In May 2004, leading Americans and the international community were indignant at the tortures of Iraqui prisoners by U.S. occupying forces when undeniable pictures were published. Yet no-one in the media of record or anyone else in a position of public trust scrupled to observe what had started it all - the lawless U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, “the supreme crime ” under international law, the crime which the judges at Nuremberg described as “only differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.2 The torture was, as the judges at Nuremberg had foreseen, a predictable consequence of “the supreme crime”. Yet all in official culture remained disconnected from the cause.

It was reassuring to life consciousness that the international media finally broadcast crimes against humanity instead of ignoring them. But manichean slogans of “the Free World” versus “the Terrorists” remained delinked from the criminality of the occupation itself. That the U.S. focus of concern was “damage to America’s image” indicated the nature of the problem. Although the Red Cross had reported that 70-90% of the torture victims were ordinary citizens picked up at random, this did not diminish cries for redirecting attention back to “the real danger, the terrorists endangering America”. That the official Taguba Report itself was not permitted to question anyone above a part-time reserve-army woman officer (who was kept out of the interrogation room by U.S. Defense Intelligence), was nowhere reported as evidence of top-down control.3 That the far worse crimes of maiming and killing defenseless Iraqui women and children by bombs were delinked from the torture regime inside the prisons indicated that the murderous blind eye was still closed.

In fact, documented reports of criminal abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces had been coming in to high command since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 with no decision to stop the routines.4 “Stress positions”, “humiliation”, “use of [attack] dogs”, “sleep deprivation”, “subjection to noise”, “prolonged isolation”, “food and water deprivation”, “restriction of toilet facilities”, and “diet denial” were the generic orders.5 Yet ever since November 13, 2001 shortly after 9-11, Presidential decree had unilaterally overridden the U.S.-signed Geneva Convention of 1949 on the Treatment of Prisoners for the first time in its history. Anyone who objected was deemed to be “lending support to terrorists”. The TV public itself daily watched prisoners - never charged or tried under any due process of law - hooded, shackled and limb-trussed, there were no visible asked questions about the brutality of the abuse, nor about the colonial occupation of the Cuban territory to perpetrate the crimes. What was central was “the torture scandal” and opinions on how to manage perception of it. Accordingly, “communist Cuba” was subjected to new and crippling sanctions for its “human rights abuses” as the state of siege by illegal U.S. embargo and destabilizations was stepped up. The Orwellian set-points of meaning did not arouse media or expert questions.

What could explain the systematic disconnect from reality with no consciousness of it? It was not confined to the U.S. Right or even the U.S. As the torture regime was exposed, the omnipresent liberal intellectual, Michael Ignatieff, urged fellow Canadians on public television to build up their military to join the U.S. in enforcing “human rights” across the globe.6 The disclosure of the videotaped Iraq tortures after years of lawless prescription was itself revealing of the selective mind-set at work. In fact, the story of U.S. torture on 60 Minutes in late April 2004 was a broadcast that had been held back for weeks because its pictures of torture by Americans were “not very patriotic” to show.7 Only when “CBS heard that Seymour Hersh, working for the New Yorker” was planning to publish fresh photographs - - and a damning report [by the army itself] - - did the network decide to go ahead”.8 Until the reports came out elsewhere first, the facts could not be seen. In consensual closing of the doors of perception, the documented evidence was blocked out as non-existent.

Throughout, U.S. concern remained narcissistic. “America is suffering a blow to its international image”, the elite and the many regretted with indifference to the fate of the victims about whom there was no further interest. The fatal pattern was overlooked that tells all - that the U.S. security state repudiates any law if it protects the lives of people outside itself. Since “America’s defence of its interests and investments” abroad entails the right to reject whatever is deemed inconsistent, it follows that its right is to act above the law. In the words of the U.S. September 2002 National Security Strategy document: “We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jursidiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept”. 9

Not only immunity from international criminal law was thus assumed. Unilateral American repudiations of the Convention for the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, the Kyoto Protocol, the Rights of Children, the Landmines Treaty, the Convention Against Racial Discrimination, the Comprehensive [Nuclear Bomb] Test Ban Treaty, the monitoring and testing requirements of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Treaties, the Covenant for Economic, Political and Cultural Rights of Nations, and the proposed Treaty on the Limitation of the Military Use of Outer Space all continued with no joining of the dots by expert commentary. What repels the pattern from view? Something deeper than class and faction is at work. A regime of meaning operates across classes and scientific disciplines themselves to disconnect the elements so that the whole cannot be seen. To be above the law - including laws applied by the U.S. to prosecute others - was assumed by all as “America’s leadership of the Free World”. Silently, the impunity that once only God-Kings pretended was internalized by other states and the UN itself as the regulating freedom of globalization.10

Exposure of the U.S. torture regime in Afghanistan and Iraq left the impunity intact. The pictures made plausible denial impossible, but the criminal occupation of Iraq continued with renewed UN support on June 8, 2004. Only disconnected pieces were perceived. The “War on Terrorism vindicated all. That the same justification was used decades earlier by the Third Reich was not observed, least of all by those invoking “appeasement of Hitler” as a justification to invade poor non-industrialized countries.11 The comparison was unthinkable through America’s lenses of self-conception which assumed itself as “the society of human rights”.

Behind one corporation-friendly state was the precipitating Reichstag Fire of February 27, 1933 to declare war on all who stood in the way. Behind the successor war state was the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9-11 to allow the same in different degree. Both industrial super states were supported by familiar transnational corporations working both sides.12 Both claimed “terrorism” by shadowy others as the ground of “self-defence” by emergency legislation and wars of invasion. But unlike the Reichstag Fire, 9-11 was advised as desirable before the event - by the Bush regime’s own Project For A New American Century . To be exact, PNAC planned a “process of transformation” to achieve “full spectrum U.S. dominance” across the world which was made contingent on “some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbour” if the process was not to be a “long one”.13

The wish of the men positioned to enable its fulfilment was duly granted within a year of Bush Jr’s inauguration, on September 11, 2001. Well known former allies monitored around the clock fulfilled their long known declaration of intention to attack the World Trade Center.14 One former U.S.-financed agent, Omar Abdel Rahman, was specially experienced at the job, having masterminded the first attack on the WTC in 1993 before warning at his trial of another to come 15. Another formerly assisted agent in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, who was U.S. armed and supported to attack the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan, was better known for the plan. When 9-11 happened, CIA Director, George Tenet, immediately attributed the attack to him, and named the U.S. flight-trained Zacarias Moussaoui.16 Still, any foreknowledge was ruled out as “conspiracy theory”, and so the ruling mind-set stayed closed as “realistic” and “patriotic”.

The facts of 9-11 which are disconnected from are now copiously documented.17 But why and how these facts are ruled out by the masses and elites at the same time is not explained. The argument has been at the first-order level of the facts, not the lawlike operations on the facts by the collective thought-system that selects, ignores and reconnects them in new form - what I call the “regulating group-mind” (RGM).18 Only when we understand this meta-level of constructing the facts and their meaning in accordance with their conformity to and expression of a pre-existing structure of understanding can we know what is going on or, more specifically, can we find our way out of the anomalies and disconnects of our era.

The Regulating Group-Mind: A Paradigm Example

Understanding of the RGM in the first instance proceeds by three basic principles of explanation:

(1) there is a “regulating group-mind” or socially regulating syntax of thought and judgement which

(2) blocks out all evidence against its assumptions; and

(3) blinkers out the destructive effects which reveal its delusions.

Response to 9-11 and the 9-11 Wars are my central paradigm example of the operations of the RGM across classes and borders. Yet the RGM operates on every level, and explains also the paralysis of nations in responding effectively to planetary ecosystem collapse. The RGM may lie behind every systematic social pathology of our era. In each case, it blocks out facts and connections of life-and-death significance, and in each instance, its exclusion is a variation on one life-blind thought regime, the “shadow subject” of our era.

Received understanding of 9-11 is a turning-point instance of the operations of the ruling group-mind, but is selected for forefront attention because of its taboo hold against so much uncontested evidence and reason. Primary connections which are preempted on the most general plane are: (1) the policy declaration in 2000 by PNAC of U.S. national security planners which expressed the commitment to “full-spectrum dominance” by the U.S. state across the world; (2) its expressed desire for a fast-track to this dominance rather than “a prolonged one”; and (3) the perfect consistency between this policy, what happened on 9-11, and what happened afterwards through the 9-11 Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.

An acute example of blocking out the defining elements of this evident continuity of fact and meaning is that all U.S. air defences at the most central level were coincidentally down on September 11, 2001 in precise accord with (1), (2) and (3). This connection is as important and demonstrable as any could be for history, but it is nevertheless consistently excluded from the contents of consciousness in all public commentary, and Left discourse itself - the tip of the deeper disorder of the RGM that we do not yet suspect..19 In fact, there was no attempt to achieve any U.S. air-defense intervention with the rogue 9-11 planes until after two jumbo jets had hit different buildings of the World Trade Center in leisurely succession and a third plane or missile had hit a just-vacated wing of the Pentagon - all of this long after the four known and separately hijacked planes had rerouted and flown around unimpeded within the most heavily defended airspace in the world for well over an hour altogether with none disturbed by any sign of defense reaction until after all three buildings had been hit.20

That the U.S. war state which then went into motion showed signs of long planning in each case was not perceived as significant,21 nor was connection to the past statements proclaiming the purpose these plans sought to fulfil. All conformed to the taboo against joined meaning. There were many levels of the disconnect. Singly and together, they ruled out of view the evident through-line of events from the policy record prior to 9-11, to 9-11 itself, and then to “America at War” continuously since in enactment of the original policy plan. Disconnect also ruled on the question of “terrorism” itself. Even as young Americans were killed in rising numbers in Iraq, while non-American families were terrorized across entire countries by the U.S. invasions in violation of the most solemn law of nations, “terrorism” was perceived in all received discussion as solely the Other’s affliction on the Free World and its allies. That in fact, on the contrary, virtually all the terrorization proceeded from the war-crimes, carpet bombings of societies, and systematic torturing of the legally innocent by the U.S. in its “war against terror” was elided from consciousness. The legal definition of terrorism itself was excluded from expert discussion of it.22 That “the central issue facing America and the world”was in these ways reversed in its meaning across cultures and classes was inexplicable when the majority had no interest in reproducing the inverted story as their own meaning. No received theory can explain such a phenomenon, yet there was an explanation. All the facts and connections were unthinkable within the a priori set-points of the reigning thought-system.

The connections across plan and fulfilment, cause and effect are not seen by the RGM to the extent that they conflict with its deciding assumptions. When one recognises that each and all are consistent in expression of one regulating syntax of meaning, anomalies of 9-11 or ecological blindness are no longer anomalous. Since this “way of life” is presupposed by all its creatures as their own framework of cognition,23 the problem is always with what does not conform to it, which is therefore perceived as subversive, irrational or the enemy. Variations on the terminology of abuse of those whose thought does not conform is the media commentator’s principal poetic license and flair. Since the ruling group-mind always operates a priori, facts cannot dislodge what its categorial structure perceives and knows already. Thus no-one in the international media noticed 33 months later in the most dramatic exposure of U.S. defense intelligence cover-up and criminality in a generation - the “Iraq torture scandal” - that the clear connections between the master strategy minted before 9-11 and everything that had occurred since held intact with no movement to modification even after the exposures of the most brutal moral and political crimes.

The lead idea of a “catastrophic and catalyzing event” to expedite desired geostrategic control over vast regions of formerly public-owned oilfields which were no longer within or protected by the Soviet Union was simply not discussed. No-one appeared to notice how amidst all the disasters of the Iraq occupation that the master strategy had strikingly achieved all of its declared pre-9-11 objectives. The through-line of meaning - seizure, control and restructuring of the routes and sources of the vast and publicly owned oil resources of Central Asia (“the Afghanistan War”) and the Middle East (“the Iraq War”) - remained unseeable as the reason for 9-11. The RGM perceived, instead, “another historic step forward for freedom” and “a better world without Saddam’s brutal regime”. Diversion of thought to the designated enemy of the group is certainly an RGM operation of the greatest importance, perpetually disconnecting consciousness from unthinkable objects of attention. It precedes any conspiratorial concealment or ruling class manipulation because it is a preempting block by a collective regime of understanding. Since it vindicates the knowing group and its members in a manner on which all can agree whatever facts contradict their perceptions of self and other, its perception remains secure and consensual.

Not even “the international community” up in arms about the tortures seemed, therefore, to notice the dramatic reversals of fact and meaning. Rather, the tortures themselves were disconnected from their cause as strange anomalies. In return to consensual security, the assistance of the international community” itself was increasingly called for by both contesting U.S. political parties to sustain the criminally illegal occupations. Even former foes of the Iraq invasion, France and Russia included, did not publicly perceive the fact that it was “the supreme crime under international law”, although that was the ultimate law governing the Security Council they sat on. Instead, the illegal war occupation was provided unanimous approval of the U.N. Security Council on October 16, 2003, and again on June 8, 2004, with congratulations around the world for “the emerging consensus on Iraq”.24 The group-mind disconnect was now global.

Financial, logistical and moral assistance for the now UN-approved occupation was accordingly demanded from “those concerned about the people of Iraq”. “The full and free independence of Iraq” proclaimed for June 30, 2004 allowed, in fact none.25 No assured say or veto by U.S.-appointed governors over the armed forces occupying the country was granted, and the agreed-upon choice by the U.N. envoy (Lakhdar Brahimi) of the Prime Minister (the anti-Saddam scientist, Hussein Shahristrani) was reversed. In his place, with none in the U.N. remembering the fact, a former killer for Saddam and then C.I.A.-backed emigré (Iyad Allawi) - was installed representing an organisation created by the CIA and Britain’s M-16.26 The ruling group-mind was a closed box with moving sides, but none within its consensus across parties and cultures publicly doubted or raised questions of the continuing war criminal occupation. It was now called “rebuilding free Iraq”. The long promise of the White House of “complete and full handover of power” was perceived as discharged with no evident notice of the compounding disconnect from reality. The “new consensus on Iraq” left all armed force, control of the economy, privatization and financial planning in U.S. control or that of its dependent appointees. Full approval by the UN Security Council was then duly granted “after disagreements were resolved by U.S. flexibility”.

A narrow epistemology variously rules across the new world order. The dominant conversation transpires within life-delinked co-ordinates, and the truth is what sells - with academic theories as all else.27 It follows that problems are resolved by changing words and perceptions so that people buy into the story for sale. “Terrorists”, for example, can only be those that resist occupation by “nations of the Free World”, whether in Baghdad or the West Bank of Palestine. Even when the armed forces of Israel and the U.S. murder resistance leaders at pleasure, blow up village houses and families, and continuously enforce a scene from Hell on civilian populations, none of this can qualify as “terrorist” to the ruling group-mind because this category admits only non-Free World others into it. Even inversion of the meaning of the term on whose behalf a “war without end” is fought cannot appear as an issue. For its consensual operations are prior to the reality it selects and excludes to understand. If the historical referent of “terrorism” is state attacks on civilians, this meaning too is blocked out of view prior to denial or affirmation. Consequently, laws for “counter-terrorism”are made across the world to meet “the international community’s greatest threat”. The problems which daily determine peoples’ life or death are, accordingly, blinkered out a priori.

Life Consciousness versus the Shadow Subject

“Not for oil” was a wide public sentiment against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, an historic uprising against the hold of the ruling group-mind by that opening of life consciousness which always leads the human condition. But not just Middle East oil was involved. Everything the people lived from was involved. In Iraq, the expropriation was planned, sudden and total, but only seen in glimpses. Publicly controlled banks, industrial infrastructures, electricity and water supplies, food production and delivery systems were all time-scheduled for dismantling, control and marketization by U.S. led and subsidized corporations.28 The full-spectrum confiscation was called the Comprehensive Privatization Plan, a history-turning document not commented upon in the media or parliaments. The Comprehensive Privatization Plan - itself a war crime not possible without 9-11 to realign global perception - was to be complemented by “forgiveness of Iraq’s debt”. Market liberation was not to be burdened with costs that public subsidies could pay. The system-deciding logic was consistent throughout, but its throughline of meaning was unthinkable to the acceptable parameters of discussion. Under terms to be specified by the International Monetary Fund, permanent debt service payments were set into motion, with publicly stripped conditions of existence for the Iraqui people to be specified by the usual IMF conditions of “economic stability and development”. The latest market miracle was, in accordance with the ruling paradigm, expected with no economic planning required. Texas bank-owning James Baker III, the Bush Jr. point man for the stolen 2000 U.S. election, was the same person selected to counsel agreement from European and Russian banks and officials for Iraq’s “debt forgiveness”.29

In market theory, the stage was set for what the September 25, 2003 Economist affirmed as “a capitalist dream”. The pattern was familiar in outer fact, but its regulating logic was not. The pattern was as pure-type as it gets, and was proclaimed as “freedom” and “future prosperity”. On the ground unseen through the ruling market prism, there was no limit to the market double take from the non-market world and confiscations of public wealth - first from American taxpayers to pay for the over $1-billion-a-day armed forces supplied and serviced by U.S. multinational corporations in semi-monopoly or no-bid conditions which guaranteed super profits to be paid by the present and future common wealth of the public realm; and secondly, at a much higher rate, there was the systematic dispossession of the Iraqui and Central Asian peoples whose natural and built resources were systematically privatized by armed force for control by U.S.-selected transnational corporations. Meanwhile the media daily limmed denunciations of the “lawless violence” of armed resisters in approximately exact reproduction of the perceptions of the Palestinians by Israel, the ANC by South Africa, and the Kenyans by Britain half a century earlier. The ruling market group-mind reproduces through time with different names for its expressions. “Freedom”, “development” and “civilization” are the known continuous advances, but always a more total corporate market on the ground is the systematic effect.

In fact, not even the opposing U.S. presidential candidate, nor formerly opposed governments, nor the international press and academics once deviated from affirmation of Iraq’s “liberation”. It was a given of Free World discourse. The unanimity on the issue was not explainable by coercion, private profit, or conspiracy. A deeper order of determination governed throughout. The genocide of a socialist society was unspeakable to name, although what happened to Iraq, as the U.N. Co-ordinator of Humanitarian Aid, Denis Halliday, observed was “in keeping with the definition of genocide in the U.N. convention”.30 Instead, the group-mind knew that “Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who had to be replaced”, and that his “invasion of Kuwait” in 1991, and then “Islamic terrorists’ attack on America” in 2001, were the background causes of “Iraq’s difficulties”. That Saddam himself was paid, armed and directed by the U.S. from obscurity into war against Iran and afterward until his 1991 invasion of Kuwait which was not opposed by the U.S. until after it started, were facts that did not register through the chinks of the RGM; nor, more deeply, did the deaths of over 1,000,000 Iraquis since 1991 by U.S.led bombings, depleted uranium contamination, and sanctions against repairs of free public water and electricity systems paid for by still publicly owned oil.31 All this was blocked out apriori by the market thought-system which ruled. And so clashing opinions, perpetual news, and academic detail work all moved within the reference points and coordinates of the one consensual program of perception and judgement. Isolated facts of mass death were reported from life-conscious medical witness at work behind the scenes, but they appeared and disappeared with no effect on the iron cage of understanding. What the group-mind knew, as it does in stadiums, squares and coliseums across millennia, was that the designated enemy must be overcome. All remain excited and united in group meaning that sees only itself, while reproduction of the group battles as the spectacles of history is perceived as higher meaning.

September 11 2001 fed perfectly into RGM escalation in place of historical learning.32 It first made the invasion of Afghanistan an act of “necessary self-defense” against “terrorist training camps attacking the U.S.” - terrorist camps which were, like Saddam Hussein, financed, armed and directed by U.S. intelligence forces from their inception.33 Within two years, “America’s New War” to invade and occupy Iraq by armed-force in place of UN inspections was propelled by a new perception of “weapons of mass destruction threatening the world”. No-one in official culture connected the wars to the stated Project of America that preceded them, nor to the market epistemology for which the only truth is what sells. Least of all were the wars connected to global market growth - although all that occurred realised these directing principles on long and short-term planes of time. The shadow subject selected for and approved the new reality as necessary and good without the genocide of a people being seen.

In this way, Iraq was now “liberated by America” with an “absolutely convinced” Tony Blair and Bush leading history from their “cojones meeting” - “to do what I think is right”.34 Many critics read these leaders as merely self-serving liars. But there is a deeper order to their lies. The function of leadership of a group-mind is to exemplify its prejudices as militant certitudes. Thus even when the WMD’s that justified the invasion of Iraq were nowhere to be found, the closed circle remained firm across parties and nations. The invasion that was illegal and failed as occupation had to continue if Iraq was to remain liberated. “We must hold the course”, “win the peace”, “not turn our backs’, all agreed through the regulating lenses. New leadership would replace old, but the set-points of meaning and purpose were fixed. What is not recognised by the self-interest theory of motivation is that the regulating group-mind may override even the self-serving calculus of opportunistic state leaders. They go as sacrifices, or not, but the meta-program rules on. It is the shadow level of determination behind the eyes. The Iraq genocide is a symptom of the larger world crisis it propels. Until the deciding base is mutual life and life conditions, the vicious deciding circle remains closed.

The line between the group-mind and life consciousness is clear once seen. The RGM is disconnected from life co-ordinates of perception and decision by a self-referential value system. Life consciousness is oppositely regulated. It is aware of life requirements around it as its body of reference, with no a priori edge to identification. Its common life-ground is ultimately all the conditions required to take our next breath. The group-mind, in contrast, is enclosed within itself as on automatic pilot. It has many variations within our time and others, but always refers attention back to its own regulating categories of meaning instead of the conditions of enabling life. It may proclaim “the free market and democracy”and “the enemies of freedom”, or “Allah’s faithful” and “the unbelievers”. No problem of life destruction can, in any case, register to a group-mind calculus because nothing of value exists beyond it. Externalities to its framework of judgement do not compute to it, and so its ruling metric becomes more formally fixed and life-blind the longer and wider it rules. Eventually, it blocks out any refutive feedback loop even at the level of breath itself - as the absurdly named “pro-life movement” of U.S. market culture expresses in microcosm. From the standpoint of market set-points of mind, only atomic selves and pieces can be seen in reified abstractions from wider organic needs and interconnections.

At its most fateful, the ruling group-mind reproduces itself as the same even in the midst of the life-system collapse which its closure finally leads to - as with the Easter islanders, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican empires, the god-king Khmers - - and the global market system today. The rigid reference body of decision and meaning fails to recognise or respond to the stripping and draw-down of life conditions which its command assumptions entail - much the same as a failed immune system at the cellular level.35.

But who disagrees with the ruling frame of perception and understanding of the global corporate market? Who across the public platforms of the Free World imagines a life-coordinated economy? Who in U.S. political life, or even in world governments or scholarly analyses, dissents from universal market supremacy with no alternative? The consequences of this preconscious absolutism may be to destroy whole societies or social infrastructures upon which hundreds of millions depend for their existence. Yet all proceeds in accordance with a set of ruling presuppositions which are closed to question. The systematic genocide of a region-leading economic order and its looted cradle of civilisation as “liberation”is only a bounded exemplar of the thought system. From early geostrategic plan to destroyed health records, the life coordinates of the people being brought to market never counted. The decisions for their deliverance to “new freedom”were not an issue except for the marginalized.36 The spectre of the ruling subject behind was not exposed by anyone.

When the pictures of systematic hands-on torture emerged as public counter-evidence to the set-points of understanding Iraq’s “liberation”, the war-crime cause which “accumulates in itself all war crimes” remained unmentioned - as blocked out as the throughline of meaning of 9-11 preceding it. Deeper than the presidential cabal’s operations lay the ruling meta-program in command across the ruler-ruled division. The group-mind that blinkers out whatever does not fit its organising frame of meaning is strange to theory because it is housed across classes, countries and cultures by a cognitive regime which is not rooted in locale, practice, or productive prestige.37 It structures the mind itself beneath professional and cultural variation from Rio de Janeiro to New York to Shanghai.38 Not even psychiatry yet penetrates its disorder because it cannot speak from a couch. Marx, in turn, has reified its basic regulating principles as external economic “laws of motion” which cannot explain why people both identify with and reject them.

A micro example of what Blake called “the mind-forged manacles” occurred immediately prior to the invasion of Iraq in clinical conditions. Their grip within and across societies and selves far from the theatre of war disclosed the transcendental set-points across borders. The public broadcasting producers of my own country, Canada - who are in the pay of no U.S. multinational and accept orders from no-one outside - continuously produced their stories prior to March 20 2003 within the ruling line of “Saddam’s dictatorship”and “the war against terror and weapons of mass destruction” - even as the supreme crime of U.S. military invasion remained unnamed, but proclaimed as “inevitably” unfolding. A silent clamp-down invisibly awaited anyone who called the assumed meaning into question. To test the hold of the ruling group-mind, I accepted an invitation onto CBC Sunday News to debate a well-known U.S. geostrategic planner and co-manager of the Project for A New American Century, Thomas Donnelly, the Sunday before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I did not remain within the assumed parameters of discussion. I explained that the U.S. was engaged in launching a criminal war against the Iraqui people, and continuing its genocidal destruction of the people’s socialised infrastructures of water supplies, electricity, food distribution, and public healthcare and education. To the predictable group-mind reflex of “what about Saddam’s brutal dictatorship” and “use of biological weapons against his own people”, I observed U.S. arming and support of Saddam and his regime in these actions from the beginning. I said Mr. Donnelly ought to be arrested under the relevant Canadian Criminal Code section, the Crimes Against Humanity Act, for counselling war crimes and crimes against humanity with no justification of self-defence, and in sabotage of ongoing and accurate UN weapons inspections. He responded with grimaces and slogans of praise for America’s love of freedom since the “U.S. liberation of Europe”.

CBC management did not approve. The “arrest” phrase was deleted from the 30-minute delayed broadcast. The research reporter who had arranged the debate would not return my inquiries on the debate’s feedback, but would only refer to other matters, and was soon no longer on CBC Television’s major public affairs program. The experimental as well as control conditions yielded a consistent result. Reality was blocked out a priori. Neither fact nor argument was relevant to or accommodated by the prior regulating framework of understanding. Far from the Washington political center and across an international border in a time of life-groundswell rising against the coming U.S. invasion, the deep lines of disconnect were at work - the omnipresent on-off switches of the ruling group-mind. They work only so far as they are not seen. Their invisible lines of force are what make us “not know what is going on” even when the evidence shows mass murder and is known.

Understanding The 9-11 Wars

Long-time U.S. National Security Committee adviser to the President, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote four years before 9-11 what inside U.S. geostrategists were already thinking across Republican-Democrat divisions after the collapse of the Soviet Union: "[The United States needs] unhindered financial and economic access [to] Central Asia's natural resources,” he advised, “[especially] the enormous economic prize of the natural oil and gas located in the region” But, he continued, it will be “difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."39 That “truly massive and widely perceived threat” was provided by 9-11. What the former Democrat National Security Adviser to the President advocated in 1999, and what the Bush Presidency’s Republican Project For A New American Century called for in 2000, thus formed across party divisions as a vector of the ruling market group-mind.

At the epicenter of this global market construction is the public and elite response to it - why such facts in clear through-line of purpose and effect have been silenced in public and media discussion. The consensus has crossed the poles of Left-Right division, with even Left institutions like Z-Net gatekeeping against the connected meaning.40 The taboo against knowing the facts was encoded into the identity structure across ideological partitions. Any fact exposing the official story was a “conspiracy theory”or, to Z-Net, a “distraction”. Given the known pre-9-11 search by U.S. geostrategic planning for a publicly salable reason to invade central Asia and Iraq, 9-11's convenient occurrence was disconnected from what it provided the ideal pretext for - administration legitimation and militarily imposed new control over the world’s main supplies of oil. Each war for seizure of oil source was, in turn, disconnected from the known plan to achieve it, and all was disconnected from the ecogenocidal pattern now in military motion as well. Why when the very major invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to ensure this control occurred right after 9-11, the sole context within which these wars could be sold as defensive, did no U.S. public figure, even the heroic Noam Chomsky, join the dots of the unfolding strategic plan? The answer is given by the evidence. A regime of consensual disconnect had formed with the overwhelming consensus blocking challenge to it. Even the most painstaking case for administration complicity in 9-11 featured an exonerating title.41

Political history since 9-11 deepened the mystery of the mind-lock whose wider meaning we investigate here. Despite a subsequent record of years of spectacular lying about Iraq by the Bush administration, still the mass media, foreign affairs respondents and opposition critics blinkered out the accumulating further evidence for a strategically constructed 9-11 attack - for documented example, the anonymously blocked F.B.I. investigations before 9-11, the ignored intelligence warnings from many foreign state agencies beforehand, and the immediately prior visit to Washington of the CIA-advised Pakistani intelligence (I.S.I) paymaster of one of the lead hijackers.42 Even the fixed reference points of physical science were ignored in understanding the steering event - most evidently, the massive steel infrastructure collapses whose instant fall from plane impacts alone, or none at all, contradicts the laws of engineering physics.43 Here more paradigmatically than the unrecognised war crime itself, a structure of denial and projection somehow decoupled elite and public consciousness from the evidence. We know Church authorities would not look through Galileo’s telescope to examine the astronomical facts, but in this case the ruling group-mind embraced entire societies, while the this-worldly evidence which it blacked out was against the interests of almost all of its community of thought. The consensual refusal to see beneath any known calculus of advantage or exchange was anomalous. Only group-mind operation provided an explanation.44

Given the Bush Jr. regime’s non-stop blocking or attack-dog treatment of those suspicious of top-level inaction before 9-11 - including the FBI Director of Anti-Terrorism, John O’Neill (who resigned in protest and then died in the World Trade Center as its chief of security), and later the Bush administration’s own official chief adviser on counter-terrorism, Richard Clarke - what more evidence was required for thought to suspect a reason? How could the long prepared plans for invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, which 9-11 alone justified, not be connected to the stand-down of defences before it? What could explain why even the elites of America could accept that the “most crooked, lying group I’ve ever seen” - John Kerry’s overheard aside about the string-pullers of the Bush Jr. administration - were somehow not in on what “all the buzz in Washington” was increasingly warned about prior to 9-11? 45 If, moreover, a number of prominent Americans followed the warnings not to be in the buildings or on the relevant flights on that day, and Bush himself was kept isolated by agenda and security managers from all commander response before and after the attack until after all the buildings had been hit, how could the U.S. secret security command not be coordinated with the sustained failure of response? How, in overview, could such a long chain of coincidences possibly occur by continuous chance?

Everyone now has probably heard that known Al-Qaeda members were long left free to operate inside the U.S. with even FBI investigations blocked by orders from above as they learned to fly, and that four American jumbo-jets were somehow successfully hijacked all at the same time with no security system successful against any member all the way through to the crashes. Once every one of the alleged 19 hijackers was safely through the many gates of prevention and now untouched and in control of four commercial jumbo-jets at once, the story goes, their hijacked airplane buses then flew around inside normally full U.S. air-grids without any interruption for 75 minutes - the Air Force advertises a two-and-a-half-minute time from ground wheel to full throttle through the skies - free-winging about the most heavily watched and protected airspace in the world with military airports all around, and then, presto and telegenically, they skillfully crashed one hijacked jumbo-jet after another into central symbolic buildings of the U.S. - while conveniently hitting the recently de-occupied portion of the Pentagon. “Bring ‘em on!” can almost be heard through the smoke of the blown-up buildings. The increasingly despised Bush administration whose Inauguration Parade had been unprecedentedly egg-pelted and chased off the central streets of Washington had good reason to want the change of enemy that would entirely reverse their fortunes. Consider the notorious secret command coordination which is everywhere at work in the U.S. national security state. Then think through the multi-level and inconceivable failures of preventative procedures on every level and at every gate from immigration to flight control to Defense Intelligence and the CIA - all “coincidentally” coming together to permit the total throughline past all stops to a simultaneously filmed, released and broadcast “Attack on America!”- with all the names of the guilty dead hijackers immediately known, although there was no evidence from the burnt-out wreckage. It was sold and exported across oceans where it could not be checked.

The many close relatives and associates of the man accused, Osama bin Laden, were then immediately exempted by White House fiat from any standard questions of their knowledge of the accused mastermind, escorted in security-cleared planes when no-one else in America was allowed to fly, and deposited in safe houses in the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia where no investigative questions were permitted. The documented details will not be repeated here, but they are impressively massive in confirming, and none disconfirming, the long open pathway to the attacks and a continuing consistent stand-down of investigation since. When all of this faultless sequence of coincidence working continuously in one direction and in favour of one vast payoff matrix was followed, in turn, by a stonewalling of questions by everyone at the top on whose watch 9-11 occurred, still no public questions arose. Everything before 9-11 and after it that bridged the forbidden meaning across it was disconnected from the event. When such a chain of coinciding actions and reactions all consistent with one explanation alone is so systematically blocked out by all around and delinked at every joint, there has been a shut-down of reason that needs to be explained. That is our purpose here - to analyse 9-11 and the 9-11 Wars as a paradigm illustration of the ruling group-mind at work, and to explain how these phenomena connect as unthinkable expressions of one regulating meta-program - the “shadow subject” of the global market thought-system.

If one remembers the record of sacrifices of countless thousands of people to covert geopolitical strategies of which the U.S. corporate security state is long known to approve, sometimes millions of people at a time on false pretexts - as in Indonesia and Vietnam - what could block the meaning here after 9-11? Why would everyday and elite perception assume that the Bush Jr. strategic cabal - who arranged the usurpation of the U.S presidency and then waged a mass-murderous war by false pretext led by many of the very same leading officials who presided over death-squads and criminal secret deals destroying countless lives in prior Republican administrations - would be above allowing 9-11 when it gave them and U.S. corporate empire unprecedented new domestic and foreign powers? What would have been done differently any step of the way had all been strategically planned? The real difficulty here is to find compelling evidence against this hypothesis - for example, some loss or harm to any of the Bush executives who reaped such vast rewards by the show attack. There is no such exculpating evidence.

In place of contra-indicative evidence, the ruling assumption is that “they could never do such a thing” - an expression of the wider religion of America analysed ahead. In the background of history, the motivations for murderous crimes by state leaders against their own citizens are familiar enough, the warp and woof of supreme power. Making others terrified is the logic of control within the framing game of the regulating group-mind across its variations. All Henry II required to murder the Archbishop of Canterbury was a question in front of those who served him. So why would distinctively power-corrupted men facing the biggest early presidential popularity slide in polling history and enmeshment in the greatest electoral and business frauds in all U.S. history, and a sliding market recession after the stockmarket meltdown which their criminally fraudulent chief financer led - just turn away from letting a planned option scenario which would save them go ahead? Would there not have to be a group delusion, perhaps operating across the individuals themselves, to make all the normal questions unthinkable even as their accumulating collapse on all fronts was reversed overnight into public adulation and near absolute power?

Just such a structure of delusion may be provided by the deification of the President bearing America’s “manifest destiny to save the fallen world by her God-given power”.46 Certainly, implication of “the President of the United States of America” in the terrorist attack would unbearably contradict ruling assumption. A murderous complicity to gain cabal and nation-state world command would hardly fit the ruling religion of America’s self-conception as God-blessed and inspired in her “shining city on the hill”. So which goes - the faith in America’s greatness and goodness in the world, or the facts which disclose the opposite at the very top? At some point, the systematic block against reality discloses to us the demonstrable zone of the unthinkable - the defining limit of the group-mind.47

“Conspiracy theory” is the stigma term to fence off the taboo zone, just as “communist” once was to alternatives to the American way. Few ask, “Do you prefer coincidence theory?” If they did, the term of abuse would change - perhaps to “anti-American” or “terrorist”. By one invalidating predicate or another, the unthinkable is blocked out a priori. But would it not be perfectly rational in the market logic of calculated risk for this regime’s top-secret planners and their principals to exploit the greatest opportunity of history to establish their planned “full spectrum dominance” if they were positioned to allow it on fast track? Would not the managed risk of being able to control investigations for the next four years and to denounce any accuser as a “unpatriotic” and “betraying America at war”not be worth the chance in the ruling market calculus? Why would this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not have been considered as an option when mass-kill nuclear-attack options have long been a daily fare of U.S. national security analysis? Would it not, in fact, be irrational from the strategic war-gaming standpoint to forfeit an unprecedentedly great payoff matrix to save fewer lives than three months of U.S. traffic accidents?

These were chief executives trained to seize every opportunity for self and corporate gain managing at the geostrategic level in which the most ruthless decision scenarios are produced by which millions die. Was there anything in the known record to indicate any aversion of any of them to self-maximizing rationality at these levels? Bear in mind more U.S. soldiers were killed or maimed within months by the Iraq occupation itself than American civilians on 9-11. Recall as well Rumsfeld’s response to innocent women and children slaughtered by American bombs - “Stuff happens”.48 Even outside the realpolitik of world empire, the corporate market calculus is seldom deterred by “externalities”of others’ deaths, and these were all corporate CEO’s of the most aggressive kind. Why, then, would they be so “soft” as to fear taking far bigger pay-offs for their own group and U.S. global empire? The regulating group-mind of the global corporate market selects towards allowing 9-11, not against it. So why would this known calculus in U.S. security as well as CEO circles be ruled out as unthinkable in understanding 9-11?

There is a deeper general operation at work here than “the catalyzing event” of 9-11 itself . This is the regulating market structure of consciousness that selects what facts are seen and not seen in accordance with whether it pays off to risk-takers and “feels good” to consumers. This calculus operates altogether independently of whether the object of desire is “true” or not, or life-serving rather than deadly - these concepts being foreign to the market paradigm. The deciding question is: “Can we sell it? Will they buy it?” Fear is the undertow hook - do I look right? am I safe? - but desire is its expression. Both moments join in the one episteme that all assume. Buying and selling is “market freedom”, “our way of life”. “Finding new wealth and markets” is the necessity of growth. Understanding the market value system and epistemology is how we come to understand the fear and aggression of 9-11 and the 9-11 Wars.

Certainly all prefer the pleasant certitudes that “America leads the Free World”, and that its President or secret intelligence apparatus “could not possibly” exploit the planning and execution of such a crime as occurred on America’s soil on 9-11 and afterwards. Yet the Bush administration’s chief executives counseled or endorsed prior Republican President Reagan’s presiding over the smuggling of cocaine into the U.S. to addict inner city Americans so as to illegally finance war crimes against Nicaragua, and before that the arming of the mullah dictatorship of Iran so that it held onto American hostages long enough for the election to be lost by “the human rights presidency of Jimmy Carter” - to, revealingly, the “anti-terrorist” Reagan regime. The reason why such connections to past practices are lost to view is that they are ruled out a priori by the ruling group-mind. So long as there is no operational failure, there is no problem to see.

When Ronald Reagan was provided with the pomp of national sainthood after he fortuitously expired in May 2004 at the height of disquiet about the U.S. torture regime in Iraq, we may remember his ultimate legacy. “He made us feel good again”. “Feeling good” is the folksy correlative of “utility function” and “welfare” in the neo-classical market calculus. It is what the Constitution’s “pursuit of happiness” has come to mean through the market prism. That is why the public identification with Ronald Reagan was so deep whatever his falsehoods and war crimes were in fact. Behind him was the same group-mind as behind Bush junior 20 years later. In the continuity of history, corporate CEO’s like Baker, Cheney, Rumsfeld and trans-administration bureaucrats like Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz bridged the generational turn to market and military absolutism as America’s post-Vietnam triumph. “We will make America great again”.

Yet life consciousness exceeds the bounds of the prison within. The marginalized ask questions. They do not block out the facts that administration people stole the 2000 presidential election by overriding legal voting procedures, rode on Enron jets and its criminal financing to get there, and were on the watch on 9-11. They know that this cabal succeeded in blocking Congressional access to even official records of national energy policy secretly advised by the same Enron executives. If they succeeded in cover-up there, why not here? So those not constrained within the ruling thought-system ask, why would anyone believe this group is above permitting 9-11 to gain vast powers? “You are the Haves, and the Have Mores. You are my base”, is Bush Junior’s known salute to those who take the most. Why, then, has the most elementary query after any crime - cui bono? (who benefits?) - been suspended from question about 9-11? When the most self-evident line of thought has been blinkered out across a people, only an a priori thought system can account for it. As with other great problems of our era, the group-mind disconnects by stopping thought before it arises.

That is why in all the public fixation on 9-11, the interests served by its occurrence were, otherwise inexplicably, not related to explanation of it. These payoffs, unprecedented in any presidency in the history of the Republic, provide guidance in the taboo zone of the unthinkable. Since their preemption from public discussion in North America discloses critical tension at the heart of America between its patriotic identity and its market presuppositions, these interests of private capital, military empire and cabal power secured by 9-11 need to be identified. They include open access to the world’s formerly untouchable and greatest wealth resources, new command position over public financing for subordinate militaries and police apparatuses not only in the U.S. but across the globe, privatization of the world’s richest publicly owned and state-controlled oilfields and the social infrastructures they support, new declared right to suspend the historical basis of rule by law, habeus corpus, to protect the reigning order against subversion, legitimation of a president who lost the election until illegal mass invalidation of votes by Bush state officials and a stacked supreme court illegally confiscated votes in the thousands in Florida and overturned the state’s vote-recount laws, public diversion from the regime’s known corrupt support and energy policy determination by the most criminally fraudulent corporate leadership in American history, unprecedented new powers for price leveraging of oil supplies and military services for a “war without end”, new police powers across borders to imprison without right of legal defense any one deemed to obstruct an international trade and investment meeting, and - at the crest of glory instead of ignominy - unlimited new rights of men with draft-dodging pasts to command everyone else with fawning media attention.49

The problem of the collectively unthinkable runs deep into the psyche.“I can’t believe - - ” is the sign pointing back to the mind-block behind it. Even media consumers’ insatiable desire to know the dark secrets of the famous is here quieted. The sentiment shared among all who acquiesce that “the President could not possibly have been involved in 9-11" was, by its own description, disconnected from the issues of fact or truth. Throughout, one defining operation of the ruling group-mind in all its forms prevailed. The reference points of meaning were pegged beneath consciousness by determining presuppositions which organize understanding to conform to them, and to screen out all that does not. These on-off switches of the group-mind are not natural drives or conscious instincts of survival, but ruling assumptions which structure the heart and senses as well as thought-system which selects, organises, and reinforces the felt sides of being. Once these set-points of consciousness are fixed by dividing lines of war, a fateful consequence follows. Their closure of prejudice-set absolutely disconnects feeling and awareness from facts and relations which conflict with the anchoring assumptions. In response to the extreme pressures of forcing reality to conform to manufactured delusions, the group and its members become increasingly submerged within a pre-conscious field of hysteria, denials and projections. In the case of 9-11 and the 9-11 Wars, the shadow subject of the ruling group-mind and its executive vector propelled two war criminal invasions of other societies and police-state laws across the world in under three years.