SHOW: FOX HANNITY & CO 9:51 PM EST January 12, 2005
Interview with John Pike
BYLINE: Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes
GUESTS: John Pike
HANNITY: Continuing on on "Hannity & Colmes," I'm Sean Hannity.
Now, believe it or not, Arab news service Al-Jazeera has been airing wild theories about the cause of the deadly tsunamis. On January 5th, the adviser to the Saudi justice minister blamed a higher power for the massive devastation. The translation is courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute.
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HANNITY: And they copy our show.
And on January 1st, a Saudi cleric implied Western tourists were the target of the lord's wrath.
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HANNITY: Some theories went as far as accusing the United States of creating the deadly waves that killed over 150,000 people.
Now joining us to help figure out what this is all about is the director of Globalsecurity.org, John Pike is with us.
John, it gets personal and it gets fairly vicious. And I want to get your take on this, that the United States purposely was involved in the testing of secret eco-weapons, et cetera. You have heard a lot of this theories, but the common theme though is to blame the U.S. or blame Israel.
JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: Well, one of the theories going around -- one of the theories going around was trying to blame the United States, Israel and India all together, saying that we had jointly conducted a nuclear test that caused the earthquake.
I think the bottom line is that there are some people who blame America, who blame America for everything that goes wrong. And so they're just going to look at that day's headline and try to figure out some theory under which it was America's fault.
HANNITY: Or that we used electromagnetic waves triggering the earthquake and then not warning people even though we knew in advance that all of this was coming, you know, questioning, why do they have warships in the area? Well, that's to help people.
PIKE: Right. We had to go to get some commercial satellite imagery of the Diego Garcia military facility, because some people were saying that, well, it had been destroyed and we wouldn't admit it. Other people were saying that it hadn't been destroyed, and that we had had warnings so that all of the airplanes could take off.
And we showed with this imagery that, in fact, the island had been undamaged and that the U.S. military had said it's because it's in very deep water. But there are some people who are going to find something bad to say about the United States regardless of the circumstances.
COLMES: Hey, John. It's Alan. Welcome to the show.
You know, some of the clerics said things like this was God's revenge on Westerners who engage in vice and prostitution, people who are sinners. You know, when you think about it, didn't some people like Pat Robertson say that about 9/11, that it was because of abortionists and gays and that God was visiting revenge on the United States?
PIKE: Well, I'm not sure exactly what he said, but I think that you do have to take it, I think, from their perspective that they're trying to come to grips with the question of how can bad things happen to good people.
HANNITY: That looks like our set, by the way, our old set.
COLMES: Actually, it's amazing. Because on that show tomorrow night, Ann Coulter. So they picked the same guest. No, I'm just kidding about that.
They have very different, you know, mindset over there, which of course...
PIKE: Yes.
COLMES: You know, but some of the people here -- you liked that, Hannity, huh?
HANNITY: I think that's funny. I really do.
COLMES: Some of the people in this country said some of the same things after 9/11. And people came up with crazy theories about it.
PIKE: Well, I think that people are trying to understand how is it that over 200,000 Muslims in Indonesia could have been killed by this, how could have Allah allowed it to happen? Well, the explanation is that they were all martyrs as a way for the almighty to get at some of the sinners in some of these other locations. I think people were just simply trying to make sense of something that's very difficult to make sense of.
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COLMES: Some have even said that aliens caused this disaster. Some say aliens caused the disaster because they wanted to correct the Earth's wobbly rotation.
PIKE: Right. Right.
HANNITY: I think Howard Dean said that.
COLMES: No, no, no.
PIKE: ... most of the people who have been working for the aliens all along.
COLMES: You'll be on the show tomorrow night. I'll be sure to ask.
HANNITY: Oh, is that right?
COLMES: Yes, I will be interviewing him tomorrow.
HANNITY: Well, thanks for keeping us up to speed. Some of these things are just bizarre, so we have got to laugh at it. Anyway, thanks for being with us, John. Appreciate it. And all the best.
PIKE: Thank you.
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