Why do you think that's the modus operandi for a lot of the press people over there?

Because they come from nice polite Western countries and they think that you need to ask permission. And some of them work for large corporations and they're technically not allowed to sneak into countries because they have insurance problems and legal problems.

So when you said you weren't a journalist, you consider yourself just a ...

I'm a writer.

You spent time with the Green Berets. You write that when you came across them they knew who you were from reading your books -- but what was the situation with the Special Ops commanders who may not have been on the ground with them. Did they know you were there? And didn't they care?

No, no. These guys had been through two months of a fairly profound experience fighting a war, and they sort of knew that if the story didn't get out from their lips, it wasn't going to get out at all. And obviously the senior commanders and also the Pentagon were going to rewrite the story and make it all pretty and perfect, and after the war they brought some journalists in to sit around and do stroke stories on the brave Green Berets or whatever. But the guys who were in the middle of it don't want to talk to anyone except guys like me because they just don't feel like the press gives them any respect. They don't let them tell their story.

It's the exact same thing with John Walker. I'm not there to judge these guys or to shape what they say into something that I can sell. I personally want to know what it was like to fight a war. And I think the reaction to my article was that the Green Berets got into a lot of trouble for talking to me and the public learned a lot about what it was like to fight a war, that it wasn't all perfect. These are human beings, they make mistakes and things happen that we're maybe not proud about or that we wish didn't happen but ultimately, all in all, it was a good war.

So the Green Berets did get in trouble?

Yeah. See, the military doesn't want information out. They only want the nice clean shiny stuff. And it's got to be processed and polished and the ugly bits removed.

So on that note, what do you think is going unreported over there?

Well, they kill a lot of people. The thing that doesn't come through is that we have killed thousands and thousands and thousands of people and you've very rarely seen an American soldier kill a foreign national [on television]. You've never seen a foreign national kill an American soldier. They're removing the bits that make war what it is and everybody's a hero. You drop a bomb on yourself you get a medal. That's the way the war has been fought.

From your perspective did you get a sense for whether or not military strategy was being influenced at all by the massive amounts of press people that were running around there?

Well, the military hates the media. The conundrum is that we live and die for the Constitution and one of the elements of the Constitution is freedom of the press -- the right of the democratic public to make decisions based on a free flow of information, without censorship, without people rewriting history. And basically since the Vietnam War, the military realizes that the press is the enemy, because the press is actually faster and more intelligent than the military is. They can assess a military situation long before the military figures it out.

I mean, John Walker is an example. John Walker is in custody because I found him, not because our military found him. I handed him over to the military so he wouldn't be damaged, but the bottom line is that the American intelligence resources on the ground are infinitesimal compared to the amount of media stuff, the amount of people running around gathering information. I mean, look at the crap that the Wall Street Journal dug up and all the New York Times information. The military doesn't have a clue. I mean there's more evidence in the John Walker case in the public archives than there is in the military interrogations.

Is that just a case of massive bureaucratic inertia?

The military controls information. They don't disseminate it. The press uses the highest-tech means to gather the information. They spend a cumulative millions and millions of dollars gathering information and then disseminating it around the world using electronic technology, and the military does exactly the opposite: They overly train people who are sort of culturally isolated and they gather information and they send it to a central point and then it's processed and edited and then disseminated very carefully to very selected people.

Some examples: I interviewed the top Taliban leadership when I was there. And the Green Berets were blown away: They're like, "Holy shit, you just talked to these guys? You got pictures of them?" And I'm like, "Yeah, you can get them off my Web site." The point is that the military is trying to compress information and withhold it, and the journalists are out there trying to find it and disseminate it, and I think what you can see from the article [in National Geographic] is there's nothing wrong with what we're doing over there and there's no reason why people shouldn't know what we're doing. But the military does not like the press. Now in Operation Anaconda, they did bring media units in there and the funny thing is, that operation is just totally overblown into some great campaign. But it was really just a few thousand American troops looking for a few handfuls of al-Qaida holdouts.

Anaconda was made to be a big deal because they had to feed the media something. And so now the media thinks they have this great battle on tape and they were there and so on and so forth, but really nothing happened.

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