Posted on 11/17/2008 4:30:59 PM PST by SandRat
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17, 2008 – Navy Adm. Mike Mullen said he was shocked by the piracy of a Saudi Arabian supertanker 450 nautical miles off the coast of Kenya in the Arabian Sea.
Mullen, speaking during a Pentagon news conference today, said the Sirius Star was attacked more than 450 nautical miles southeast of Mombasa, Kenya. News reports indicate the pirates have hijacked the ship and are heading for the Somali port of Eyl.
The ship is owned by a Saudi Arabian oil company and flagged in Liberia. Its crew of 25 includes citizens of Croatia, Great Britain, The Philippines, Poland and Saudi Arabia.
“I'm stunned by the range of it, less so than I am of the size,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said. The pirates have proven in the past that they are capable of planning and launching attacks on large supply vessels.
“Once the (pirates) have access, they seem to be able to get on and take over, which they've done in this case,” he said.
There are a number of military ships in the area, and American ships and crews have the rules of engagement and the necessary force needed to take on pirates, the chairman said.
The attack comes amid a decrease in the rate of successful pirate attacks on merchant vessels off the coast of Somalia, said officials at the Navy’s 5th Fleet based in Manama, Bahrain. Military and civilian efforts in the region has reduced the percentage of successful piracy attacks from 53 percent in August, to 31 percent in October.
“Our presence in the region is helping deter and disrupt criminal attacks off the Somali coast, but the situation with the Sirius Star clearly indicates the pirates’ ability to adapt their tactics and methods of attack” Navy Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, commander of Combined Maritime Forces, said in a release today.
“One of the challenges that … you have in piracy clearly is, if you are intervening and you capture pirates, is there a path to prosecute them?” Mullen said. “That's something I think the international community has got to answer for the long run.”
While the percentage of successful attacks has dropped the overall number of incidents still causes the chairman concern. “We're going to continue to have bring pressures on these pirates,” he said.
“Millions for tribute, but not one red cent for defense!”
I don’t understand. Can’t you throw crap at them as they climb on board? It must be a big job to climb abord, and takover.
They probably thought Zero was president already. The Saudis and Bush are on speaking terms and have a history of dealing with SA’s enemies.
“One of the challenges that … you have in piracy clearly is, if you are intervening and you capture pirates, is there a path to prosecute them?” Mullen said. “That’s something I think the international community has got to answer for the long run.”
I thought that immediate execution would be a time-honored and viable solution.
“Its crew of 25 includes citizens of Croatia, Great Britain, The Philippines, Poland and Saudi Arabia.”
Sounds like a decent training excersise for Poland’s new Special Forces, The GROM-Grupa Reagowania Operacyjno Mobilnego (Operational Mobile Response Group)
To have an oil tanker seized right out from under the noses of the Navy is pretty embarrassing.
My own countermeasure would involve smoking hulks on the horizon, but that’s just me...
Apparently, we’ve suddenly forgotten how to deal with pirates.
They need to adopt rules of engagement (ROE) of “Sighted Pirates - Sank Same.”
Are there no firearms on those ships?
L
When the Founding Fathers Faced Islamists
"Back in 1784, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had to decide whether to appease or stand up to armed Middle Eastern pirates. Sound familiar?
.... The Middle East, a term coined by Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of McCain’s boyhood idols, is where both American warfare and American diplomacy began in the late 18th century, as our infant republic faced its first post-Revolutionary struggle against the evocatively named Barbary States of the Ottoman Empire.
The regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers (future homes of Muammar Qaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and the Islamic Salvation Front, respectively) had been hosting and sponsoring Islamic piracy since the Middle Ages. Scimitar-wielding corsairs would regularly interrupt the flow of trade and traffic along the coasts of North Africa, seizing European vessels and taking their crews into bondage. Cervantes wrote his first play, in the 16th century, about the dread corsairs, and by the 18th, the American colonies had a minor seagoing presence in the Mediterranean protected by the redoubtable British Navy. But the Crown was reluctant to war against so petty an antagonist, preferring to pay “tribute” to the Barbary States instead, as a shopkeeper would protection money to the mafia. After the U.S. broke away from England and became its own nation, however, the geopolitical dynamics changed, as did the American equanimity with doing business with pirates.
In 1784, corsairs attacked the Betsy, a 300-ton brig that had sailed from Boston to Tenerife Island, about 100 miles off the North African coast, selling her new-made citizens as chattel on the markets of Morocco. The U.S. was not free of its own moral taint of slavery, of course, but it would be impossible to hasten the industrial development that would eventually render the agrarian-plantation economy obsolete if merchant ships could not be assured of safe conduct near the Turkish Porte. Other vessels, such as the Dauphin and Maria, were also seized, this time by Algiers, and the horrifying experiences of their captive passengers relayed back home were the cause for outrage. James Leander Cathcart described the dungeon in which he was being kept as “perfectly dark…where the slaves sleep four tiers deep…many nearly naked, and few with anything more than an old tattered blanket to cover them in the depth of winter.”
In response, Thomas Jefferson, then the Minister to France, suggested a multilateral approach of what we would now term “deterrence.” He asked that Spain, Portugal, Naples, Denmark, Sweden and France enter into a coalition with America to dissuade the regencies from their criminal assaults on life, liberty and the pursuit of international commerce. As Michael Oren, in his magisterial history Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to Present relates, “By deterring, rather than appeasing, Barbary, the United States would preserve its economy and send an unambiguous message to potentially hostile powers.” Jefferson thought it would impress Europe if America could do what Europe had failed to do for centuries and beat back the persistent thuggery of Islamists. “It will procure us respect,” said the author of the Declaration of Independence. “And respect is a safeguard to interest.”
This sober judgment fused the cold calculations of latter-day “realism” with the morality behind revolutionary interventionism: not only would America protect its citizens from plunder and foreign slaveholding; it would ensure that other countries under “Christendom” were similarly protected.
Though Jefferson found a stalwart Continental ally in a former one, the Marquis de Lafayette, France squelched the idea of a NATO made of buckshot and cannon. While waiting for funds that would never come from Congress for the construction of a 150-gun navy, the sage of Monticello resigned himself to further diplomacy with the enemy. In 1785, he dispatched John Lamb, a Connecticut businessman, to secure the release of hostages in Algiers, held by its dynastic sovereign Hassan Dey. Lamb failed ignominiously.
At the same time, John Adams, then minister to England, agreed to receive the pasha of Tripoli, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar, in his London quarters to discuss a possible peace deal. Adams described his interlocutor as a man who looked all “pestilence and war,” a suspicion that was soon confirmed by the pasha’s demand of 30,000 guineas for his statelet, plus a 3,000 guinea gratuity for himself. He also did Adams the favor of estimating what it would cost the U.S. to broker a similar deal with Tunis, Morocco and Algiers — the total price for blackmail would be about $1 million, or a tenth the annual budget of the United States.
Adams was incensed. “It would be more proper to write [of his meeting with ‘Abd al-Rahman] for the… New York Theatre,” he thundered. He agreed with Jefferson that a military response was increasingly likely, but Adams doubted his country’s economic ability to sustain it. For the short term, he thought it better to offer “one Gift of two hundred Thousand Pounds” rather than forfeit “a Million annually” in trade revenue, which the pirates were sure to disrupt. Not long thereafter, Jefferson joined him in London to prevent the “universal and horrible War” and reach an accord with the refractory envoy from Tripoli. Both gentlemen of the Enlightenment, and comrades in revolution, affirmed America’s desire for peace, its respect for all nations, and suggested a treaty of lasting friendship with the regency. ‘Abd al-Rahman listened well, but his reply was one that would shock modern ears less than it did those of the two Founding Fathers:
“It was… written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged [the Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon wheoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
Though a period of paying tribute and douceurs (or “softeners” — expensive trickets and toys) to Islamic pirates would continue, the words of ‘Abd al-Rahman Adams were chilling enough to leave Adams and Jefferson in no doubt as to the sanguinary and messianic nature of their adversary. “An angel sent on this business,” lamented Jefferson, “could have done nothing” to placate such men. He called them “sea dogs” and a “pettifogging nest of robbers.” The episode preceded further acts of piracy against American vessels and the imprisonment and sale of its crews and passengers, and was enough to get Jefferson to overlook his wariness of federalism and agree to a Constitution with a strong central government capable of building and keeping a powerful navy. Adams, as it turned out, was more worried that American opinion wouldn’t rally for war, or accept its dire consequences. But the Philadelphia convention that drafted our national covenant in 1787 was hastened, and its welter of opinions unified, by the Barbary question. As the historian Thomas Bailey wrote, “In an indirect sense, the brutal Dey of Algiers was a Founding Father of the Constitution.”
America still sued for peace. The Betsy’s release had been negotiated, albeit abjectly, and to the accompaniment of America’s first diplomatic accord, the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Ship-Signals, signed with Morocco in 1786. But no sooner was the ship let go and its captives freed than it was recaptured by Tunis and renamed the Mashuda. Also, Washington at one point found itself spending 20% of its annual revenue in paying blackmail to a loose confederation of terrorists on the high seas. Under Jefferson’s presidency, the first era of American military predominance was inaugurated, with men like William Bainbridge, William Eaton and the Byronic swashbuckler Stephen Decatur, becoming folk heroes.
....Santayana got it backwards, in fact: even those who remember history are still doomed to repeat it."
if you are intervening and you capture pirates, is there a path to prosecute them?”
What an asinine question. Piracy on the high seas, is deserving of death. No one in their right might could believe otherwise, unless you want the world court and the court of public opinion to prosecute those who were pirated, and let the real pirates go.
There should be IMHO zero tolerance, and no mercy shown to any such activity. Piracy as we know it died in the 19th century.
The rebirth can only be attributed to the rich prize and little risk (apparently) for engaging in the crime. With the right security force, the right weapons, and the mission to let no one escape back to their homeland, and rules of engagement to support the mission It would take less than a year to end the latest version.
I guess not.
Hire half a dozen mercenary machine-gun crews and place them on the deck at appropriate locations. Be sure they have plenty of ammunition.
Next question.
Bill Clinton, is that you?
During a February 2002 speech, Clinton explained that he turned down an offer from Sudan for bin Laden's extradition to the U.S., saying, "At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him."
Just kill them and do something tasteful with their heads along the rail for the next batch.
This is a clash of civilizations, not an oral before the department head.
Doesn’t it inspire confidence in you to hear an admiral say he is, “Shocked,” by a predictable tactical scenario!
Lord, deliver us from political military types.
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