As Samuel Coleridge long ago advised, suspension of disbelief is
the necessary state of mind for a drama to capture an audience's attention.
As entertainment pervasively supplants understanding in global mass
culture, suspension of disbelief regarding 9-11 seamlessly operates
by liquidation of the facts that ground truth.
The long line of repressed facts begins years before 9-11, most clearly
with top-down blockings of F.B.I. agents' investigations of mounting
evidence of a plan for civilian aircraft hijacking and dive-bombing
of major U.S. buildings - a plan called "Project Bolinka"
and known about since before 1996. These blocks on F.B.I. investigations
were so obstructive that the Deputy-Director of the F.B.I. and its
Director of Anti-Terrorism, John O'Neill, resigned in a career-sacrificing
protest at the top-down interference. This was before he too revealingly
died on 9-11 as the World Trade Center's new Director of Security.1
There were also explicit warnings from the intelligence agencies of
Sudan, France, Russia and a chorus of other international sources
about the coming 9-11 attack. There were even statements by "Israeli
members of the intelligence community in the U.S." that they
knew of the attack beforehand - reports which were not denied by U.S.
Secretary of State Powell when the question arose in a press conference
which I observed on December 18. Perhaps most remarkably, there had
been direct warnings from the Republican Party's own past Chief Investigative
Council for the House Judiciary Committee to the closed decision circuits
of Congress and the Bush administration. Representing F.B.I. special
agents suing the U.S. Justice Department (along with Washington-DC
Judicial Watch), David Philip Schippers reported in Houston on October
10 on the "Alex Jones Talk Show" that these agents knew
of a plan of bin Laden's network to attack Lower Manhattan with "commercial
airlines as bombs" long before 9-11, but were blocked from investigative
and preventative action by F.B.I. and U.S. Justice Department command,
and threatened with prosecution under the National Security Act if
they published this information. Attorney-General Ashcroft himself,
reports Schippers, refused to return calls on this matter to his fellow
senior Republican for four weeks before 9-11.
The Inner Logic of Decision
The mass media, dominantly owned by military-industrial and infotainment
corporations, declined to report any of these facts. The inner logic
of the shared value ground and decision structure operating under
the deadly phenomena of "America's War against Terrorism"
runs deeper and wider the more one looks. In the world of forgotten
fact, U.S. logistical and financial support of terrorist networks
and narcotic-financed "wars of liberation" from Afghanistan
to Kosovo had been systematically fomenting chaos for well over a
decade before 9-11 - the distinguishing strategy of this empire's
movement of military-political perimeters across borders. In this
case, it involved the CIA's partnership with Pakistan's Intelligence
Services (I.S.I.) in financing and training al Qaeda, the Taliban
and the Afghanistan-based terrorist camps. The I.S.I's commander in
chief, Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad was, in another moment of this offstage
decision structure, visiting Washington the week preceding 9-11, and
is known to have ordered that $100,000 be wired to the lead WTC hijacker,
Mohammed Atta before that. These facts do not fit "the whole
new reality" that is officially proclaimed after 9-11, and so
the global corporate news empire communicates only disconnected trivia
dominated by terrorist news to sustain the appropriate audience mood.
What is feared above all in rule of home audiences by illusion is
reversal of public acceptance of the image structure.
It would take a logbook more to report the full panoply of failures
and stand-downs of standard operating procedures throughout the highly
co-ordinated steps and logistics of the 9-11 attack, described by
a former German Minister of Technology, Andreas van Buelow, as "unthinkable
without years-long support from secret apparatuses of the state and
industry". High-level interventions in normal precautionary routine
included years of overriding immigration rules for U.S. passports
to Middle East "freedom fighters" destined for al Qaeda,
U.S. airforce training of Afghani-based terrorists, non-action on
repeated alarms of al Qaeda terrorist activities threatening the United
States and New York, top-down interdiction of investigation of Saudi
royal funding of al Qaeda, and ignoring of known floods of puts on
affected airline stocks before 9-11 linked to a firm, A.B. Brown,
with high-level C.I.A. management.
The money sequences, arms and illegal narcotics connections all bore
a familiar pattern. What connected them was their ruling moral syntax
whose portrayed meaning is "protecting the Free World".
But the last steps on the stage were across the open heavens and difficult
to conceal. Although U.S. airforce interceptions of hijacked planes
are normally only minutes-long, there was a stand-down of these automatic
interception actions for all of the hijacked planes of 9-11, without
one airforce plane turning a wheel for over two hours. The terrorists
circled jumbo jets known to be hijacked around the military air-command's
front yard airspace until after all three of the buildings had been
dive-bombed. Yet no disciplinary process nor formal investigation
by the Pentagon, the F.B.I., Congress or the mass media was undertaken
despite all the stunning breaches of defence routine, which together
provided an open passage for the long-planned attack.
None of these connected gaping holes in the official story have been
followed up in the received media. One reason for this is that from
the first moment of the 9-11 aftermath all attention was, instead,
riveted on the claimed threat of an Islamic-based plot to "destroy
America". No sooner had the 9-11 disaster sunk in than "the
anthrax attack" then followed. Not even the known genetic signature
of an official U.S. source for the anthrax sent to Democrat Senate
majority leader, Tom Daischle, registered as a fact over the weeks
of terror that followed. Throughout, the inertial acquiescence of
the terrorist-occupied mass mind remained intact. What goes against
the grain of conditioning is experienced as not credible, or as a
hostile act.
The Unseen Moral Syntax
As a philosopher, I am not interested in "conspiracy theories",
the favoured term to invalidate questions about 9-11. I am interested
in the deeper question of the life-and-death principles of regulating
value systems which connect across and explain social orders.
In the wider lens of investigation of the normative regime of a civilisation,
the pattern of 9-11 decisions is linked to a larger historical pattern.
This larger pattern included U.S. plans prior to 9-11 to invade Afghanistan
for long-stated geostrategic reasons of Middle Asia oil, forward military
bases, and political axes of control. It included as well the U.S.'s
successful strategic plan for Soviet Union collapse a decade before
that - a collapse which was precipitated by the multi-billion dollar
strategic, financial and armaments support by the U.S. National Security
Agency and the C.I.A. of the same Afghanistan fundamentalist factions
and warlords as plotted 9-11, including Osama bin Laden. These "moral
equivalents of the founding fathers", as U.S. president Reagan
then called them, were U.S.-supported terrorist rings who were also
later involved in training, armed support and narcotics-route partnership
with the KLA ("Kosovo Liberation Army") insurrection in
Yugoslavia, as well as in Russia's Chechnya province. Interestingly,
it was only when the formerly favoured Taliban faction suddenly shut
down over 90% of Afghanistan's opium production for the global market
in 2001, as UN officials confirmed in March 2002, that the Taliban
was declared America's mortal enemy and all its known positions bombed
for months on end - while the opium that remained growing was concentrated
in the areas controlled by the newly favoured Northern Alliance.
With the transnational opium market on the covert side of the new
business, and the vast new oil and gas fields for Texas control on
the overt side, the "expanding global market" has a deeper
meaning than yet spoken. "Who cares about wetlands and the environment
any more?" proclaimed the New York Times in the post-9-11
ghost town of public affairs. Yet the price of oil kept sliding in
the world market - to only $16 a barrel in November after all these
victories against "Islamic terrorism" had been won. So a
threatened war against Iraq unfurled from the strategic planning of
the oilman Whitehouse to select for better outcomes. Declaration of
imminent war on Iraq soon righted the pattern. It focussed all attention
on another shadow of the Other whose omnipresent threat is always
necessary to sustain a deranged order of rule, and it almost doubled
the price of oil to over $27 in April. Behind all the shadows dancing
on the wall of the global media screen was one constant - the deranged
value system determining the decisions from behind. It silently regulates
"Free World" approval and disapproval across borders with
an actually regulating meaning of "our values and way of life"
whose inner logic is morally insane.
"Who benefits?" is a standard forensic question which helps
to clarify the meaning of acts of commission and omission. One of
the prime connecting interests of "the great game" being
played here is the vast and largely untapped mineral deposits across
the entire third world of continuing crises and wars. Political
chaos is a prime strategic pattern of this resource rule - from
Latin American death-squads through sub-Sahara African wars to South-East
Asian covert armies and invasions. In this case, there was also the
U.S. off-stage government's threat of a "carpet of bombs"
for Afghanistan before September 11 if the formerly U.S.-favoured
Taliban faction could or did not expedite the long-planned Unocal
oil pipelines through Afghanistan to Central Asia's vast oil and gas
fields. This prime value objective was quickly confirmed for construction
with the Pakistani Minister of Oil on October 10 as soon as the bombing
of Afghanistan had been accepted by the official world. The newly
installed Afghanistan government's support for the U.S. oil consortium
was then certain after that, because Afghanistan's newly appointed
interim Prime Minister, Hamid Karzai, is known to be a friend of U.S.
oil interests, the CIA and specifically a former Unocal representative
to Afghanistan.
In short, the more the dots of the officially unmentioned facts are
tracked in their interlocking frame across time and place, the more
the lines of their connection reveal a deep structure of values, choice
and consequence which crosses national borders as the universalising
logic of a civilisation's moral corruption. "America is at war"
has a meaning which has not yet been understood. As long as it is
not comprehended, it will continue to command its allies to loot and
destroy the planet, now all under cover as "the free world's
war against terrorism".
The Deranged Value System
An illustration explains the closure of the fanatic moral syntax.
When the U.S. president immediately identified the 9-11 terrorist
attack as "a declaration of war", his categorical assertion
was certain and officially accepted as certain by obedient allies
like Canada although there was no international law or norm which
justified this official designation. Here as elsewhere, an absolutist
groupthink rules above the law and beneath it, and is what the law
itself is selectively enforced or disregarded in terms of. That the
saturating declaration of "war against America" by an enemy
that could not be found and who came from another country than the
one to be bombed did not occasion reflection. Nor did the fact that
international law requires invading forces to be repelled to justify
such an attack across another nation's borders.
True to the comportment of the fanatic mindset, the imperviousness
to due process or evidence overrode the indisputable fact that the
subsequent U.S. bombing and invasion of peasant Afghanistan 8000 miles
from its borders was itself a major war crime. None of these issues
can register to this fundamentalist value set. For it is structured
to militantly repudiate or deny whatever evidence questions its validity,
including the number of innocent civilians maimed and killed by the
"historic triumph" of the superpower's attacks on one of
the world's poorest countries. Official and media representation operates
only manages public perception to justify what cannot be wrong. Since
this value system is not connected to life interests beyond its commands,
no problem can arise to it. That the war which followed 9-11 bombed
a distant and starving people, that it knowingly stopped food supplies
from reaching the rapidly increasing millions of famine victims, that
it disrupted planting of the next year's crops, that it terrorised
the majorities of the larger cities to flee into homelessness, that
it directly killed by far more innocent civilians than were killed
on September 11, and that its carpet-bomb invasion caused the deaths
of countless innocent children and uprooted millions - none of these
facts could be perceived through the lenses of the ruling moral syntax
as facts.
Like the rules of the game to the players, and "the great game"
is the language of the ascendant players themselves, the rules of
value are not an issue they can think of inside the game. They can
only calculate what maximises their places within its political offices
and investment returns. The truth thus comes increasingly to be only
an issue of when the cheque clears, and how much more of the globe
is made subject to transnational money-sequencing. In this way, the
English-speaking world acquiesces step by step in a pattern of fanatic
absolutism not witnessed since the fascist interregnum.
This article is adapted from the Preface of John McMurtry's VALUE
WARS: THE GLOBAL MARKET VERSUS THE LIFE ECONOMY now in press (London:
Pluto Press, 2002).
1. These facts and those in the following two paragraphs are most
comprehensively documented by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Director of the
Institute for Policy Research and Development, in his valuable 200-page
study, The War On Freedom: Causes and Consequences of 9-11
(Brighton U.K.: 2002).