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CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports

Was the Friendly Fire Human Error or a Smart Bomb Gone Astray?; Has Osama bin Laden Lost Some of His Key Henchmen?

Aired December 05, 2001 - 19:00   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.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight on WOLF BLITZER REPORTS, THE WAR ROOM: Serious casualties: U.S. special forces and their Afghan allies are hit by friendly fire. Human error, or a smart bomb gone astray?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REAR ADMIRAL JOHN STUFFLEBEEM, PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: One of those JDAM weapons landed somewhere in the vicinity of 100 meters from where our troops were at.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Serious fighting: Backed by U.S. air strikes, anti- Taliban forces lay siege to Kandahar and attack al Qaeda diehards near the mountain caves of Tora Bora. Has Osama bin Laden lost some of his key henchmen?

We'll go live to our correspondents. And I'll speak live with Senator Chuck Hagel, an infantry squad leader in Vietnam; security expert Kelly McCann, a former Marine special ops officer; and CNN military analyst retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd as we go into THE WAR ROOM.

Good evening, I'm Wolf Blitzer reporting tonight from Washington.

We all knew it would happen. It does during every war. It's called friendly fire or fratricide. The U.S. military accidentally killing it's own. We'll be focusing on that tonight because it's now happened in southern Afghanistan. Three Americans and five Afghan allies were killed in the incident.

Let's go right to CNN military affairs correspondent Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon. He has details -- Jamie.

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN MILITARY AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, it appears that two of those American dead were killed almost immediately by the powerful blast from this 2,000-pound bomb. A third died as he was being transported to a medical facility outside of Afghanistan.

All together, more than two dozen were wounded, including more than 20 friendly Afghan fighters, and the Pentagon now is trying to find out what went wrong.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MCINTYRE (voice over): As the dead and more than two dozen wounded, American and Afghan troops were flown into the U.S. Marine Base southwest of the frontlines. Heavy press restrictions allowed only these pictures from far away.

American pool reporters could see only wounded Afghan troops who were fighting the Taliban when the bombing accident occurred. According to the Pentagon, a 2,000-pound satellite-guided bomb dropped from a U.S. Air Force B-52 hit within 100 meters of where two teams of U.S. Army and Air Force Special Forces were helping opposition groups fighting the Taliban.

Someone on those teams radioed the target coordinates for the strike to the bomber crew. No one yet knows what went wrong.

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: The coordinates could have been wrong in the first instance. They could have been transmitted incorrectly. They could have been received incorrectly. They could have been put into the fire control system incorrectly.

There are many other things that could also have happened. There could be a bent fin on the weapon.

MCINTYRE: It's the second time an errant 2,000-pound bomb has hit too close to friendly forces. Five U.S. Special Forces have been awarded purple hearts for injuries from a similar accident last week near Mazar-e Sharif.

CAPTAIN PAUL, U.S. ARMY: I didn't hear anything and then all of a sudden, I didn't hear an explosion or anything. It was just all of a sudden I could feel myself flying and, like I said, everything was brown. Once I hit the ground, my first thought was I just laid there in a little ball because I was thinking, okay now something's going to land on top of me.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCINTYRE (on camera): Pentagon sources say the blast from today's bombing accident also injured Hamid Karzai, the man picked to head Afghanistan's interim government.

One Pentagon official described his injuries as flesh wounds. Another said he was visible and appeared to be fine -- Wolf.

BLITZER: Jamie, I don't believe they've yet released the names of the three killed U.S. soldiers, but what do we know about them?

MCINTYRE: Well as it happens, Wolf, just a moment ago the Pentagon did release those names of the three soldiers, all from Fort Campbell, from the Third Batallion, 5th Special Forces Group. And the interesting thing about it is, these are very - these special forces are very experienced soldiers. One, 39-year-old Master Sergeant Jefferson Donald Davis; Sergeant First Class Daniel Henry Petithory, 32, from Massachusetts; and 28- year-old Staff Sergeant Brian Cody Prosser. All of those U.S. Army special forces from Fort Campbell, those identities just being released a short time ago -- Wolf.

BLITZER: All right, thank you very much, Jamie McIntyre. And our condolences, of course, to the families of those three men.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials say they have an intelligence report suggesting one of Osama bin Laden's older sons may have been killed in an air strike. Officials stress they can't confirm the report. Experts say bin Laden has at least 23 children, of whom at least 14 are sons.

And on the ground in Afghanistan, they're assessing today's deadly error, but the fierce battle to seize the remaining Taliban stronghold has not let up.

CNN's Nic Robertson is at the Pakistani-Afghan border with the latest from the region. Nic, give us the latest, please.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Indeed, Wolf, it appears as if that campaign is not only stepping up in and around Kandahar, but also around Kandahar Province.

Just across the border from here, a few miles away, is the border town, Afghan border town of Spin Boldak. We watched through the night as there were intense bombing raids on that town, flashes lighting up the sky.

Now tribal fighters have been moving in from this area to Kandahar. They've been trying to take control of Kandahar City Airport, and we hear again that the bombing raids were intense around the airport.

Tribal commanders there told us that they pulled back their forces from the airport so that the bombing raids could intensify without endangering their forces.

We're also told that bombing raids are inside Kandahar city. Our sources there tell us that some of the targets inside Kandahar are houses that have been formerly occupied by Arabs and their families.

Also to the north, around Jalalabad, the eastern city of Afghanistan, Mujahedeen forces, thousands of them, moved in on the ground around the mountain hideout of Tora Bora. This is a complex system of caves in the mountains where the al Qaeda, where al Qaeda fighters are believed to be holding out.

The Mujahedeen commander said they met with stiff resistance. Some witnesses said that possibly Osama bin Laden is still in that area. That is impossible to verify, but these Mujahedeen fighters in the north now, now working with the U.S. led air strikes around that complex cave system in the mountains. Wolf. BLITZER: Nic, what are you seeing and hearing about the refugees that are coming across the border or at least trying to get to the border from the Kandahar region?

ROBERTSON: For people coming out at this time, Wolf, there is a lot of concern among people now leaving Afghanistan about the main highway from Kandahar. It's a 60-mile highway but it's not navigable for most of the route now. People are taking detours through the deserts.

Tribal commanders we talked to talk of seeing destroyed vehicles along that route. They believe that U.S. led bombing campaigns have been targeting vehicles that they believe belong to Taliban forces along that road.

There have also been reports of deaths and injuries to Afghans fleeing Afghanistan, as they tried to travel that route. Their vehicle in some cases appear to have been targeted, mistaken for Taliban fighters. One jeep full of refugees apparently was hit in the last few days.

Aid workers at the border tell us that they are seeing less people turning up and the stories that they are hearing from people coming out of Afghanistan is a great deal of concern and confusion about what's happening in Kandahar. No one really seems to know who exactly is in control of the city or the roads to the border -- Wolf.

BLITZER: Nic Robertson, thank you very much. And this note, Nic will have much more at the top of the hour in a special report "Live from Afghanistan."

So how does a friendly fire incident happen? What went wrong on the battlefield in a war that seems to be going so right for the United States? Joining me now, here in the CNN WAR ROOM, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. He was awarded two purple hearts as an infantry squad leader in Vietnam.

Kelly McCann, CEO of Crucible Security, and anti-terror consultant, and a former Marine special ops officer.

And CNN military analyst, retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd. He flew 247 combat missions as a fighter pilot in Vietnam. And remember, you can e-mail your WAR ROOM questions to my Web site. Just go to cnn.com/wolf. That's where you can also, by the way, read my daily column.

Let me begin with you, General Shepperd. A question from Donald from Syracuse wants to know this: "Considering the front lines have become very close, why is the U.S. still using high altitude B-52 bombing strikes that potentially, of course, could kill U.S. troops?"

MAJOR GENERAL DON SHEPPERD, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Because it's a very good, very effective weapon, Wolf. What we've done with an old, 50-year-old airplane is basically take the airplane and put precision- guided munitions on it that are capable of hitting coordinates that are properly relayed.

Now something went wrong in this case and we're investigating to find out why. But it doesn't matter whether it's a fighter delivering it or a bomber delivering it, the bomber is a good way because it's a truck that can go back and forth, deliver many bombs over time, and it's the accuracy of the weapon, the accuracy of the coordinates that makes it deadly. It's a good way to deliver.

WOLF: Kelly McCann, what do you know about this joint direct attack munitions, the JDAM that killed these U.S. troops, injured so many others?

KELLY MCCANN, CEO, CRUCIBLE SECURITY: Well, it's an adjunct system to a normally dumb bomb that's unguided and just does free fall into a target. And what, a kit is attached to it, a tail direction kit. Basically GPS coordinates are put into it and those GPS coordinates could be off a target list or, you know, generated from on the ground.

And then the crew can actually change those coordinates as it's in flight before the bomb is dropped. So the general's right. In fact, the B-52 with the loiter time available, if that was a target of opportunity, it makes sense if it was loaded that way to just cue up the GPS coordinates and use that platform.

WOLF: Senator Hagel, you know something about friendly fire from your days in Vietnam. It does have a chilling effect on U.S. military personnel, not only those who are obviously there and those who were involved in the incident, but all of them. They hear about this pretty quickly.

SENATOR CHUCK HAGEL (R), NEBRASKA: Oh yes. It close quarters like they're operating in now, that impact is difficult to deal with. But these are professionals, Wolf. These are committed men and women who are trained well. They understand their mission. They understand the hazards of this, the realities of war, and they expect, and they're trained to expect and they know intellectually that these things do happen and will happen.

BLITZER: General Shepperd, Mike in Basking Ridge, New Jersey has this good question: "When I was in the infantry in Vietnam, quite a few of us were hit by friendly fire. I would have thought this would be a very rare occurrence 30 years later. What is being done to ensure the safety of our troops from these mistakes?"

SHEPPERD: Well, basically, you practice and you train and you train day after day. But it is a dangerous business and with weapons such as 2,000-pound bombs, let me give you an idea. Basically, the frag pattern goes out about 3,500 feet. That's over half a mile, and the frag goes up in the air and it comes down as well as going out. It takes about 30 seconds for the last frag to hit the ground.

So these are very powerful weapons, and if you choose to use them because you're in trouble, you got to be very, very careful. And friendly fire happened in Vietnam, not daily, but certainly weekly there. We had fratricide weekly. It's a dangerous business, a dangerous business out there and we all accept the dangers that go with it.

BLITZER: Were you ever hit by or some of your colleagues hit by friendly fire?

HAGEL: Some of my colleagues were. I never was, but the general is right. It was a 10-day kind of occurrence, and because it is imperfect, it is imprecise and you are fighting at these close quarters and in these close quarter parameters, that was part of the risk and people understood that.

You tried to minimize that and there was a margin of error in that, but nonetheless, it was part of the process.

MCCANN: A lot of people don't understand exactly all the battlefield controls that are put in place to prevent this from happening. There is Grunt (ph) tape, you know, which is kind of a dumb system that can seen from the air and separates troops from what's on the ground. There's battlefield control measures, restricted fire areas, et cetera, that's on everybody's maps.

But in a fluid case like this, as the Senator just brought up, people are moving, targets of opportunity pop up. You're under pressure. Maybe you're under fire. So I mean, there's a lot of things going on. These are historical incidents all the way back to the American Revolution. There has always been friendly fire situations as sad as that is.

BLITZER: But a lot of people think in the world of high technology, this would not necessarily be the case. Marty from Columbus, Ohio, General Shepperd, has this question: "Microchip technology allowed television networks to track a hockey puck and illuminate it on the screen. Why can't the U.S. military use similar technology to track friendly troops?"

And this is a good question because, I remember when I was covering the Gulf War a decade ago, there were all sorts of friendly fire incidents, as you well remember, and there was a lot of talk at that time, why not put some sort of illuminating signs on the tanks, on the other equipment and even have some sort of chips in the helmets so that the U.S. planners, those that order these bombs to be dropped, know precisely where all U.S. forces are?

SHEPPERD: You can do that and you do do that as a matter of fact. And again, marking of targets with tape and paint and all that type of thing has gone back many, many years.

But the thing is, you're always just about ready for the next war. And we're going to deploy some of those systems, but they're not deployed yet and they're not foolproof. Even when you put them out there, the other side can get hold of them and drag you into a trap.

So we're going, we're doing all of those things, but there's no magic way with a 2,000-pound bomb to avoid in all cases hitting your own troops. It simply won't happen. It will happen in the future. MCCANN: It's a reaction to fire too. As you saw in the journalist case there that took the picture when you heard the SF guy saying "get down." How did he take that picture? He was standing upright.

So in other words, frags coming his way and he's, you know, from the chest up holding this camera. Everyone else is saying "get down." People are not used to flying fragments from that distance.

And as you heard the general say, it could be 30 seconds before the last frag hits the ground. So it's a familiarity with the battlefield too.

BLITZER: As far as you know, Senator Hagel, the top military planners who approved these specific strikes, are they sensitive enough to the dangers of friendly fire out there? Have they done enough to prepare the battlefield, if you will, for this possibility?

HAGEL: Oh, I think that is factored into every battle plan, every possibility, every option. But as we've all three discussed, imperfect, imprecise, messy, things happen, that's war. That's the reality of what you're dealing with.

But there is no question, and the general and the major would be more qualified than I to talk about it, but what I know and I know a little something about it, that that dynamic is factored in always. You minimize those casualties always. But in war, there's risk and there are casualties.

BLITZER: General Shepperd, as you know during peacetime, when there's an accident like this, there's a pause. They stop using the equipment in place while an investigation continues, whether it's the B-52 or the JDAM.

Should there be a pause in using this equipment right now as a result of this incident?

SHEPPERD: I'll leave that to the Pentagon, but probably not is the answer, because we've had so many successful strikes, very, very few errant bombs over there. So the exigencies of the war, you know the want to get the targets out there, is an overriding case in this particular case because we've had one instance now of this errant bomb so we're going to investigate it.

But again, you look at each one of these things very, very carefully, just like an active investigation. You don't stop the war. You continue and then you find out what went wrong.

Now we had some cases in Vietnam, for instance, where we were trying a new radar fuse. We'd pull up to the tanker and the first few times they pulled up to the tanker, it rang in on the tanker and blew up the fighter aircraft. So in that case, something is wrong with those fuses. We're going to pause here.

But in this case, where we've done it time after time against so many targets, it doesn't make sense to take a pause, but it does make sense to investigate.

BLITZER: All right. Let's take a quick break. We have a lot more to talk about. When we come back, taking the war to the caves and tunnels. And President Bush vows to smoke out the terrorists. Did he mean it literally?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Welcome back to the CNN WAR ROOM. Diehard al Qaeda fighters and perhaps even Osama bin Laden may be hold up in a massive complex of caves and tunnels in the Tora Bora mountains. How should the United States and it's allies go after them.

Let's get back to our discussion, and Kelly, I want to put up on our screen, show our viewers precisely the area. And let's go to the map to show our viewers where this Tora Bora area is in the eastern part of Afghanistan, right around over here.

This seems to be the area where U.S. intelligence believes Osama bin Laden may be hiding out some of his top al Qaeda leaders. And we also have an animation to show the caves, the nature of these caves. These aren't simply caves as you and I might know of caves.

But take a look at this picture, showing what is at stake here, not only in one area but we're told multiple areas of this eastern region of Afghanistan. Very sophisticated cave network that U.S. bombs might not even be able to penetrate. So how do you go after Osama bin Laden in these kinds of areas?

MCCANN: The first danger is, is that the graphics that people are using have to be based on fact before they're believable. We don't know that those are accurate representations unless you have firsthand representation that someone has an eyewitness account, that's what they look like.

BLITZER: Those are approximations, guesses.

MCCANN: Right.

BLITZER: Based on eyewitness accounts of what people have told us, that these caves exist in these kinds of situations.

MCCANN: Suffice it to say they house quite a few numbers of people. The problem then becomes a very messy one, which is you're going to have to close with the enemy, close with, into close combat destroy, which means you have to enter the cave. You have to control space, and then you have to deal with mid-objective barricades, mid- objective improvised explosive devices, darkness. There's a question whether it was information of disinformation that they may have some kind of noxious or toxic gases that they could release as a result of information that was on your show, you know, picked up another objective.

So it becomes very difficult. The Pentagon has so far said we are going to enable the locals to do it themselves and Haron Amin, who's been on your show before, the spokesman for the Northern Alliance, said they're aggressive enough. They want to do it. They're chomping at the bit.

But if you want an indication, if you think back when there was two al Qaeda members in the basement at Mazar-e Sharif, that would be a clearing exercise, where you would go in and use that tactic technique's procedures to clear that space.

They didn't do it. They stayed outside. They gave verbal commands and through a grenade in, so.

BLITZER: General Shepperd, a viewer Rob in New Orleans, e-mails us this question: "Why don't the coalition forces pump gas into the Tora Bora caves and ignite the network to kill or drive out bin Laden and any al Qaeda hiding in them?"

Literally, as President Bush has said and perhaps figuratively, smoke them out.

SHEPPERD: Well, obviously, the cave complexes are designed with that in mind. They know you can pump gas in, and they know you can bomb it with bunker-busting bombs and that type of thing.

So you design around that, a lot of it with U.S. money against the Soviets in the Soviet days. Again as Kelly said, we know a lot about it. But you can't just flood all these complexes with gas. There's a lot of air in there. It takes a lot of gas, maybe for days maybe to do that. So it simply is not easy to do and not feasible is what it amounts to.

BLITZER: Senator Hagel, during your experience in Vietnam when you were in the infantry, was there anything along these lines that you remember of having to go in, look cave-by-cave, tunnel-by-tunnel for the enemy?

HAGEL: Well, in the famous Cu Chi tunnels up in the central highlands, which I was not in that area. I was in the Mekong Delta near Saigon. There was some of that, but not with the kind of complexity and sophistication that we know exists in Afghanistan.

But some of the basic principles were the same. But in the Vietnam days, you used basically the smallest guy in the unit, and they were trained. They were called tunnel rats. They had a flashlight and a .45, and these guys had courage. And you'd send them down in those holes and that's the way a lot of it took place.

BLITZER: Did those tunnel rats usually get out of those holes?

HAGEL: Well, that casualty rate was high, but it wasn't a matter of you just turned them loose. I mean there was a certain amount of preliminary work as you recon the area and you prepared it as well as you could. But going down in those tunnels, you didn't know what you were going to confront.

Kelly was right in talking a little bit about what our guys would confront in Afghanistan in those tunnels, booby traps, all kind of possibilities and that's what the did.

So some of the same standards and complexities still hold today as they did in Vietnam.

BLITZER: All right, Senator, we have to leave it right there. While you were talking, you probably don't know this, we were showing our viewers some pictures of you during Vietnam. You have not aged at all. You looked good then. You look great now.

HAGEL: How nice of you, Wolf.

BLITZER: Thanks, Senator Hagel, General Shepperd, Kelly, thanks for joining us.

Is Uncle Sam using September 11 to step on the constitutional rights of hundreds of people? The ACLU thinks so. Coming up, find out what the group is doing about it, right now. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Welcome back.

Here are the latest developments. From the White House today, harsh words for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In a letter delivered to President Bush, Arafat pleaded for more time to prove he's trying to crack down on anti-Israeli terrorism.

Mr. Bush's message to Arafat, "Now is his time." Attorney General John Ashcroft has come under fire for detaining hundreds of people in the September 11 terrorism investigation.

Today a coalition of civil liberties groups, including the ACLU, filed a suit demanding the Federal Government disclose the names of those detainees and do it soon.

"CROSSFIRE", by the way, will debate that issue, coming up next. It's a blast-off for the Space Shuttle Endeavor. After almost a week of delays, Endeavor roared into space a few hours ago, ferrying a fresh replacement crew to the International Space Station.

And that's all the time we have tonight. Please join me again tomorrow twice, at both 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Until then, thanks very much for watching. I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington.

"CROSSFIRE" begins right now.

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