American Captain freed by Navy snipers and navy Seals.

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No. I just pay attention to facts. There is nothing more real than three skulls blasted to mush by high power rifle bullets. The exit wounds must have been horrendous.

ruveyn

You Are Being Lied to About Pirates

By Johann Hari

April 12, 2009 "Huffington Post" --- Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of 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.

Yes: nuclear waste. 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. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.

link - http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22399.htm

Being serious just for a moment. It seems like the problem is entirely tactical.

Okay, you can't just have pirates going around seizing ships and collecting ransoms.

The problem in this case is that there's such a large area of ocean to cover.

Considering the Somali pirate's level of technology, it doesn't take a ship like a destroyer to run them off. A fifty caliber could out range their AK-47's and RPG's and tear a wooden boat to pieces. Any missile could also take out a pirate boat.

It seems to me that we could build at least hundreds of small anti-pirate boats for the cost of one destroyer. Converted civilian boats would probably work.

Basically just guard dogs for the civilian shipping. You don't need a tyrannosaurus to chase away a burglar.

I'm just wondering but have you ever considered that there might well be a sub text to why there is currently a massive international naval build up centering on the Gulf of Aden? That the pirate story is potentially a ruse?

I'm just wondering but have you ever considered that there might well be a sub text to why there is currently a massive international naval build up centering on the Gulf of Aden? That the pirate story is potentially a ruse?

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has been going on for quite a while. Somebody must have been considering what we could do about it.

Such as? It's not as if there were anything valuable in Somalia, or in the Horn of Africa for that matter; the sole US interest in Somalia itself is preventing al-Qaeda setting up camp there, and bin Laden has no navy. The Suez Canal is already under the control of a US ally, and the US already has bases in the Middle East.

American and Chinese oil companies are also excited about the prospect of oil and other natural resources in Somalia. An oil group listed in Sydney, Range Resources, anticipates that the Puntland province in the north has the potential to produce 5 billion to 10 billion barrels of oil.[58]

First time an American ship was involved, hence first time US Navy bothered with it.

There's nothing the Chinese could want in Somalia either, apart from not getting their ships hijacked. Conspiracy theories about Somalia of all places are pretty far-fetched given there's nothing worth conspiring over.

Hmmm...

I'm not one to jump on secret conspiracy ideas, except when the official explanation doesn't make sense or fit the facts, I start wondering. Like a small time mafia punk strip joint owner shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in a police station in front of a bunch of TV cameras, for example.

I don't understand the automatic knee jerk aversion some people have to the idea that there's under the table stuff going on. An awful lot of ordinary people have stuff going on in their lives they don't want other people to know about.

Small business? I'm not sure Susie's Laundromat reports every quarter they take out of a washing machine to the IRS. Secrecy in big business? I don't think there's any doubt about that.

So I guess it comes down to the question of whether you believe that politicians are that much more honest than everybody else.

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has been going on for quite a while. Somebody must have been considering what we could do about it. One of the Navy people said there was a million square miles of ocean involved. I find it hard to believe they concluded that a few destroyers was the most effective way to hunt down lightly armed pirates in small wooden boats over such a huge area.

So I wouldn't rule out the possibility there was something else going on.

One thing makes it really odd. I read a couple of weeks ago that the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (gotta love that name) sent a couple of destroyers to the region to protect their shipping.

Same thing everybody else was doing, except it was the first time since way back in ancient times that a Chinese warship had left the area around China on a military mission.

It's a strange quirk about the Chinese. Their history couldn't possibly be described as peaceful, but for some reason, despite the fact that they're one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth, they've never had much interest in empire building.

Vietnam and Tibet would seem like exceptions, but the Chinese have always considered them to be part of China. Obviously the locals didn't agree.

But there was never a Chinese Alexander, or a Chinese Julius Caesar, or a Chinese Genghis Khan. They've had plenty of megalomaniac geniuses, but they always seem content to just conquer all of China.

So if there is something else going on, the Chinese are probably in on it, and I'm not sure why.

They don't have any reason to kiss our butts. If they stopped buying our treasury bills, there's no telling what would happen to the US economy. They can destroy us a functioning nation anytime they want to.

*yawn* Evidence that there's any oil in her seas (last time I checked, the Navy was in the ocean)? Evidence that anyone is willing to invade and occupy the ungovernable hellhole that is Somalia, given how it's gone in the past (or how else is anyone going to set up a goverment there)? It's particularly silly given how much oil prices have fallen, and how overstretched the US military is already.

* Evidence that there's any oil in her seas (last time I checked, the Navy was in the ocean)

The Somali pirates have never killed a hostage. I don't think they've ever hurt one. All they're doing is robbing the insurance companies.