Press conference by US Major General John Sattler

US Major General John Sattler is commanding the US-led anti-terrorist task force based in Djibouti, known as the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF). Following are his comments to journalists in Addis Ababa on Friday after a three-day visit to Ethiopia. QUESTION: If you had intelligence that Osama bin Laden was in Somalia would you have any intention of going into a sovereign country? ANSWER: Right now Somalia is labelled as a failed state. Right now there is no government per se. The TNG [Transitional National Government] is down south. [There is] Somaliland and Puntland. Who do you deal with, who do you negotiate with? If in fact we had actionable intelligence to indicate any of the high level terrorists who have already committed acts and been charged were in any of the countries, for all the other countries we would go to get permission to the highest levels of the government. [We would] get the permission to either provide the information and have a country such as Ethiopia go ahead and prosecute, arrest the individual in their own country. If they asked us we would assist. But the main assistance they would like us to share is the information and they would much rather go ahead and police up any activity within their own country. When it comes to Somalia we would press that back up to Washington DC, and the decision would come directly from the president to go ahead and go in unilaterally to Somalia to go and prosecute that target. If I was to speculate myself I would say yes we would do it...but that decision will be made at the presidential level. Q: Who are your partners in Somalia? A: We have no partners in Somalia because of all the countries we visited there have been established governments. It is very easy to find out and determine through the US embassy who we need to sit down to talk to. So I can tell everyone we have not been into Somalia to talk to anyone, the TNG, anybody in Somaliland or Puntland. We have not been there. The other countries we have. Q: What role does Ethiopia play in this fight against terrorism? A: We have had the opportunity to meet with both the civilian and military leadership of your great country and we have agreed that we will become very tight partners in this global war on terrorism. What that means is that we will assist and respond to the desires of the Ethiopian leadership to assist in training to teach the tactics, the techniques and the procedures for combating terrorism for counter-terrorism operations. We will work very closely military-to-military to train along those areas. We are also working very closely to share information. Information concerning the long porous border that exists between Ethiopia and Somalia, to assist in locating potential places where terrorists may or may not attempt to cross by sharing that information. The Ethiopian government can utilise their forces more efficiently to put them at the right place at the right time. So it is a very open partnership that we're very excited about and we welcome. Q: Will you be doing military exercises with the Ethiopians? A: We were in with Lt General Somora [Head of Ethiopian Defence Force] just yesterday talking about some military-to-military training - both us sending the structures in to work very closely with the Ethiopian military and the second phase of that would be for us to come in and do some combined operations training within the country of Ethiopia. That was discussed and that will be at the invitation of the Ethiopian government and we will work very hard at that in coordination with the US embassy. Q: Are you supplying weapons to Ethiopia? A: As we work with each nation, we come in and we do a combined assessment. We sit down and take a look at the equipment available, some of the technologies that we may have developed over time to play very heavily in a war on terrorism. So as we do more and become more embedded with the country in these discussions, the next stage we will talk about is equipment, equipment that might be needed and might assist. I have not had those discussions yet here inside Ethiopia, but they certainly would be on the table for a future visit. Q: Who specifically are you targeting? A: We qualify a terrorist as any individual or cell who intend, through maiming or murdering attempts, to inculcate fear in the hearts of innocent people for political or personal gain. Right now the Al-Qaeda network, which may have moved down coming out of Afghanistan across the peninsula and possibly across the Gulf of Aden into the Horn. Other than Al-Qaeda, we are homing in on individuals and looking at their intentions. The sharing of intelligence is not focused towards any particular group and there are multiple groups that flow back and forth from Somalia into Ethiopia into Kenya up into Djibouti. So we are keeping our eye to out intelligence-collecting apparatus... Q: What concrete achievements have been achieved so far? A: I would say the most concrete event so far is our ability to go out and meet with the leadership, both military and civilian, of our partners inside the Horn of Africa. You can’t really understand what needs to be done coming in as a military coalition combined monitoring task force, till we meet with the US embassy and then we meet with the leaders of the individual countries. So rather than stay at one location we have gone out and talked to that leadership, shook their hand, and now we can see what each of our coalition partners would like us to do. We did not come in with a mandate or a complete solution to the problem. We came in with an extended hand and an open mind. So the first thing we have done, is we have looked at what needs to be done and how we can contribute to it. Q: How much is this costing? A: I really don’t know but the cost associated with not partnering, with not coming together as a coalition to fight this global war on terrorism, the cost of not confronting it, dwarfs by any stretch of the imagination whatever cost it is for us to come out and be here in the area. Q: What is the reaction from the east African countries to your presence? A: We are not putting a military presence - people on the ground, soldiers, sailors, airmen or marines or coalition partners on the ground - in any of the coalition countries except the country of Djibouti and that is at the invitation of President Guelleh. So the only place we will have a base is in Djibouti. The trips around to our other coalition partners, we have been received very warmly. There are a lot of things that we can do as a team that neither one of us can do as an individual, so the reception has been very heart warming. Q: Are the US military looking at using Assab as a deep-water port? A: No. For all the humanitarian assistance, any re-supplies that we have planned, we will really be opening up the Port of Djibouti. The military will not clog the Port of Djibouti. The intention is to keep that wide open for any food assistance that is needed. Q: If war breaks out in Iraq how will that affect your role? A: When the secretary of defence, the president and General [Tommy] Franks decided to focus in on Afghanistan, they established a combined joint task force just to home in and focus on Afghanistan and the terrorism that was there. They made the decision just about 90 days ago, to go and stand up this combined task force to do exactly the same thing for the Horn of Africa. So our total focus, all the forces that we have out here, all the forces we have access to in our command and control structure, is purely focused on our coalition partners from the countries from Yemen and down across inside the Horn of Africa. So regardless of anywhere else in the world, whether it is Iraq or anywhere else, we will maintain 100 percent of our focus and our effort right here working with our coalition partners. So to answer the question, if something was to happen we will not be pulled to go anywhere else in the world. We will stay right here and continue to work very closely with the nations in eastern Africa.