matters. colonel, your reaction at what you saw yesterday at walter reed. well, i thought the choice of wording was a little inartful but, you know, as errol says, this was a real honor for the sergeant and his family. something they will always remember. i think it s very important that people recognize the sacrifice, the service and the dedication of our troops. and the president presenting this award in public highlights the jsacrifices being made even today. people tend to forget we are fighting wars on several fronts. particularly in afghanistan. talked about the mohab, a lot of people were surprised we still had that level of confrontation going on in afghanistan. so i think it serves to keep the sacrifice of our troops in the public eye and, of course, this sergeant s life has changed forever and i think it was important for the president to recognize that. so to a great extent, we see i ve read the responses
and i don t think any of the kind of awkwardness that you saw or will continue to see, if he continues to make these ceremonies public, is going to change that. moving beyond the word here, colonel francona, would you like to see more of these presentations of the purple heart publicly as errol pointed out? president obama did it privately during his terms. yeah. i think so. as i said before, i think it s important that we realize and, you know, i wrote an article sometime back about this and i called this the cost of our freedom and we need to recognize that there are young men and women paying these prices and some of these wounds are horrific. the sergeant has lost his leg. he is going to go through years, years of trying to recover from this. so i think it s important that we, as a nation, recognize that and honor these young men and women and one way to do that is to have these purple heart ceremonies. lieutenant colonel francona and errol lewis, thank you both.
more leeway to use weapons, and i d ask that the generals here, and the lieutenant colonel francona to see if they agree, it appears they ve been given more leeway to push the limits a bit. and increase that risk of collateral damage. a shake of the head. i think they agree with that. i m not buying that, don. i ve got to jump in. having been in combat, knowing what commanders go through to get strikes and knowing the constraints commanders live under when striking targets, there may be fewer rules in terms of the processes. but they re still going to look very closely at collateral damage. you don t want the death of innocents on your conscience. the other thing is, the comment by the president saying, we ve done more in the last eight weeks than we ve done in the last eight years.
process. the obama administration was famous, perhaps notorious for how many hoops the military had to jump through to approve strikes. that was i expect a lot of time in the pentagon and that was often a frustration there. on the flip side, though, the reason behind that was a desire to minimize civilian casualties, and to be fair, if you look in the last several weeks, there have been a number of strikes listen, this happens all the time. it s risky to drop bombs in areas wherever you re doing it. you have a number of strikes in the last several weeks, a bomb in mosul, friendly forces struck in syria in the last 24 hours. you had the use of this weapon. so there is evidence, maybe not conclusive yet, but there s evidence that the military has more leeway to use weapons, and i d ask that the generals here, and the lieutenant colonel francona to see if they agree, it appears they ve been given more leeway to push the limits a bit. and increase that risk of
interesting you should say that. because the president wouldn t say if he green-lit using this bomb. here s exactly how he responded when asked. everybody knows exactly what happened. and what i do is i authorize my military, we have the greatest military in the world and they ve done a job as usual. we have given them total authorization. colonel, i need to tell you that sources are telling cnn that general john nicholson, commander of the u.s. forces in afghanistan, signed off on this. but the white house was informed of the plan ahead of time. here s the question, realistically, a bomb with a nickname of mother of all bomb. did that happen without the direct signoff of the commander in chief? i think so. that s what sources at the pentagon are telling us. we were talking about this elier today. the president has authorized the theater commander and also the commander of u.s. forces in afghanistan to employ these weapons. i think the general was very