The White House Briefing Room
September 18, 1998
PRESS BRIEFING BY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR SANDY BERGER
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release September 18, 1998
PRESS BRIEFING BY
NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR SANDY BERGER
The Briefing Room
9:59 A.M. EDT
..........
MR. BERGER:
Then the President will address the U.N. General
Assembly. As usual, the President of the United States is the first
speaker to the General Assembly, after the President of the UNGA.
This is the ninth time the President will have addressed the United
Nations -- sixth in terms of the annual meetings, but also in special
sessions that they have held on drugs, environment, and on the
occasion of the U.N.'s 50th anniversary.
And the President will talk about terrorism and the
common obligations of the international community to fight it. In
recent months, as you know, for example at the Naval Academy, and in
recent weeks in the wake of the bombings of our embassies in Africa
and our strikes in Sudan and in Afghanistan, the President has spoken
about this issue quite frequently. But he has done so often,
particularly, for example, in the Naval Academy speech, in
programmatic terms: here's what the international community must do
together to fight terrorism. We have to have better money-laundering
legislation. We have to have better cooperative mechanisms.
I expect in this speech for him to address the question
more broadly and speak to the international community about why the
fight against terrorism has become one that has to be at or near the
top of our world agenda. He will point out that with the spread of
information technology and the potential spread of weapons of mass
destruction, the technology of terror has become more lethal and more
available, and therefore there is a greater degree of common
responsibility to deal with this issue together.
He wants to make it clear to the international community
that the fight against terrorism is not a clash of civilizations or
cultures. The dividing line is between those who practice, support,
and tolerate terror, and those who understand that terrorism is plain
and simple murder. And he wants to press his case that the only way
to succeed in the combat against terrorism is working together and
understanding our common obligations to deal with this increasingly
serious problem.
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