I love that story about Wes and Richard Clarke...
Also this one that Seymour Hersh related to Amy Goodman about his encounters with Wes Clark:
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan?
SEYMOUR HERSH: This is -- it's interesting. I have been doing interviews, and you're the first person to ask me about it. This is a story that I didn't write. I was doing a lot of work, as you know, since 9/11. I have been sort of writing the alternative history of the war, with the help of people on the inside. I'm not -- you know, people -- there are people all along very high levels who don't approve of what's going on. It's very hard for people in certain positions in the military and the intelligence to come forward. Anaconda was an operation to take place March 1, 2002, where we were going to attack in the mountains, in the eastern mountains of Afghanistan.
The idea was to attack what we believed were a group of embedded al Qaeda living in redoubts, in caves, et cetera. And the army wanted to do it. There had been -- the war had been going on for months. It had been largely a special forces war and air force war. The army and the commander at this time was General Franks. Little did I know then that this Tommy Franks would end up running the war and be described as sort of a hero, because this was Katzenjammer Kids stuff what he did. It was really sort of really dumb. The plan was to recruit some Afghans and with the American soldiers, they initially wanted the marines, they were going to drive -- there was going to be no advanced bombing of the area or artillery, because we did not want to tip off the al Qaeda we were coming. Never mind we were dealing with all of the local Afghan tribes, all of whom we know, history shows, who pays the most determines their loyalty. The idea that you could run a covert operation, particularly the way we move, like General Motors, but that was the idea, so we could have no -- the air force wasn't allowed to do preparatory bombing. We're going to send boys from the Tenth Mountain Division out of Ft. Drum, New York. They're going to paratroop land by helicopter into an area. There's going to be no advance bombing and there's going to be no artillery. And the first wave is going to be a group of Afghans going up a mountain with the marines. The marines said, "Are you kidding?" I quote an ex-- a wonderful marine officer saying -- that's why I love the marines - "We said 'Are you nuts? F*** you. We're not going. We'll go, fight and kill anybody, but we're not stupid. We don't go up a mountain without artillery and without intelligence.'" They wouldn't go, so they send the Afghans up, they get wiped out in what they call registered mortar fire.
In other words, the opposition had mortars aimed at the various congregation sites they had already planned in advance. They were going to be points where they rendezvous. And the fire was already registered. Clearly they knew what the points were going to be. When the Ft. Drum soldiers landed by chopper, up higher in the mountains, their landing zones were also the target of registered mortar fire. In other words, the enemy knew. I think they suffered 28% casualties, not deaths, mostly wounded from shrapnel and other shells in the first thee minutes. Then they ran down the mountain, 100 people, literally, some didn't, perhaps, but many did, including the junior officers, ran from an ambush, not irrational, leaving behind night vision gear, weapons, radios, they just shed themselves and went down the mountain, because otherwise they were in real trouble. They would have been wiped out. It's a nightmare. It was just a nightmare. Then, of course, the press is down below in Bagram near a base. After the first day was over, that's my favorite quote of the war, a lieutenant colonel from the Tenth Mountain Division briefs the American press corps that's down below about what a victory it was. And he said, "The best thing about it is we found and engaged the enemy right away." Which is -- I have to think I said it was a very strange way to describe an ambush. And an air force officer -- the air force went crazy about this. I got there after action started, which was just devastating, I mean, brutal. There's always interesting warfare, but this was extraordinary. They just said, this was the worst they have ever seen. One air force colonel, who is a wonderful, bright young air force colonel said to me, "Well, the army demonstrated that they were able to send a bunch of boys up a mountain to their death." That's what they showed in this mission. Complete disaster. They tried to tell the press as many as 700 al Qaeda were killed. Newsweek reported ten bodies were found. Shades of Vietnam again. But I didn't write it.
What makes it interesting, while doing reporting on it, I called Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander, who is sort of an interesting guy in this stuff, because early in the war, early in my reporting on the war, I had written critically about a Delta Force operation. Delta is the secret unit of the army. The commander unit. They had been ambushed. The Delta guys were enraged. I'm talking about the first month of the war because they had been sent on this stupid operation and they had gotten hurt very badly. And they don't like it. Delta guys, they like to crawl in little holes for a week and get to their target. They were ordered to do it in a different way. Everybody denied the story like crazy. And Wes Clark, to his credit, told a bunch of newspapers, "Look, I know this is right." I had said 13 people were hurt and he said 12 was the number that he had. I saw in him somebody with a great streak of integrity, difficult he may be. In any case, I called him about this story while I was doing it. He encouraged me to write it. I didn't write it. About a year-and-a-half later, he's running for president. I mention this in the book, and I bump into him, and he jumped all over me. He said, "Why didn't you do that story?" I said, "Well, I just thought, it just would have been -- I just didn't do it." He said, "You should have done it. That was your job." Pretty scary. You know, he was right.http://www.democracynow.org/static/hersh_trans.shtml"Somebody with a great streak of integrity"....yep, that's a pretty darn good description.
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