Erik Prince --OUT OF Blackwater/Xe and INTO AFRICA

Along the central east coast of Africa, modern-day pirates threaten some of the world's busiest shipping routes, attacking both European and American merchant ships and seizing their cargoes. According to the BBC:

"Piracy off the coast of Somalia has made many people very rich.A new economy has developed both within Somalia and further afield, as security companies, lawyers and negotiators reap huge profits from their involvement. But finding out what happens to the money delivered as ransom payments is doubly difficult, first because piracy is a transnational crime, and second because Somalia is a country without rules, regulations or a functioning government. There have been various reports that piracy in Somalia is attracting big-time criminals from all over the world; that it is being orchestrated from London; that the ship owners themselves are involved."

And now the area has attracted another pirate of sorts--Erik Prince, formerly of Blackwater fame.

Blackwater Founder Is Said to Back African Mercenaries

By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT 

Published: January 20, 2011

WASHINGTON — Erik Prince, the founder of international security giant Blackwater Worldwide, is secretly backing an effort by a controversial South African mercenary firm to insert itself into Somalia’s bloody civil war by protecting government leaders, training Somali militias, and battling pirates and Islamic militants there, according to Western and African officials.

The disclosure comes as Mr. Prince sells off his interest in the company he built into a behemoth with billions of dollars in American government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, work that mired him in controversy and lawsuits amid reports of reckless behavior by his operatives, including the deaths of civilians in Iraq. His efforts to wade into the chaos of Somalia appears to be Mr. Prince’s latest endeavor to remain at the center of a campaign against Islamic radicalism in some of the world’s most war ravaged corners. Mr. Prince moved to the United Arab Emirates late last year.

According to a report by the African Union, an organization of African states, Mr. Prince provided initial funding for a project by Saracen International to win contracts with Somalia’s embattled government. The Somali government has been cornered into a small patch of Mogadishu by the Shabab, a Somali militant group with ties to Al Qaeda.

Saracen International is a private security company based in South Africa, with corporate offshoots in Uganda and other countries. The company was formed with the remnants of Executive Outcomes, a private mercenary firm composed largely of former South African special operations troops that operated throughout Africa in the 1990s


The company makes little public about its operations and personnel, but it appears to be run by Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau, an apartheid-era internal security force notorious for killings of opponents of the government.

With its barely functional government and a fierce hostility to foreign armies since the hasty American withdrawal from Mogadishu in the early 1990s, Somalia is a country where Western militaries have long feared to tread. This has created an opportunity for private security companies like Saracen to fill the security vacuum created by years of civil war.

Saracen International has yet to formally announce its plans in Somalia, and there appear to be bitter disagreements within Somalia’s fractious government about whether to hire the South African firm. Somali officials have said that Saracen’s operations — which would also include training a anti-piracy army in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland — are being financed by an anonymous Middle Eastern country. 

Several people with knowledge of Saracen’s operations confirmed that the country is the United Arab Emirates.

Mr. Prince could not be reached for comment. According to a Jan. 12 confidential report by the African Union, Mr. Prince “is at the top of the management chain of Saracen and provided seed money for the Saracen contract.” A Western official working in Somalia says he believes that it was Mr. Prince who first raised the idea of the Saracen contract with members of the Emirates’ ruling families, with whom he has a close relationship.

American officials have said little about Saracen since news reports about the company’s planned operations in Somalia emerged last month. Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, said in December that the American government is “concerned about the lack of transparency” of Saracen’s funding and plans.
Mr. Prince for years has tried to spot new business opportunities in the security world. In 2008, he sought to capitalize on the growing piracy endemic off the Horn of Africa to win Blackwater contracts from companies that that frequent the shipping lanes there. He even reconfigured a 183-foot oceanographic research vessel into a pirate hunting ship for hire, complete with drone aircraft and .50-caliber machine guns. 

In an interview in the November Men’s Journal, Mr. Prince expressed frustration with the wave of lawsuits filed against Blackwater, which developed a reputation in Iraq and Afghanistan for reckless behavior. Mr. Prince, who said that moving to Abu Dhabi would “make it harder for the jackals to get my money,” said he intended to find business opportunities in “the energy field.” Despite all of Blackwater’s legal troubles, Mr. Prince has never been directly accused of criminal activity.

Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.

Loughner's "mental downfall"

Friends, teachers tell of Loughner's

descent into world of fantasy

By Amy Gardner, David A. Fahrenthold and Marc Fisher - Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, January 13, 2011; 12:00 AM

He played late-night marathon games of Monopoly with his buddies. He went with friends on family vacations. He would hang with pals at IHOP on Fridays. He had a girlfriend. He laughed and he loved and he knew things - about jazz, cars, fantasy games.

From his elementary years through middle school, Jared Loughner lived a life that his friends saw as little different from their own. There was something awkward about him, and he was teased more than most, but he had friends and they were often among the smarter kids in his grade. There were sleepovers and hikes and long games of Starcraft and Earth Empires.

Mick Burton, a friend who played with Loughner in the Tortolita Middle School band and on the basketball team, recalled that he "sort of got picked on a little bit. He had a sort of bowl cut of curly hair. He wore glasses. I just remember people on the basketball team calling him Harry Potter."

"It was pretty messed up," said Nasser Rey, 21, a friend from elementary and middle school. "Somebody taped a sticker on his back and it said, 'Kick me,' and people started kicking him. They just started trying to trip him. But he wasn't being bullied. He didn't start crying or nothing."

Rey remembered Loughner as quiet and not popular in high school, but not a recluse, either. They would work on assignments together and hang out, talking about hip-hop songs. "We would get into conversations about regular stuff," Rey said. "He was a normal dude."

In those years, Loughner's music was at the center of his life. "His parents spent thousands on musical instruments for him," said Alex Montanaro, one of Loughner's best friends from seventh through 10th grades.
Loughner started on the saxophone around the fifth grade. By late middle school, he was a serious jazz buff, keeping lots of John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker on his iPod.

Burton, who played gigs with Loughner at restaurants, recalled that Loughner beat him out in the eighth grade for first chair in the band's tenor saxophone section. "He was a really good player," Burton said. "I feel that he could have gone pretty far if he'd stuck with it."

Loughner took lessons at the Arizona Jazz Academy, a now-defunct school that his mother took him to each week, a 10-mile drive that impressed one teacher as a sign of commitment. The teacher, Doug Tidaback, recalled Loughner as a good student, though at the time, Tidaback thought the boy was using drugs. Still, the teacher sensed that Amy Loughner was eager for her son to have a "good, positive experience. She was quiet, but she was very clear in stating what she wanted for her son," Tidaback said. "I definitely got the impression that she cared."

Teachers and students who knew Loughner in middle school recall a boy with long, curly hair who was by no means part of the cool crowd but was an interesting kid. He could talk current events. He wanted to be a writer.

Montanaro went with the Loughners to New Mexico for a New Year's vacation one year and remembers everyone getting along well. "All I saw was a normal, loving relationship," he said. "They'd have us over for sleepovers where they'd order too much pizza. We even went to concerts together as a family."

'Mental breakdown'
Many teenagers try on different identities, experiment with new friends, and explore intellectual and emotional frontiers. Friends say Loughner's sophomore year was a whirlwind of change. He left behind his passion of the past few years - he stopped playing sax. He found a new love - his first real girlfriend. [see below] He lost that love, changed his look, switched friends, discovered new interests and seemed to drift off into a world of ideas that friends found odd, irrational, disturbing.

What Montanaro calls Loughner's "mental downfall" seemed to start after his breakup with the girlfriend, who did not respond to a request for an interview. Until that relationship blossomed, Loughner "actually had many friends," Montanaro said.  "Jared really became an outcast," he said. "We allowed him around us for a while, but he started acting nutty. His friends changed from people like us to more drug-oriented people."

That year, Loughner "hung out with a different crowd," Burton said, and started dressing in "goth" styles. "I remember cargo shorts and fingernails painted black. Maybe a couple of fingernails painted. It was never really extreme."Montanaro remembers Loughner's relationship with his parents fraying during that period, especially with his father, "because Jared began disrespecting them."

That fall, Pima County police were called to Mountain View High School after Loughner reported that a student had stuck him with a needle crafted from an ink pen. According to a police report, Loughner said he became pale and dizzy after the pen prick, but he declined to press charges.

In the spring of his junior year, police were called to school again when Loughner showed up "extremely intoxicated" after drinking about a third of a bottle of vodka. "He drank the alcohol because he was very upset as his father yelled at him," the police report said.

In 2006, Loughner dropped out after his junior year. That summer, he enrolled in an alternative high school, Aztec Middle College, and earned his diploma that December.

During his late high school years and thereafter, Loughner moved through a blur of entry-level jobs at chain stores and restaurants - Red Robin, Mandarin Grill, Quiznos, Eddie Bauer.

"He absolutely hated Red Robin," recalled Montanaro, who also worked there. "He couldn't stand the people who worked there or the customers." One night, Loughner, then busing tables, walked off the job. "He just told me he couldn't take it anymore," Montanaro said.

In an online forum, Loughner called his time at Red Robin a "terrible situation. Mental breakdown."
The year after high school, Rey worked with Loughner at a Mandarin Grill. To Rey's surprise, he said, Loughner talked a lot about smoking marijuana and taking mushrooms.

 "I just never thought he'd be the type who would be getting high," Rey said. "I thought he was like a goody-good. He was pretty smart in school. I was more of a partyer."

Loughner was arrested twice on minor charges, in 2007 for possession of a small amount of marijuana and a pipe, and a year later, for defacing a stop sign. Both cases were dismissed after Loughner completed a diversion program, but the arrests proved a lasting stain. Military officials say the drug charge was the reason they rejected Loughner's enlistment application. And Loughner complained that employers wanted nothing to do with him because of it.

After high school, Loughner again shifted passions. He cut his hair short, switched from hip-hop to heavy-metal, and wore metal band T-shirts. He spent a lot of time at the home of his friend Zachary Osler, sometimes staying the night. One night when Loughner was not there, his parents came looking for him, saying that Jared had "run away from home." Osler told the parents that their son was at a motel, said Osler's father, George.

By this time, Loughner had a growing fascination with dreams and alternative realities. He believed in lucid or conscious dreaming, the idea that you could consciously enter your own dream and change the path of its characters. He loved the 2001 movie "Waking Life," in which a young man walks in and out of dreams, exploring ideas about the fleeting nature of identity.

Loughner "focused all his energy into understanding the mystery of man's existence on Earth," George Osler said. "He was desperately trying to escape from all the chaos and suffering in his world."

Loughner's favorite writer was Philip K. Dick, whose science-fiction tales travel a mystical path in which omnipotent governments and businesses are the bad guys and the average man is often lost in an identity-shattering swirl of paranoia, schizophrenia and questions about whether the universe and the individual are real or part of some vast conspiracy.

Two years ago, Loughner texted his old friend Zach Osler: "I don't want to be your friend anymore."

"What Jared did was wrong," said Roxanne Osler, Zach's mother, referring to his alleged shootings. "But . . . I feel bad for the kid. . . . I wish people would have taken a better notice of him and gotten him help.

"He had friends, but then all of a sudden . . . he had nobody, and that's not a nice place to be."

'That evil stare'
In the past year or so, the crumbling of what was once Loughner was clear to anyone who bothered to look. Teachers, fellow students, even the anonymous e-buddies who substituted for the real friends he had lost - many suspected mental illness and said so, to one another, to Loughner, even to people who might have taken action. But no one did.

A student in Loughner's math class at Pima Community College usually sat near the classroom door for fear that he might turn violent, said her professor, Ben McGahee. The student recently moved out of her home and the new occupant left this note on the door Wednesday: "Both my husband and I had an experience where someone resembling the shooter came to our property and spent some time with a bit of a strange face-off between us. This person gave me the creeps and gave my husband the creeps." She declined to comment further.

Within minutes of the start of McGahee's eight-week course on algebra last June, he knew Loughner would be a problem. Loughner, who had already failed the same course, called the remedial class a "scam" and the teacher a "fraud." Asked to quiet down, Loughner calmly replied, "How can you deny math and not accept math?"

The next day, McGahee sent Loughner to see a school counselor, Delisa Siddall, who spoke to him in the hall for a few minutes. The counselor told Loughner to stop disrupting class, and he promised to do so.
"He gave me that evil stare," McGahee said. "When I turned my back to write something down on the board, I'd look out of the corner of my eye to make sure he had not hurt anyone."

That Friday, on his first quiz, Loughner doodled in the margins, drew cartoon figures, and wrote nonsensical equations such as "Eat + Sleep + Brush Teeth = Math" and the words "MAYHEM FEST."  McGahee showed the quiz to Siddall, who looked up Loughner's record and saw that he had had several run-ins with campus police. Students and teachers had reported his odd comments and inappropriate behavior. At first, according to police reports, officers decided only to "document the faculty's concern." One report was marked "No Bonafide Incident."

When Siddall asked Loughner about what had happened in class, he said his comments were only about math, according to a memo she wrote. For example, he said, "My instructor said he called a number 6 and I said I call it 18." The counselor concluded that the student had a "unique ideology that is not always homogeneous."

McGahee asked police to send an officer to his class every day. Several students asked that Loughner be given treatment or psychological testing. McGahee said he asked the counselor to "do something, but they kept telling me, 'He hasn't brought a weapon to class. He promised he'd be quiet. It doesn't look like he's hurting anybody.' "

After three weeks of class - and after other incidents, including one that led an officer to conclude that "there might be a mental health concern" - the professor asked the dean to remove Loughner for good. On Sept. 29, a campus police officer visited Loughner at home and read him a letter of immediate suspension. At the end of an hour-long exchange in which Loughner "held a constant trance of staring," he told the officer, "I realize now that this is all a scam."

McGahee said he never felt much relief, even after the suspension. "I was always worried that he could come back," he said.

Over the past two years, Loughner "was desperate to hang out with people," Montanaro said. "He'd just show up at our houses, call us constantly and would even pay for us just to get us to chill with him. It was rather annoying." By last summer, evidence of Loughner's increasingly deteriorating mental state was littered across the electronic worlds he inhabited.

On one site, Above Top Secret, Loughner left dozens of posts with bizarre theories about U.S. currency, the Constitution and grammar. Finally, another regular on the site wrote back that "I think you're frankly schizophrenic, and no that's not an amateur opinion and not intended as an uninformed or insulting remark. I really do care. Seek help before you hurt yourself or others or start taking your medications again, please."
Loughner, known on the site as "erad3," responded, "Thank you for the concern."

gardnera@washpost.com fahrenthold@washpost.com marcfisher@washpost.com
Gardner reported from Tucson. Staff writers Brigid Schulte in Washington and Clarence Williams in Tucson and staff researchers Alice Crites and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jared Loughner's ex-girlfriend says 

Tucson shooting suspect changed

The Associated Press
Thursday, January 13, 2011; 8:03 AM

TUCSON, Ariz. -- An ex-girlfriend of the suspect in Saturday's mass shooting in Tucson says he was a lot different than when they dated six years ago when both were in high school. Kelsey Hawkes was interviewed Thursday on CBS' "The Early Show" about Jared Loughner, whom she hasn't spoken to in five years.

Hawkes says he was caring, sweet and kind when they went out, and she remembers his parents as being great. She says she never saw any violent tendencies in Loughner.

Hawkes says it was upsetting when she learned that he had been arrested for the shootings and she could only imagine what had been going on with him.

Loughner has been charged in federal court for killing a judge and another federal employee and attempting to kill Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and two others.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

"Transparency should be proportional to the power that one has. The more power one has, the greater the dangers generated by that power, and the more need for transparency. Conversely, the weaker one is, the more danger there is in being transparent....We're not promoting transparency.  Only the transparency of the most powerful organizations."

Quote from Julian Assange, Paris Match, 12/23-29/2010, translation.

Julian Assange expressed in his recent interview one of those strange paradoxes of truth that many find to be impossible to grasp. When questioned by Paris Match last December he consistently reframed the questions presented to him. Told that he has avoided transparency while calling for it in others, he countered: "We're not promoting transparency.  Only the transparency of the most powerful organizations."  When WikiLeaks was then called "a powerful organization," he forcefully declared, "That's absurd!" While he admitted members of his organization show great courage, he denied that having courage gives one power.

So how can we define power?

Knowledge is power, said the philosopher Francis Bacon. And conversely, power is knowledge -- and more relevantly -- the witholding of knowledge. Even more than its intrinsic violence, the real scandal of power lies in its secrecy....

The central element [of WikiLeaks] is the possibility that everyone can know the moves and action of those people in power....

[Source: Edoardo Acotto, "Assange: The Power of Secrecy," Vogue Italia (12/09/2010)]

It's impossible not to see the irony implicit in the struggle that is now going on between the Western governments, which for so long have been fighting authoritarian governments throughout the world, and this one organization which is intent on exposing the hypocricy of the leaders these so-called democratic nations. There's no better way to illustrate that hypocrisy than by a comparison of the reality with the fiction created by author George Orwell. 

Orwell wrote an essay in 1946 about his Second Thoughts on James Burnham, in which he analyzed Burnham's writings as follows:

What Burnham is mainly concerned to show is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud. Burnham does not deny that ‘good’ motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else. All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or ‘the classless society’, or ‘the Kingdom of Heaven on earth’, are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way into power.

The English Puritans, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, were in each case simply power seekers using the hopes of the masses in order to win a privileged position for themselves. Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority. In each great revolutionary struggle the masses are led on by vague dreams of human brotherhood, and then, when the new ruling class is well established in power, they are thrust back into servitude. This is practically the whole of political history, as Burnham sees it.

Orwell almost plagiarized from his own essay about Burnham's thesis when he wrote a fictional treatise within the novel, 1984, published three years later. Written by Oceana's arch-enemy Emmanuel Goldstein (not unlike today's hated Osama bin Laden), "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" details the history of class war that led up to the oligarchic rule by a managerial class of accountants, engineers and bankers:

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim--for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives--is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters. 

 

Goldstein's chapter entitled, appropriately enough, "Ignorance Is Strength," then proceeds to enlighten its readers with the truth about how advanced technology had ended the turnover of the existing elite ruler class by another, and how that stability could only be maintained by perpetual war and by hiding the truth to the point that all those below the ruling class were fed and forced to accept a constant stream of lies.

As for the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since the development of machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare, which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way. 

Going back to Orwell's essay on Burnham, he says:

Burnham has probably been more right than wrong about the present and the immediate past. For quite fifty years past the general drift has almost certainly been towards oligarchy. The ever-increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and the growth of the new ‘managerial’ class of scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats; the weakness of the proletariat against the centralised state; the increasing helplessness of small countries against big ones; the decay of representative institutions and the appearance of one-party régimes based on police terrorism, faked plebiscites, etc: all these things seem to point in the same direction. Burnham sees the trend and assumes that it is irresistible, rather as a rabbit fascinated by a boa constrictor might assume that a boa constrictor is the strongest thing in the world.

As one jumps back and forth between these two works Orwell produced in the last four years of his life, it becomes increasingly apparent that he had identified James Burnham's expressed ideals as those by which the State, personified as Big Brother, ruled Oceania.

For this reason if no other, it is important to know who James Burnham was. We'll save that for another day.

What we've got here is a failure to communicate.

 

Cool Hand Luke [Blu-ray]
(Guard in the movie, Cool Hand Luke, pointing gun at Luke as the Cap'n identifies the problem.) 

You remember the old riddle: "If a tree falls in the forest and there is no living creature there to hear it, does it make a sound?" The answer, we were told, was no; there were vibrations, but without an animal or human with ears to translate the vibrations, there could be no sound because sound, by definition, is the perception of vibration.

To Jared Loughner, logical arguments such as this were his life, and in a recent video he posed another:

"If you call me a terrorist then the argument to call me a terrorist is Ad hominem," the 22-year-old wrote Dec. 15 in a wide-ranging screed that was posted in video form and ended with this: "What's government if words don't have meaning?"

Most who read that quote undoubtedly find it totally meaningless. A discussion of the phrase "ad hominem," however, helps to explain what Jared was unable to express clearly:

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting). This type of "argument" has the following form:

1. Person A makes claim X.
2. Person B makes an attack on person A.
3. Therefore A's claim is false.

The reason why an Ad Hominem (of any kind) is a fallacy is that the character, circumstances, or actions of a person do not (in most cases) have a bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being made (or the quality of the argument being made).
Bill: "I believe that abortion is morally wrong."
Dave: "Of course you would say that, you're a priest."
Bill: "What about the arguments I gave to support my position?"
Dave: "Those don't count. Like I said, you're a priest, so you have to say that abortion is wrong. Further, you are just a lackey to the Pope, so I can't believe what you say."
[Source: Fallacy Tutorial Pro 3.0 by Dr. Michael C. Labossiere, which appears at the website The Nizkor Project. Note that Nizkor is a group that is anti-revisionist, opposing the holocaust-deniers.]

The question Jared asked about the meaning of government in his video is one that was on his mind for at least three years. According to reporter Justin Pritchard of AP, Jared was present at one of Congresswoman Giffords' first events called “Congress on Your Corner” in 2007:

At an event roughly three years ago, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords took a question from Jared Loughner, the man accused of trying to assassinate her and killing six other people. According to two of his high school friends the question was essentially this:

"What is government if words have no meaning?"

The strangely worded query caught Giffords off her guard, as it likely would any of us, particularly at a public event where we were the center of attention, but Jared felt her inability to answer meant she was not intelligent. Possibly it led him to believe she should be assassinated, but it is not quite clear what or who influenced him to believe that. As Pritchard explained:

Mistrust of government was Loughner's defining conviction, the friends said. He believed the U.S. government was behind 9/11, and worried that governments were maneuvering to create a unified monetary system ("a New World Order currency" one friend said) so that social elites and bureaucrats could control the rest of the world.

Jared's friends were interviewed by Pritchard for his Associated Press article and offered a great deal of insight to their friend.

"He appeared to be to me an emotional cripple or an emotional child," Coorough said. "He lacked compassion, he lacked understanding and he lacked an ability to connect." Cates said Loughner "didn't have the social intelligence, but he definitely had the academic intelligence."

"He was very into the knowledge aspect of school. He was really into his philosophy classes and he was really into logic and English. And he would get frustrated by the dumbed-down words people used in class," Cates said.

Loughner expressed his interest in grammar and logic on the Internet as he made bizarre claims - such as that the Mars rover and the space shuttle missions were faked. He frequently used "if-then" constructions in making nonsensical arguments. For instance:

"If the living space is able to maintain the crews life at a temperature of -454F then the human body is alive in the NASA Space Shuttle. The human body isn't alive in the NASA Space Shuttle. Thus, the living space isn't able to maintain the crews life at a temperature of -454F."

Other writers have speculated that Jared may have a form of autism that causes him to behave in the socially isolating manner he has exhibited for at least five years. They call it Aspergers Syndrome.

Failure to Communicate

It's all about communication. If words have no meaning, i.e. if the representatives we elect don't hear us when we speak, are they really our government? Conversely, if they don't tell us the truth, do we have the right to learn the truth for ourselves outside the authorized government's classified system?

 Researchers have been through all this many times before. It has been well documented that Lee Harvey Oswald, for example, was taken in by military intelligence while in the Marines, then sheep-dipped and reassigned to an unnamed agency. He was then given instructions that would make it appear he was a Communist after he was in fact ordered to pretend to be a defector to the Soviet Union. After that "defection," he was welcomed back and used again; told to infiltrate pro-Castro groups to gain information. He was then tossed on the heap where useless agents end up, dead and unable to tell his story about his work on behalf of the government he loved.

Government Secrecy

We have also read about other agents who worked in another division of that same agency Oswald was assigned to whose job was to create hallucinogenic drugs that would help them create a so-called Manchurian Candidate who would kill to order and not remember later what he had done. Once that agency lied to the American people and escaped accountability for illegal research on their victims, they tested the drugs they created on innocent populations, possibly for the agency's own profit through cut out entities.

It's a sordid tale about government and its failure to communicate with its own citizens. Jared was right about that. But was he a victim of this government or just a poor unfortunate boy with an autistic syndrome?

Unfortunately, the truth will be hidden from us. We may never know for sure.

It's Going to be Another Strange Year

Already a week has gone by in 2011, and the news seems weirder than ever. Birds and fish are dropping like flies with the most unscientific of explanations concocted.

The U.S. government has attempted to subpoena Twitter communications of the WikiLeaks associates but asked that Twitter not tell anyone about the subpoena, a request Twitter decided to ignore.

A former Air Force official (John Parsons Wheeler III) who was an expert/adviser to Presidents in biowarfare and cyber warfare was found dead --murdered?-- in a landfill after making a strange trip to Wilmington, Delaware and caught on film by camera in a Dupont de Nemours building with one shoe on and one shoe off. Suspicions abound.

And today, I launch my new blog, the purpose of which is to go after all these giants in the news. Will they turn out to be windmills, like those windmills in our minds? It doesn't matter; after all, the true adventure of life is in the chase.

With acknowledgements to Miquel de Cervantes, who experienced the same quandaries about evil giants centuries ago:

At this point they came in sight of thirty forty windmills that there are on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire,

"Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth."

"What giants?" said Sancho Panza.

"Those thou seest there," answered his master, "with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long."

"Look, your worship," said Sancho; "what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go."

"It is easy to see," replied Don Quixote, "that thou art not used to this business of adventures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat."

So saying, he gave the spur to his steed Rocinante, heedless of the cries his squire Sancho sent after him, warning him that most certainly they were windmills and not giants he was going to attack. He, however, was so positive they were giants that he neither heard the cries of Sancho, nor perceived, near as he was, what they were, but made at them shouting, "Fly not, cowards and vile beings, for a single knight attacks you."

A slight breeze at this moment sprang up, and the great sails began to move, seeing which Don Quixote exclaimed, "Though ye flourish more arms than the giant Briareus, ye have to reckon with me."

So saying, and commending himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, imploring her to support him in such a peril, with lance in rest and covered by his buckler, he charged at Rocinante's fullest gallop and fell upon the first mill that stood in front of him; but as he drove his lance-point into the sail the wind whirled it round with such force that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse and rider, who went rolling over on the plain, in a sorry condition. Sancho hastened to his assistance as fast as his ass could go, and when he came up found him unable to move, with such a shock had Rocinante fallen with him.

"God bless me!" said Sancho, "did I not tell your worship to mind what you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head."

"Hush, friend Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "the fortunes of war more than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I think, and it is the truth, that that same sage Friston who carried off my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me; but in the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword."