We might as well brace ourselves for a second stri

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., USA – There’s no doubt the backlash from the horrors of September 11 have united Americans in grief, rage, prayer and plain simple patriotism, more than ever before. Congress quickly gave US President George W. Bush the $40 billion he said he needed for the rescue effort, to rebuild, for counter-terrorism measures – and a military strike.

In short $10 billion is available immediately, another $10 billion will be released once Bush catalogues what he intends to do with it. Can America afford such immense sums? Raising won’t be a problem despite the country virtually having been pushed into a mini-recession by the destruction of the World Trade Center complex (it’s not just the crumbled Twin Towers that were destroyed, but surrounding buildings were severely damaged). In architectural terms, Wall Street is practically "finished" and will someday have to be torn down and reconstructed. But the greatest loss is not just in terms of lives lost and the tears and suffering of those bereaved but in the "brain power" diminished by the loss of so many executives and "knowledge" workers in the doomed offices. And not just American "brain power." Thirty-one Japanese banks had branch offices in the Twin Towers. Hundreds of foreign executives and businessmen died, too, in last Tuesday’s carnage.

Yet, the American spirit, already astir, will carry this suddenly-embattled nation through. Americans, critics can rightly say, may have grown fat and complacent. However, that was before September 11. There will be a tougher, leaner America mobilizing in the weeks to come. That nation has been shocked out of its easy-going indifference and smugness – and there’s no nation on earth more formidable than an America aroused.

Tom Brokaw hymned the heroism of The Greatest Generation in his bestselling book, praising the generation of teenagers who fought and won World War II, crushing the Nazis and Imperial Nippon. This generation has now been given a chance to prove itself.

As for raising funds, given the mood of Americans throughout this continent, they’ll flock to buy up any "war bonds" that may be issued – just as they queued up individually for four to five hours to donate blood for the victims of the terrorist assault.

Here in San Francisco, the store windows are draped with American flags. From flagpoles all over the city, flags fly at half-mast in mourning for the victims of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. In the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue’s branch overlooking Union Square, large flags are draped, with funeral bouquets of lillies while on the windows themselves are painted the words, "In Deep Sorrow."

Twenty-thousand reservists are waiting for the call to mobilize here in California, and Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield is readying 36 C-5 transports and 24 KC-10 air refueling tankers to airlift the men called to the colors.

California alone has 5,000 Air Guard members (the California National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing at Moffet Field has already been flying helicopters and refueling tankers in the Persian Gulf, and the 349th Air Mobilization Wing, with 3,500 reservists scattered throughout Northern California, had already seen much action in "Desert Storm" and the Gulf War. (It may be a case, don’t forget, of Saddam, Here We Come Again!" and the "New Baghdad Blues," if it’s discovered that Saddam Insane had something to do with the World Trade Center strike.) Then, there are 16,000 Californians in the Army Guard, plus another 7,500, with headquarters in San Diego, belonging to the Naval reserves, although its reservists are scattered around California, Arizona and Nevada.

The "use of force resolution" just passed by Congress, of course, authorizes President Bush to order a "partial mobilization" of at least one million troops.

Will the United States forces attack Afghanistan for harboring and abetting "main suspect" Osama bin Laden, whose global network of terror is aptly called Al Qaeda, which is "The Base" in Arabic? It’s no secret that Afghanistan is his "base", with the fanatical Islamic Taleban rulers there as his protectors.

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Nineteen men of "Arab" origin have been identified as the hijackers of the four aircraft involved, men who had led quiet lives in Florida and other places. Two had come from the Saudi Arabian Air Force and had even been given flight training by the US Air Force, while two others graduated from a flying school in Florida.

Obviously, the "suicide" hijackers, who carried 266 passengers and air crew to their deaths along with themselves, were part of a much bigger conspiracy. Which gives the US the right to be paranoid about where the terrorist group, waging in its mind an Islamic Jihad (Holy War) against the infidel Americans, will "strike" next.

With our large population of Muslims, not only in Mindanao but in Metro Manila, we in the Philippines must brace ourselves. We might be part of that "second strike." Stopping the drug syndicates and resisting becoming a "narco-state" may turn out to be a lesser problem than defending ourselves against a well-funded, well-planned Islamic jihad. Remember, it was old Osama who helped jump-start the Abu Sayyaf, and who had sent not only bomb-expert Ramzi Youssef, but his own brother-in-law, to revive Moro rebellion in Basilan and the Mindanao mainland. The Muslim Filipinos, who fought alongside him in the Afghan war against Soviet invasion, have a special place in the heart and deep pockets of Bin Laden.

With regard to the US, it’s inconceivable that the men who seized those large passenger jets and rammed them into the North and South Towers of the WTC in New York and into the side of the Pentagon, acted in isolation. They surely have comrades and collaborators left at large, in spite of the raids successfully conducted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on their lairs and the arrest of some of their suspected confederates.

At the risk of sounding like a rumormonger, I’m sure the think tanks of the White House and the Pentagon have already been considering possible terrorist scenarios. Have the terrorists, for instance, secretly installed a nuclear bomb in one of America’s major cities? On television here, newscasters have already asked the question of whether the next horrid step might be "biological warfare."

This is why everyone here is on the alert.

That, if it’s so, is in sharp contrast to the laxity that resulted in the terrorist successes of Black Tuesday. What happened to the FAA’s Air Traffic Controllers whose radar screens and watchful eyes should have detected that American Airlines flight from Boston’s Logan airport suddenly changing its course, making a sharp left turn and heading not for Los Angeles but towards New York? Is the "Defcon" alert status of the US Air Force, which scrambles jets in minutes to intercept suspected incoming aircraft (as in the movie Air Force One), only in the motion pictures? And what about those "eyes in the sky," the NORAD satellites, which ostensibly track everything on earth? Couldn’t they have detect and transmitted that something was amiss?

There will be some "quiet" fingerpointing and the "lopping off" of heads in the days to come – which won’t be publicized. It would be too embarrasing.

There’s now a hue and cry about America lacking HUMINT or "human intelligence" resources, and making the mistake of relying only on technology. Yet, too often, HUMINT agents and informers report their findings but are ignored by the top brass. That, in truth, is what usually happens.

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On the other hand, there, too, is the heroism exhibited during the past terrible days. There are the 300 New York firemen, led even unto death by their courageous Fire Chief and his Deputy, along with Father Myck ("Mike"), the fire department’s chaplain of many years, who died in a desperate effort to evacuate the panicked workers and personnel from the burning and collapsing Twin Towers while attempting to douse the flames. And the 78 policemen from the NYPD who gallantly gave their lives, too. All today stand bareheaded in the dust and debris to do them honor.

In a column headed, "Inspiring Stories of the American Spirit" (Saturday, Sept. 15), columnist Ken Garcia of the San Francisco Chronicle said of that gallant crew: "Tragedies may not build character, but they certainly reveal it."

He lauded not only the firemen and policemen, but the thousands of volunteers now dangerously searching through the still-smoking rubble for any survivors, or "clues."

Garcia added: "I know I will never forget the image of Tom Barnett, the San Ramon man who it appears was among a group of airline passengers who took on the armed terrorists, hoping to thwart a maniacal plot to blow up the White House or another target in Washington DC. Or Jeremy Glick, a fellow passenger on doomed Flight 93, whom his wife said was destined to be on that plane for the simple reason that he was a person who always made a difference."

Jeremy was one of the men who had apparently joined Barnett in an effort to wrestle the plane from the control of the hijackers. They succeeded in crashing the plane, it seems, far short of its target – at the cost of their own lives. "He had to be on that flight because he was a person who knows that it only takes one person to change the world," his wife said through has tears.

Remarked the columnist about the hero’s widow Elizabeth: ". . . I will never be able to tell who is braver, Jeremy, or his wife."

He ended with a magnificent line: "Heroes are not hard to find. They’re just looking for the right time and place to show up."