Art Bell and guests dissect the November 13, 2015 Paris attacks—153 dead across six sites—with counterterrorism expert Richard S. Hahn confirming global sleeper cells, possibly linked to ISIS’s "Jihadi John" retaliation or geopolitical chaos like Syria’s Russian plane downing. John Batchelor warns New York is next, citing ISIS’s ideological war against modernity and U.S. strategic failures, while callers debate manufactured crises, migrant policies, and radical solutions like border walls or nuclear strikes. Hahn and Batchelor agree only decisive force can stop ISIS, but Bell cautions against conflating Islam with extremism amid calls questioning funding and political motives, ending with a stark reminder: the threat demands action, not distraction. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world's 25 beautiful time zones, each and every one covered like a blanket by this program, Midnight in the Desert.
I'm Art Bell.
Thank you for being here.
There are some, you know, some days in your life, you live long enough, where you get to see things or walk in on things on TV and they just stop you cold, right?
For me, I remember walking in as Challenger launched in the accident.
That stopped me cold.
And so did, of course, 9-11.
And now today, Paris.
I walked in and the TV was nothing but Paris.
It had just begun.
And I've seen all the coverage.
So we're going to talk about it in this first hour.
In the second hour, we're going to go to Open Lines, and you can talk about that or anything else.
But it's pretty darn big news.
Two rules for this program, no bad language, one call per show.
Here's what I know about Paris.
It's not much.
Six sites were attacked in the city of Paris.
They believe 153 people or more may be dead.
Reported dead.
It was a terrorist attack.
France has declared, get this now, a state of emergency and France has closed its borders.
Very unusual move.
The citizens of Paris are asked to stay at home tomorrow.
There are thought to be five attackers dead thus far.
There were three wearing varying kinds of explosives like belts.
Gunmen are thought to perhaps still be loose, unknown how many.
You have to wonder where the next major city is, perhaps New York.
ISIS is celebrating, but not yet claiming official credit for doing this.
And there could be a lot of reasons for that.
It could be there are more attacks to unfold there or elsewhere.
One attacker was quoted by somebody who was there as speaking in French that this attack is related to Syria and Iraq.
And then he was heard to scream, Allah Akbar.
I have one complaint to, I guess you could call it.
The French police did not move in on the theater soon enough.
If they had understood who these people were, they would have moved in right away because they were in there killing them one at a time.
And it's probably ISIS, that's my opinion.
But whoever it turns out to be, they had only one motive, and that was to kill people to commit a terrorist act, act as many as possible.
So that theater should have been rushed immediately, in my opinion.
Otherwise, the French look like they're doing a good job.
Coming up, Richard S. Hahn is president of R. Hahn and Company, Inc.
They are a security consulting and investigative company specializing in counterterrorism and homeland security.
All at stake here, right?
Rick also works as an instructor and a lecturer for various U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Department of State.
Rick retired from the FBI after a distinguished career spanning 32 years.
As an agent, he specialized in investigations of domestic and international terrorist organizations dating to the first terrorist activities in this country.
I'm sure all of our major cities are at this point.
You know, this is the sort of thing that all of the intelligence community is acutely aware of is the fact that there are sleeper cells probably throughout the world that can be activated to do these types of terrorist attacks at almost any time on short notice.
There is a theory that you might want to comment on, and that is that we apparently turned Jihadi John into little pieces with a strike, what was it, 24 hours ago.
If whoever did this had a cell ready in Paris, do you think it could be a reaction to that?
Oh, there's no question that that's certainly one of the more probable motives.
But at this point, the fact that, as you point out, that ISIS has not claimed credit for this leaves us wondering at this point, speculating as to what group this could be.
Well, I think they were quoted on Twitter as saying, be patient.
Now, that might indicate that they're going to take credit, but there's still something going on, or they don't want to expose operatives, or who knows.
And at this point, there could be outstanding orders for them to attack other cities, either in Europe or the United States or Australia for that matter, or Canada.
And they may be just waiting to see how opportune those situations are in those various countries.
Again, as you stated, the city of New York is on alert, and I'm sure Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco are all also on alert at this point.
Well, ISIS, of course, is probably number one on the list, only because of the motivation factor with Jihadi John now, as you said, in pieces.
But that doesn't eliminate Al-Qaeda.
It doesn't eliminate Lashkari Taiba, which is the organization that pulled off the attacks in Mumbai.
And I would point out that in Mumbai, we had 10 attackers that also attacked six separate targets, very similar targets in that they're upscale restaurants, hotels, things like that.
And it's a demonstration of the fact that it doesn't take a lot.
A few weapons and a small amount of explosives can cause a great deal of havoc.
And because these are terrorists, these are not military personnel that wear uniforms that are distinguishable from the rest of the crowd, it makes it almost impossible for security services, be it police or military, to identify, locate, and neutralize these people.
Well, I think you're certainly in part right that we opened the door, we opened Pandora's box by going into Iraq.
There's no question about that.
What we failed to recognize, I think, back at the time in 2001, 2002, was the conflict that goes on within Islam between the Shia and the Sunni organizations.
And at this point, we're kind of caught in the middle.
We're ending up more or less supporting Shia organizations against terrorists like ISIS in Syria and in Iraq at this point, which is, you know, not exactly where anyone would have thought we have been 10 years ago.
You've got the president of Syria still sort of barely there, Assad, and then you've got the rebels trying to take him out, and the Russians trying to take out the rebels.
Then you've got ISIS, and we're bombing ISIS and upset that the Russians are trying to help us to death by hitting the wrong people.
I mean, you've got American and Russian airplanes, jets in the air, and now boots on the ground.
That seems like a mixture for World War III to me.
It is very much that politics make strange bedfellows, sort of thing.
Again, the fact of the matter is that al-Qaeda and ISIS are both Sunni organizations.
And on the other hand, the people who, over the past three decades, have treated the Americans worse have been the Shia, starting with Iran, of course.
And now we're basically defending the Shia populations.
And we've installed a Shia government, basically, in Iraq.
The fact of the matter is that we all believe that there are sleeper cells here in the United States.
Their access to weapons, their access to explosives here is probably pretty much unlimited.
So in terms of having the logistics to do this, having personnel on the ground that are trained to do this, I think there's no question that those cells exist in the United States.
So if you know that you've got a group like that that's going to say to you, convert or kill, well, we're not going to convert.
And so if kill is the only thing that's going to happen, and it sure looks like it's the only thing they did in Paris tonight, so what about the idea of just absolutely eliminating them from the face of the earth, more or less?
Well, that certainly is perhaps a speculative dream, but I don't think that that would ever be possible.
This is a system of beliefs, and it has recruited, successfully recruited, thousands of young people who perhaps had no other future in store for themselves.
And they see themselves as brave, heroic warriors.
And it gives meaning to them.
And this is the sort of thing that terrorism does.
It provides a reason for being for a lot of young and energetic people.
I think you're absolutely right that we have to go to complete war.
But this is, again, this is a terror organization that is amorphous.
Trying to identify and recognize specific individuals that may be movers and shakers in this organization gets to be pretty difficult when you get outside of their own publication networks.
And so you don't know who's out there that may be fomenting this sort of thing.
And obviously they've recruited the lone wolf terrorists.
They've inspired young people to do things.
But on the other hand, America, the United States specifically, cannot confront this alone.
This has to be confronted everywhere that it exists, which means all of Europe.
And of course, with the refugee outflow from Syria and Iraq at this point, has just been an opportunity for organizations like ISIS to infiltrate more and more believers and establish more and more sleeper cells in Europe.
So we really need to make sure that Germany, France, Belgium, et cetera, et cetera, get on board here and cooperate with us.
What do you think, you can get a shot at this if you want to, has changed in American culture that allows for the successful recruitment of these young people, even here in America, who go there and then come back here and they're part of a cell or whatever.
Specifically, what has changed is our methods of communication.
The director of the FBI testified this summer about the fact of the matter that things like Twitter allow these organizations to be literally in the pocket of people who may be recruited.
That didn't exist 10 years ago.
These days, you started visiting various websites, you communicate with people on Twitter, and suddenly in your pocket there's constant reminders that, gee, you may be a bus Driver in New Jersey, but you could be a jihadi, you could be a freedom fighter for the great Islamification of the world.
And that's the sort of thing that I think has really influenced a lot of young people and not only recruited them to take terrorist actions, but recruited them to do other things to support organizations, including raising money and sending money on to the organizations.
Now we're getting into the area that Mr. Edward Snowden obviously took umbrage to, and that is, you know, at what point does the government intrude into these sorts of communications?
For example, if, for example, we did not have the infrastructure in the National Security Agency to do the things that were going on when Edward Snowden outed the agency, after the fact, you can't go back and recapture those messages if they haven't been archived in some way.
So, you know, that's the other side of the coin.
On the one hand, we all want to say, well, we're sure that the government isn't somehow surveilling us 24-7.
And on the other hand, something like this happens in France.
And, you know, France is a country the size of Texas, roughly.
And the communications in and out of there, and I would suspect that, much like Mumbai, that the actors, the terrorists that have been carrying out these actions in France, have been in communication with some sort of leadership or with one another.
And that sort of thing, if we haven't been capturing it as it goes along in terms of that communication, then we're not going to be able to figure out exactly who these people are.
I mean, they throw away their, you know, when they're done, they throw away their weapons, they throw away their explosives, they change clothes, and they're just somebody else walking around somewhere in France.
I think we need to sit down with Assad and with his backers, which of course would be the Iranian government, and say, look, we cannot let this continue to spread.
We cannot let this continue to go on.
Assad, of course, is at this point believed to have used chemical weapons.
I mean, this is a violation of international accords.
But we do need to go to him and say, this has to stop.
And then the other thing we need to do is, again, have a coalition that goes to these various organizations.
And if they are unwilling to speak with us and have some sort of armistice, then we just have to go completely to war with them.
You know, if we want to resolve this problem, again, it has to be a coalition of various governments that have an interest in this, including the Russians.
And we have to send more than just advisors and trainers.
The bottom line is we have to engage in war with those that are not willing to cooperate.
The world, unfortunately, the world economy does not offer a lot of hope for young people, particularly from the Middle East and some of these other countries, or Middle Eastern people living in Europe for that matter.
And so the recruitment ability of organizations like ISIS or Al-Qaeda or you name it, I mean, it doesn't really matter.
The whole point is that those young people are frustrated, they're angry, and they're easily motivated to do terrible things in the belief that they're somehow participating in something romantic, something that's a grand cause, and something heroic.
And as long as that exists, that's not going to go away.
Well, again, without respect to a discussion about Mr. Snowden, do you think that the Twitters of the world should be asked not to propagate this stuff?
And as I pointed out, they could use, if you're talking about the terrorists, they could use the dark net to communicate their wishes and commands.
But I was just addressing what you pointed out, which was the ISIS public relations campaign that seems to be effective in luring our young people to go do stupid things.
We're running out of time, Rick, but I'm going to have you on again.
It's been really, really good having you on.
So I hope you will come back and do another program.
On September 12th of 2001, that'd be the day after the fall of the Twin Towers, WABCAM in New York City recruited John Batchelor to go on the air until Osama bin Laden was either killed or captured.
John's been on ever since and remains on.
Offering insightful commentary on the war on terrorism, politics, the presidency, national, and global economics.
And defending our civilization.
That's one you'd underline for tonight, right?
His personal interest in American history and wars from revolutionary through today's long war has generated remarkable coverage of jihadism as it enters our Western vocabulary and at high speeds, our chests and our heads as well.
Yeah, I opened up with, you know, the main facts as we know them in Paris and a gentleman who is in this business from the U.S. government originally, and we had a talk about it.
You're in New York.
So what I'd love from you is how is New York this morning?
The whole story has drifted away from New York City these last years.
We're the number one target.
We were in 1993, certainly 2001, the two strikes on the towers.
And we remain the number one target, not for one of trying these last 15 years I've been broadcasting.
So I do believe that the enemy, and there are a number of groups, there's an alphabet soup of witchcraft out there, the enemy has a very small playbook, and it repeats and repeats and repeats.
And New York City is page one, paragraph one, sentence one of to be destroyed.
And yes, and they hit a soft target, but it was a target that was in the middle.
It's downtown Paris.
It's the young people of Paris.
And they hit it without French intelligence knowing or anticipating or being prepared.
We have very incomplete facts at this point, but the Desm Bureau, the French intelligence network, is first-rate.
We learn from them.
They have skills we don't have.
And that's what, to go back to your New York question, New York is a lot worse off now than it was 24 hours ago, knowing that the enemy just cracked a better and more sophisticated fortress than this one.
The Arabic language is integrated into French life.
The North Africans have been fighting for the French Empire for hundreds of years.
Their families are intermarried.
Their literary skills are entangled.
The French language and the Arabic language flow back and forth, have for, well, we can reach back to Rome in the commerce of the Mediterranean.
We're a new bunch to this of maintaining the watchtowers.
I don't want to get paranoid here.
I just want to emphasize that Paris is very, very good.
And what I heard in the course of the evening, because the attack, first word of it was about 4.50 p.m.
East Coast time, what I heard in the course of the evening from people I respect a lot, I've worked with for a lot of years, is that the French intelligence was asking this side of the Atlantic for anything we'd heard because they didn't have identities, they didn't have patterns, they didn't have safe houses, they didn't have it, Art.
Well, I keep noticing that they say, after they talk about Paris, they say, but U.S. sources say they're not hearing any chatter about the U.S. And I thought, well, yeah, but the French didn't hear any chatter about Paris either.
Someone said to me, and I can't remember exactly where it was, that it isn't the jihadist in hand.
It's the one in the future.
It's the teenager alienated by a difficult culture with incomplete language and his mom and dad alienated because they can't work, who's at the mosque and in the year 2022 or 2028 is recruited for a single mission.
No, no, well, we did go over there and pretty much get control of it.
But ISIS is kind of like Ebola in a sense.
I mean, it spreads in much the same way.
It gets in one area and multiplies like rabbits.
And if we don't do something to stop it, if we don't muster up the political cojones to go after them, then it's going to be like Ebola in a big city runaway.
We're in a contest, a recognizable contest with the great powers right now.
We're fighting on several spheres.
We're contesting in the South China Sea against Beijing.
We're contesting in the Black Sea basin and the Mediterranean basin against Russia.
And Russia is moving very effectively to coax, to invite the great powers of Europe into the Russian camp, as Beijing is moving effectively to intimidate the powers of Asia into its camp.
So we have that contest.
And then we have this other contest out of Mesopotamia.
They're not savages.
They're warrior class.
They're a primitive warrior class we come from.
We started there 3,000, 2,000 years ago.
And they're making war on civilization.
And I don't, at this time, measure that we have the authority, the money, the power, or the unanimity to go into Mesopotamia.
And here's what has to happen.
Not has to happen.
Here's what would work.
What would work is what we did and what the Russians did between 1942 and 1945.
And we think of 1936 Spain and how the powers interfered, intervened, manipulated the outcome in Spain training their own weapons to contest with each other.
It's not a complete fit, but it's not bad to describe what Russia and its ally, China and its ally Iran, are doing in the Syrian and Iraqi and Yemeni battlefields.
And it's not bad to argue the way we're manipulating and intervening with our surrogates in the same battlefield.
And NATO and its contest with Russia in Eastern Europe is part of this mix.
So that's why it's not a perfect fit for Spain.
But we do see now the symmetrical warfare units that we associate with the great powers practicing and practicing their ability to project power in a battlefield that contains this warrior class that just raided Paris.
There is no easy example because it's like we're fighting in time and space and the enemy, some of the enemy is fighting in the 21st century and some of the enemy is fighting in the 10th century.
And that means that I do not see a remedy for this.
Well, I do, actually.
There is one larger remedy, which is to recognize that we're outside of it.
To accept the fact that Russia is the center of the world island, of Eurasia, and that Russia and Europe can defend themselves, will defend themselves, and that our interference, our intervention is not welcome, and that we remain outside and they'll call upon us.
We're a sea power, not a land power in the world island.
And remaining outside, that gives us some time to prepare.
I'm measuring how we've performed these last, let's date it from the fall of the Soviet state in 89.
We're not effective.
We're fighting half-heartedly, or we're coming up with limited goals, and then we fail.
And we think capitals and governments are important.
They're not.
This is a battle for modernity versus savagery, but at the same time, the capitals themselves, Russia, Moscow, and Berlin, are cognizant of the fact that it's their land.
It's their world island.
I don't have an easy metaphor for this.
I work on it all the time.
And I'm describing something that we're not good at or haven't been.
We're the savior nation, and nobody's asking us to save them.
It's a very simple idea, and it's attractive to alienated young men, tending to be between the ages of 18 and 38, somewhere in there, alienated by their broken cultures, by their failed states.
Alienated because they've been dislocated into Europe or North Africa or some other part of the world.
Alienated and who find the power of a gun and the power of the band of brothers to kill the Crusaders, to kill the Christians, to kill anything that isn't like us, that doesn't obey us.
And I wrote my second novel entitled The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica.
And in it, I wrote it between 81 and 82.
I published it in 83.
In it, my characters, for reasons to do with the plot, was about alienation and refugees and being driven out of your land and not being able to get back in.
And it was projected between the year 1972 and 2035.
In it, my characters come across the Falkland Islands, and there's a war, and it's been invaded, and there's a battle, and my characters are caught up with it and escape because they see the whole place is burning, and it's been overrun by savagery.
I wrote that before the Falklands War.
And NPR had me on to ask me how I did that, and I didn't have an answer.
I didn't have an answer.
I published the book the next year.
It got a lot of attention.
And I never had the answer.
But a science fiction friend of mine, who's gone now, his name was Tom Dish.
He was very popular once upon a time in the 20th century.
He came to me and he said, John, how'd you do this?
And I said, I don't know.
And I had a literal story to tell that I looked it up and I read it a little bit and I saw the map and it was just, it was a plus device.
And he said, do me a favor.
All right.
He said, whatever you've got, never write about an atomic war.
And I never did, Art.
And I've, over all these years, and it's, what, 30 years later now, I've obeyed that taboo.
I just did a story with Charlie Pellegrino, a very detailed story of what those bombs meant, August 6th, August 9th, 45, to the people on the ground, to the survivors, to the single and double survivors.
Our Pentagon now, I did a report last week with Josh Rogan of Bloomberg Views, who's a young correspondent, great sources, works in intelligence.
There was a conference recently in Washington attended by Secretary Carter and some very big brains.
It's a DOD.
They have a concept that is in the think tank part of the DOD.
It's called third offset, third offset.
The first two offsets were in the 20th century, and they describe how America's technology upped the game, so we overwhelmed our adversaries.
They're now talking about the third offset because they're anticipating that the Chinese and the Russians have caught us, and they have aerial denial weapons and ability to fight in airland sea and low Earth orbit.
So we need a leap.
And they can't describe what it is.
It's some leap into the future.
I think that that is probably what the Pentagon is also thinking about in combating the jihadist, a third offset, some magical way of defeating the enemy, knowing they're coming for us.
I don't believe it.
I think it's a sales device in Washington right now.
You cannot beat an idea that means to destroy itself and you with it.
Well, I'm not above, John, believing that we are manipulating some news toward Moscow about that plane, for example, and perhaps now about what's going on in Paris that will move the Russians in the direction we wish them to move.
Because right now, they're just mainly bombing the rebels, not ISIS.
Well, I think it's time that we call on the great-grandsons of our greatest generation to get their heads straight, stop looking at their iPhones, look around, see what's happening in this world, and come together for America, stand up for America.
Let's put this country back on its feet and get that Muslim out of the White House.
Well, you know, if this prevents, actually, a big escalation in the Cold War and we have to actually get together to fight a common enemy, you actually could be right.
It might at least forestall what's going to inevitably come.
unidentified
It could.
And I read a report this morning where ISIS threatened to take out the Kremlin.
And I was listening to the news on the radio as I was driving.
I'm saying to myself, they're messing with the wrong guy.
We might not agree with Putin's politics, but they go and try anything funny over there.
I very, very much appreciate your call, and it's going to be interesting to see how it's done.
I do agree with both of my guests tonight that we don't have the political construct right now to deal with this, and we're not going to.
It's not going to be this president that deals with it.
He's just not going to do it.
Having said that, it was probably a painful thing for me to ask either one of these fellows who they saw on the horizon on either side of the aisle who could come along and effectively deal with this.
Nobody came up with a name.
That in itself is a little concerning.
John on Skype, you're on the air.
unidentified
Yeah, good evening, Art.
Nobody could ever accuse you of being boring, that's for sure.
The one thing when I was listening to your guest talk is that nobody seems to talk about any hope for intelligence, where we can all kind of move the world along to get rid of this religion stuff.
We're going to have to do something before this infection.
And that really is how I think of it as a virus, an infection.
And if we don't stop it, if we don't stamp it out, as we finally decided we had to do with what was happening in Africa, or it would have come to get us.
It was actively trying, right?
It was getting on airplanes, just like people flying to Turkey and then making their way to Syria.
A lot of people think I don't pay attention to politics, but I do.
I am glued to it.
Even though I don't discuss it all the time, I'm fully capable of doing so.
It's just that in general, I find politics boring.
When something like this happens, there's no way to avoid a little bit of discussion about politics because it drives national policy.
And in this case, national policy damn well better get driven by a competent driver pretty soon or we're in big trouble.
It's like a virus, I'm telling you.
They have only one goal, and that is to kill us.
I think they have long since decided they're not going to convert us.
So killing us is their only other option.
And if that's the name of the game, then I say kill them first.
Right?
Let's go to the first-time caller line and say you're on the air.
You're on the air.
Going once, going twice, gone.
You get one shot at that.
Let's instead go to Skype and say, yo, you're on the air.
Yeah, I was listening to you earlier, and I was thinking, you think maybe the Navy should possibly test-fire a third Trident missile and say, oops, that one's got a live warhead.
Well, I guess the only way this is going to get done, boots on the ground, lots of American young men going off to fight yet again another war.
I hope that we can put together the kind of coalition it's going to take to really do this.
And maybe the world's not quite ready for it.
Paris was awful.
I think that if a New York City was hard hit, and I don't mean just New York City, a city here in the U.S. was hit hard, that might be enough to do it.
I don't know.
What about you?
unidentified
You know, what I'm worried about is I'm not thinking that New York would be the target next time.
I'm thinking possibly it might be Las Vegas just because of, you know, ISIS's beliefs and all that.
And, you know, Las Vegas is gambling, sin, sex, you know, everything, you know, and I'm thinking that, I got to hope I'm wrong.
But I keep thinking maybe Vegas might be the next place they might get.
Nor, if I could have caught it, would I have killed the mouse?
The mouse had no ill intention that I'm aware of toward me.
No, no, no, no, no.
I would have...
And if I could have caught him, I would have put him in a box and taken him outside and introduced him to the Great Wild, but he went all on his own.
So there you have it.
All our phone lines are full, but if you would like to try and get through, you're welcome in so many ways.
Public number, 952-225-5278, Skype for North America, MITD51.
The rest of the world, MITD55.
And, of course, the first time caller line, if I can find that number, which is area code 775-285-5800, whether it's Paris you want to talk about or anything else.
And I love Paris, by the way.
I really love Paris.
I've been there a number of times.
In fact, it accounts for one of the times that I quit.
Well, I didn't quit.
I got fired.
From KDWN in Las Vegas, what happened was the company that operated the Concorde.
You remember that?
We used to have supersonic flying.
They contacted me and said, hey, Art, how would you and your wife like a free trip to Paris on the Concorde from Las Vegas?
You don't get that every day.
So I went to my boss, Claire, and I said, Claire, I'm going to Paris in the Concorde.
Firstly, I'd like to let your guests tonight, your little mini guests, whatever you want to call them, was absolutely correct about a player basically emerging.
Like an unknown player, I think, is absolutely going to emerge from basically once we really hit bottom, which we haven't hit, it's been with like quantitative easing and any other sort of inflations or rather whatever you want to call them.
I know, I kind of like what you already came up with in the political spectrum.
It's like quantitative easing.
That's very good.
unidentified
Next.
But about that, my dad's been saying that literally since about like 2008.
Even though it's been bad, I mean, it just hasn't gotten so bad that it's like abysmal.
Not to sound like an alarmist, but basically, honestly, like Weimar Germany, like before it fell, basically.
I absolutely believe that not like a Hitler, but when we do hit bottom, we're going to have someone who would either be horrible or who will probably be either horrible for us or great for us, one way or the other.
But it'll be something like that.
And I honestly believe it'll change the country dramatically and for a very long time.
What do you think would happen, Stephen, if we began to get a lot of attacks like the Paris attack here in the U.S.?
Or even worse, a dirty bomb?
unidentified
That actually kind of ties into the second thing I want to talk about, which was this Bulgarian psychic or whatever that my ex-girlfriend told me about, Abba Vanga.
She predicted, she was a little off in her years, like in her timeframe, but something she's apparently been right about.
She predicted that Europe would be attacked by the Muslims, or by rather Muslims, and they would attack it with chemical weapons, and Europe would be basically decimated.
The United States would be mostly fine eventually and like over the course of like 80, like something like, I think in like 80 years after that course of events, a revolution would start basically in France.
And that would pretty much start the end of the reign of the Muslims in Europe.
So I think that was kind of interesting, especially since it was way before Syria or anything else like that.
And how that ties into, by the way, the first thing I was talking about when you asked me what do you think would really happen, I think chemical attacks, serious chemical attacks and serious decimation of the European economy would absolutely affect our economy and would just destroy our way of life.
So I do believe that that would be one of the things that would bring about a dramatic change in our way of life.
Beyond that, the third thing I want to talk about was actually your first caller where he said he started to talk about current generation, stop looking at their iPhones.
I mean, I'm from that generation.
And honestly, in my opinion, the problem is mostly not our generation, but rather just in general.
We aren't any worse than any previous or any preceding generation.
Baby boomers, what have you, are no treat, have been no particular boon to the country.
It's just that if you look at how horribly set up the country is just structurally, how many just structural disadvantages that we have for the future, be it population growth rates, whatever you want to call it, whatever you want to bring up.
Honestly, we have so many things coming to a head at this point where there has to be a dramatic change or we're just totally kind of screwed.
But no, the thing I just wanted to say was about 10 years ago, the United States military and its satellites had operations going all over the world to take care of terrorists, and there was a lot of stuff that just people didn't know about.
SF was training in the Philippines and down in Africa and Middle East, of course.
And from what I'm hearing from people still in the military today, the Obama administration has really cut back on that.
I don't think there's political will to deal with ISIS the way that Bush did.
All right, then let me try the same question on you, if I Can that I did on my guests?
If you could, as you look around the political landscape right now, is there anybody either running or thinking of running that you think could take care of the problem?
unidentified
Nobody on the Republican side really impresses me too much.
Definitely nobody on the Democratic side, but if I had to pick one, it's probably Donald Trump.
Well, he's on the well, I don't know where he is, actually.
Thank you.
Donald actually is running as a Republican.
He's probably not a Republican.
He's somewhere in between, which I guess for some people would make him an attractive option.
The problem is that since we're rarely do I talk politics, but I think that Trump is on the verge of falling apart.
Now, I say that not because I want him to fall apart, but because I don't see him articulating any sort of national issues beyond the one that he has picked, you know, immigration and a couple of others.
I think Trump would be effective in dealing with China.
He knows China.
He knows trade policies.
Economically, he'd be not so bad.
But unless he begins articulating rather quickly what issues really are important to Americans right now, then I think he will be cast aside.
And that's just an opinion for whatever it's worth, and that's not much.
I get the little square down there, and it says, do it now, do it now, do it now.
unidentified
And I just can't click it.
My best advice is if you are concerned with want to click it, just double-check, go to your manufacturer's site, and make sure that they have the practice compatible.
All right, Lucin, I'm going to ask that you do a little work, Bill, on your Skype.
It could be actually your Internet provider, but you're cutting out.
So you probably have a little bit of what's known as jitter in your upside Internet on that side.
You might want to look into it, but it's kind of weird.
When Skype is good, it's very, very good.
And when it's bad, it's still actually tolerable most of the time unless you've got bad Internet.
Let's go to Kennewick, Washington on the phone.
Hello.
unidentified
Hello, Mr. Bell.
Hi.
Well, my question revolves around this tragedy that happened tonight.
You had just mentioned Donald Trump.
With his immigration plan, do you think that it will galvanize the American public between the terrorist attacks that happened to France and seeing people gravitate even more to Donald Trump?
Well, yeah, though I'm not from Russia per se, I'm from a country that's called Turkmenistan.
I'm not sure.
Many people can point the finger on the globe to point that country.
But it's ex-USSR.
Sort of a satellite republic.
Sure.
Now, it's an interesting topic today, and I was shocked to find out, as everybody else, what happened in France.
But I just want to say that I was back in Moscow, I think it's about 2003, when they had a hostage situation in their Nord Ost, I believe it was called the musical, the show that they had, and there was about 700 hostages taken.
Yeah.
So as I was hearing, I was teaching at that moment when that happened today, actually, and I was thinking about that back in Moscow, and I was hoping that French government would contact the Russian government, so to speak, to kind of get those clues and those tactics that they were using back then and what they learned.
Because from what I remember, the Russians, Svetsnas, that's the special tactical group, they were using this sort of a sleep gas.
Okay, well, I want to say something here, and it is this.
In the theater where most of the people died, I noticed that the French authorities waited way, way too long.
There were actually messages being sent by hostages inside saying, for God's sakes, raid this place.
They're killing us one by one, picking us off like birds.
And still they waited.
And I think that was wrong.
When you encounter a group like ISIS, if that's who it was, or these jihadists, they have only one goal, and that is to kill as many people as they can.
So once you know that, you don't wait because there's not going to be any bargaining.
There's not going to be any back and forth.
There's just going to be dead people.
unidentified
And that is surprising to me as well.
Well, I didn't know the details.
That's the first details I'm hearing from you.
I've read some of it, but this is very surprising to me.
And given the fact, if you remember, and I'm sure your audience remember, I think it was just past this year, Charlie Hepdo.
And so what's striking me is that the measures that were not taken, given the fact that those armed radicals were with a weapon at the show, I believe the American band, Metal Band, was playing at that time.
And they had those AK-47 inside of that club.
That was just kind of really strange and inconsistent with the previous events that happened.
Back in Russia, when that unfortunate event happened, I knew that things were much more tighter in a sense of security because you can turn the corner, but there was security all over the place.
I was wondering if the Dark Matter Network noticed an increase in listeners after that show, because I've been listening to the Dark Matter Network every night since.
I think that intent is extremely important, whether it's expressed through religious belief in prayer or just simple concentration or whatever you want to call it.
I think it can have an effect.
I am hesitant to direct many people in one, you know, toward one thing or another ever since the experiments I did, as you know.
But should it be important enough, I definitely can get behind it.
William on Skype, hello.
unidentified
Yeah, I've listened to you for, I don't know, quite a while.
I remember as a kid, you know, used to get yelled at by my parents, you know, turn the radio off.
Another thing real quick, I started listening to you on the TuneIn app, which I actually found on my PlayStation, so I can actually listen to you through the TV.
What I was calling about was, of course, like everybody else, the French attacks tonight.
And I just wanted your opinion on concealed carry.
You know, I know Europe, you know, in general, is pretty anti-gun.
And do you think it would have made much of a difference if concealed carry was a political idea?
At least somebody on the inside may have had a chance to, you know, maybe save at least one life because you saw how long it took for any officers to show up and do anything.
A lot of things might happen in America, but that would be about last on the list.
Americans are not going to give up the guns.
I have had a carry permit for most of my adult life and wouldn't be without it.
unidentified
I totally agree.
I'm in the process of hitting mine myself, just waiting on the next class to start here in town.
So that'll be good.
Yeah, I just think that it's a decent idea because you may not be able to prevent the entire tragedy, but if you can save one life, I mean, it's well worth it.
The president is slowly bringing all the Gitmo prisoners up into the U.S. Yeah, well, take them and put them inside the wall, and they won't have anywhere to go.
Well, you can't control the headlines now, can you?
And I'm sure that a lot of the presidential candidates are upset with it as well.
It steals the news cycle for many days to come.
unidentified
Yeah, and I think what needs to happen is if they want a global counter fight, I can't pronounce that word, we need to have a global crusade, and we can't be afraid to say that word anymore.
I think we'll provide material support and all that stuff for France, but until something happens here, I don't think we'll actually get physically involved.
It's been very pleasant this evening, other than the horrible news, of course, out of there.
Yes.
But I was listening to your first two guests earlier, and I think the one thing that our country is missing and that they don't cover in the press, and it drives me nuts every time I watch it, is contact.
This movement didn't appear out of nowhere overnight.
These terrorists just didn't pop up in our generation.
But what really lit the fuse on this was what happened in Iraq, what we did in Iraq.
CNN is actually running a pretty good show right now called The Road to Hell.
And it's about Iraq and what we did in Iraq.
unidentified
Right, but we went into Iraq to a degree to clean up our own mess.
Look at what Iraq was doing.
You know, are you familiar with Project Babylon that was going on over there where they were building an artillery piece capable of showing Tel Aviv from Baghdad?
Yeah, I'm aware of all these stories that were out there.
Thank you for the call, but I'm not going down that road.
There was no good reason to start a war with Iraq.
None at all.
It was manufactured.
It was a case, in my opinion, of making the intel say what you wanted it to say so you could justify a war that otherwise was completely unjustifiable.
So we went in there, sacrificed American treasure, American lives, and then we walked out completely.
Just vanished.
Said, okay, that's it.
Mission accomplished, I believe was the phrase.
And then we completely left the country.
We disassembled the government.
So by the time we left, there was no real government there, and there wasn't going to be.
And we just left.
And so we created a vacuum.
And nature abhors a vacuum.
Truly it does.
And so ISIS came along in Syria and then Iraq to fill that vacuum.
I'm telling you, we lit that fuse.
James on Skype, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi.
I remember you having that experiment where you got to heal people.
And I've also read that you can change, you know, things around the world, like stop crime a little bit.
What about some suggestions?
What would we throw it out to the audience?
What would be the best mass experiment we could do right now?
You know, would it be calm the minds of those guys?
You know, just the thoughts that throw out there, if anybody has any thoughts on a good meditation, or not a meditation, but a mass prayer that we could conduct on, you know, hopefully you'd be open to something like that and to ease the stuff over there.
Well, that's why, you know, if we had an open discussion and everybody tried to agree on one idea, see what, you know, if one great idea comes up, what would be the best thing to meditate on?
And uh sir, when you go off this evening, uh one of your proteges I listen to on WTVN, 610 TV um radio here in I see.
Um I'm not sure that a lot of your listeners will agree with what I'm going to say, but it seems that the youngsters are youngsters now, and I'm from the time when we had the draft.
I do not believe in the draft, so we'll go there first.
I did enlist which I there are a lot of kids enlisting, but I don't think that the a lot of the underprivileged, a lot of the kids that just don't have any idea what they're going to do with their lives.
I will, but then I want to interject something, so go ahead.
unidentified
Okay.
If we would basically go back to the initial thought of, okay, let's extend school two to three years.
Put those basically, after you graduate, jump into the military for two to three years.
You're going to have your GI bill when you come out, all the benefits when you come out.
And there's many things in the military you can do besides go to war.
But at the same time, we're going to pull a lot of these kids that are underprivileged, a lot of these kids that don't know where they're going, to learn something not only about welding, being a barber, working in a shop somewhere, working with motors, the many things that you can do, being an MP, I've been through quite a few.
Once you do that, their minds are going to be reset away from the way the kids are thinking now because they're going to get that responsibility.
They're going to get the training.
They're going to get all of that.
Plus, they're going to get the GI ability to go back to college if they want to go when they're done.
And so it's, you know, it's something, I don't know how to balance that.
I don't have a solution, but the thing that we're looking at is certainly we need to have some kind of safeguards and protections, but the other side of that is the coming, if not already present police state, which seems to be so prevalent in the U.S. and around the world, if you will.
In other words, if you had ISIS all in one geographic area and you could be sure that the innocent civilians weren't going to get slaughtered in large numbers, then maybe.
But that's why.
I mean, it's an emotional reaction more than an intellectual one.
unidentified
Well, let me give you another one.
Do you ask the question, who would be strong enough to take care of this?
First of all, you probably remember that the Islamics destroyed the library in Alexandria, Egypt, at least 3,000 years ago.
And they have never done anything except try to keep people ignorant for that period of time.
And I've thought for a long time that we were at war with Islam.
And what I'm afraid of is the only way that we're going to be able to deal with it is the same way that Adolf Hitler tried to do the Jews.
First of all, it is a truth that is far from being just Islam that is a problem.
It's the radicalized arm or part of Islam that's the problem.
The radicalized part.
Islam is a gigantic religion, and for the most part, peaceful.
However, could it eventually turn into basically a war between Christianity or the West and Islam?
I would hope not.
And so every president has to be careful to say it is not a war or a problem we have with all of Islam.
It is the radicalized group who somehow has found in the same book that the peaceful people use language that to them indicates murder and genocide is the only way to they want to spread.
I don't know how they find those words, and they can't seem to make, you know, when you actually get somebody who's radicalized on and you ask them that question, they generally will quote something that makes no sense at all, except perhaps to them.
And, you know, I mean, the trillions of dollars that we had borrowed from the Chinese to carry on with this guy's folly, I really contend that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, they should actually be put up on trial, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison.
I mean, none of this would have occurred had we just simply gone after the bad guys in Afghanistan, and that would have been that.
We had the whole world behind us after 9-11.
Even Iran was willing to offer assistance and aid.
And what did we end up with?
The world looked at us like one big hillbilly, rope belt and all.
I don't know about the trials, but I really don't disagree that we really did this.
We really did.
And if any of you get the opportunity, The Road to Hell in Iraq is worth watching.
It's a special on CNN.
And I really recommend you watch it.
A lot of people, I guess, have short memories when it comes to what we do, and or they listen to people who attempt to justify it, and it is unjustifiable.
I think something that will be very important in the aftermath of this terrible tragedy will be the foreign policies in Europe as they are formatted, especially in France, to see how they react to the whole migrant issue and immigration and stuff.
And what they're going to do next is going to be an interesting observation.
What do you think?
unidentified
That's a pretty big thing for France.
They haven't done that since 1944.
So stuff is starting to really get real low there.
And with more of these attacks, public opinion starts to sway, which, you know, as public opinion changes, it may give politicians more power to do action or to get stuff done as well.
And this can even be more said for the American government in their inaction, especially in the Middle East.
I believe my own theory is that Minister Obama, the reason he's not really interfering much in Syria is because he doesn't want the same issue that the Americans had in Somalia back way back when, when American bodies were being drawn through the streets, you know, like, you don't want that doesn't look good for public image.
No, nobody is saying, nobody of any intellectual prowess at all is saying that because it's just untrue.
But these people who have decided they want to bring about Armageddon, the end of the world, and they're going to kill everybody who refuses to convert.
And they pretty much decided we're not going to convert, and they're right.
So they just want to kill us.
And if that's the case, then we must go and kill them.
unidentified
Yeah.
Yeah.
Again, even if America got boots on the ground in the Middle East, I'd feel it's sort of the same issue that America had in Afghanistan, like identifying targets, like who is the enemy, who is civilian, you know, war crimes.
It comes very blurred lines.
I'm quite perplexed on how to combat this, and I'm sure many generals and world leaders are perplexed as well.
It's hard to erase an ideology from the face of the earth.
The whole reason, and I listen to you on the internet, the whole reason that people listen to your show and shows like it is because there's a bigger picture.
If even some of the conspiracies, if even some of the, quote, extraterrestrials that are visiting us are true, then isn't it interesting that at a time when we're really pushing disclosure, Stephen Bassett and his group, Dr. Greer and all,
that all of a sudden now, this point person, this point group, ISIS, that we created, I agree with everything you said, and we shouldn't have gone into Iraq and all the political stuff, but isn't it interesting that if there is a breakaway society, as we hear on your program, if there is a secret space program, if there are underground bases all around the world, what a perfect way to divert our attention.
And what a perfect way, as you say, for people to take away guns.
Not that I'm a violent person, but I would feel a lot more comfortable if my community would allow me to have a concealed carry so I could defend myself if some idiot went off in a restaurant or a theater.
Well, I'm just saying, back to the original issue, whether it's defending ourselves, which I would rather do, it becomes more of everything that we've talked about.
That's where it is political.
Or the Bill of Rights was thrown out after 9-11.
The military budget or the $37 trillion that Cheney said was missing a week before 9-11, that got thrown out because of 9-11.
And that's how the black budgets, if we listen to people on your program, are funded.
And that's how we have weapons and technology that could throw oil down the toilet and we could all have free energy devices.
But the point is we all can surmise that if there are other civilizations visiting us, if we're being lied to and covered up by, quote, a breakaway society who keeps the technology, who keeps the knowledge of the fact that there are others visiting us secret, then that's the type of person that could create a group.
Who funds these groups?
At least Al-Qaeda, we had, you know, Bin Laden was rich, and there were rich Arabs, you know, and it was oil.
So it all ties together.
So if ISIS is created by us, who's funding them?
Are there that many rich guys in the 1% that want to spend money on this?