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CNN Live At Daybreak

America Strikes Back: U.S. Military Had Taliban Leader Cornered On First Night

Aired October 15, 2001 - 07:23   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: It appears that Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar have survived the U.S.-led air strikes in Afghanistan so far.

Our next guest, Seymour Hersh, writes in this week's "New Yorker" magazine that the U.S. had Taliban leader Mullah Omar in its sights on the very first night of the air attack. But as Hersh writes, "...the CIA did not have the authority to push the button, nor did the nearby command and control suite of the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, where many of the war planes had been drawn up. Rather, the decision had to be made by the officers on duty at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida."

Seymour Hersh joins me now with more on this story. Good to have you with us this morning. Welcome.

SEYMOUR HERSH, "NEW YORKER": Welcome to yourself.

ZAHN: OK, thanks.

No one's done that so far this morning. I appreciate that.

So, Mr. Hersh, can you explain to me how close the U.S. got to taking out the mullah?

HERSH: Well, if they wanted to put the F-18 in there, there -- our fighter bombers, they would have destroyed the building in which he was sort of stopped, or cornered, if you will. We tracked him driving apparently for quite a while, some miles. We have a reconnaissance plane known as the Predator, which can fly very slowly and has amazing powers of sight, I guess, all of which aren't very clear. Some are probably still highly classified.

And we knew there was a convoy in which he was driving, and his car was identified and we watched him get into a building and put some security around it. And the people operationally said let's take it out. And there was, it went to the CENTCOM command. That was the procedure. That's the way it's set up. And the head of the CENTCOM, General Franks, who by every account is a good, solid man, was cautious and said to his JAG officer, his legal officer, the judge advocate general, his lawyer, in effect, said to him let's be more careful. Let's make sure we have the right man. Let's avoid collateral damage. There's a tremendous drive on the part of the military not to hurt people that shouldn't be hurt.

And so they wanted to be sure they could I.D. him and they asked the people on the ground to fire a missile from the Predator -- it has two missiles, hellfire missiles -- and bounce it into the building. And instead of shooting the building or destroying, trying to kill Omar, they bounced, they destroyed some cars in front to see, I guess, if Omar would come out and the idea was get a good photograph of him and see if we can get a visual I.D.

And by the time they finally got around to putting some planes and destroying the building, he had gone and there was a great deal of gnashing and, you know, throwing tantrums about it afterwards, as an example of how not to run a war, with some people being very, very angry at the top. I guess this goes to Don Rumsfeld's office, too, so I understand. That, you know, as somebody said to me, this isn't like when we're 6 years old and your mom calls you in for lunch and you're playing war with your biddies and you say kings, time out. This is war.

Other people are saying that General Franks is maligned a little bit here because his job is to make sure that you hit the right people when you do, when you fire. So it's a great conundrum.

ZAHN: All right, so what happens now? Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, as you said, outraged. I mean this came down to a legal decision. That's exactly what you're telling me this morning, right?

HERSH: Well, people...

ZAHN: I mean how do you avoid that in the future?

HERSH: Well, one of the things you do is it's, for some things, you know, if you're fighting a war you're fighting a war and these guys did, you know, have something to do with people flying, you know, airplanes into buildings and killing an awful lot of innocent civilians in America. So there's a great deal of rage at them. But if you're fighting a war it's a war.

On the other hand, it's the old battle, you know? What happens now is they're going to, they're looking at command and control. As somebody says to me, why should you have a decision that's on the ground 8,000 miles away being made back in Florida? It's got to be made more regionally and that would help, you know?

It takes, you know, when you go back and forth that far, there's a lot of miscommunication. And so one solution is to do that. And Rumsfeld is trying to change the whole structure of the United States' military, get away from these commanders in chiefs locally and centralize things more, which, of course, the military is going to fight.

I don't know what the answer is. The answer is that we don't want an army and an air force that shoots without being sure. On the other hand, if you had a reasonably good identification -- and that's something that people on the ground felt they had -- and I think the next morning or the next day we learned, as Rumsfeld and others have said, we do have people on the ground, we learned from people on the ground that, indeed, it was Omar and, indeed, he escaped. And that's when the anger really got bad, more acute.

It's a complicated issue and one, the good side of it is we are trying to the very best of our ability to avoid, as they say, collateral damage. That's the job of all of the commanders. On the other hand, you're fighting a war and if you could have gotten Omar on the first day, it would have been a big coup for the administration and also for the notion of this kind of a war, because right now we are a week into the war and we have a lot of political problems about wither the Taliban, do we want them, do the Paks want them, what about the Northern Alliance? We're looking at a lot of problems that maybe bombs won't cure.

ZAHN: Mr. Hersh, I need a quick answer to this one before I move on to the subject of Saudi Arabia. Are you hearing any evidence that Secretary Rumsfeld can change things fast enough so this won't happen again?

HERSH: No. I know he'd like to. I don't think you can change a structure that's been set up with generals and, you know -- it takes a lot of shaking and moving, particularly now in the middle of a war. And I'm not optimistic that it can be done quickly.

ZAHN: All right, OK. Finally this morning, let's talk a little bit about Saudi Arabia. You write that the Saudi regime is "increasingly corrupt, alienated from its religious rank and file and so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channeling hundreds of millions of dollars of what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it."

HERSH: What I did is I got access to an awful lot of very -- I should, I guess, just to, at the National Security Agency, our electronic eavesdropping unit has been monitoring signals and communications of the leadership of Saudi Arabia since at least '94, as I write. And it's a very distressing package of intelligence.

It shows how they're fighting among each other, the princes, about money and corruption, about what percent of what to take. Almost every deal, arms deal that goes down has a kickback, as much as 40 percent, to the princes, all of whom live very high. Nothing gets down to the people. And I guess if you really look at the intelligence we have and if you were living in Saudi Arabia, you'd probably be a fundamentalist if you weren't part of the kingdom because nothing gets, it's, really, it's a monarchy that doesn't distribute the oil wealth.

And so they're frightened. They have every reason to be. They're an easy target. They, we've done studies of the oil field. As you know, that's the largest independent, the largest fields in the world are in Saudi Arabia. They can produce 10 million barrels a day if they want. They are our best ally in terms of getting oil.

And yet in the long run they're almost doomed because, you know, the way they're proceeding with the lack of democracy and the internal bickering and the corruption there's no way bin Laden isn't, as people will tell you, probably the most popular person, Osama bin Laden is probably the most popular person in that country outside the royal family because he represents something that the royal family does not.

If he wants to torch those fields, and this is the worry we have, he could very easily. And then what would we do then? If we bring troops in there, my god, we're the outside infidels. I actually think we'd have to look for Iraq to come in and bail us out, which is an amazing scenario.

The bottom line is the documents also show the intelligence that I got a hold of that King Fahd, the leader, has been essentially brain dead for five or six years and nobody in America acknowledges that. We had Don Rumsfeld, who's a very decent, honorable guy -- please, he's just following the path of many predecessors -- going the other week on the visit there before the air war and shaking Fahd's hand. It's a Potemkin village. You know, he's not running the country.

And we don't tell the American people the truth. We don't tell ourselves the truth about Saudi Arabia. And the faster we do it, the faster we get these kind of countries being more democratic, the less chances people like Osama bin Laden will get to mobilize fundamentalists.

We've got to simply isolate the radicals from the many people in the middle who simply want a taste of life as they see it as possible -- more education...

ZAHN: All right. Sorry.

HERSH: No, go ahead.

ZAHN: Sorry to cut you off there.

HERSH: It's your show.

ZAHN: We're going to leave it there this morning. But, boy, your piece in the "New Yorker" is absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much for sharing some of it with us this morning. Appreciate your coming by.

HERSH: Thank you.

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