Well that isn’t going to happen the way Peden wants. His own actions guaranteed his son a long, long period of hardship particularly if he keeps his father’s notorious name.

Good riddance.

This story just leaves me speechless. These are military members.

I would love to have read the transcript of the interrogation of these people…to see how the skilled GBI investigator cracked through their youth and “Rambo” mentality to expose their immaturity, hypocrisy, and incompetence.

They seem to have some kind of strange idea that they would live out one of their video games, score 80 million points, and get their own country as a reward.

Mr. Aguigui seems to have, like many people in these situations, finally been overwhelmed with the harsh reality of what he had done and created, and his defenses collapsed. Now he’s ratting out the men he led, in exchange for saving his own skin. Figures.

It’s interesting that Mr. Aguigui told the police that he wanted to create a militia to crack down on drug smuggling on the US-Canadian border. Then it appears he has spent as much as $15,000 on cocaine and marijuana. I guess that would explain his familiarity with the drug-smuggling business, and perhaps is desire to create a militia to “address” it…perhaps he wants to get a cut of this lucrative enterprise. Or maybe cynically use it to finance his planned coup d’etat.

I’m not sure even he knows. He seems to have blubbered over having “created a monster.” Like other would-be revolutionaries, he assumed that his operations would go according to plan, work out perfectly, and everybody would live happily ever after. He lacked age and experience to understand either Clausewitz’s concept of “friction” or the simpler concept of “Murphy’s Law.”

Apparently their inspiration was not a video game, but a magazine article about a video game that has not come out yet, based on a Tom Clancy novel, in which disaffected young soldiers snatch back the government from the usually snotty “fat cats and politicians and give it back to the people.”

I haven’t read Mr. Clancy’s latest novels…I ran out of patience with him after “Debt of Honor,” where he gave more character depth to the fuel tank of a Japanese-made car than to his human beings, but I noted that he seems to have a great admiration for, if not the politicians of government, the various front-line and technical operators of government. I haven’t seen those characters engage in rebellion and mutiny, although he has certainly menaced America with a variety of foreign onslaughts, including the nuclear destruction of Denver.

In a couple of his novels, those same foreign enemies have tried to manipulate Americans to achieve their ends…for example, the men who plant the nuclear weapon in Denver are angry native Americans. Oh, yes, and in “Executive Orders,” the Iranians plant a deep-cover agent in the Secret Service, but that’s pretty much so that President Jack Ryan can be heroic, as usual.

My point is that I don’t see Tom Clancy creating games in which American troops try to overthrow their government. Sounds to me like Mr. Aguigui and his acolytes got their facts wrong, or the magazine writer did the same. I wonder what he must be making of all of this.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
… And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B. Yeats
The Second Coming (1919)