Piracy! - Blackwater Launches first Warships

[TonyGosling]

anti-piracy fleet

Blackwater Floats Private Navy To Fight Pirates
William Pentland 10.23.08, 2:16 PM ET

Pix of Blackwater's first War on Terror warship 'McArthur'
http://hamptonroads.com/2008/10/blackwater-sets-sights-somali-pirates

In September, Somali pirates captured a Ukrainian ship bound for Kenya that had a cargo of 33 T-72 tanks and other military equipment. Despite the presence of a number of U.S. Naval vessels, the pirates have refused to return the ship until they receive a $35 million ransom.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/23/blackwater-pirates-somalia-biz-logist ics-cx_wp_1023blackwater.html

The brazen assault made headlines around the world, but it was simply the highest-profile attack in the region of late. More than 70 shipping vessels have been attacked off the coast of Somalia in the past year. Eleven of those ships and 200 crew members are still being held for ransom by rogue Somali pirates.

Foreign navies have begun patrolling the Gulf of Aden to rein in the pirate gangs off the coast of northern Somalia, but they have had only limited success. As a result, ship owners have seen insurance premiums for coverage of passage through the Straits of Aden climb from an average of $900 to $9,000.

In Pictures: The World's Most Dangerous Waters

It's bad news for shippers, but an opportunity for Blackwater Worldwide, the North Carolina-based private military contractor. Last week, the company announced plans to dispatch the MV MacArthur, a 183-foot vessel with a crew of 14 and a helicopter pad, to the Gulf of Aden to provide escort services for ships in need of security.

"Billions of dollars of goods move through the Gulf of Aden each year," said Bill Matthews, executive vice president of Blackwater Worldwide, in a press release. "We have been contacted by ship owners who say they need our help in making sure those goods get to their destination safely. The McArthur can help us accomplish that."

The mercenary outfit--founded by former Navy SEALs in 1997 and heavily involved in U.S. military efforts in Iraq--has tentative plans to build a small fleet of two or three anti-piracy vessels, each able to carry several dozen armed security personnel, according to reports in Lloyds List Maritime. Although the Blackwater vessels will not be armed, the crew will be. Unlike official military personnel, they may have fewer qualms about using those arms against pirates.

Blackwater grabbed worldwide attention last year when guards in Iraq allegedly shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians with little or no provocation while escorting a convoy of U.S. State Department vehicles in Baghdad. The incident sparked a huge controversy over the appropriate role of private military contractors in U.S. combat operations. Although Blackwater temporarily lost its license to operate in Iraq, the U.S. State Department ultimately reinstated it. The company will need a State Department license to sell its services to a foreign government or business, said Anne Tyrrell, a Blackwater spokeswoman.

The company's decision to provide maritime security services reflects rising concerns in the maritime industry about sea piracy. The growth of global commerce in the past two decades crowded the oceans with cargo vessels, dry-bulk carriers and supertankers loaded with every good imaginable. The world currently transports 80% of all international freight by sea. More than 10 million cargo containers are moving across the world's oceans at any given time.

The heavy ocean traffic (and its valuable cargo) spawned a surge in sea piracy and a new breed of pirates, the bloodiest ever seen. More than 2,400 acts of piracy were reported around the world between 2000 and 2006, roughly twice the number reported for the preceding six-year period.

Although pirate attacks have at least tripled during that time period, the actual number of attacks remains unclear. Shipping companies frequently do not report attacks out of concern that it could increase insurance premiums.

And nearly every group or government monitoring sea piracy believes that number is seriously undercounted. The Australian government estimates the actual number of piracy attacks is 2,000% higher. Piracy is estimated to cost between $13 billion and $16 billion every year and could cost substantially more in coming years.

"Piracy is not going away," said Peter Chalk, an international security analyst at the RAND Institute. "In fact, it's getting more serious and more violent; and it's only a matter of time before you need to take it more seriously.".....

[TonyGosling]

How convenient.
Blackwater launch themselves on the high seas and suddenly the world's first crude oil hijack occurs.
Did they know this was going to happen?
Couldn't be that Blackwater put the 'pirates' up to it could it?
No, coincidence of course!

[TonyGosling]

5 Blackwater guards charged for Iraq massacre
Andrew McLemore
Published: Friday December 5, 2008
Five Blackwater security guards have been indicted on charges related to a 2007 massacre that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, some of them children.
The federal investigation into the shooting remains under court seal, but sources say the guards have been asked to surrender to the FBI by Monday to face federal manslaughter and assault charges, ABC News reported.
A recent report suggests the guards could face up to 30 years in prison.
The State Department, which hires Blackwater guards to protect US diplomats and other military employees, has no comment on the development. Blackwater and the Justice Department have both also refused to comment, CNN reported......
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/5_Blackwater_guards_charged_for_Iraq_120 5.html

[QuitTheirClogs]

Pirates in Savile Row suits

[TonyGosling]

Blackwater's first ship isn't quite as big as you might think.


http://hamptonroads.com/2008/10/blackwater-sets-sights-somali-pirates

[TonyGosling]

Somalia: You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
by Johann Hari
Global Research, April 15, 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-h ari-you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13193
The Independent

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." (empasis added)

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?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper.

[Disco_Destroyer]

[Jayhawk]

Surely if we're dumping waste in their seas then nicking the fish we're poisoning ourselves?

[QuitTheirClogs]

Somali pirates guided by London intelligence team, report says

Document obtained by Spanish radio station says 'well-placed informers' in constant contact by satellite telephone

Giles Tremlett in Madrid guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 May 2009 12.59 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/11/somali-pirates-london-inte lligence

The Somali pirates attacking shipping in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean are directed to their targets by a "consultant" team in London, according to a European military intelligence document obtained by a Spanish radio station.

The document, obtained by Cadena SER radio, says the team and the pirates remain in contact by satellite telephone. It says that pirate groups have "well-placed informers" in London who are in regular contact with control centres in Somalia where decisions on which vessels to attack are made. These London-based "consultants" help the pirates select targets, providing information on the ships' cargoes and courses.

Captains of attacked ships have found that pirates know everything from the layout of the vessel to its ports of call. ...the pirates had full knowledge of the cargo, nationality and course of the vessel.

The national flag of a ship is also taken into account when choosing a target, with British vessels being increasingly avoided, according to the report. It was not clear whether this was because pirates did not want to draw the attention of British police to their information sources in London.

[TonyGosling]

Dad’s navy: Retired sea dogs to protect shipping from Somali pirates
Published: 06 January, 2013, 22:33

The UK's first private navy in almost 200 years has been set up by a group of pioneering businessmen, former marines and retired captains and soldiers to defend shipping off the coast of east Africa from the threat of pirates.

They are frustrated at the inability of the Royal Navy, NATO, the European Union Naval Task Force and other navies to guarantee security for shipping in an area of ocean the size of North America.

“They can’t do the job because they haven’t got the budget and deploying a billion-pound warship against six guys [pirates] with $500 of kit is not a very good use of the asset,” Anthony Sharp, chief executive of Typhon, the company behind the venture, told the Times.

Typhon is chaired by Simon Murray a millionaire business man with a colorful past including a spell in the French Foreign Legion as a teenager and walking unsupported to the South Pole aged 63.

Other Typhon directors include Admiral Henry Ulrich, former commander of US Naval Force’s Europe, General Sir Jack Deverell, former commander in chief Allied Forces Northern Europe and Lord Dannatt Britain’s former chief of the general staff.

The navy will include a 10,000 ton mother ship and high speed armored patrol boats and will be led by a former Royal Navy commodore and 240 former marines and other sailors. The marines will be armed with close quarter weapons such as the M4 carbine and sniper rifles with a range of 2 km.

It will escort its first convoy of oil tankers, bulk carriers and the occasional yacht along the east coast of Africa in late March or early April. They will aim to deter pirates rather than engage in firefights.

They will sail under a British flag, which would give them the legal right to carry their weapons into harbor rather than keep them on platforms in international waters.

The navy will be funded by shipping firms in much the same way as the cargo ships sailing under Russian, Chinese and Indian flags hire private convoys.

The Russian navy as well the navies of China, India and other countries also patrol the coast off east Africa.

They are part a multinational coalition task force, called Combined Task Force 150, which took on the role of fighting piracy off of the coast of Somalia by establishing a Maritime Security Patrol Area (MSPA) within the Gulf of Aden.

But despite such a large international presence in the area, piracy still remains a problem although the pirates are now on the back foot.

According to the International Maritime Bureau, pirate attacks had by October 2012 dropped to a six-year low, with only 1 ship attacked in the third quarter compared to 36 during the same period in 2011. As of 31st December 2012, the pirates were holding four large ships and an estimated 114 hostages.

http://rt.com/news/piracy-somalia-navy-private-460/

[Disco_Destroyer]

Aren't free lance fighters/personnel called MERCENARIES?

Is that not almost exactly what Pirates are???

[TonyGosling]

Indian security officials have reportedly arrested 35 crew members of a US ship detained last week for illegally carrying weapons into the South Asian country’s territorial waters.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/10/18/330005/india-arrests-questions -us-ship-crew/

India’s coastguard entered the ship, docked at a port in the southern state of Tamil Nadu since last week, and arrested the ten crew members and 25 security guards, in an early morning operation on Friday, an unnamed intelligence official told Times of India.

The vessel was stopped and detained off the coast of Tamil Nadu on October 12 after Indian security officials discovered a huge cache of weapons and ammunition on board.

According to the report, 33 of the arrested were taken to a local police station for interrogation while two of the men were left on board to do maintenance work.

Indian officials say the crew could not provide proper documents authorizing the vessel to carry weapons and ammunition.

The report further said as many as 31 assault rifles and over 5,000 rounds of ammunition were seized in the vessel. The arrested crews also include nationals from Britain, Estonia, India and Ukraine.

The ship, dubbed MV Seaman Guard Ohio, is owned by a private US-based security firm and is registered in Sierra Leone.

Analysts say the arrests would be legal if the ship was within Indian waters without permission.

India’s Deputy National Security Advisor Nehchal Sandhu said the police would drop its investigations if it was determined the vessel had been outside of Indian waters.

“You have to understand that our territorial waters extend up to 12 nautical miles,” Indian media quoted Sandhu as saying. “Anything that happens beyond that is not within the realm of our control.”