Next Stop Philippines?

This is a partial transcript from The War on Terror: The Hunt for the Killers. For a complete transcript of the entire broadcast click here.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RUMSFELD: Someone told me it took 17-and-a-half years to find the Unabomber. Now, it suggests that the task we're about is a difficult one, which is why from the outset, we've tried not to personalize this and pretend that the ultimate goal was to capture one or two people. It never has been. The goal has been to deal with terrorism. Do we want to catch them? You bet? Are we trying to? You bet. Will we eventually? I certainly believe we will.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VESTER: OK, joining us now, retired U.S. Army captain David Christian, a frequent guest here, a Green Beret and a Senate military adviser.

David, question about, first of all, this money man. Appears to be somebody who gave a lot of dough to al Qaeda, funded a lot of whatever it is they've been up to. Do you think he's for real?

CAPT. DAVID CHRISTIAN, U.S. ARMY (RET.): I think there's...

VESTER: Now that he's surrendered?

CHRISTIAN: ... great possibilities for real because the psychological warfare campaign that we've been waging over there...

VESTER: Yeah.

CHRISTIAN: ... has been quite effective, as it was in Desert Storm. We can look at that as kind of a matrix or a format. We leafleted millions and millions of these passes people brought in. And aside from that, we had all this bombing. It was all psychological warfare. And for the first time in history, we had people surrendering to journalists, thousands of people, and the Italian journalists didn't know what to do with these passes because they couldn't read Arabic or English. So they didn't know at to do.

But I think this man is for real, in the sense that, one, our people are excited about it, our intelligence are excited about the guy. Number two, why would he do it is because he feels that we are winning the war there in Afghanistan, and he has things to protect. He has assets.

VESTER: Right.

CHRISTIAN: He's coming from his area, his tribe, and he wants to protect these things.

VESTER: All things being equal, he probably figures he's better off in our hands, I guess. I don't know. Now the Philippines because now I hear so much about it. Well, actually some friends of mine in the FBI have been working in the Philippines for weeks. I mean, God, back at Thanksgiving, I think, they were telling me about it.

CHRISTIAN: They could have been there last year. They could have been there...

VESTER: Yeah.

CHRISTIAN: We've been helping the Philippines with problems, whether it's communist problems, but the...

VESTER: So why now? I mean, why now are we sort of sending more U.S. military personnel?

CHRISTIAN: Well, President Bush declared war against al Qaeda and his top general, Donald Rumsfeld, has launched everything. And he has the generals underneath them.

VESTER: Right. I mean, that's the general answer, but is there something specific happening?

CHRISTIAN: Well, the Philippines is near and dear to me. I've spent a number of times, at least a dozen times in the Philippines. My mother and father met in the Philippines, fell in love. So the Philippines is near to me and dear to me. And it's also near and dear to the United States of America. McArthur went and liberated the Philippines. And actually, we have the opportunity to go in there and clean up things that have been going wrong for about 30 years. And not only, you know, the Muslim situation, in terms of the radical Muslims -- and there are some radical extremists there that we're going after. You know, the good Muslims, we're not worried about.

VESTER: Yeah.

CHRISTIAN: It's the radical extremists.

VESTER: The Abu Sayyaf group. And these are not minor players.

CHRISTIAN: That's correct. They're allies to al Qaeda...

VESTER: Yeah.

CHRISTIAN: ... and they're allies to the wishes of bin Laden. But it's a friendly country. And the difference between Somalia and the Philippines is we have a friendly country, a host country that has their people, indigenous people to work next to our Green Berets.

VESTER: Right.

CHRISTIAN: We have approximately 200 right now. We'll probably end up with about 1,000 Green Berets. The terrain's triple-canopy jungle. That means there's three layers. It's hard to see through from the air.

VESTER: Right.

CHRISTIAN: Even though we have free air superiority there, it'll be hard to see the movement underneath. Also, the government targeted, they been moved on a terrorist camp recently...

VESTER: Yeah.

CHRISTIAN: ... and as they moved on the terrorists, the terrorists, unbeknownst to the government, had tunneled behind a waterfall, and they all escaped through this tunnel.

VESTER: Whew!

CHRISTIAN: So we're facing again tough terrain...

VESTER: Right.

CHRISTIAN: ... but it's terrain that is covered with vegetation that people can blend into. And that's the difference with Afghanistan. You could see the people moving from the air.

VESTER: Are we going to get the American hostages back, those two, Martin and Gracia Burnham

from Kansas?

CHRISTIAN: That's one of our goals. Absolutely. Just like we got the hostages that were the Christian hostages...

VESTER: Right.

CHRISTIAN: ... that were in Kabul.

VESTER: So the Burnhams were just on vacation.

CHRISTIAN: Yes. And what's happened, it's killed that portion of the Philippines, in terms of tourism dollars...

VESTER: Yeah.

CHRISTIAN: ... tax dollars, whatever it may be. You have to realize these guerrillas cannot exist there without subsistence from the people. Now, it may be forced existence. They have to take food from the people. They have to take money from the people to buy arms, whatever they have to do. So one good thing about the Green Berets, one good thing about special forces...

VESTER: There are many good things about the Green Berets.

CHRISTIAN: OK. There are a lot of good things about them, but one of the great things is they can come in and they can be the guerrilla. They can live like the guerrilla. They can eat like the guerrilla. They can travel like the guerrilla. They can travel light, small teams. And we learned from the Russians' experience with Speznaz, with their form of Green Berets...

VESTER: Right.

CHRISTIAN: ... in Afghanistan, so that's what we use. We didn't move in conventional armies. And the Green Berets are going to be perfect to ferret out and find and extinguish the enemies of the United States and the enemies of the Philippines, and al Qaeda's allies will be somewhat gone.

VESTER: Fingers crossed.

CHRISTIAN: Fingers crossed.

VESTER: Captain David Christian, it's good to see you, as always.

CHRISTIAN: Thank you, Linda.

Be sure to watch The War on Terror: The Hunt for the Killers every weeknight live at 10 p.m. ET on the Fox News Channel for all the very latest news on America at War.