Which one of these is the more unintentionally funny headline?
Kerry calls for pirate hearings as drama continues
or
Special ops ‘itching’ to fight pirates, waiting for Obama to say go
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
I think we need to come up with a new name for these guys. I keep imagining Johnny Depp and they don’t seem that scary.
In fact it made you want to be on that ship. Didn’t it? C’mon admit it – didn’t it?
kinda…
Number 2, especially if the spec ops guys are wearing black outfits.
With Pirates dominating the last two news cycles, other MLB teams threatening to “go Galt!”
Avast maties!
Someone had to say it.
U.S. military already prepared with battle plans for Somalia pirates, say intelligence sources
BY James Gordon Meek
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Thursday, April 9th 2009, 5:06 AM
So the Daily News has a Washington bureau now? I thought that it never reached beyond Soho. This is what they call a scoop, right? Well, what newspaper is better equiped to handle the Defense Department than the Daily News. Does its fat frontpage still dirty your hands with ink? Who owns it now, Murdoch?
This is like old times again.
That headline is like “World is round, intelligence sources say.” The Pentagon tries to have contingency plans available for anything that might happen. It keeps them prepared and provides employment for strategists with vivid imaginations. Seriously, you want them to have a plan ready for any conceivable situation. They don’t like being caught with their thumbs up and upon reflection you’ll probably agree that you don’t want that either.
It’s got to be Kerry calling for hearings.
Send Jane Fonda to Puntland wearing an eyepatch and declaring solidarity with pirates.
The pirates aren`t going anywhere.
They`ve lost all the traditional fishing grounds to live a subsistence life, to the world`s greedy large commercial fishing industry.
All they have is their old dilapidated boats to go out & risk their lives to get what they can & at any price from a world that left them behind, & through no fault of their own.
Those itchy trigger fingered special ops guys, had better be prepared to kill thousands of “pirates” & then the next thousand after that.
The world is now seeing those proverbial chickens & we have seen just about nothing yet.
The face of the pirates are just changing along with the weapons used.
Soon large war ships & carrier groups with stealthy planes will be pirating the oil from brown people, but I imagine the next fleet of pirates will be preceding the tankers, only this time they will be water tankers.
Btw, how`s Iraq doing or Afghanistan.
One more thing that really pissed me off today, was Panetta, & his “we don`t hold prisoners in black sites anymore. We will not be boiling people alive & raping children so their fathers can give up shit info to make the screams stop & oh yeah Happy Easter.”
What a fucking world.
And then, there`s the pirates. Another little joke.
It`s not funny, yet so laughable.
Following the itchy & scratchy link above & going to the discussion link at it, here`s a real bunch of Gunga-ho stuff. Sick actually.
http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/2009/04/09/president-no/
There’s a little more to it than just “piracy,” isn’t there? An excerpt from Common Dreams:
Take this fact: Over $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are “being stolen every year by illegal trawlers” off Somalia’s coast, forcing the fishing industry there into a state of virtual non-existence.
But it isn’t just the theft of seafood. Nuclear dumping has polluted the environment. “In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed,” wrote Johann Hari in The Independent. “Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.”
According to Hari:
As soon as the [Somali] government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean.
The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
…
This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them.
They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence.”
As the media coverage of the pirates has increased, private security companies like Xe/Blackwater have stepped in, seeing profits. A few months ago, Blackwater executives flew to London to meet with shipping company executives about protecting their ships from pirate attacks.
In October, the company deployed the MacArthur, its “private sector warship equipped with helicopters” to the Gulf of Aden. “We have been contacted by shipowners who say they need our help in making sure goods get to their destination,” said the company’s executive vice-president, Bill Matthews. “The McArthur can help us accomplish that.”
According to an engineer aboard the MacArthur, the ship, whose crew includes former Navy SEALS, was at one point stationed in an area several hundred miles off the coast of Yemen. “Security teams will escort ships around both horns of Africa, Somalia and Yemen as they head to the Suez Canal… The McArthur will serve as a staging point for the SEALs and their smaller boats.”
All of this is important to keep in context any time you see a short blurb pop up about pirates attacking ships. “Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome?” Hari asked. “We won’t act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.”
© 2009 Jeremy Scahill
They do not need American special ops troops. They can easily hire some Dyn Corp or Blackwater thugs, put them on a tanker and send it into harms way as bait. Pull that stunt with 3-4 different ships and the pirates won’t know which ships to target.
The whole thing would cost less than $10-million. The insurance companies should consider this since they are spending more than that with each hijacking.
Aren’t we already spending enough billions each month to protect and defend the oil companies?
Yes, but why should massively profitable oil companies pay for their own security when they can get FREE security services from we, the sappy taxpayers, via the U.S. military?
Good to see John “Herman Munster” Kerry going after the really big issues like piracy.
we have the world’s largest and most expensive military in the world; they can’t deal with this problem w/o Kerry’s “help”?
as far as international law; I think we pretty well dispensed with the that with the Iraq invasion.
I think there is some bullyit going on with this pirate thing. As I understand it, the ocean area that the Somalia pirates operate in is about the size of the state of Texas and it is supposedly impossible to have security vessels cover that amount of ocean expanse. The insurers of shipping moving through the area have issued an operational mandate that basically says “DO NOT PROVIDE ANY DEFENSIVE WEAPONS ON BOARD THE SHIPS”. If attacked just surrender peacefully and the insurer will negotiate with the pirates as to how much ransom will be payed for the release of the ship and its hostages.
When I say something stinks, try this on for size! The U.S. of A has had multiple earth monitoring spy satellites in orbit for years. It is also my understanding that the optical systems on board these satellites can almost read the license plate number off of any car on earth that it is in its focus. So why can’t we monitor the activities of the pirates off the coast of Somalia? We certainly have the technical capability to at least provide early warning to shipping in the area. Further, the Government could also charge the shipping companies and the insurers a modest subscription fee for this service. Computers would provide all of the data crunching and plotting required to make this an efficient system. Since all of the legitimate naval traffic would be known, identification of any “mother ships” carrying the pirates and tracking them by satellite would be easy, and their respective target shipping could be warned.
They can`t do that yet, because the pirates are hiding in a cave somewhat north of here & south a bit somewhat to the west etc.
I don’t understand your comment! Where are the caves out on the open sea lanes? I think you have the wrong pirates. These guys are not the Pirates of the Caribbean. These guys are modern, they have cell phones, AK47’s, Ipods,and motor boats. The pirates actually have several old tankers at their disposal which they use as “mother ships”. These mother boats are used to transport small high speed outboard motor driven boats far out in the open sea close to the normal shipping lanes. Once out in the shipping lanes these small fast boats are used to transport the pirates to the designated target ship for boarding. Trust me, these Somalis don’t spend any time in caves. Back in Somalia, on dry land they can be generally found in and around the heavily populated cities.
Parvenu,
I should have mentioned how utterly stupid it is to think that a place the size of Texas cannot be monitored by the equipment & technology at the disposal of the world`s only Super Power.
They can pinpoint weddings to launch smart bombs on & bunker busters to terrorize Iraqis & Afghanis.
My point was that even when Rumsfeld lied about the weapons of mass destruction being “Somewhat North East & West bla bla bla, he didn`t have a clue where they were.
In this instance, on the other hand, these pirates are in plain view, on an open sea. So if they can`t monitor these areas, no bigger than one war zone, from disrupting the most important shipping lanes in the world, it must be because the pirates are hiding in caves, or they are lying about the circumstances.
I was agreeing with you, Sorry if I`m so pissed off at the situation that I didn`t make my sarcasm more apparent.
You might want to read my comment at the top of this page.
I believe it was moved to the first one, although I know I had not posted first.
Disclosure; I`ve spent some time at sea, & have been in the exact situation the “pirates” are in right now, being monitored & pursued, & with hostages.
Another thing.
I understand there are more piracy events going on right now. One was thwarted by French commandoes today. Another large German pirated ship is thought to be being used as a “mother” ship, as you mentioned, & that it is steaming at full speed to join in the defense of the pirates holding the American ship captain hostage. I`ve also heard reports of more pirate vessels hoping to join in that defense.
Stay tuned.