Wednesday - April 08, 2009

Fighting Back: US Ship Rescues Itself

BREAKING NEWS ....

The crew of a U.S.-flag ship seized by pirates off Somalia has retaken the vessel, American officials said Wednesday, even as a shaken national security establishment faced troubling questions about the hostage-taking at high sea.

Capt. Joseph Murphy, an instructor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told The Associated Press the Department of Defense that his son Shane, the second in command on the ship, had called him to say the crew had regained control.

The ship, captured by pirates near the coast of Somalia, apparently was the first such hostage-taking involving U.S. citizens in 200 years.

“The crew is back in control of the ship,” a U.S. official said at midday, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak on the record. “It’s reported that one pirate is on board under crew control — the other three were trying to flee,” the official said. The status of the other pirates was unknown, the official said, but they were reported to “be in the water.”

The crew apparently contacted the private shipping that it works for. That company, Maersk, scheduled a noon news conference in Norfolk, Va, defense officials said.

Another U.S. official, citing a readout from an interagency conference call, said: “Multiple reliable sources are now reporting that the Maersk Alabama is now under control of the U.S. crew. The crew reportedly has one pirate in custody. The status of others is unclear, they are believed to be in the water.”

If this is true, then it deserves a major

Woo Hoo!!!

Fox et al is covering the story too, emphasizing that the crew was unarmed

“All the crew members are trained in security detail in how to deal with piracy,” Maersk CEO John Reinhart told reporters. “As merchant vessels we do not carry arms. We have ways to push back, but we do not carry arms.”

I don’t think the crew really had any choice. They’d never work again, being members of the first crew since Tripoli that allowed themselves to be hijacked. And on a ship named Alabama? No, they had no choice at all. They had to fight.

Anybody got a link to the original video from Team America? 

UNPLEASANT UPDATE: The self-rescue was not without cost. The Alabama’s skipper is being held hostage. By 4 pirates in a rowboat. [wait a second, isn’t that one of those Agent 86 lines from Get Smart?]

The crew of a U.S.-flagged freighter recaptured their ship from pirates who seized it off the Horn of Africa early Wednesday, but the ship’s captain remained in the hands of the marauders, one of its officers said.

“There’s four Somali pirates, and they’ve got our captain,” Ken Quinn said in a ship-to-shore phone interview. Capt. Richard Phillips is being held in the Maersk Alabama’s 28-foot lifeboat, Quinn said.

The crew had a plan to make an exchange for their captain.

“We had a pirate we took and kept him for 12 hours,” Quinn said. “We tied him up and he was our prisoner.” Video Quinn describes the hijacking to CNN. The crew gave back their prisoner but the pirates reneged on the plan and are continuing to hold Phillips captive.

“So now we’re just trying to offer them whatever we can, food, but it’s not working too good,” he said.

The guided-missile destroyer USS Bainbridge, part of the allied fleet that patrols the waterway, is headed to the area to assist, the U.S. Navy reported. Quinn said his sailors were trying to hold the pirates off for a few more hours, “and then we’ll have a warship here to help us.

Meanwhile, since today the winds of change are blowing against the pirates, Secretary of State Clinton is calling for a get-tough policy ...

“We are deeply concerned and we are following it very closely,” Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said. “We are now focused on this particular act of piracy and the seizure of the ship that carries 21 American citizens. More generally, we think the world must come together to end the scourge of piracy.”

Posted by Drew458     on 04/08/2009 at 11:27 AM   
Filed Under: • Pirates, aarrgh! •  
• Comments (7) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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