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Is he bringing Mrs. Peel along as well?
Posted on 03/27/2015 5:01:43 AM PDT by Pan_Yan
...
Two years ago, Colonel John Steed, a former military attache to the British embassy in neighbouring Kenya, began his own personal mission to save those who were dubbed the “forgotten hostages” - the 100-plus sailors who still languished in pirate custody as of 2013. Drawn exclusively from poorer nations, their stories are a dark mirror image of that of Captain Phillips, the hijacked American whose rescue by US Navy seals became a blockbuster movie. Most have spent years in captivity, left to their fate not just by their employers but by their governments, who lack either the will or the means to mount rescues.
Mr Steed’s only chance is to get the pirates to see the sailors as a lost cause too. He tactfully persuades them to abandon hopes of a multi-million dollar ransom, and settle for a much smaller payment of “expenses”, which he scrapes together from charitable donations.
A high-stakes, dangerous game, it is not for the fainthearted - something that Mr Steed, 59, is all too well aware of, having suffered a serious heart attack just three months into his work. Still, given how close last month’s release operation came to disaster, it seems his heart surgeon did a good job. After raising a sum believed to be around $150,000 for the release of the four Thais - a fraction of the original $9 million ransom demand - Mr Steed flew to the Somali town of Galkayo, from where he despatched a team of Somali go-betweens to undertake the exchange in a patch of desert outside Amara. All was going fine, until he got a call on his mobile. He could hear a firefight.
“An al-Shabaab faction had attacked both my group and the pirates - they were probably after the money,”
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Not a career choice, but a soul choice.
His motivation is something only missionaries and doctors who go to third world countries can ever understand.
He will make a difference few people in “careers” will ever get close to.
Maybe someone should just kill all the pirates.
Is he bringing Mrs. Peel along as well?
Wow, what a man! How are men like these created?
What a hero! I admire the heck out of that guy..
They are born British.
Definitely not someone who was looking for a hobby to fill his retirement years. The ability to take on a failed state, pirates, Islamic extremists and navigate bureaucracies while convincing people to give money for a ‘lost cause’ shows an incredible amount of drive and will power.
We should have killed the terrorists, re-taken or sunk all of the captured ships, destroyed the waterfronts and destroyed all the ships and boats in the harbors of any port that harbored the pirates, rescued the hostages, and killed a minimum of 100 Somalis from the local area for each hostage killed.
We can’t make them like us, but we can make them soil themselves at the thought of us coming back.
Team America World Police? For the most part these aren’t terrorists. They aren’t ideological radicals trying to instill fear. They haven’t declared jihad on the United States. They are pirates trying to get rich off ransom. Still despicable but not the same. And the only time they were stupid enough to capture Americans we did kill them. If it’s America’s job to kill every criminal in the world we’re way behind.
http://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/John-Steed.jpg
Mrs. Peel... we’re needed.
May God bless and keep this man. Brave and noble.
Pirates are enemies of all of humanity (hostis humani generis) and should be dealt with in a fashion that strikes terror into the hearts of anyone else who might be considering piracy as a career choice.
Likewise, anyone who provide them support or otherwise does business with them.
But what you said was they WE should have killed them, sunk or retaken all the ships and destroyed their ports. Is it the job of the United States to hunt down pirates every time they capture a Vietnamese fishing boat?
The US is the obvious candidate.
And a smoking ruin choked with corpses is a good negotiating position from which to deal with other groups like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Isis, etc.
Hell yes.
And I don’t care that their motives are pure profit, a terrorist is a terrorist.
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