BR Tag Bug

I sometimes use <br clear=”all” /> in a post or page to force a paragraph to start after the bottom of an image in a previous paragraph. I insert this in HTML editing mode, which is how I create all of my posts, even the ones created with offline composition tool, ecto.

Unfortunately, this tag is converted to a
tag when I save the post.

I think this is a bug. I don’t think WP should change any code that’s entered in HTML view.

Or is there something verboten about this code that I don’t know about?