arrgh, pirates UPDATE

 

1. (1) Who the hell is stupid enough to sail their unarmed yacht near the Somali coastline?  Anybody who has read a newspaper in the last two years knows it’s a hotbed of pirate activity.  (2) The Frog navy will never do this, but one sure way of stopping piracy for good would be to just blow this yacht - pirates and hostages included - into oblivion.  We’d shoot down a hijacked airliner these days, if the need presented itself, right?  Or, just launch a marine raiding party, waste the pirates and save as many hostages as you can. 
   These pirates aren’t suicide bombers.  They don’t have a death wish, they want money.  If it’s well-known that the only end game for piracy is a watery grave, they’ll quit.

   Posted by PabloD       04/06/2008  at  12:39 PM  



2. The yacht was in the high seas in the Gulf of Aden, off Somalia’s coast in the Indian Ocean, the French Foreign Ministry said.

   Somalia has lots of coast. The country is shaped like a “7” and runs west-east and then east-southwest. When I first heard the story, the ship was said to have been captured off the Seychelles. Now they’re saying the Gulf of Aden. The Guld of Aden is the mouth of the Red Sea. Since Somalia is the Horn of Africa, GoA is right off the coast. So are the Seychelle Islands, but 1300 miles south of the GoA. Except they’re 775 miles right off the Somali coast. Journalistic relativity? Basically any ship using the Suez Canal at the other end of the Red Sea has to skirt the Somali coast, and if they’re heading south, say towards South Africa, they have to skirt the whole damn thing.

   Posted by Drew458       04/06/2008  at  08:25 PM  

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