THE Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (ARAMCO) pt 2 (merged)

[GASMON]

Every ship in the area around Somaila / Yemen should have two Gurkahs on board, hidden below decks.



God help the pirates.

Gasmon

[Tanada]

Every ship in the area around Somaila / Yemen should have two Gurkahs on board, hidden below decks.

God help the pirates.

Gasmon

That was more or less my thought, pretty soon the ship owners will start putting a few "Sea Marshall's" on as adjunct crew members whose job will be ship security and dealing with borders. If the pirates lose a boarding crew or two they will have a major attitude adjustment. It is one thing to sail out and board a merchant ship that is basically defenseless and make a tidy profit, its a whole nother story if your freind's went out and never came back.

[yesplease]

The problem w/ that sort of retaliation is that the pirates might respond in kind. A billion dollar ship at the bottom of the sea won't do any good for anyone. Something live a cover over the edges of the ship so that pirates couldn't get any purchase w/ grappling hooks/similar would be the best bet IMO, and maybe cheaper than hiring another two crew members in the long run.

[ReverseEngineer]

Reading further on this story, to this point the shipping companies have been resistant to the idea of hiring armed crew, the reason for this being you actually do the work for the Pirates of getting arms aboard.

If you are an armed guard on a Supertanker worth $200M making say $100K a year, it would be pretty tempting to hijack the ship YOURSELF and pilot it to Somalia. Give the local Somali Pirates a piece of the action, they would be your best friends. LOL.

Anyhow, to adequately protect each ship probably takes a good dozen well armed mercenaries, so your security force for each ship is around $1M/yr if you get your Killers on the cheap at $100K a pop. Now it becomes an actuarial analysis. If there are few hijackings and each one only costs you $10M in Ransom, its probably cheaper to just pay the ransom than hire security personnel. Nowadays with hijackings on the increase, you proabably need to buy some security. It will drive up the cost of doing business, no doubt.

The Good Old Days of Piracy are BACK. Unless Oil Tankers and Food Cargo ships are accompanied by military protection, they WILL be Pirated.

Reverse Engineer

Every ship in the area around Somaila / Yemen should have two Gurkahs on board, hidden below decks.



God help the pirates.

Gasmon

[eastbay]

Every ship in the area around Somaila / Yemen should have two Gurkahs on board, hidden below decks.

God help the pirates.

Gasmon

That was more or less my thought, pretty soon the ship owners will start putting a few "Sea Marshall's" on as adjunct crew members whose job will be ship security and dealing with borders. If the pirates lose a boarding crew or two they will have a major attitude adjustment. It is one thing to sail out and board a merchant ship that is basically defenseless and make a tidy profit, its a whole nother story if your freind's went out and never came back.

Passenger aircraft routinely carry armed anti-hijack officers. Why not ships? A handful of armed men and women would deter most of these pirates and do it fairly cheap too!

[Sixstrings]

“Now that they have shown they are able to seize an enormous ship like this, it is beyond a military solution. You won’t fix this without a political solution.”

“Maritime security operations in that area are addressing the symptoms not the causes,”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 183710.ece

Say what? Beyond a military solution? For goodness sakes, the West has fought pirates in days gone by. Some of the US Navy's first successes were anti-pirate campaigns (sing along, the shores of Tripoli..).

My golly, I think we have grown soft. Our military types are saying the military solution doesn't address the "root cause" of piracy. This is not childhood illiteracy here, there are no root causes to be addressed.

A military solution always has been, and always will be the solution to piracy.

It' simple math. Blow enough pirates out of the water, and guess what.. no more pirates.

I really cannot believe that our society "doesn't know what to do" about pirates. Are we completely illiterate of history? It's a problem as old as as the Parthenon, and the solution hasn't changed. Boats in the water. Guns. Sunk ships.

Oh, and here's another solution from the pages of history: when pirates are about, put some bloody defenses on the merchant ships. It's not like these Somalis are cruising around in navy destroyers. Get some armed crew on those ships, and some gun batteries.

The article aslo mentions legal entanglements regarding habeus corpus. Ok. Habeaus corpus for pirates. Am I the only who thinks this is beyond ludicrous?

Argh.

[Quagmire]

.
Somali Pirates Attack 2 More Ships
"Gun-toting buccaneers were reported to have stormed a chemical tanker in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia's northern coast, while another group tried to seize a United Nations World Food Programme ship off the coast of the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
The attacks, disclosed by the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Centre, bring the number of hijacks and attempted hijacks off the Somali coast to 69 this year alone.
They came as American warships remain in an armed standoff with pirates who captured the MV Faina, a Ukrainian boat carrying tanks and weapons that was hijacked en route to Kenya on September 25.
The pirate gang's self-styled leader, Sugule Adi, issued an extraordinary threat to blow the ship up and his own men along with it unless they were paid the $20m (£12m) ransom that they have demanded for the 21-strong crew's release.
Speaking to a news agency via a satellite phone, Mr Adi vowed the threat would be carried out by Monday night.
"We held a consultative meeting for more than three hours and decided to blow up the ship and its cargo - us included - if the ship owners did not meet our ransom demand," he said.
The latest drama will add to the growing calls for an international force to patrol the waters off the Somali coast, which have mirrored the country's collapse into lawlessness and civil war over the last two years.
Such is the current risk from piracy that it threatens the entire shipping industry through Suez Canal to the north, which is one of the world's busiest maritime traffic routes and which connects Europe with growing markets in Asia and the Middle East."

Link

They're not saying whether the attempt on the wheat freighter was successful or not.
.

[ColossalContrarian]

Me this should become the official

Another Pritated Ship Thread

CNN

The spate of hijackings underscores a dramatic increase in piracy that has alarmed national governments and shipping companies around the world.

"This is completely unprecedented," said Michael Howlett, assistant director of the International Maritime Bureau in London, which tracks pirate attacks. "We've never seen a situation like this."

The three hijackings reported Tuesday bring to 95 the number of incidents involving pirates and commercial vessels off the East African coast this year -- up from 31 incidents in 2007 and 10 in 2006, Howlett said.

[3aidlillahi]

With the recent spate of piracy incidents and the scant reporting of any global warming activities, I'd like to officially declare GGC dead!



National Pirate Day and the Pirate language application on Facebook take on a whole new meaning now. We're being bred to become Pirate. Notice that Obama is Kenyan, which is next to Somalia. He must be our first Pirate-American and will soon convert us all to Pirate. Look at how he's planning to plunder our treasury (er, booty) to give to his friends (AIG, GM, Goldman Sachs, etc.)

[ReverseEngineer]

The Pirates got still ANOTHER ship, this one bound for Iran with FOOD on board.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 183710.ece

Interesting the cargo, Oil bound for the US, Food bound for the Middle East

Meanwhile, the Navies say they are "Powerless" to stop this. What they are REALLY saying is "Hey! Its not MY job to Police YOUR cargo! PAY ME if you want some Protection!"

Trust me, when the Saudis Pony Up money for the US to take out Somali pirates hitting their Oil Tankers, and Iranians Pony Up money for us to protect Grain Shipments, the US Navy will be HAPPY to blow these Pirates out of the water.

The Somali Pirates are an extension of US policy, like Israel they are playing a part as a Proxy.

If the US Navy wanted to stop the Somali Pirates, they could do so in a heartbeat. They don't WANT to stop them. Instead of stealing directly, we let others do the stealing, then get Protection money to keep the theft from happening. You can even fund your own thieves to make this happen.

This is as old as Al capone and the Rackets in Chicago, just done on a bigger scale.

Reverse Engineer

[Plantagenet]

The Somali Pirates are an extension of US policy

All your bases are belong to us!!!!

[Sixstrings]

With the recent spate of piracy incidents and the scant reporting of any global warming activities, I'd like to officially declare GGC dead!

The peace of the Flying Spaghetti Monster be upon you.

[Dreamtwister]

A military solution always has been, and always will be the solution to piracy.

It' simple math. Blow enough pirates out of the water, and guess what.. no more pirates.

You are absolutely right! All we need to do is have every ship on the seas assigned a personal escort vessel. After all, how much hardware could it take?

Setting aside the root causes for a second (yes, there are root causes that have given rise to this situation), the scope of the problem is well beyond anyone's control.

Wow, I find myself saying that more and more often these days...

[idiom]

Why don't we just blow the random crap out of Somali civilization.

Oh wait...

[SuperTico]

Ahhhhh. Those characters at the CIA never fail to stir the minds (if you can call them that) of the sheeple.....

[IslandCrow]

Revenge: India 'sinks pirate ship'

The Indian navy has said that one of its warships in the Gulf of Aden has destroyed a ship belonging to pirates operating off the coast of Somalia.

The INS Tabar opened fire on a pirate "mother ship" after it came under attack, a government statement said.

It probably will be dealt with by pup55 in the thread on supplies to the States, but I wonder if the delay in getting the 2 million barrels of oil will show up in the reserve figures in a couple of week's time.

[Quagmire]

.
Life in a Somali Pirate Town

"Whenever word comes out that pirates have taken yet another ship in the Somali region of Puntland, extraordinary things start to happen.

Pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia have been surging
There is a great rush to the port of Eyl, where most of the hijacked vessels are kept by the well-armed pirate gangs.
People put on ties and smart clothes. They arrive in land cruisers with their laptops, one saying he is the pirates' accountant, another that he is their chief negotiator.
With yet more foreign vessels seized off the coast of Somalia this week, it could be said that hijackings in the region have become epidemic.
Insurance premiums for ships sailing through the busy Gulf of Aden have increased tenfold over the past year because of the pirates, most of whom come from the semi-autonomous region of Puntland.
In Eyl, there is a lot of money to be made, and everybody is anxious for a cut."

I haven't been able to find any reviews of the restaurants that have been opened for hostages yet.
.

[Tanada]

How soon people forget. Back in the '80s during the Iran/Iraq war Kuwait kept having problems getting its oil out. Their solution? They registered their tankers into the USA Merchant Marine, at which point it became the responsibility of the US Navy to protect those ships. The US Navy then became a major safety force in the Persian Gulf and as a result two US Ships were seriously damaged, one hit a mine and another was attacked by a suicide boat in the late 90's. So far all the ships I have heard of being hit were registered to countries like Liberia that really does not have a navy, up until this ship from India was attacked. Oops Pirates, make sure you are attacking ships of weak countries in the future or you might get sunk.

[Quagmire]

.

Want a Loan? Ask a Pirate

It has been reported in the past that wealthy businessmen in Dubai were financing the pirates.
But the BBC's Somali Service says these days it is the businessmen asking the pirates for loans.

Who are these pirates?

Ex-fishermen, who are considered the brains of the operation because they know the sea
Ex-militiamen, who are considered the muscle - having fought for various Somali clan warlords
The technical experts, who are the computer geeks and know how to operate the hi-tech equipment needed to operate as a pirate - satellite phones, GPS and military hardware.

same link as above.

[wibble]

As reported in The Daily Mash

VENTURE CAPITALISTS INVEST IN SOMALI PIRATES

VENTURE capitalists in New York and London are pumping millions of dollars into Somalia's booming pirate sector.

The sharp-eyed investors say Indian Ocean piracy has replaced Bangladeshi t-shirt factories as the developing world's strongest source of high-growth revenue streams.

Julian Cook, head of strategy at Porter, Pinkney and Turner (PPT), said: "The margins are very impressive. These guys can board a Chinese freighter or Saudi oil tanker and turn it around in less than a week. Usually without killing anyone.

"The staff are well-trained and they operate a structured bonus system involving the daughters of nomadic tribal chiefs and as much hallucinogenic tree bark as they can eat.

"The tax position is also very favourable given that Somalia isn't really what you would describe as a 'country' with 'laws' and a 'government'."

PPT has paid £25.7 million for a 32% stake in Captain Ahmed's Crazee Bastards with the initial tranche used for capital purchases including new speed boats, 200 yards of very strong rope and a gun the size of a cow.

The investment will also be used to establish an out-sourced personnel department to ensure the quick replacement of any colleagues shot by the Royal Navy during working hours.

Captain Ahmed will retain day-to-day management control and has also negotiated a clause allowing him to go 'ape-shit crazee' and shoot everyone on board up to three times a year.