I mean, we have aircraft now flying around dropping million-dollar munitions on pickup trucks.
While we're ignoring the underlying major political issues that are tearing that country apart.