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PENTAGON: NEW YORKER STORY FALSE, NO SERIOUS INJURIES DURING DELTA RAID Sun Nov 04 2001 15:13:35 ET

Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers strongly debunked a story filed by the NEW YORKER's Seymour Hersh [set for publication on Monday] which claims U.S. Delta members were seriously injured during a raid on Mullah Omar's complex in Afghanistan.

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Myers made him comments on NBC's MEET THE PRESS to host Tim Russert:

RUSSERT: On October 20 there was a commando raid by U.S. forces into Afghanistan. You showed pictures of people being parachuted in and some infrared pictures and things like that.

A New Yorker magazine today reports that during that exercise, that operation, 12 U.S. soldiers were wounded, three seriously.

RUSSERT: Is that accurate?

MYERS: Let me just tell you exactly what happened and then--I don't think that report is accurate in the context that it was written.

As you know, we lost two individuals to an helicopter accident before they even went into Afghanistan. They were the reserve force, sitting back, waiting to respond in case...

RUSSERT: In Pakistan?

MYERS: In Pakistan, waiting in case they were needed. They were not needed, but this helicopter landing in a dust storm, rolled over on landing and, tragically, two service members were killed. Two were injured in that one, as well.

The force that went in on the ground, there were a couple of parachute injuries that we expected, and those happened, and there were some other wounds from some of the action and some of the activity that they were undergoing, but none of it was inflicted by the enemy.

We took, essentially--I think, the article--I have not read the article, but I've heard that it portrays that we ran into some stiff resistance. That's simply not true. There was no resistance. The Taliban were in complete disarray.

RUSSERT: The article said that there was a firefight and that the Taliban not only had rifle fire but also mortars and grenades in response to the U.S., and 12 U.S. soldiers were injured, three seriously.

MYERS: And that's not true. That's not true. My guess is and my belief is that every soldier that came back from that particular raid is back on duty today. None of them seriously injured. Certainly, none of them injured by the Taliban.

The Taliban probably did return fire. They had that--all those capabilities. We know from other reporting, that they were trying to muster greater capability. They were unable to do so. Our soldiers just simply overwhelmed them.

RUSSERT: It also says there was grave concern within the special operations community about being sent into an operation like that, suggesting they were not fully prepared or properly planned.

MYERS: Nothing could be further from the truth. This operation was planned for some time. The leader of the special operation community, General Charlie Holland, down in Tampa, Florida, was fully aware of what was going on and was participating in the planing. And when it came down to it, we were all very satisfied that we were ready to go in.

And in fact, we executed that exactly as we thought we would do. The fact that we damaged a helicopter inside the compound we went into, that's just one of the things in war that's going to happen. We know when we're setting down helicopters with lots of troops in a dusty environment that there are going to be some incidents like that, and there were in this case.

But it went, from my view, it went flawlessly.

END

-- Anonymous, November 04, 2001