brand new fateful code has been born. September 11, 2001, witnessed the birth of a new danger code in the world. (No) Thanks to the Bin Laden terrorists we now have a new combination of numbers to henceforth dread as portending fate and ill omen. It is the 9-11 code. Only a little hyphenation separates it from the largely fateful and awe-inspiring emergency code 911 that often signals a dire situation in America. 9-11-01, a day that will forever live in infamy in the traditions of Pearl Harbor, has etched itself on the columns of modern civilization as a day to be memorialized as a dark and a fateful day of rage, what the old Latin described as Dies Irae.

It is not yet clear to anyone known to me why Bin Laden and his terror brigade chose that particular September day to unleash their terror on America and the contemporary world. But a reasonable speculation suggests that the terrorists settled on that fateful date for the mundane reason that the monumental tragedies they would wrought on the so-called western civilization would serve as an unforgettable warning to the Americans and the world at large of more tragic terrors ahead and hence of many more reasons for the citizens of the world to dial 911. As you can see, this is mere speculation for it is not a gift given to any sane human being to decipher what goes on in the mind of a suicidal terrorist.

However the infamous 9-11 date is rapidly assuming a legendary life of its own in the annals of landmark events in America and perhaps in the world over. On that fateful day, amidst the commotion that trailed the tragic attacks, one of our students approached my office and handed me a copy of a quotation from Nostradamus 1654. She claimed that the message had been e-mailed to her by some other students:

In the city of God there will be a great thunder, two brothers torn apart by chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb.� �The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.� �On the 11th day of the 9th month � two metal birds would crash into two tall statues � in the new city � and the world will end soon after.

She sought my opinion as regards what to make of what she described as Nostradamus�s prediction of the tragedy in New York City. I told her that I had at the moment no opinion whatsoever but would research the issue further if she let me. I wanted to consult with peers with regard to the said predictions of Nostradamus since I had never taken any interest in his predictions and was therefore totally ignorant of his books. In the next couple of days later, I would discover to my utmost amazement that almost everybody around me had acquiesced to the view that what happened on 9-11-01 in New York had been long predicted by Nostradamus. I was the odd person out. I did not know Nostradamus and had not anticipated the supposed fulfillment of his predictions on that fateful day of September 11.

The invocation of the predictions of Nostradamus to explain the events of 9-11 was perhaps the beginning of the current mythologizing of the September tragedy and its date. Hence 9-11 became for many people not just a date of the horrific crimes of the Bin Laden�s terrorists but a divinely determined date long in the mind of the great predictor of all times. And for many more people thereafter 9-11 became the first day and a code to a long chain of cataclysmic events that would culminate in the third world war, which some astrologers and doomsday prognosticators believe to be the end of human history, as we know it.

But for me, that was too scary a burden to be invested in one calendar day. I was not yet ready to concede the 9-11 tragedy to Nostradamus instead of Bin Laden. But to compound the whole situation and marginalize my view of the tragedy, every other segment of the American society seemed to follow in tandem in investing this date with mystery upon mystery. The press, the musicians, sportsmen and women, ordinary people on the streets and even the politicians, immediately accorded 9-11 a BC-AD status. To the effect that 9-11 ceased to be just a calendar day. It became both an end and a beginning of a new era, a watershed to a new life of modified freedom and abbreviated openness that has dawned on America - �land of the free and home of the brave�. Hence one often reads and overhears even as I write a pre-9-11 or post-9-11 America or the world. And I have every reason to suspect that for many centuries to come this earth-shattering event on September 11 will be chronicled with the ancient formulary of groundbreaking events:

On the eleventh day of the ninth month of the first year of the third millennium, in the first year of the presidency of George Walker Bush of the United States of America, a band of suicide terrorists from the camp of Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan hijacked and crashed four passenger planes into the American symbol of prosperity and civilization, the World Trade Center Twin Towers and the American seat of military power, the Pentagon massacring thousands of innocent people. The last plane aimed to crash either on the American seat of political power, the Whitehouse or the Capitol, was heroically wrestled to a fatal crash in a farmland in Pennsylvania by a daredevil group of passengers who on learning of the tragic endings to the earlier flights to New York and Washington DC on that day took their own fates in their hands and therefore paid the supreme price while trying to stem the tide of the terrorist massacre as well as save their nation from further embarrassment.

Nowhere to my knowledge is the significance of 9-11 being played out the most than in the hyperboles and symbols people are using to appreciate the tragedies of that day. It seems though that the old clich�, namely, that it was the day America lost her innocence, seems to be winning out in a landslide. Nearly every writer nowadays claims that America had some innocence, which it lost as a result of the terrorist victory in her territory. But I do not know much about this hyperbole of innocence in this situation. Thank God there are other emerging clich�s for us to consider. Representative Barney Frank, the fiery Massachusetts Democrat, preferred to turn the well-worn clich� upside down when he described 9-11 as the day America lost her guilt, meaning that it was the day America was relieved of the guilt she had felt in waging wars in other countries since she had had a successful war waged against her own citizens in her own territory. Though the congressman seemed to make some sense, he was immediately hushed down by the objectivity professing American press. The understandable argument against him being that nothing in the history of America and the world could justify the horrendous crimes the terrorists had on 9-11 committed against her and her innocent citizens. And that seemed absolutely valid as an argument. Nothing on earth can bring rationality to bear on the crimes of the terrorists. However it was also true that Bin Laden and his organization had managed in their despicable crimes against civilization to bring home to many Americans something they had previously only heard as news items or seen as television pictures. But whether such pictures did excite some guilt in their consciences previous to 9-11 as Mr. Frank had claimed is something we will never know.

Along the line of Bonny Frank, the acerbic-tongued Bill Maher of the ABC�s Politically Incorrect fame seemed to have put his foot in his mouth and got his tongue tangled in the process when he appeared to suggest that the terrorists who died in their irrational 9-11 mission showed real courage while the American soldiers who launch intermittent missiles into foreign countries from thousands of miles away were the real cowards. He was roundly condemned in the �fair and balanced� American media and made to prostrate from one network to another professing his patriotism and retracting his �apostasy�. The common argument against him, which was perhaps also true, was that in this time of needed courage and bravery it would be unpatriotic and counterproductive for any bona fide American citizen to suggest that his/her superpower nation had at any point in time acted cowardly.

The fact is a true superpower never acts cowardly. Even when she has her back pressed against the wall, she manages to act bravely if only to maintain her superpower status. And that is the politically correct impression mandated on everyone in this extraordinary time in America. Maher was true to type. His statement was politically incorrect. But he forgot to realize that there was little room for expensive comedies in a war situation. Every nation, whether possessing of a super or a minor power, needs to distance itself from the word �coward� in order to keep its war efforts going. Bravery and heroism are the two driving forces of warfare. Cowardice walks in the opposition direction. And such is the accepted hypocrisy of warfare. It has been with us since Cain slaughtered his brother Abel and Abraham went to war against the Chedorlaomer.

A lonely superpower in the present world is like an absolute monarch of the ancient world. He hardly falls sick and never dies. He is never defeated even when living in exile. And should he eventually die, he is announced as having disappeared and assumed his high throne in the skies. Such a thought process is alive and well today. And it has a place even in this strange war against the shadowy forces of Bin Laden. It is called propaganda and it is needed in every war enterprise for success and victory. For anybody like the comedian Maher to suggest otherwise in the name of free speech and humor means that he is yet to arrive in the post-9-11 era.

All these tend to show that it was not only the twin towers of the WTC, the fortress of the Pentagon, the innocent people of America and the world that were made casualties by the Bin Laden terrorists on 9-11. A large portion of the press and in fact the American and world public as a whole became casualties one way or the other as they seemed to have sacrificed a lot of their vaunted objectivity and gone for the juggler in muzzling free speech. But that certainly is going to be the life of the post-9-11 era. The era of unfettered freedom of speech as a human right issue, of an open and expansive society as indicative of the sophistication of contemporary civilization, may have been murdered by the terrorists on 9-11. We will sooner than later begin to adjust to life in the post-9-11 time of war without end. The new era is that in which we may be called to sacrifice a lot of what makes contemporary society civilized so as to purchase from the terrorists our primary right to continue to enjoy our human lives.

Also not to be outdone in this season of confusion, symbolism and hyperboles are people�s ingenious efforts to eke out whatever positives that could be extracted from the rubbles of the tragedies of 9-11. Many great minds are employing all sorts of hyperboles to convey what they see as the shoots of heroism arising from the tragic ruins of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the downed aircraft in Pennsylvania. In a sermon during one of the marathon religious services honoring the dead and consoling the afflicted of the tragedy, Cardinal Edward Egan of New York described the terrorists as having reduced Ground Zero to Ground Hero. He was ingenious. The imagery immediately caught people�s imagination. All the ancient records containing the hero-word were dusted and made to dominate the airwaves and newspapers of New York once again. The Latin pop superstar, Enrique Iglesias, made an instant cash-in. His latest outing in pop music with chorus that runs �I can be your hero baby�, though having nothing to do with the heroes of 9-11, became an instant hit anyway. People were searching for the word hero anywhere and could make use of it even when the purported hero was as mundane as an imaginary lover reassuring his/her beloved. Grammarians usually describe such an attitude as grasping for straws. On the days following the tragedy of 9-11, everybody in America and perhaps the world over grasped for straws in an effort to make meaning out of the monumental absurdity unleashed by the terrorists.

In a similar vein, pontificating as the �arch-episcopa� in the ultra-ecumenical service at the Yankee Stadium a few days after the tragedy, Oprah Winfrey and her array of high profile clergy speakers managed to elevate the memories of the ordinary victims, the great firefighters, police officers, emergency workers and the daring passengers aboard the flight from Pennsylvania to sainthood. The whole atmosphere was suffused with patriotism, heroism and prayerfulness. Never has America been so prayerful, so holy, so fervent and so disciplined than it was in those few days after the tragedy. America, stretching from the prairies to the mountains to the oceans, became just like one huge monastery. Even self-professed atheists appeared to have fallen deep into prayer for meaning and consolation. There was a coast-to-coast offering of holy oblation to God on behalf of the dead and the living. It was an eerily solemn period in America. The super-material American society suddenly embarked on a prayerful retreat. The whole situation was absolutely surreal and different. The five hundred-plus legislators in Washington were transformed in an instant into one huge choir with Senator Daschle and Speaker Hastardt acting as stand-in choirmasters. The great American folk hymns - �God Bless America� and �America the Beautiful� leaped-frog past the Brit-bashing �Star Spangled Banner� as the people�s anthem of choice. The Los Angeles Police Department fought gallantly and threatened to sue so as to be allowed to make a badge of honor and valor out of 9-11 in remembrance of the great heroes who laid down their lives trying to save those entrapped in the WTC and Pentagon rubbles. Everybody was working very hard trying to highlight and maximize the positives from the ruins of the 9-11 absurdity.

The lavish outpouring of patriotism and fellow-feeling as a result of the tragedy of that day has been praised as a great silver lining beyond the dark cloud of evil that became manifest on 9-11. Especially the resurgence of the practice of religion and its validation as a veritable force of social integration, the return of acts of courtesy on the American streets, the value of family life and preciousness of love and marital relationships, the dissolution, or a least, the suspension of ethnic rivalry and feuding, etc., have been seen as some of the positives drawing from the tragedies of 9-11. As people have been remarking ever since, America became her best in that period of her great tragedy. In fact everything seemed to have taken up a new meaning as a result of the events of 9-11. It looked like America was born anew on the day of its greatest humiliation. And no matter what Bin Laden and his forces may be celebrating as their victory against America on that fateful day, the realization of these positives is a great achievement for America and the world.

Whatever one chooses to say about the motivation, cowardice or valor of Bin Laden and his terrorist organization, the fact remains that their accomplishment on that fateful 9-11 has completely reshaped the landscape of modern civilization, mandating a re-evaluation of the principles of contemporary arts and science, initiating a new conception of warfare, a new perception of an open and a free society as well as inaugurating a new era of secretive and behind-the-camera-kind of war that will neither have an end in view nor respect any traditional convention on warfare. That September day and the symbols of its calendar date have perhaps become a code that will sooner than later acquire the fateful aura of the Apocalypse�s satanic code 666. This springs from the fact that it was the day the dark shadowy forces of terrorism accomplished its most significant feat ever against the supreme forces of might, liberty and civilization in our world. It was the day the sole superpower in the world was dressed down and made to kiss the dust, even though for a fleeting moment, by the ragtag kamikaze forces of the murderous genius Bin Laden. I wonder if the Qu�ran that seems to have a counter version of almost every story in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible will not produce its own version of the David and Goliath story with which the terrorist sponsors of the September massacre could gloat in to explain their phenomenal accomplishment. In a way, the terrorists were like the little David that thumbed the nose and marched on the trunk of the giant and mighty Goliath of the American superpower.

However, if the west and the rest of the civilized world stopped short at this material evaluation of the terrorist accomplishments on 9-11, they would have completely missed the real lessons of that fateful day. It was a day that shattered assumptions more than it destroyed the artifacts and superstructures of civilization. Bin Laden terrorists left in their trails not just thousands of innocent victims violently massacred and cremated against their unsuspecting wills, but heaps of rubbles of the western civilization�s monumental landmarks and incalculable number of scientific and historical assumptions raped and shattered forever. As one of my favorite columnists of the New York Times Thomas Friedman brilliantly said, what the terrorists accomplished in America would be comparable to a band of foreign bandits knocking down the symbols of Egyptian civilization, the pyramids. In a way, Bin Laden not only knocked down the pyramids of American and western civilization, he made a mockery of contemporary way of life and blew a hole on contemporary fortresses of wealth and power. And that was indeed a very significant achievement. The terrorists have therefore made a case that the contemporary west must reconsider the assumptions that underlie its civilization. So, when the American government is making plans to rebuild New York and Washington, fortify their fortresses and curtail civil liberty as an adequate response to the tragedy, it must include also an effort to reconsider some of the underlying principles of western science and culture that became victims of the terrorist attack.

First, the science of modern architecture took a terrible hit and became the number one victim of the terrorist attack. According to a documentary I watched a few days ago, the twin towers of the WTC were conceived and built by their architect from Michigan to be able to survive the impacts of 9-11. According to the documentary, the architect encased the towers in durable steel cages for resistance against a bullet-like or missile-like impact. His achievement was then praised as an ingenious innovation in modern skyscraper architecture. He even was said to have boasted that even if the biggest Boeing aircraft ever to be made were to slam into them, they would standstill. Guess what? The aircrafts that brought down the towers were not the largest Boeing or airbus in service. Yet the towers collapsed like a pack of cards on that fateful day, and so did the vaunted scientific assumptions of the twin towers� architect. The once ingenious architectural assumption that fed many skyscrapers built after the New York Twin Towers lies today in the rubbles of what used to be called the twin towers of the world trade center of New York. And that is a warning to all ye skyscraper builders!

What about the Pentagon? It was presumably built in the height of the cold war era. According to an opinion, the walls were conceived to withstand the explosion of a nuclear bomb. And many vital buildings in Washington DC were built or refurbished with such assurances, I have been told. And this is understandable. The beginning of wisdom during the cold war was the fear of a Soviet explosion of a nuclear bomb in any American city especially Washington DC. So every vital building in Washington was perhaps refurbished in anticipation of the possibility of this unthinkable scenario becoming a reality. But on that fateful 9-11, the great Pentagon, the ultimate fortified building in Washington DC comparable to the Whitehouse, could not even withstand the jet-fuel of a passenger aircraft. The engineering assumption that underlies the erection of those concrete columns and beams could not hold up on the day of need. Under the rubbles of the great Pentagon lie today the many assumptions that have served important edifices across the world. And in the post-9-11 world, all of those building that drew from the Pentagon, wherever they may be in the world, would have to have their principles reconsidered and reconceived.

Consider the assumption that steel structures held the key to future architectural marvels. As clay and concrete structures looked miserably archaic, structures of steel began to assert their dominance of modern cities. It appeared as if the Roman-like beams and columns were on their way out to make room for the lighter and more flexible structures made of steel and the like. But those assumptions were buried on 9-11 in the rubbles of the twin towers in New York. The meticulously crafted steel structures of the WTC just melted away in the face of a heat wave averaging 3000 degrees from the highly inflammable jet-fuel. One architect confessed the other day that at the time the WTC was built there was no way any one would have suspected that its steel skeleton would be required to withstand a heat intensity averaging 3000 degrees. Nice try at a post-eventum rationalization buddy! The fact is that the post-9-11 architectural science must be forced to play down the use of steel in landmark edifices and return to the old world of concrete and clay beams and columns. They seem to be the only structures that stand the test of time. Ask the only real architects the world has ever known, namely, the builders of the pyramids.

Can you remember the assumption that dominated debates during the 2000 American presidential election? It was touted that the future American war would be hi-tech, spaced-based and missile-oriented. The Republican candidate and now the president was firm in his belief that America faced her greatest danger by way of a rogue nation launching an errant missile against American cities in an attempt to maximize the massacre of innocent civilians. Hence he vigorously campaigned and still campaigns for the voiding of the Antiballistic Missile treaty to enable America embark on building a solid defense shield to protect her from errant missiles. But the assumption underlying that belief died on 9-11. The Bin Laden terrorists managed to tell the world that the weapon they should have and must continue to worry about is that that could easily be made by converting a civilian aircraft into a portent missile that could be as lethal as a nuclear bomb.

The Bin Laden terrorists and their allies also buried the assumption that the greatest threat to humanity was the war to be fought with a nuclear weapon. With the current spate of anthrax cases in many US cities, the terrorists or whoever is behind them, is warning the world that the new kid in the block is not nuclear warhead after all. But rather it is the highly portent biological and chemical weapons. That is to say, innocent people may not have to wait to be nuked to die in droves with the highly complicated science of nuclear chemistry but a simple release of a common gas or germ can get the job of a mass liquidation of innocents accomplished for the mischievous terrorists.

What about the pre-9-11 assumption that the war of the future would have to depend on the size of a country�s armed forces arrayed face to face in a battle formation as well as the complexity of its military hardware and the sophistication of its intelligence apparatus? That was partly what made the US, the Russians and the Chinese boast of their superpower status. All of them have and could maintain armies numbering in the millions. Well the terrorists of Bin Laden laid this assumption to rest as well on September 11. That the military contingent of about nineteen terrorists wreaked such a monumental havoc on the most sophisticated security operatives in human history made nonsense of all previous assumptions on warfare.

Have you thought about the assumption that an ideal civilized society is one that is free and open to all her citizens? With such a standard America prided herself as the most civilized and most sophisticated nation in the world since she was relatively open and free to all her citizens. Well the Bin Laden terrorists also proved on 9-11 that the march towards such an ideal civilized society could prove too costly to sustain. They succeeded in forcing us back to the real world of hate, enmity and insecurity. And the answer is surely going to be more restrictions and denials of what used to be considered as our inalienable human rights in a free and civilized society.

Has anybody been taking note of how fast the different institutions of government have been embarking on a rethink of their previous assumptions? The airline industry is scampering back to install the once discarded primitive and low-tech latches on its cockpit doors to prevent potential terrorists from breaking and banging their way into the cockpit cabin. Members of the intelligence community have begun to abandon their sophisticated eavesdropping gadgets that woefully failed them on that fateful day. They are now returning to the ancient methods of intelligence gathering by paying up human agents to spy and report what they had witnessed. The world did change on 9-11. The only way we can react appropriately to the new era we have found ourselves is to painstakingly look into all our assumptions of the previous era. Many of them have ceased to be valid in the world of post-9-11.

Finally, America and the civilized world must take the challenge of Bin Laden and his terrorists very seriously. If there is any lesson to be learned from history it is, sophisticated empires and civilizations are usually destroyed by rogues, criminals and barbarians. History is littered with the skeletons of wondrous civilizations that were felled by common criminals and barbarians. And history advances in circles of cycles!