Part I of a series. No matter who is labeled president after the election, the crisis this process has created for most Americans will not be over. It will be like no other moment in all of America's history. Now is the time to look back into the past and connect those events that have led us to this most strange and significant moment. We'll start with the day America's leadership lost all consciousness.

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PART I of IV: When America Became the Dark Force

No matter who is labeled president after the election, the crisis this process has created for most Americans will not be over. It will be like no other moment in all of America's history. Now is the time to look back into the past and connect those events that have led us to this most strange and significant moment. We'll start with the day America's leadership lost all consciousness.

"'We're the dark matter. We're the force that orders the universe but can't be seen,' a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit."

If anyone thought the war on terror contained an otherworldly quality, this quote on the front page of the September 11, 2011Washington Post from Dana Priest and William M. Arkin's book Top Secret America confirmed it. 9/11 had taken America through the mirror and there was no coming back.

Following 9/11 the elected government of the United States willingly delivered over what remained of America's civilian control to a department of Homeland Security dedicated to expanding the unelected government's fear of darkness into everybody's life. Added to this was a top secret military operation known as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that thought of itself as the dark.

Begun as a modest hostage rescue team, by 2011 JSOC had morphed into a veritable heart of darkness, with the power to murder at will and completely unaccountable to American or international law.

At the height of its notoriety under General Stanley McChrystal in Iraq and Afghanistan, JSOC operated completely in the black as a "Stovepipe," operation, reporting to no one and employing infamous rogue ex-CIA professionals such as indicted Iran Contra operative Dewey Clarridge. The Navy Seal Team that was said to have taken out Osama bin Laden operated under JSOC. Retired military personnel refer to JSOC as "Murder, Incorporated" and the "most dangerous people on the face of the earth."

But if JSOC's reputation for secrecy, vengeance and death can't be explained from within the context of traditional U.S. military operations or U.S. law, then what set of rules is it operating from? Or is it simply that the rational enlightenment traditions that most Americans take for granted have become subjected to deeper and older rules of behavior rooted in an irrational world of personal, private and holy war?

No one less than the legendary Cold Warrior, Time Magazine's Henry Luce understood that his passion for defeating Communism constituted "a declaration of private war," which, in citing the example of the privateer Sir Francis Drake made it not only "unlawful," but "probably mad." As the child of American missionaries, Luce was committed to the militant spread of Christian Capitalism while viewing its ultimate triumph over the world as an inevitable consequence of God's will.

Described by Tournament of Shadows authors Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac as mystical imperialism, the term can be traced to both Britain and Russia's 19^th century efforts to establish dominion through a mix of imperialism and Christian zeal. The competition came to a dead stop in Afghanistan with the end of the Great Game in 1907 when Imperial Russia and Great Britain chose to accept Afghanistan as a neutral buffer state between empires. But with the advent of the Cold War in 1947 and the mysterious and intoxicating god-like qualities inherent in nuclear weapons, a new and more apocalyptic iteration of mystical imperialism came into being.

The sole purpose of America's mid 20^th century defense intellectuals was to rationalize nuclear war, not mystify it. America's cold warriors were far removed technologically from their 19^th century counterparts whose Christian elite believed they were bringing enlightenment to the "darker regions of the earth."

But whether by design or by accident, within a short time an entire stratum of American scientific and political thought found itself immersed in an irrational realm that looked, smelled and tasted like medieval mysticism. A 1960s London Times Literary Supplement marveled at the new priesthood who moved as freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department as the Jesuits once had through the courts of Madrid and Vienna, centuries before. Tasked with defeating Communism by any means possible, they invented their own reality, accelerated the nuclear arms race, created an imaginary domino theory of Communist aggression in Southeast Asia and then escalated a real war in Vietnam to counter it.

President Kennedy's science advisor Jerome Wiesner eventually came to realize that the so called "missile gap" and the massive buildup of America's nuclear arsenal in response to it was only a "mirror image" of America's own intentions towards the Soviet Union and not the other way around. Yet instead of addressing the error, the U.S. slipped deeper into the Cold War mirror.

By 1978 these thermonuclear Jesuits and their CIA counterparts were using the U.S., NATO, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia to shake the Soviet Union's domination over Central Asia through a Christian/Islamic holy war in Afghanistan. In a rational world, it might be assumed that this war would stop with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. But instead of ending, America's full blown splurge into personal and private holy war caused the U.S. into a crisis of identity.

Forced after seventy five years of anti-communism to finally define itself based on what it stood for and not what it stood against, the United States entered a house of shadows in which it continues to wander. Stricken by decades of economic and military excess, its mission has become confused, its legal, moral and philosophical foundation abandoned and its role as leader of the western world questioned as never before.

America is clearly not the country it was before 9/11 but what has it become and what do the current candidates for the 2016 presidential election tell us about the direction we're headed?

Join us as we explore the little-analyzed facts and covert agendas that the United States must now reconsider in the 21^st century, and what those agendas mean to America's role as "the dark force that orders the universe," in our next installment of America, an Empire in Twilight Part II.

Copyright 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire andThe Voice . For more information visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk.

America, an Empire in Twilight Series

PART I of IV: When America Became the Dark Force

PART II of IV: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant

PART III of IV: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire

PART IV of IV: America's Late Stage Imperial Dementia

Authors Bio:

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice,a novel.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team began working together in 1979 co-producing a documentary for Paul's television show, Watchworks. Called, The Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, they found themselves in the midst of a controversy that was to boil over a few months later with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Their acquisition of the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew in 1981, brought them into the most heated Cold War controversy since Vietnam. But the people inside Soviet-occupied Afghanistan told a very different story from the one being broadcast on the evening news.

Following their news story for the CBS Evening News, they produced a documentary (Afghanistan Between Three Worlds) for PBS and in 1983 they returned to Kabul for ABC Nightline with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher. Arriving in Kabul that spring they were told that the Russians wanted to go home and negotiate their way out. But the story that President Carter called, "the greatest threat to peace since the second World War" had already been written by America's pundits was not about to change the script.

As the first American journalists to get behind the official propaganda on the war, they not only got a view of an unseen Afghan life, but a revelatory look at how the US defined itself under the veil of superpower confrontation. But as they pursued the reasons behind the propaganda, they were drawn into a story that was growing into mythic dimensions.

It was at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 when they were working on the film version of their experience under contract to Oliver Stone, that they began to piece together the mythic implications of the story. During the research for the screenplay crucial documents were declassified. Over the next decade they trailed a labyrinth of clues to find a likeness in Washington's official policy towards Afghanistan - in the ancient Zoroastrian war of the light against the dark - whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan. It was a likeness that grows more visible as America's involvement deepens.
By 1998, as the horrors of the Taliban regime began to grab headlines, they started collaborating with Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali. They contributed to the Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future book project. In 2002 they filmed Wali's first return to Kabul since her exile in 1978. The film they produced about Wali's journey home, The Woman in Exile Returns, gave audiences the chance to discover the message of one of Afghanistan's most articulate voices and her hopes for her people.

In the years since 9/11 much has happened to bring their story into sharp focus. Their experience at combining personal diplomacy with activist journalism could become a model for restoring a healthy and vibrant dialogue to American democracy. Ultimately, Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story lays bare why it was inevitable that the Soviet Union and the U.S. should end up in Afghanistan and what that means to the future of the American emp