Final proof that the war on terror is total BS

[eek.]

These guys have just nicked a brand new fully laden 300,000 ton oil tanker.

lol

:drink:
----------------------------------------------



<TABLE class=storycontent cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0><TBODY><TR><TD colSpan=2>Pirates capture Saudi oil tanker


</TD></TR><TR><TD class=storybody><!-- S BO --><!-- S IIMA --><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=226 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>

The Sirius Star made its maiden voyage in March of this year

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!-- E IIMA --><!-- S SF -->
Pirates have seized a giant Saudi-owned oil tanker in the Indian Ocean off the Kenyan coast and are steering it towards Somalia, the US Navy reports.
The US-bound tanker was captured on Saturday some 450 nautical miles (830km) south-east of Mombasa, and is now approaching the Somali port of Eyl.
The Sirius Star is carrying its full load of 2m barrels - more than one-quarter of Saudi Arabia's daily output.
Its international crew of 25, including two Britons, is said to be safe. <!-- E SF -->
Lt Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the US Navy's 5th Fleet, said the attack was "unprecedented".
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<!-- S ILIN -->Life in Somalia's pirate town
<!-- E ILIN --><!-- S ILIN -->From cutlass to AK-47
<!-- E ILIN -->
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!-- E IBOX -->
According to the Navy, the ship is "nearing an anchorage point" at Eyl, a port often used by pirates based in Somalia's Puntland region.
War-torn Somalia has not had an effective government since 1991.
A BBC correspondent in Mombasa reports that this is the third tanker to have been hijacked in the region.
News of the attack raised crude oil prices on global markets following an earlier slump, Reuters news agency reported.
The capture of the tanker appears to mark a worrying new development, both in terms of the size of the ship and the fact it was attacked so far from the African coast.
Attacks on shipping off the Horn of Africa and Kenya by mainly Somali pirates seeking ransoms prompted foreign navies to send warships to the area this year.
A number of vessels and their crews have been held captive for months, including the Ukrainian freighter MV Faina, seized in September.
'Crew safe'
The supertanker was heading for the US via the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, Reuters reports. <!-- S IBOX --><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=231 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=5>

</TD><TD class=sibtbg>THE SIRIUS STAR

Nearly the length of a US aircraft carrier
Weighs more than three times as much as a carrier when loaded
Can carry 2 million barrels of oil - more than 25% of Saudi Arabia's daily output
Is third tanker, and biggest vessel, to be hijacked in the region

<!-- S ILIN -->Life in Somalia's pirate town
<!-- E ILIN -->
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!-- E IBOX -->
The route around the Cape of Good Hope is a main thoroughfare for fully-laden supertankers from the Gulf, the world's biggest oil-exporting region.
With a capacity of 318,000 dead weight tonnes, the ship is 330m (1,080ft) long and is classed as a Very Large Crude Carrier.
It is about as long as a US aircraft carrier and, when loaded, weighs more than three times as much.
"It's the largest ship that we've seen pirated," said Lt Christensen.
The South Korean-built Sirius Star, owned by the Saudi company Aramco, made its maiden voyage in March 2008.
The ship's operator, Vela International, said that all of the crew were reported to be safe.
"Vela response teams have been mobilised and are working to ensure the safe release of crew members and the vessel," it added.
Confirming that two Britons were aboard the tanker, the UK Foreign Office said it could not give any details of their role on the ship.
"We are seeking more information on the incident," a spokesman said.
The other crew are said to be from Croatia, the Philippines, Poland and Saudi Arabia.
Captive vessels
Figures from the International Maritime Bureau show that attacks in the area - the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean off the African coast - have made up one-third of all piracy incidents worldwide in 2008.
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</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!-- E IIMA -->
In the first nine months of the year 63 incidents were reported.
As of 30 September, 12 vessels remained captive and under negotiation with more than 250 crew being held hostage.
Pirates remain active and regularly strike in the region. In the past week alone:
• A Russian warship in the Gulf of Aden drove off pirates who tried to capture the Saudi Arabian merchant ship Rabih
• Pirates hijacked a Japanese cargo ship off Somalia
• A Chinese fishing boat was seized off the Kenyan coast • A Turkish ship transporting chemicals to India was hijacked off Yemen • The UK's Royal Navy shot dead two suspected pirates attacking a Danish cargo-ship off the coast of Yemen
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7733482.stm

 

[steaktartar]

lol..no one could save them.............comedy gold

 

[3peet]

War on terror BS?? A-fucking-men.

 

[Willie99]

hehehehe, good one

compare and contrast terrorist activities pre-9/11 to post 9/11 and get back to me

 

[RobFunk]

hehehehe, good one

compare and contrast terrorist activities pre-9/11 to post 9/11 and get back to me

Homeland security dept. It's done wonders.

 

[Willie99]

something seems to be working, we all know that hear no evil see no evil approach that paved the path to 9/11 didn't work.

I kinda think that killing their leaders, freezing their assets, chasing them into caves and tapping their communications has cramped their style, but there are some that still disagree. I'm ok with that.

I just hope that President Obama is not silly enough to put us back at risk, I actually think he's going to do the right thing and essentially ignore the left on this issue.

 

[barman]

hehehehe, good one

compare and contrast terrorist activities pre-9/11 to post 9/11 and get back to me

I think the general level of "terrorist activities "pre 9/11" as compared to "post 9/11" are likely fairly similar.

The real trouble was that one day that fell between pre9/11 and post9/11.

d1g1t

 

[tiznow]

somali pirates basically equivalent to drugs for taliban

islamic extremism growing in horn of africa and funding comes via the pirates hijacking shit for ransom

like the taliban is spreading into pakistan via the increase in drug trade (poppy seed cultivation) since US intervened and got involved

in the case of somali we intervened by supporting ethiopia in a war since they good little christians throwing away any sense of stability that seemed to be forming at the time

---------------------------------------------

From The Times
November 18, 2008

How the War on Terror pushed Somalia into the arms of al-Qaeda
It has been the forgotten debacle of the Bush years. But anarchy in the Horn of Africa may soon haunt the West
Martin Fletcher

As President Bush prepares to leave office, the pundits will start to produce their balance sheets. It is hard to know what they will list under “achievements”, but easy to predict their “disasters”: Iraq, Afghanistan, economic meltdown, soaring debt and America's loss of global stature.

One other debacle should feature prominently in that second column, but probably won't because it has occurred in a faraway country that most Westerners know only through the film Black Hawk Down - or from recent reports of rampant piracy including the seizure early on Sunday of a Saudi tanker, carrying more than two million barrels of oil, which had an immediate effect on crude prices.

I am referring to the Bush Administration's intervention in Somalia in the name of the War on Terror. It has helped to destroy that wretched country's best chance of peace in a generation, left more than a million Somalis dead, homeless or starving, and achieved the precise opposite of its original goal. Far from stamping out an Islamic militancy that scarcely existed, the intervention has turned Somalia into a breeding ground for Islamic extremists and given al-Qaeda a valuable foothold in the Horn of Africa.

Rewind to the early summer of 2006. For 15 years, since the fall of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, feuding warlords had made Somalia a byword for anarchy and terrorism - the archetypal failed state. A tenth of its population had been killed. A million had fled abroad. At that point the warlords were finally routed, despite covert CIA backing, by a remarkable public uprising in support of the so-called Islamic Courts movement that promised to end the lawlessness.
Background

Somalia had always practised a mild form of Islam, but the Courts received a bad press in the West, being widely portrayed as a new Taleban determined to impose the most draconian forms of Sharia on a terrified populace. That was certainly what I expected when I visited Mogadishu in early December 2006. But what I actually found was a people still celebrating the return of peace and security.

Gone were the checkpoints where the warlords' gunmen extorted and killed. Gone were their “technicals” - the Jeeps with heavy machineguns on the back with which they terrorised the citzenry. For the first time that most Somalis could remember, they were walking around their shattered capital in safety, even at night. Businesses were reopening. Exiles were returning. Mountains of rubbish were being carted away.

“It's like paradise compared to even one year ago,” according to Mohammed Ahmed, a doctor who had returned from working at the West Middlesex Hospital.

The Courts had certainly imposed what would be seen in the West as some fairly repressive moral codes. They cracked down on the narcotic qat that rendered half the menfolk senseless, banned sexually explicit films, encouraged women to cover their heads and discouraged Western music and dancing. There had been two public executions. But that was a price most Somalis were happy to pay, and while the Courts' disparate factions undoubtedly included extremists with dangerous connections and intentions, they also included moderates with whom the West could have done business.

European nations favoured engagement. Washington did not. It accused the Courts of harbouring the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The Courts hardly helped their cause by claiming territory in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Weeks after my visit the US supported - morally, materially and with intelligence - an invasion by predominantly Christian Ethiopia, Somalia's oldest bitter enemy. That replaced what was, for all its faults, Somalia's most effective government in memory with a deeply unpopular one led by former warlords, which had been cobbled together by the international community in Nairobi two years previously.

“The Americans see an extremist under every Muslim stone,” one European official complained bitterly, and the consequences were entirely predictable. An insurgency that began early in 2007 has steadily gathered strength, while the reviled Government in Mogadishu has come to depend utterly for its survival on thousands of Ethiopian troops that were meant to withdraw within weeks.

As the fighting has worsened 10,000 Somali civilians are thought to have been killed, more than a million have fled their homes, and more than three million - 40 per cent of the population - now urgently need humanitarian assistance. Although the UN World Food Programme is still getting some aid into the country the situation is deteriorating and scores of humanitarian workers have been killed or abducted. Exploiting the lawlessness, pirates have turned the waters off Somalia into some of the most dangerous in the world.

In Kenya last weekend Abdullahi Yusuf, Somalia's President, finally admitted that insurgents now control most of the country and have advanced to the very edge of Mogadishu. His Government, he said, was close to collapse.

There are several insurgent forces, but one of the most powerful is the Shabab - a group of virulently anti-Western jihadists that has now eclipsed the Islamic Courts movement of which it was once part.

Somalia's nightmare may be only just starting. President Yusuf predicts wholesale slaughter if the Shabab seize Mogadishu. Diplomats fear that the Shabab will wage all-out war with other insurgent forces, including those of the Islamic Courts, for control of the country once Ethiopian troops - the common enemy - are withdrawn.

And unlike the Courts, the Shabab has no truck with moderation: in the port city of Kismayo last month a young girl who complained that she had been raped was stoned to death for adultery, while in Balad two dozen Somalis were flogged for performing a traditional dance.

Whatever happens, Somalia will be another horrendous legacy for Barack Obama, but somewhere on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border one man will be celebrating. Shabab openly supports al-Qaeda. It has adopted suicide bombings and other tactics. “Al-Qaeda is the mother of the holy war in Somalia... We are negotiating how we can unite into one,” Muktar Robow, a leading Shabab commander, recently told the Los Angeles Times. “We will take our orders from Sheikh Osama bin Laden because we are his students.”

All in all, hardly a resounding triumph for the War on Terror.

 

[nimue77]

War on terror BS?? A-fucking-men.

Obama doesn't agree with you.

 

[mamatried]

somali pirates basically equivalent to drugs for taliban

islamic extremism growing in horn of africa and funding comes via the pirates hijacking shit for ransom

like the taliban is spreading into pakistan via the increase in drug trade (poppy seed cultivation) since US intervened and got involved

in the case of somali we intervened by supporting ethiopia in a war since they good little christians throwing away any sense of stability that seemed to be forming at the time

---------------------------------------------

From The Times
November 18, 2008

How the War on Terror pushed Somalia into the arms of al-Qaeda
It has been the forgotten debacle of the Bush years. But anarchy in the Horn of Africa may soon haunt the West
Martin Fletcher

As President Bush prepares to leave office, the pundits will start to produce their balance sheets. It is hard to know what they will list under “achievements”, but easy to predict their “disasters”: Iraq, Afghanistan, economic meltdown, soaring debt and America's loss of global stature.

One other debacle should feature prominently in that second column, but probably won't because it has occurred in a faraway country that most Westerners know only through the film Black Hawk Down - or from recent reports of rampant piracy including the seizure early on Sunday of a Saudi tanker, carrying more than two million barrels of oil, which had an immediate effect on crude prices.

I am referring to the Bush Administration's intervention in Somalia in the name of the War on Terror. It has helped to destroy that wretched country's best chance of peace in a generation, left more than a million Somalis dead, homeless or starving, and achieved the precise opposite of its original goal. Far from stamping out an Islamic militancy that scarcely existed, the intervention has turned Somalia into a breeding ground for Islamic extremists and given al-Qaeda a valuable foothold in the Horn of Africa.

Rewind to the early summer of 2006. For 15 years, since the fall of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, feuding warlords had made Somalia a byword for anarchy and terrorism - the archetypal failed state. A tenth of its population had been killed. A million had fled abroad. At that point the warlords were finally routed, despite covert CIA backing, by a remarkable public uprising in support of the so-called Islamic Courts movement that promised to end the lawlessness.
Background

Somalia had always practised a mild form of Islam, but the Courts received a bad press in the West, being widely portrayed as a new Taleban determined to impose the most draconian forms of Sharia on a terrified populace. That was certainly what I expected when I visited Mogadishu in early December 2006. But what I actually found was a people still celebrating the return of peace and security.

Gone were the checkpoints where the warlords' gunmen extorted and killed. Gone were their “technicals” - the Jeeps with heavy machineguns on the back with which they terrorised the citzenry. For the first time that most Somalis could remember, they were walking around their shattered capital in safety, even at night. Businesses were reopening. Exiles were returning. Mountains of rubbish were being carted away.

“It's like paradise compared to even one year ago,” according to Mohammed Ahmed, a doctor who had returned from working at the West Middlesex Hospital.

The Courts had certainly imposed what would be seen in the West as some fairly repressive moral codes. They cracked down on the narcotic qat that rendered half the menfolk senseless, banned sexually explicit films, encouraged women to cover their heads and discouraged Western music and dancing. There had been two public executions. But that was a price most Somalis were happy to pay, and while the Courts' disparate factions undoubtedly included extremists with dangerous connections and intentions, they also included moderates with whom the West could have done business.

European nations favoured engagement. Washington did not. It accused the Courts of harbouring the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The Courts hardly helped their cause by claiming territory in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Weeks after my visit the US supported - morally, materially and with intelligence - an invasion by predominantly Christian Ethiopia, Somalia's oldest bitter enemy. That replaced what was, for all its faults, Somalia's most effective government in memory with a deeply unpopular one led by former warlords, which had been cobbled together by the international community in Nairobi two years previously.

“The Americans see an extremist under every Muslim stone,” one European official complained bitterly, and the consequences were entirely predictable. An insurgency that began early in 2007 has steadily gathered strength, while the reviled Government in Mogadishu has come to depend utterly for its survival on thousands of Ethiopian troops that were meant to withdraw within weeks.

As the fighting has worsened 10,000 Somali civilians are thought to have been killed, more than a million have fled their homes, and more than three million - 40 per cent of the population - now urgently need humanitarian assistance. Although the UN World Food Programme is still getting some aid into the country the situation is deteriorating and scores of humanitarian workers have been killed or abducted. Exploiting the lawlessness, pirates have turned the waters off Somalia into some of the most dangerous in the world.

In Kenya last weekend Abdullahi Yusuf, Somalia's President, finally admitted that insurgents now control most of the country and have advanced to the very edge of Mogadishu. His Government, he said, was close to collapse.

There are several insurgent forces, but one of the most powerful is the Shabab - a group of virulently anti-Western jihadists that has now eclipsed the Islamic Courts movement of which it was once part.

Somalia's nightmare may be only just starting. President Yusuf predicts wholesale slaughter if the Shabab seize Mogadishu. Diplomats fear that the Shabab will wage all-out war with other insurgent forces, including those of the Islamic Courts, for control of the country once Ethiopian troops - the common enemy - are withdrawn.

And unlike the Courts, the Shabab has no truck with moderation: in the port city of Kismayo last month a young girl who complained that she had been raped was stoned to death for adultery, while in Balad two dozen Somalis were flogged for performing a traditional dance.

Whatever happens, Somalia will be another horrendous legacy for Barack Obama, but somewhere on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border one man will be celebrating. Shabab openly supports al-Qaeda. It has adopted suicide bombings and other tactics. “Al-Qaeda is the mother of the holy war in Somalia... We are negotiating how we can unite into one,” Muktar Robow, a leading Shabab commander, recently told the Los Angeles Times. “We will take our orders from Sheikh Osama bin Laden because we are his students.”

All in all, hardly a resounding triumph for the War on Terror.

LOFL. So we're supposed to sit back and let them harbor known terrorists who attacked us? Ethiopia's supposed to sit back and let a neighboring country threaten an African Anschluss against them? What we should have done with them is the same thing we should have done in Afghanistan. Given them 24 hours to hand over the murderers or else....no more Somolia. And whoever's left there can clean up the mess.

So the Somalians were willing to trade all of their freedoms for security - and that's a good thing? Unless you're a Jew in Nazi Germany. Or a Kurd in Saddam's Iraq. Or a music lover in this Godforsaken place. Frankly, I don't give a fuck what the Somalians do to each other. The only alternatives they have, are very bad, very very bad, and worst of all the bads.

Let's face it. These people are hopeless and helpless.

 

[Muddy]

Final proof that the war on terror is total BS

I dont know about ALL

I know Pakistan = Taliban and the bad guys have nuclear weapons

fukk iraq and afghanistan, something must be done about Pakistan, this is serious shit mister, and W did not do shit about it

 

[Dilrod]

I dont know about ALL

I know Pakistan = Taliban and the bad guys have nuclear weapons

fukk iraq and afghanistan, something must be done about Pakistan, this is serious shit mister, and W did not do shit about it

:nohead: Are you kidding me???

Someone tell these guys to make a movie about the Taliban now.
Top Ranking CIA Operatives Admit Al-qaeda Is a Complete Fabrication

 

[Muddy]

Its true but Taliban is not

 

[Muddy]

Those cocksukkers cannot fool me

 

[SayHeyKid]

:nohead: Are you kidding me???

Someone tell these guys to make a movie about the Taliban now.
Top Ranking CIA Operatives Admit Al-qaeda Is a Complete Fabrication

Yep. It's all a big joke. Not sure how anyone can take the war on terror seriously when the borders are wide open and illegal aliens are above the law.

 

[tiznow]

i chuckled at this comment on another forum

us bears have a sick twisted sense of humor

---------------------

Good news/ bad news for shippers

Well, the bad news is that the Baltic Dry Index is Plumbing new lows

The good news for shippers is that, even though nobody will pay to use their ships any more, their options for liquidiating the ship to collect insurance money are better than ever. All they have to do is cruise around in the Gulf of Aden until the inevitable piracy happens. And with the proper insurance policy - Voila! Your white elephant capesize freighter is instantly converted to cash at prices several times its' present market value.


Now THERE's a business plan. Maybe it explains a lot about why security is so lax

 

[nimue77]

Its true but Taliban is not

Taliban created by Pakistani ISI (intelligence) and the ISI is basically a CIA outpost.

 

[eek.]

Ronald Reagan created the modern Taliban.

 

[Willie99]

Ronald Reagan created the modern Taliban.

you guys have a powerful imagination

The USA encouraged an uprising against the Russian invasion, but that is a far cry from creating the "modern day Taliban".

hno:

 

[eek.]

Ron and his buddies shipped huge amounts of gear into Afghanistan, and taught them how to fight against a modern invader.

Boot's on the other foot now tho.


An uprising against the Russian invasion, lol.
There were about three million refugees after the Russkies invaded.