<!--quoteo(post=280422:date=Oct 1 2008, 11:05 AM:name=Stallion)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Stallion @ Oct 1 2008, 11:05 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=280422"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I wonder if there's some way to get the tanks up on deck? They could fire on the warships then. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/yes.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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Gunner, i would doubt very much they would be loaded with either ammo or fuel. That would just be asking for trouble. Stallion, Even if they could figure out how to fuel them, load them, drive them up the stairs <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" /> and aim them ....they would probably just end up shooting each other! Oh ...I'm sorry, I mean they would "celebrate a holy day" ...by shooting each other... <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/24.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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I haven't been able to find any real news on the standoff, looks like everyone is waiting on the Russians to show up, but i did run across a couple of well written articles, one is an opinion piece, the other gets a little bit more into detail about how these Somali pirates operate.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Exterminate that Plague of Pirates
By Ralph Peters
New York Post | Thursday, October 02, 2008
SOMALI pirates got a shock last week: The ship they seized carried dozens of Russian-built tanks, along with a wealth of heavy weapons and ammo. It was more than they'd bargained for.
As I write, the Faina sits at anchor off a notorious pirate port, its crew held captive by 30 or more Somalis. US Navy warships circle the vessel. Our helicopters buzz its deck.
We don't want that weaponry falling into terrorist hands. The Somalis lack the facilities to unload 40-ton tanks, but the smaller weapons aboard would delight the local al Qaeda franchise.
But we don't know what to do next. Neither do the pirates, who caught a whale by the tail. We'd like them to drop their $20-million ransom demand. They'd like us to go away. Meanwhile, the pirates may have killed a number of their own for opaque reasons.
Chartered through a Ukrainian front company, the Faina's a typical post-Soviet arms smuggler: Its cargo is manifested to the Kenyan military, but the true destination for those T-72 tanks is either Sudan's government, which is under an international arms embargo, or southern-Sudanese rebels chafing under a rickety peace deal. The Kenyans are just middlemen making a buck.
The pirates attacked the wrong ship and screwed up everything.
Playing hide-and-seek along nearly 2,000 miles of coastline, Somali pirates have attacked over five dozen vessels this year alone. Their targets ranged from luxury yachts to oil tankers.
Pirates successfully hijacked 26 of those vessels, a dozen of which remain captive pending ransom payments. With few exceptions, ship owners pay up. To their credit, the French sent commandos to free a captured yacht, killing one pirate and capturing a gang. The rest of the world just rolls over.
Our Navy maintains an impressive presence off the Horn of Africa, along with vessels from other NATO states. We have the surveillance means to find and the firepower to destroy the pirate fleets of fast boats. But we don't want to hurt anybody.
Nonetheless, The New York Times has already tilted toward the pirates (and against our sailors), arguing that the hijackers are just poor lads who started out defending their fishing rights and became up-from-poverty entrepreneurs who don't like to hurt anybody. (You almost expect Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley to pop from a hatch.)
As usual, Western leftists excuse lawlessness that terrorizes the wretched of the earth - as long as their own wealthy neighborhoods remain safe. (Woe unto the Pirates of Narragansett Bay!)
The response to piracy must be the same as it was when the British brought an end to the profession's "golden age:" Sink them or board them, kill them or hang them.
Zero tolerance is the only effective policy.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Rest of the story here :
<a href="http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=FC1C9982-217F-4457-9E05-2AF9FF17D198" target="_blank">http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read...05-2AF9FF17D198</a>
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->The Chilling Innocence of Piracy[/b]
Somali pirates hijacked a Ukrainian vessel carrying tanks and other military hardware in the Gulf of Aden. U.S. Navy warships have surrounded them.
This year alone, pirates have attacked 61 ships in the region. They have held 14 oil tankers, cargo vessels, and other ships with a total of over 300 crew members, and have demanded ransoms of over $1 million per ship.
The word "pirate" summons all sorts of romantic images from the great age of piracy in the 17th century Caribbean: a ship flying the Jolly Roger and manned by cutthroats with black eyepatches and sashes around their heads. The Indian Ocean pirate of the early 21st century -- in his flip-flops, tank-top, and light jacket -- is different in some ways but similar in others. Only through the distance of time can we find anything charming or romantic about Caribbean pirates, who were murderous thugs just like their modern-day Indian Ocean counterparts.
Piracy is the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. Somalia is a failed state with a long coastline, so piracy flourishes nearby, as it does offshore from other weakly governed states like Indonesia and Nigeria. But it is particularly prevalent off the Somali coast because the anarchy is far more severe than in the other two countries. The Somali civil war began in the early 1990s, but the country had, in effect, been broken up since a decade earlier. I was in Somalia in 1986; there was essentially no government at that time, and the country was a virtual ward of the United Nations. Then, Somali pirates were often unemployed male youth who hung around the docks, and whom the local warlord dispatched to the seas to bring back income for him. Piracy is organized crime. Like roving gangs, each group of pirates patrols a part of the sea. The waters in the Gulf of Aden might as well be a street in Mogadishu.
I spoke recently with several U.S. Navy officers who had been involved in anti-piracy operations off Somalia, and who had interviewed captured pirates. The officers told me that Somali pirate confederations consist of cells of ten men, with each cell distributed among three skiffs. The skiffs are usually old, ratty, and roach-infested, and made of unpainted, decaying wood or fiberglass. A typical pirate cell goes into the open ocean for three weeks at a time, navigating by the stars. The pirates come equipped with drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, grappling hooks, short ladders, knives, AK-47 assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. They bring millet and qat (the local narcotic of choice), and they use lines and nets to catch fish, which they eat raw. One captured pirate skiff held a hunk of shark meat so tough it had teeth marks all over it. With no shade and only a limited amount of water, their existence on the high seas is painfully rugged.
The classic tactic of Somali pirates is to take over a slightly larger dhow, often a fishing boat manned by Indians, Taiwanese, or South Koreans, and then live on it, with the skiff attached. Once in possession of a dhow, they can seize an even bigger ship. As they leapfrog to yet bigger ships, they let the smaller ships go free. Because the sea is vast, only when a large ship issues a distress call do foreign navies even know where to look for pirates. If Somali pirates hunted only small boats, no warship in the international coalition would know about the piracy.
Off-hand cruelty is the pirates' signature behavior. In one instance, they had beaten, bullied, and semi-starved an Indian merchant crew for a week, and thrown overboard a live monkey that the crew was transporting to Dubai. "Forget the Johnny Depp charm," one Navy officer told me. "Theirs is a savage brutality not born of malice or evil, like a lion killing an antelope. There is almost a natural innocence about what they do."
The one upside of piracy is that it creates incentives for cooperation among navies of countries who often have tense relations with each other. The U.S. and the Russians cooperate off the Gulf of Aden, and we might begin to work with the Chinese and other navies off the coast of Indonesia, too. As a transnational threat tied to anarchy, piracy brings nations together, helping to form the new coalitions of the 21st century.
— Robert D. Kaplan<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Original story here :
<a href="http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/10/pirates.php" target="_blank">http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archives.../10/pirates.php</a>
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