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| August 16, 2002 | Friday | Jamadi-us-Saani 6, 1423 |
Rumsfeld defends Pakistan
WASHINGTON, Aug 15: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has dismissed the claim that Pakistan was hiding Osama bin Laden as “vicious” and said that if Islamabad had any information about the head of Al Qaeda network it would inform Washington.
At a briefing at the Pentagon a journalist asked him to comment on a statement by the Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes last week that Osama was hiding in Pakistan and the ISI knew where he was.
“That is a vicious question,” said Rumsfeld when the journalist suggested that according to the Indian defence minister, Pakistan was misleading the United States.
“The facts are that we rely on every conceivable scrap of intelligence we can get.”
He said both Pakistan and Afghanistan were “a part of the global war on terror” and if “they had coordinates, I have every confidence they’d give them to us.”
When reminded of a recent Newsweek report that in February Osama had moved from Tora Bora to Shahi Kote, Rumsfeld said neither the United States nor any of its allies knew where the Al Qaeda leader was now.
He assured the reporter that if the United States or any of its allies had any information about his whereabouts “you can have every confidence that we’d go looking.”
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