This is what I am thinking.
New brand of piracy threatens oil tankers in Malacca Straits
Piracy map for 2003
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SINGAPORE (AP) - Fears are growing of terrorism in the Malacca Straits, the pirate-ridden Southeast Asian waterway that is a conduit for half the world's oil supply.
Despite those concerns, the Muslim nations of Indonesia and Malaysia have rebuffed U.S. offers to help police the strategic route. Part of the agenda when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld meets Asian officials Friday and Saturday will be Pentagon proposals to help provide intelligence, conduct joint patrols and send U.S. Marines into the straits.
The United States and Singapore believe the 50,000 commercial vessels - from cruise ships to supertankers - that travel through the straits each year are vulnerable targets for al-Qaida and its South Asian affiliates.
The narrow, 550-mile-long waterway straddling Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore has been a pirates' paradise since the 1800s. Piracy worldwide has tripled in the past decade, rising by 20 percent last year alone, said the U.N. International Maritime Bureau. It counted 189 incidents in Southeast Asia, more than 40 percent of the 2003 total.
"There is a fear that terrorists could resort to pirate-style tactics, or even work in concert with pirates," the maritime bureau's Secretary-General Efthimios Mitropoulos said.
"An uptrend in crew abductions could signal a move by terrorists to train themselves in operating and navigating large commercial vessels," he added during a late-May visit to Singapore.
In one incident last year, 10 armed pirates stormed an Indonesian chemical tanker from their speedboat in the Malacca Straits, escaping with $13,000 in electronic equipment and cash.
The United States and Singapore believe Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network and its regional affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah are targeting the straits, where chemical and oil tankers mingle with small craft that could carry suicide attackers.
Al-Qaida is blamed for the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 American servicemen, and the bombing of the French tanker Limburg, which killed one and spilled 90,000 barrels of oil off the Yemeni coast.
"Al-Qaida's attacks on commercial shipping in Yemen and the Arabian Sea and planned or attempted attacks in several straits ... should be ample demonstration that our concerns are not merely theoretical," said Matthew Daley, a deputy assistant U.S. secretary of state.
Adm. Thomas Fargo, head of U.S. Forces in the Pacific, told a congressional panel in March that the Pentagon's approach to secure the straits would likely include providing satellite and radar-tracking equipment to Indonesia. Fargo also hinted it might involve U.S. elite troops who could "take action when the decision has been made to do so."
Just after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, U.S.-led forces found a videotape in an Afghanistan safehouse showing plans to attack U.S. Navy warships heading through the straits to the Middle East. The warships would be targeted by suicide speedboats in a narrow "kill zone" in the straits, Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said.
Malacca Straits are about one nautical mile wide at their narrowest point and many ships barely skim above the shallowest point at 82 feet, putting them at risk from a bomb planted on the sea bottom.
A major attack would disrupt global trade for months. One quarter of the world's commerce passes through the straits, including 10 million barrels of crude oil heading daily from the Gulf toward boom economies of China, South Korea and Japan.
It is not immediately clear what maritime assets extremists groups have in the region. But Al-Qaida is believed to operate 15 to 25 vessels transporting people and weapons in the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian and Atlantic oceans, said Kweilen Kimmelman, an analyst with the Maritime Intelligence Group, a respected Washington-based think-tank.
Malaysia, on one side of the straits, has only 18 Marine Police boats in the water at a time. Indonesia, on the other side, has about 20 coast guard boats and several navy ships in the area, but not all at the same time.
On a recent day, an Indonesian Coast Guard crew of 14 patrolled aboard a ship a few miles south of Singapore, home to the world's busiest port.
"Indonesia can handle the terrorists at sea. We don't like them, and we have a duty to wipe them out," said Tri Yuswoyo, a 20-year veteran of the Indonesian Coast Guard. "We may need a thousand ships, but not the Americans. ... These are our straits,"
Although Indonesia refuses American help in the straits, it takes advantage of American expertise. Yuswoyo just returned from a three-month course at the U.S. Coast Guard training center in Yorktown, Va., where teachers focused on combatting terror.
Malaysian officials also reject U.S. help.
"I think we can look after our own area," Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi told the Far Eastern Economic Review last month.
Rumsfeld is expected to outline the Pentagon's proposal to secure the straits in greater detail at the security conference in Singapore on Friday and Saturday with officials from 20 of the region's nations.
Singapore has welcomed American involvement.
The city-state escorts high-value vessels in and out of its waters, while helicopters and jets buzz overhead at designated safe zones. The government spent $1.5 million for a global satellite ship-tracking system.
Singapore fears a ship packed with explosives, or chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons could be hijacked and sailed into one of its three ports.
Extremists also could block the straits by sinking a big vessel in a narrow waterway, disrupting commerce for months and forcing ships to travel another 1,000 miles from the Middle East to Asian destinations.
Another fear is that lower-level crewmen - mostly from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe - could be recruited as terrorists.
"It is very easy for terrorists to become sailors," said Andrew Tan, a security analyst with Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies. "Documents can be forged. ... The size, the scope of the maritime industry and the amount of seaborne trade is immense."
Requirements to work on a ship are much less stringent than to fly a plane, he said, which al-Qaida managed to do in the Sept. 11 hijack attacks.