Defense Department Report, December 19: Rumsfeld Briefing

(Rumsfeld: U.S. determined to get its hands on terrorists) (310)





"You can be darn certain we're going to try to get our hands on"


al-Qaida terrorists who have fled into Pakistan and are being held


prisoner there, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says.





"If they're al-Qaida ... it's hard to believe they were innocents,"


Rumsfeld told journalists at a December 19 Pentagon briefing. "And it


doesn't require that someone had been directly involved in the


September 11th bombing. If they're al-Qaida, al-Qaida was involved.


That's good enough for me. These are terrorists. They are bad people.


They are people that need to be stopped," he said.





Rumsfeld had just returned from a trip to Central Asia -- including


Afghanistan -- and had attended two days of NATO meetings in Brussels.


He said that while in Afghanistan he had met with new interim Prime


Minister Hamid Karzai and interim Defense Minister Fahim Khan. He


assured both leaders of the U.S. commitment "to hunt down the al-Qaida


and Taliban leadership," in addition to helping the new government


keep out terrorists.








The whereabouts of some top Taliban leaders are known, Rumsfeld told


reporters. "We've got some of them. Some other folks have some of


them. Some of them are dead, and a lot of them are missing. ... And


the latter category's larger than the former," he said.





Rumsfeld disputed the characterization of Osama bin Laden as having


"vanished."





"I don't think he's vanished. He's either dead in some tunnel, or he's


alive. And if he's alive, he's either in Afghanistan or he isn't. And


it does not matter: we'll find him one day. And we'll know what's


happened," Rumsfeld said.