NEWS TRANSCRIPT from the United States Department of Defense
DoD News Briefing
Victoria Clarke, ASD PA
Monday, January 28, 2002 - 11:29 a.m. EST
(Also participating; Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, Joint Staff)


Q : What have the interrogations revealed about who these people in custody are aligned with? Taliban? Al Qaeda?

ADM. STUFFLEBEEM : Well, it's a fair question, but the truth is, I don't know. I called and asked this morning of -- the people who are in control of this. They are still doing the interrogations. They didn't have anything that they could tell me differently than what they did a couple of days ago, which -- the indications are that these appear to be Taliban. Now that's initial indications, and you know, we don't have the names or who they are. We don't know what they were doing.

Q : To go to the issue of the identity of the detainees, particularly the ones in Cuba, if you're not sure who they are, how could they have been characterized as the worst of the worst? What did you know about them that allowed you to make that characterization?

ADM. STUFFLEBEEM : I would say that it just wasn't clear whom exactly we were dealing with. Was it al Qaeda? Was it Taliban? In the MO -- I keep using term, and I'm probably mis-applying it, but that's my word -- in looking how we derived the intelligence and what we saw, this looked like it was an al Qaeda or Taliban -- not to differentiate -- you can't -- they're indistinguishable. When these bad guys have been getting together, this is what it looks like.