Captured: Giles Lane, left, appears to cry out while his Australian companion (right) looks on
Posted on 01/15/2008 7:43:41 PM PST by Stoat
This is the moment a British anti-whaling activist was taken captive on a Japanese harpoon ship.
Giles Lane appears to be crying out in pain as the sailors surround him and bind him.
In the dramatic pictures his companion, an Australian, is wrapped around with rope and seems powerless to help.
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Captured: Giles Lane, left, appears to cry out while his Australian companion (right) looks on
Colleagues of the pair in the Sea Shepherd marine protection organisation claim they were later tied to the radar mast in the freezing cold as the vessel sped from the area in the Antarctic.
"They have assaulted and kidnapped two of my crew," said Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd vessel Steve Irwin.
The Japanese Whaling Association last night denied the men had been tied to the mast, but admitted they were being held on board the Yushin Maru.
A spokesman claimed that Mr Lane, 36, from Cuckfield, in West Sussex, and Australian Benjamin Potts had boarded the ship illegally and intended to entangle the vessel's propellers with rope and throw bottles of acid on the decks.
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Sea spray: The Yushin Maru crew turn a high pressure hose on the men as they approach
The sensational confrontation came hours after an Australian court banned Japan from whaling in its Antarctic waters.
The ruling applies to a sanctuary declared by Australia in 2000 - which Japan does not recognise.
Some of its ships are already in the area for a planned cull of 1,000 fin and minke whales for "scientific research".
When crew members on board the Steve Irwin learned of the judgment they clapped and cheered, then tried to send a radio message to a fleet they had been shadowing for three days.
The Japanese failed to respond, so Captain Watson decided to send Mr Lane and Mr Potts to one of the ships, the Yushin Maru, to deliver a letter outlining the judgment and demanding that the whaling stop immediately.
First the sailors turned high-pressure hoses on them. And Captain Watson said that as soon as the two men boarded the ship by clambering up a ladder the Japanese set upon them.
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Illegal: Japanese whalers have been banned from hunting in Australian waters by a court judgment
"First of all they tried to throw Benjamin Potts overboard, but he managed to get his way out of that," he said.
"Then they assaulted Giles Lane. He seems to be in some pain.
"They tied him up with an incredible number of ropes. It looks like some kind of bondage movie. It's ridiculous."
There are concerns now for the safety of the two men in the freezing conditions.
In Tokyo last night, Makoto Ito, spokesman for the Japanese Whaling Association denied they had been tied to a mast.
"It is illegal to board another country's vessels on the high seas. As a result, at this stage, they are being held in custody while decisions are made on their future," he said.
"This is just propaganda by Sea Shepherd," he added. "I believe the two men are on the boat but we cannot give further details at this time.
"Sea Shepherd has been harassing our research vessels, but no one is bound to the mast of the Yushin Maru."
There are also concerns that more serious confrontations will occur in coming days when an Australian government vessel arrives in the area.
The converted cruise liner has a number of weapons on board - and environmentalists believe it will try to drive the Japanese out.
Send over a case of wine.
What goes well with whale?
Send over a case of wine.
What goes well with whale?
LMAO!
I'm not sure that anything does....
An amusing (at least to me) related item that may be of interest is that here in Washington State, the Makah Indians were in the news back in the late 1990's because they wanted to revive whaling as a tradition for their community. The screaming hysteria in the press and the courts was deafening, seemingly for years, until 1999 when they finally got clearance to do this. It took quite a while for them to actually get one, in large measure because whenever they would go out in the longboats there would be a flotilla of Greenpeace hippies shadowing them, shouting and screaming and racing about and doing everything they could to harass the Makahs as well as any whales in the vicinity. Well, they finally got one, harpooned and then shot dead with a .50 cal. rifle. They dragged it up onto the beach and had a huge production over the cleaning and cooking of the meat, but when it came down to the locals actually eating it there were few takers and all of the TV interviews that I saw at the time showed local indians turning up their noses in disgust after one timid bite and throwing the rest away.
I'm told that for weeks thereafter there were huge billboards advertising "whale meat dinners" at the casinos in the area, but I also understand that there were few takers.
I guess it's an 'acquired taste' that's difficult to become enthusiastic about when you've got a McDonald's and a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Wendy's right down the street.
Whales are warm-blooded mamals, and as such would probably be considered "red meat".
Therefore, I am thinking grilled on the barby, like a steak.
Or slow-roasted, like prime rib.
It would be interesting, at least if one did not end up with 10 tons of leftovers.
kaizoku!
My recollection is that they were grilling it on the beach after they killed it, but I’m not sure what they did with it in the casino restaurants.
It seems to me that the whole exercise could have been avoided by a little bit of research beforehand. Perhaps a plane trip to Japan to chat with some of the chefs there might have been a thought? The whole thing was a media-frenzy mess from start to finish, and it seems that it wasn’t really thought through very well.
No way man, we can just go to the past to get more.
"Gaia, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Collectivism. It's five-year plan: To explore strange new climate change theories. To seek out endangered life, and stifle new civilization. To baldly lie where no man has lied but Gore!"
Australia to Pick Up Whaling Activists
(excerpt) The protesters from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society scored a victory with their stunt, bringing Japan's whale hunt to a standstill while officials scrambled to resolve the faceoff. The Australian customs ship Oceanic Viking will pick up the two activists, an Australian and a Briton, and return them to their anti-whaling vessel as soon as the details can be arranged, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said. The offer came at the request of the Japanese government, and the head of the activist group said he agreed to the transfer as long as there were no conditions requiring him to stop harassing the whalers.
I presume you’ve seen the updates. If not, see my post and link at #167. You’re quite right that it’s being handled as a “Customs and Fisheries exercise”, and it appears that a Customs ship is about to aid to abet the activities of the Sea Shepherd group, with the full support of the Australian government. Go Aussies!
Thanks for the clarification.
I have no doubt at all that this is precisely what it means to you, however it appears that the Australian Government is not quite so depraved as what you take them to be. From a far more reputable and balanced Australian news source:
Canberra casts off whaling activists NEWS.com.au
THE Australian Government has condemned the actions of the rogue activists who boarded a Japanese whaling ship in the Southern Ocean, as federal police examined whether they could be prosecuted.
(edit)
Mr Smith said the incident was being "evaluated" by the Australian Federal Police.
(end edit)
I think that many here will find it quite telling that in your giddiness and jubilation at the notion of these scummy violent hippie terrorists being released, your default source for information on it is America's Pravda, the endlessly-discredited New York Slimes which is losing readership as a sieve loses water precisely because of it's increasingly shoddy 'reporting' and blatant leftwing bias. As is the NYT's ongoing pattern of bias, they omit crucial details in their version of this story in order to spin the story to appeal to it's leftwing readership. This story is being carried on over a thousand major sites, and this is the one that you choose.
Also quite telling is the fact that the Sea Shepherd people are so violent, imbalanced and hysterical that even the normally hard-Left Greenpeace hippies reject them. From the article:
Mr Watson was a co-founder of Greenpeace before he split with the organisation in 1977 to pursue more radical action against whaling.
"We are there to defend the whales, not to attack whalers," Mr Nicholl said.
This matter is far from being over.
You’re ignoring the bottom line. From the article you linked to: “Mr Smith said the Oceanic Viking would be used as a neutral platform to return the two activists to their own ship, the Steve Irwin.” This hardly sounds like the Australian government is interested in stopping them. They can “evaluate” all they like, but actions are what counts. If they didn’t want the Sea Shepherders to carry on, they’d take them onto the customs ship and bring them to Australian soil, to await the conclusions of the legal authorities’ “evaluations”.
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