While I celebrate now that Capt. Richard Phillip’s life was saved by Navy Seals, I mourn the three anonymous lives lost. Who were the Somali pirates? Were they regular guys, with families? Who finances this pirating? Who benefits? Where does the pirated money go? What has driven these men to the high seas? How much has The West fished out of Somali waters? Please see this Alternet article, which I received from Kalamu, below:

>>POV: is the media telling the whole ‘pirate’ story?
======================================

http://www.alternet.org/story/135716/
‘Pirates’ Strike a U.S. Ship Owned by a Pentagon Contractor, But Is the Media
Telling the Whole Story?
By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports

UPDATE: At least one nuclear-powered U.S. warship is reportedly on its way to
the scene of the hijacking off the coast of Somalia of a vessel owned by a major
Pentagon contractor. A U.S. official told the Associated Press the destroyer USS
Bainbridge is en route while another official said six or seven ships are
responding to the takeover of the ?Maersk Alabama,? which is part of a fleet of
ships owned by Maersk Ltd.., a U.S. subsidiary of a Denmark firm, which does
about a half-billion dollars in business with the U.S. government a year.

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

The closest U.S. warship to the “Alabama” at the time of the seizure was 300
miles away. The U.S. Navy did not say how or if it would respond, but seemed not
to rule out intervention. “It’s fair to say we are closely monitoring the
situation, but we will not discuss nor speculate on current and future military
operations,” said Navy Cmdr. Jane Campbell.

The seizure of the ship seemed to have been short-lived. At the time of this
writing, the Pentagon was reporting that the U.S. 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.

Over the past year, there has been a dramatic uptick in media coverage of the
“pirates,” particularly in the Gulf of Aden. Pirates reportedly took in upwards
of $150 million in ransoms last year alone. In fact, at the moment the
Alabama’s seizure, pirates were already holding 14 other vessels with about 200
crew members, according to the International Maritime Bureau. There have been
seven hijackings in the past month alone..

Often, the reporting on pirates centers around the gangsterism of the pirates
and the seemingly huge ransoms they demand. Indeed, piracy can be a very
profitable business, as the following report from Reuters suggests:

A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the operation to hijack the
Saudi tanker, the Sirius Star, cost no more than $25,000, assuming that the
pirates bought new equipment and weapons ($450 apiece for an AK-47 Kalashnikov,
$5,000 for an RPG-7 grenade launcher, $15,000 for a speedboat). That contrasts
with an initial ransom demand to the tanker’s owner, Saudi Aramco, of $25
million.

“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 Timesafter 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 [Somali] 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.
?

This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took
speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax”
on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia — and
ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70
per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence.”

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.”

Just as it seemed that this drama was coming to an end, the story has taken a
very bizarre turn. It seems as though the pirates essentially tricked the ship?s
?all-American? crew into handing over the Alabama?s captain, Capt. Richard
Phillips.

After reports, based on Pentagon sources, emerged that the ship had been retaken
by the US crew, word came from the ship that the captain of the ?Alabama? had
been taken by the pirates onto a lifeboat. The details of how exactly the four
pirates managed to get the captain onto a lifeboat are still sketchy, but it
seems a little bit like a scene out of a Marx brothers movie. The ship?s second
mate Kenn Quinn was interviewed on CNN and described how the crew was
essentially tricked into handing the captain over to the pirates. Quinn spoke to
CNN?s Kyra Phillips:

Quinn: When they board, they sank their boats so the captain talked them into
getting off the ship with the lifeboat. But we took one of their pirates hostage
and did an exchange. What? Huh? Okay. I?ve got to go.
Phillips: Ken, can you stay with me for just two more seconds?
Quinn: What?
Phillips: Can you tell me about the negotiations, what you?ve offered these
pirates in exchange for your captain?
Quinn: We had one of their hostages. We had a pirate we took and kept him for 12
hours. We tied him up and he was our prisoner.
Phillips: Did you return him?
Quinn: Yeah, we did. But we returned him but they didn?t return the captain. So
now we?re just trying to offer them whatever we can. Food. But it?s not working
too good.?
As TV Newser pointed out, ?Later Phillips gave what may be the understatement of
the day: ?It sounds like the pirates did not keep their end of the deal.??

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the
national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting
from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation
Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most
Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available
at RebelReports.com.

© 2009 Rebel Reports All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135716/