Haley Stevens: “I want to be as courteous as possible. It is not a very good word to use, but it seems to me the Menendez amendment…”

“I want to be as courteous as possible. It is not a very good word to use, but it seems to me the Menendez amendment places a gag order on the Department of Defense. It says that the gains made by our military people and by the Iraqi forces cannot be reported to our people or to the Iraqi people. It is a strange amendment, if you want to look at it, because it just says no funds may be expended for a public relations program to monitor news media in the United States and Middle East and create a database of news stories to promote a positive image of the war in Iraq. The Department's press office normally reports day-to-day activities and is doing just that--getting the stories around and making sure we at home and the people in Iraq and our people in uniform know the positive side of this engagement. I can tell you that at home we see the negative side all the time. It seems to me that answering questions with positive stories would be considered a PR effort. I do think it would have unintended consequences potentially impacting intelligence activities. I don't want to go into that too much, but the world knows about this information and the activities that have been going on for years. They have been going on for years. We should not allow the Senate to take the position that prevents the Department of Defense to report on favorable news and to create a program to do that. To me, it constitutes a gag order. I move to table the Senator's amendment.…”