Putting Today's 'Pirate' Attack in Context - Scahill

http://rebelreports.com/post/94198014/putting-todays-pirate-attack-in-context

Putting Today's 'Pirate' Attack in Context


A US ship, owned by a Pentagon contractor with ‘Top Security’ clearance, was seized off the Somali coast. Reports say the US crew has retaken the ship. But the question remains: Why are the pirates attacking?

By Jeremy Scahill



The Somali pirates who took control of the 17,000-ton “Maersk Alabama” cargo-ship in the early hours of Wednesday morning probably were unaware that the ship they were boarding belonged to a US Department of Defense contractor with “top security clearance,” which does a half-billion dollars in annual business with the Pentagon, primarily the Navy. The ship was being operated by an “all-American” crew—there were 20 US nationals onboard. “Every indication is that this is the first time a U.S.-flagged ship has been successfully seized by pirates,” said Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesperson for for the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet. The last documented pirate attack of a US vessel by African pirates was reported in 1804, off Libya, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The company, A.P. Moller-Maersk, is a Denmark-based company with a large US subsidiary, Maersk Line, Ltd, that serves US government agencies and contractors. The company, which is based in Norfolk, Virginia, runs the world’s largest fleet of US-flag vessels. The “Alabama” was about 300 miles off the coast of the Puntland region of northern Somalia when it was taken. The US military says the Alabama was not operating on a DoD contract at the time and was said to be delivering food aid.

- clip -

The seizure of the ship seemed to have been short-lived. At the time of this writing, the Pentagon was reporting that the US crew retook the ship and was holding one of the pirates in custody. At this point, it is unclear if the crew acted alone or had assistance from the military or another security force.

- clip -

“Piracy is an excellent business model if you operate from an impoverished, lawless place like Somalia,” says Patrick Cullen, a security expert at the London School of Economics who has been researching piracy. “The risk-reward ratio is just huge.”

But this type of coverage of the pirates is similar to the false narrative about “tribalism” being the cause of all of Africa’s problems. Of course, there are straight-up gangsters and criminals engaged in these hijackings. Perhaps the pirates who hijacked the Alabama on Wednesday fall into that category. We do not yet know. But that is hardly the whole “pirate” story. Consider what one pirate told The New York Times after he and his men seized a Ukrainian freighter “loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition” last year. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” said Sugule Ali:. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.” Now, that “coast guard” analogy is a stretch, but his point is an important and widely omitted part of this story. Indeed the Times article was titled, “Somali Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money.” Yet, The New York Times acknowledged, “the piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago… as a response to illegal fishing.”

Take this fact: Over $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are “being stolen every year by illegal trawlers” off Somalia’s coast, forcing the fishing industry there into a state of virtual non-existence.

But it isn’t just the theft of seafood. Nuclear dumping has polluted the environment. “In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed,” wrote Johann Hari in The Independent. “Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.”

According to Hari:

As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

- clip -

As the media coverage of the pirates has increased, private security companies like Xe/Blackwater have stepped in, seeing profits. A few months ago, Blackwater executives flew to London to meet with shipping company executives about protecting their ships from pirate attacks. In October, the company deployed the MacArthur, its “private sector warship equipped with helicopters” to the Gulf of Aden. “We have been contacted by shipowners who say they need our help in making sure goods get to their destination,” said the company’s executive vice-president, Bill Matthews. “The McArthur can help us accomplish that.”

According to an engineer aboard the MacArthur, the ship, whose crew includes former Navy SEALS, was at one point stationed in an area several hundred miles off the coast of Yemen. “Security teams will escort ships around both horns of Africa, Somalia and Yemen as they head to the Suez Canal… The McArthur will serve as a staging point for the SEALs and their smaller boats.”


All of this is important to keep in context any time you see a short blurb pop up about pirates attacking ships. “Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome?” Hari asked. “We won’t act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.”

They should be blown out of the water on sight, so as to render their 'business model' less lucrative.

Here we go again.
At least this time Jeremy is on our side :-)

No one asks for sympathy we're just curious why there suddenly are peasant pirates again, and we like to see things in context.

Not like its trying to rationalize piracy or anything.

criminality. I find that highly interesting. I remember allot of threads on Binghamton/Pittsburgh and why they did what they did. Seems to be rather common, wanting details.

How is knowing the cause defending the action?
No one is talking amnesty, no one has sympathy for organized crime.
But when a whole coastline practically runs amok I'm sure interested in how that came to be, because these things have a tendency to be caused by something.

If toxic waste dumping and overfishing have gone on unchallenged, it is due to a condition of relative anarchy that exists in Somalia. And yet your intellectual curiosity is confined only to learning what can be blamed on European boogeymen.

Here, from the OP, is a clear attempt to find moral justification for their crimes:

“Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome?” Hari asked. “We won’t act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.”

At this point I don't expect anything from Somalians except to not engage in piracy.

I bow before your debating awesomeness.

Deny the empire.
Be happy.

We don't do that with financial criminals like Madoff, or Enron, after all.

good point. justice for all.

I'm merely suggesting that shipping companies modify their business model to improve their risk-reward ratio. Blowing pirates out of the water would have the immediate effect of eliminating known liabilities, while discouraging similar piracy ventures in the future by making them less lucrative.

You should try to look at it rationally.

public forum in the grand old tradition of medieval Europe.

The problem here is not too much force against pirates, but too little against other types of pirates!

somehow you seem to "know" that it is all "bullshit." Please provide links.

They're certainly poor enough.

On the other hand, the firepower owned by the pirates could be used to establish some sort of order in the country, but chaos tends to favor criminals. These guys wouldn't be putting their own personal gains ahead of their fellow citizens, would they?

Remind me again how much toxic waste was dumped by the food aid ship on its way to Kenya.....and how much fishing that crew did as they passed through the area.

Miners are removing the mountaintop right across the river from my house. They're polluting the groundwater and they're not giving me any of the money they get for the coal they mine. I am now empowered!

Think I'll go to the nearest Interstate and sit there until I see a carload of likely victims going by. A carload of Swiss tourists on their way to Florida would be perfect! Then me and my buds could run up behind them in our pickup trucks. We could point our shotguns at them and make them pull over so we could jump behind the wheel of their car and take them to our hideout, where we would await a $10 million ransom for their release.

This is owed to us. We're not criminals, we're entrepreneurs. Other people do bad things and get by with it, so we wouldn't be doing anything wrong.

activity and should be seen as such. These pirates are armed and dangerous criminals that are making millions of dollars by taking part in illegal activities.

of the whole world on them at the moment. If they really were poor peasants lashing out in the only way available to them to protest what was being done in their offshore waters territory, NOW would be a really good time to tell everyone about it. But what do they do? Ask for money.

Discuss.

Maybe some "radicals" are the pirates who are letting the poor take the blame?

Just who is really doing these acts? And taking over a U.S. flagged ship that belongs to a military contractor working for the Navy. Pirates taking over a U.S. flagged ship is a first in history according to the article. After all that has happened in that area how is it that the ship was not more protected?

Fishy.