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US Briefs NATO Defense Ministers on Anti-terrorism Ideas
The United States briefed its 18 NATO allies about ideas and approaches for the future anti- terrorism strategy and actions at an informal meeting of defense ministers on Wednesday, a NATO official said.
US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who represented US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the meeting, gave a presentation over possible correlations between the September 11 attacks on the United States and international terrorist groups, the official told reporters.
Rumsfeld canceled his planned trip to Brussels because he had to stay at home to continue planning the American response to the attacks, NATO sources said.
Instead, Wolfowitz came here to present some of the information the United States has collected linking suspects to the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, the official said.
Obviously, the official said, the United States believes that the anti-terrorism campaign will be a long-term drive and a multi- faceted one, which needs combined means including political, diplomatic, financial, police and people, among other resources.
Opening the meeting, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said the "barbaric acts" in New York and Washington two weeks ago represent an intolerable assault on not just the American people and those who were injured, but also humanity and "the values we all share."
"They are an affront to everything this alliance stands for and they are a direct threat to international peace and security," the NATO chief said. That is why the alliance has decided to determine that if "the attack was directed from abroad," it should be regarded as being covered by Article 5 of NATO's founding Washington Treaty, Robertson said.
Under the article 5, the attack on the United States was an attack on all the NATO allies if attacks come from abroad, Robertson added.
The defense ministers from 19 NATO member states also discussed the alliance's relations with Russia and were due to meet, in a separate session, with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov later on Wednesday. The United States is seeking Russian support for its campaign against terrorist organizations.
The one-day meeting was originally scheduled to be held on Wednesday and Thursday in Naples, Italy, but the venue was switched to Brussels because "it would be unwise to move so many key staff away from this (Brussels) headquarters at a time when we need to be functioning at full capacity," said Robertson.
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