Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that military members injured or killed in the Sept. 11 attacks will receive the Purple Heart, while civilian Defense Department workers injured or killed will earn a new medal.
The Secretary of Defense Medal for the Defense of Freedom will be awarded to civilian Defense Department workers hurt or killed in the attacks in New York and Washington.
Thursday marked the first time that the medals have been given for an incident on U.S. soil since World War II, Rumsfeld said. Purple Heart medals are usually given to soldiers wounded or killed during wartime.
"These assaults have brought the battlefield home to us," Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld wrote in an opinion piece in Thursday's editions of The New York Times that the war against terrorism is as much a battle over money as between military forces.
"This war will not necessarily be one in which we pore over military targets and mass forces to seize those targets," he wrote. "Instead, military force will likely be one of many tools we use to stop individuals, groups and countries that engage in terrorism."
He said one U.S. response may be to fire cruise missiles into military targets "somewhere in the world." But the United States is just as likely to focus on tracking investments moving through offshore banking centers.
"The uniforms of this conflict will be bankers' pinstripes and programmers' grunge just as assuredly as desert camouflage," he wrote.
In Islamabad, U.S. and Pakistani officials ended two days of talks in "complete unanimity" on military preparations for combating Usama bin Laden's terrorist network in Afghanistan, a Pakistani general said.
Details of the agreement were not announced, but Gen. Rashid Qureshi, spokesman for Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, said there was "no difference of opinion between Pakistan and America on the issue of combating terrorism." Pakistan, however, opposes any U.S. or other effort to bolster the northern alliance of opposition Afghan groups, which has been fighting the ruling Taliban that harbors bin Laden.
Pakistani officials said both sides had agreed to minimize the use of ground forces in any strike in Afghanistan.
Two U.S. government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Pakistan's report of a broad accord with the U.S. military was essentially correct. They would not elaborate.
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