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DoD News Briefing: ASD PA Clarke and Rear Adm. Stufflebeem
Friday, December 28, 2001
(12:00 PM ET)
By Victoria Clarke
ASD PA

(Also participating was Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, deputy director for operations, current readiness and capabilities, Joint Staff.)

“The pressure is constant. It's not going to change. We're going to keep looking for al Qaeda or anybody trying to flee who is an obvious warrior in this area.”

Clarke: Good afternoon, everybody. Happy New Year! Charlie's not back, so I feel like we can't get started.

Let me just address one thing up front here. Over the last few days, there have been a lot of stories about activity in Afghanistan, and I fully admit some of it has been confusing. So I just want to restate what our general policy is, and that is, in general, we do not talk about operational details for the obvious reasons. It puts people's lives at risk; it gives the bad guys a heads-up as to what we're doing.

We try hard to give you information when we can that tells you something has happened, when it won't do any harm to a future operation. But in general, we're not going to get into operational details; we're not going to get into, as many people wanted to over the last couple of days, you know, waving people on and off various aspects of stories. If you do that, we can very quickly get ourselves to a place where we've painted a very clear picture about what an operation might be -- a current one or an upcoming one. So, in general, we are going to try hard not to do that. But we are going to try to give you as much information as we can.

Q: Torie, Central Command, yesterday morning, was talking about an operation as it was in progress, and it seemed to only be 12 or 14 hours after Admiral Quigley said that there is no operation of any kind. Was Admiral Quigley just misinformed? Was he lied to? And how do you explain all of that?

Clarke: You know, I don't think it's particularly useful to go over everything over the last couple of days. As I said --

Q: But it's confusing.

Clarke: As I said --

Q: And I don't think it was on the part of the journalists that made it that confusing.

Clarke: I didn't say that. I said it's been confusing. And I'm just trying to reassert and reestablish what our general policy will be.

Q: Did the United States military spokesman lie about --

Clarke: Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not.
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2001 © The United States Department of Defense.

Dan