U.S. COMMANDOS WOUNDED, REPORT SAYS

In unprecedented deception by the Pentagon, casualties are being admitted two or three weeks after the fact, when they can be hidden in the news. After the ‘helicopter with broken wheels’ incident and no further commando raids(!), Reuters reports. . .

U.S. COMMANDOS WOUNDED, REPORT SAYS

As the military campaign unfolded, a report released on Saturday said 12 elite U.S. Delta Force commandos were wounded by Taliban troops in an Oct. 20 raid in southern Afghanistan.

Despite comments by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that resistance to the two raids was light, author Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker magazine the Taliban surprised U.S. forces with a fierce firefight at one target.

Hersh reported in the Nov. 12 issue that the fight erupted as members of the secret and highly trained Delta Force emerged from a house in a compound near Kandahar sometimes used by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who was not there.

“It was like an ambush,” he quoted one senior officer as saying. “The Taliban were firing light arms and either RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) or mortars.”

It was “a tactical firefight, and the Taliban had the advantage,” the officer told Hersh, who reported that 12 U.S. commandos were wounded, three of them seriously.

Defense officials declined to comment on the report or discuss further details of last month’s raids.

But Hersh, who earlier was the first to report that the United States was using missile-armed unmanned reconnaissance drones over Afghanistan, said some U.S. officers were furious because the Pentagon showed reporters dramatic films of a separate parachute raid that night by Army Rangers on an airfield near Kandahar.