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�s 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 coordinated 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 US passports to Middle East �freedom fighters� destined for al Qaeda, US 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 CIA 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 US 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 with no standard intercept action until after all three of the buildings had been dive-bombed. Yet no disciplinary process nor formal investigation by the Pentagon, the FBI, 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. All attention was, instead, rivetted 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� followed. Not even the known genetic signature of an official US 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 civilization, the pattern of 9�11 decisions is linked to a larger historical pattern. This larger pattern included US 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 US�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 US National Security Agency and the CIA of the same Afghanistan fundamentalist factions and warlords as plotted 9�11, including Osama bin Laden. These �moral equivalents of the founding fathers,� as US president Reagan then called them, were US-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 fa�voured 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 now-favoured Northern Alliance. The underlying connections disclose a system of �Free World� approval and disapproval across borders whose moral meaning has remained unpenetrated � the actually regulating deep lines of �the defence of our values and what we hold dear� which evade the detection of analysis.

�Who benefits?� is a standard forensic question which helps to clarify the moral 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 this entire middle-world region of continuing crises and wars. Political chaos is a prime strategic pattern of this system of world 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 US off-stage governments� threat of a �carpet of bombs� for Afghanistan before September 11 if the formerly favoured Taliban faction could or did not expedite the long-planned UNOCAL oil pipelines through Afghanistan to Middle Asia�s vast oil and gas fields � a prime value objective which was quickly confirmed for construction with the Pakistani Minister of Oil on October 10 after the bombing of Afghanistan had been accepted by the official world. The more the dots of the documented details 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 universalizing logic of a civilization�s moral corruption.

The Deranged Value System

An illustration explains the closure of the fanatic moral syntax. When the US president immediately identified the 9�11 terrorist attack as �a declaration of war,� his categorical assertion was certain and officially accepted as certain although there was no international law or norm which justified this official designation. Here as elsewhere, an absolutist group think 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 US 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 terrorized 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