Free Republic

Last night the Indian Navy Ship Tabar struck a long overdue blow for freedom of the seas by sinking a pirate mother ship in the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden. At last, the pirates will know that the hijacking party has been crashed. Some are questioning whether the Tabar acted in self-defense. Ridiculous, they acted in the cause of law and order in support of freedom - a much higher calling. Perhaps this event will shake other nations out of their unwillingness to address the threat and put together a meaningful military force to eliminate these nautical terrorists...

Piracy: India, from whose Hindi language we get the word "thug," knows how to handle them. Its navy blew away two Somali pirate ships in a week, sending a message in the only language thugs understand. Kudos.The next Somali crew of pirates on a ship slinking through the Gulf of Aden looking for an easy ransom won't smile through its cutlasses if it spies an Indian-flagged ship. It will move the other way as fast as possible. Tuesday, a pirate mother-ship crew aimed grenade launchers at an Indian naval frigate and tried to ram it. The Indian ship Tabar fired...

MOGADISHU, Somalia - Somalia's increasingly brazen pirates are building sprawling stone houses, cruising in luxury cars, marrying beautiful women - even hiring caterers to prepare Western-style food for their hostages. And in an impoverished country where every public institution has crumbled, they have become heroes in the steamy coastal dens they operate from because they are the only real business in town. "The pirates depend on us, and we benefit from them," said Sahra Sheik Dahir, a shop owner in Haradhere, the nearest village to where a hijacked Saudi Arabian supertanker carrying $100 million in crude was anchored Wednesday. These...

Indian navy sinks pirate “mother ship” in Gulf of Aden Late Tuesday, Nov. 18, after a Thai boat and Iranian cargo vessel were hijacked, the Indian navy’s Tabar stealth frigate fought back and destroyed a pirate ship in the Gulf of Aden. It was described by the Indian navy as a mother vessel loaded with food, diesel and water, with two speed boats in tow. On the deck, were rocket-propelled grenade launchers and guns. The pirates threatened to blow up the Indian warship then opened fire. After destroying the pirate ship, the Tabar chased one of the speed boats, which...

Somali bandits terrorising the busy shipping routes around the Horn of Africa suffered a rare setback when an Indian warship destroyed a pirate "mothership" after coming under fire in the Gulf of Aden. The Indian navy said that its frigate, one of the numerous international warships dispatched to patrol the waters around the Horn of Africa, had approached a suspicious vessel yesterday evening. It turned out to be a previously captured ship being used by pirates as a base from which to launch their speedboats far out to sea. "The INS Tabar closed in on the mother vessel and asked...

An Indian navy warship has sunk a Somali pirate "mother ship" in the Gulf of Aden, the world's most treacherous waterway, after the renegades threatened to attack the frigate. The clash happened as pirates claimed to begin negotiations over a ransom for the Saudi super-tanker that was seized nearby on Saturday with two Britons aboard. The Sirius Star, which is carrying at least $100 million worth of oil, is the biggest ship ever to be hijacked. INS Tabar, an Indian frigate dispatched last month to the area to protect the country's merchant fleet, sighted the pirate vessel late on Tuesday....

This map shows all the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre during 2008. If exact coordinates are not provided, estimated positions are shown based on information provided. Zoom-in and click on the pointers to view more information of an individual attack. Pointers may be superimposed on each other.

NEW DELHI: In dramatic action on the high seas, an Indian warship with its armed helicopter and elite marine commandos repulsed in quick succession attempts made by different bands of gun-toting pirates to hijack a Saudi and a Mumbai-based merchant vessel in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia on Tuesday morning. INS Tabar, a Talwar-class guided-missile stealth frigate, was cruising in the Gulf of Aden at about 10 am when it got a frantic distress call from Saudi Arabian chemical and oil carrier NCC Tihama. Tihamas call said two to three high-speed boats, with several armed men, were trying to...

The Saudi Royal Family condemned Somali pirates as terrorists today after losing $100 million worth of oil in an audacious heist that saw bandits seize a supertanker in the Arabian Sea. The Sirius Star, which was carrying two million barrels of oil, a quarter of the Kingdom's daily output, was captured with its multi-national crew, including two Britons, 450 miles off the coast of Kenya on Sunday. The hijack was the biggest ever act of piracy in the perilous shipping lanes off the east coast of Africa. Vela International, the ship’s owners, said today that the crew were safe and...

• British government appeals for immediate release of the hostages • Owner says ship is fully loaded with crude oil and crew is safe

Energy: Piracy has always been a shipping hazard, but Somalia's buccaneers have taken it up a notch. Their hijacking of a supertanker Monday shows how vulnerable oil supplies are and how critical it is to stop them.Events around the Horn of Africa are often bellwethers of trouble. The terror attacks on the USS Cole and the U.S. embassies in East Africa presaged 9/11. Saturday's unprecedented attack on a 319,000-ton supertanker with $100 million in oil could be a warning of a new threat to world energy. The Somali pirates who launched the attack on a Saudi-flagged carrier hijacked the largest...

Alarm grows as governments and navies are rendered legally powerless to conduct security operations on the high seas Somali pirates struck again yesterday, seizing an Iranian cargo ship holding 30,000 tonnes of grain, as the world’s governments and navies pronounced themselves powerless against this new threat to global trade. Admiral Michael Mullen, the US military chief, pronounced himself stunned by the pirates’ reach after their capture of the supertanker Sirius Star and its $100 million (£70 million) cargo. Commanders from the US Fifth Fleet and from Nato warships in the area said that they would not intervene to retake the...

Even as the world's largest supertanker the Sirius Star continues to be in the grip of Pirates of the coast of Somalia. The Indian Navy appears to have taken the lead in the fight aagainst pirates, shortly after a successful operation against Pirates last week -- the Indian Navy warship INS Tabar sank a Somalian Pirate ship of the Gulf of Aden. At about 10 PM last night the Indian Navy spotted a pirate ship, The Navy challenged the pirate ship which had several speed boats accompanying it. The Pirate ship tried to ram the Tabar at which point the...

NEW DELHI: Even as the world's largest supertanker the Saudi Sirius Star continues to be in the grip of pirates of the coast of Somalia, the Indian navy appears to have taken the lead in the fight against pirates. After a successful operation against pirates last week when the Indian navy warship INS Tabar sank a Somalian pirate ship of the Gulf of Aden, at about 10 pm last night the navy spotted another pirate ship; it challenged the pirate ship which had several speed boats accompanying it, according to TV channel Times Now. The pirate’s ship tried to ram...

NEW DELHI (AP) — An Indian naval vessel sank a suspected pirate "mother ship" in the Gulf of Aden and chased two attack boats into the night, officials said Wednesday, as separate bands of brigands seized Thai and Iranian ships in the lawless seas.

... Capturing pirates is not the critical problem. Rather, the issue is how to handle those in captivity. Traditionally, pirates fell within that category of illegitimate hostiles that once included slave traders, brigands on the roads and, in wartime, unprivileged or "unlawful" enemy combatants. ... The key problem is that America's NATO allies have effectively abandoned the historical legal rules permitting irregular fighters to be tried in special military courts (or, in the case of pirates, admiralty courts) in favor of a straightforward criminal-justice model. Although piracy is certainly a criminal offense, treating it like bank robbery or an ordinary...

"If I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the Constitution framed by the convention, where I had the honor to preside, might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical society, I would never have placed my signature to it." -- George Washington -- There is an ever-growing debate in America over the relationship between government and religion. In recent times, Constitutional law, or at least the modern-day interpretation thereof, has moved from one of accommodation concerning religion to a position many call hostile to the expression of personal faith in the public square. From their writings, it's clear...

structure (not words) changed for clear reading) “No American natural history was more influential during the 18th century than Thomas Jefferson's (1743-1826) Notes on the State of Virginia, though it is, as intended, far more than a simple natural history. At once a description of the land and people of the state and a theoretical discourse on historical, natural, and political systems, the Notes represents Jefferson's conflicted views on the present and future of the new American nation, an integral mix of hope and anxiety. “Jefferson's Notes began inauspiciously during the late autumn, 1780, when François de Barbé Marbois, the...

Most Americans remain utterly ignorant of this nation’s first foreign war but that exotic, long-ago struggle set the pattern for nearly all the many distant conflicts that followed. Refusal to confront the lessons of the First Barbary War (1801-1805) has led to some of the silliest arguments concerning Iraq and Afghanistan, and any effort to apply traditional American values to our future foreign policy requires an understanding of this all-but-forgotten episode from our past. The war against the Barbary States of North Africa (Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli—today’s Libya) involved commitment and sacrifice far from home and in no way involved...

THE NEW YORK TIMES VS. HELMS, PART 529,876July 9, 2008 Last Friday, on the Fourth of July, the great American patriot Jesse Helms passed away. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also went to their great reward on Independence Day, so this is further proof of God. Helms is now the second great American patriot I've always wanted to meet and never will, at least in this lifetime. The only other one is the magnificent Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger. (Wikipedia quote: "I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.") After a week of...