Posted on 04/08/2009 5:25:46 AM PDT by Jeff Head
NAIROBI, Kenya - Somali pirates on Wednesday hijacked a cargo ship with 21 American crew members aboard, a diplomat and U.S. Navy officials said.
The Kenya-based diplomat identified the vessel as the 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Fifth Fleet confirmed that a Danish-owned, U.S.-operated container ship carrying 21 Americans "came under attack" about 240 nautical miles southeast of Eyl, a town in the northern Puntland region of Somalia.
Maersk Line is one of the U.S. Department of Defense's primary shipping contractors, according to GlobalSecurity.org. The Web site said the firm "manages a fleet of nearly 50 ships in commercial and government service, including vessels requiring Top Secret security clearances."
U.S. Navy spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen said the vessel was not working under a Pentagon contract when hijacked.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
If given the green light (not a certain proposition under this president) SEAL Team 6 will be all over this ship in less than 24 hours.
He’s probably worried that the SEALs will hurt the muslim pirates.
As I type, he is drafting a heavily worded response that will frown upon their piracy.
A good thought, but then think about this, which Team is still at full combat readiness, with the World “at peace”, as the Left is trying to tell us with “0” at the helm, and with almost all the usable manpower already deployed....I don’t get a warm fuzzy feeling about this at all. And it make me mad as hell!
“I read somewhere that these cargo ships are prohibited from bearing arms. If correct, that is stupid.”
Yes, it seems so stupid.
There seems to be some international law that says merchant
vessels can not defend themselves.
I understand that the pirates do nothing more then throw some
grappling hooks up and just climb on board as they wish.
My dream would be to pour 20 gallons of gas down the road and strike a match.
Nobody is running Somalia. It’s a nation of bandits, pirates and terrorists.
There’s your problem, there hasn’t been anyone “in charge” of Somalia since the mid 1990’s. Even the Red Cross and UN aid workers stay away from that place......
And every port there already looks like a scrap metal dump, except no scrap metal, everything of value has already been taken and sold to the black market by the Clans to buy weapons for their “Militias”.
And all the major cities already are basically rubble....
so now what?
And most of that 24 hours would be the flight time from Norfolk to Somalia.
Even China has 3 ships in the area. I believe we could run 15-20 convoys a week with the ships already involved, assigning two war vessels to each convoy.
Exactly...extend them your hand Barry.
Prayer bump.
Nah, they’re already in the area. We even have a shared base in Djibouti. (French base, with US specops troops.)
Let's say you have a cargo ship manned by foreign nationals, many with potential anti-american setiments, coming into New York harbor. They are all heavily armed. You want to let that ship come into port?
And the One will make sure that they don’t get them. All hail to you, Barbary pirates, I, the One, bow down before you.
I lay the blame for this directly at Obama’s teleprompter-reflected feet. He has been mumbling his way across the world, radiating weakness wherever he went, so the terrorists/pirates just shrugged their shoulders and went out and captured some Americans. It’s Jimmuh Carter and the Iranian hostages all over again.
The flaw in your plan is that nobody's running Somalia.
The only solution is a stealth ship that looks like a cargo vessel, but is really a death trap for whichever band of pirates "takes it over". All bodies and pirate vessels are sunk at sea, and it all gets handled quietly.
Vigilante justice, at the end of the day, is simply justice.
Danish ship, true, but on charter to Maersk U.S.A. which is an American subsidiary of Maersk in Denmark.
In all respects, this is a U.S. vessel with a U.S. crew conducting commerce for the U.S.A.
Pres_ent O will issue an apology for US ships being outside US coastal waters.
Then, he will ask for a UN resolution condemning the capitain of the ship for drifting his ship into Somali-controlled waters.
But Obama'sWORLD supports pirates as DIVERSITY.
Slavery is OK (Africa, Moslem nations).
Rape is OK. (Africa, Moslem nations, Afghanistan)
Everyone in power has forgotten 911, except they want more.
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.”
Barbary Pirates torture western prisoners
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."
I notice these bastids don’t capture Israeli ships. Wonder why.
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