Washington, Sept. 14 (UPI) - Chanting "USA - USA", exhausted police, rescue workers and firefighters found new energy to cheer and flourish flags amid the ruins of New York's World Trade Center on Friday, hailing President George W. Bush as the symbol of an America that would revive, recover and retaliate for the terrorist wounds gouged into its heart.
"Thank you for your hard work - thank you for making America proud," Bush told them, in a moment when his presidency struck a chord of moral unity and resolve with an outraged and grieving nation.
Meanwhile, intense scrutiny focused on Osama bin Laden and his al Qaida network as suspects in the terror attacks that devastated the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Tuesday -- though Secretary of State Colin Powell cautioned that the U.S. government had yet to make a formal determination that bin Laden was to blame for Tuesday's attacks.
"We have not yet identified Osama Bin Laden as the direct perpetrator," Powell said.
But American officials were rallying cooperation in countries around Afghanistan, where bin Laden has been based.
In Islamabad, U.S. ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, a former top CIA analyst on the region, met Pakistan's military ruler General Pervaiz Musharraf on Friday for the second time in 24 hours. A Pakistani official involved in the negotiations told United Press International that Pakistan granted four requests for cooperation from the United States:
--Overflight rights for use of Pakistani air space.
--Cutoff of fuel supplies to the Taliban.
--Closing the country's mountainous border with Afghanistan.
--Sharing vital intelligence.
However, the official told UPI Pakistan refused permission for any use of its territory as a staging area for U.S. troops to launch ground operations against Afghanistan.
"We're afraid of a backlash against our country," the official told UPI.
In Washington Friday, Bush formally declared a national state of emergency, citing "the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks." The president signed an order to call up to 50,000 military reservists to active duty, the first such activation since the Gulf War mobilization led by his father, President George H.W. Bush, in 1991.
The U.S. Senate Friday approved a resolution authorizing "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States." The House was expected to pass the resolution late in the day.
Both houses approved $40 billion to respond to Tuesday's attacks, half for rescue and rebuilding efforts in New York and at the Pentagon, and half for the pursuit and destruction of the hijackers, their networks and their sponsors.
"Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil," Bush said, at the earlier service of mourning at Washington's National Cathedral.
"War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing," he said.
At the same time, Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a public warning that henceforth American relations with other countries would depend on their cooperation with the Bush administration's new anti-terrorism campaign.
"I am not threatening so much as I am saying this has become a new benchmark, a new way of measuring the relationship and what we can do together in the future and what kind of support we can provide to you in the future across the whole range of issues and activities," Powell said.
American pressure had already elicited assurances of cooperation from some countries seen as state sponsors of terrorism, including Syria, and Sudan, State Department officials said.
Powell also warned Afghanistan's governing Taliban movement that their country was in immediate danger of America's vengeance.
"To the extent that you are providing haven, support, encouragement and other resources to organizations such as the organization headed by Osama Bin Laden ... you need to understand you cannot separate your activities from the activity of the perpetrators," Powell said at a State Department briefing. Powell then cautioned that the U.S. government had yet to make a formal determination that bin Laden was to blame for Tuesday's attacks.
U.S. and British intelligence agencies also were investigating whether there were links between bin Laden and various stock trades in the United States and Europe around the time of Tuesday's devastating attacks, the Sankei Shimbun newspaper in Japan reported. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission declined to confirm or deny the investigations.
In other developments, FBI officials in New Delhi secured from the Indian government documents and intelligence on bin Laden's operations in the region, including video film and the names and addresses of known militants, on the Taliban and its training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But in Europe, some conditions emerged to blur the unprecedented decision Wednesday by NATO to invoke Article V of the NATO Treaty and treat the attack on the U.S. as an attack on all the allies. Officials in Paris and Berlin, and Tony Blair's official spokesman in London, all said that this commitment was "not a blank check" of unconditional support for any American response.
NATO sources also told UPI Friday that during the North Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels Wednesday, representatives of Germany, Belgium and Holland had all questioned the invocation of Article V, fearing an American over-reaction in which they would be complicit. NATO finally agreed to give the Article V commitment when British and French delegates argued strongly for it, noting that the NATO commitment could also constrain the U.S. retaliation by requiring consultation with NATO allies.
Nonetheless, British officials said that the British aircraft carrier task force and 20,000 troops currently exercising with Omani forces in the Persian Gulf could be available to support an U.S. operations, under the terms of the NATO agreement.
"We are unlikely to divert from (the exercise) Saif Sereea to join the U.S. with strike forces, but we could help with logistics," said one senior British official. "Having said that, we have also clearly declared our support for Article 5 of NATO and there is obviously a huge willingness to support America wherever we can."
Afghanistan was bracing Friday for American attacks, Taliban officials told UPI.
"We fear the Americans will go for the offensive without determining whether Osama bin Laden was behind Tuesday's attacks or not," a spokesman for supreme Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar told UPI from Kabul in a telephone interview. "We are, nonetheless, ready for a U.S. offensive."
Despite tremendous international pressure, including United Nations sanctions, Taliban rulers have refused to expel bin Laden. But diplomatic sources told UPI that Pakistan was now trying to persuade the Taliban to surrender bin Laden for trial before an Islamic court, possibly in Saudi Arabia, but few Muslim countries are expected to relish such a prospect.
Although the U.S. armed forces were on high alert, and two aircraft carriers were reported cruising near the Persian Gulf within striking distance of Afghanistan, a senior White House official warned against any rush to judgment, or any expectation of a swift U.S, response.
"This is a long struggle, not a short one," the senior official told reporters in a background briefing. "If it takes multi-year, we'll devote multi-year. And I think it's probably a good thing to think that it probably will."
The international cooperation effort gathered pace, with Egypt's President Honsi Mubarak calling for an special conference of world leaders: "to adopt a decisive and lasting international stand against terrorism, which threatened and targets international peace and the security of (every citizen)."
Interpol, the global police cooperation bureau based in Lyon, France, has established a September 11 Task Force to coordinate all international police intelligence on the terrorist attacks, secretary-general Ron Noble, formerly of London's Scotland Yard, said Friday. Interpol plans to collate expand its existing data base on global terror networks with the latest passport and travel, telephone and credit card records used by known terrorist suspects.
British, French, German, Italian, Israeli and Russian intelligence services, who have been offering full cooperation with their American counterparts, have all conveyed to Washington their belief that bin Laden's network, known as al Qaida, is the prime suspect in the attacks, diplomatic sources told UPI.
"The way it was carried out, the choice of targets, the military approach, the highly professional preparation and the presumably large resources" were all reasons pointing to bin Laden, Frank-Walter Steinmayer, chief of staff to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, told reporters in Berlin.
In a statement distributed Friday by his spokesman in Islamabad, Pakistan, Omar said bin Laden was not involved in Tuesday's attacks.
Urging Washington to provide whatever evidence it had against bin Laden, Omar said: "We have no planes, no pilots in Afghanistan. It is not possible for Osama bin Laden to carry out such an attack from Afghanistan. He has no fax, no telephone, no computers."
Describing bin Laden as "a victim of his own reputation," the Taliban leader asked the United States to "catch those responsible for the attacks."
Taliban officials said they expected the U.S. attack to be far more extensive than the limited cruise missiles strikes launched after the 1998 bombings in East Africa. They said that the last time the Americans only targeted bin Laden's bases but this time they believed they would try to destroy Taliban's infrastructure.
On Tuesday, two commandeered planes were flown into the 110-story towers of the World Trade Center, a third hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in rural Western Pennsylvania after passengers told relatives by cellphone that they were planning to try and overpower the hijackers.
A total of 266 people on the planes died in the crashes. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Thursday 4,763 people were listed as missing at the World Trade Center. At the Pentagon, 126 were feared dead.
The FBI on Friday released the names of 19 people who it said were the hijackers.
The flight data recorder was recovered
from the crater formed when the airplane crashed in Pennsylvania, and the
flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were recovered from the
wreckage at Pentagon. The data devices from the New York crashes had not
yet been found.