Somali Pirates Evolve Tactics After US Navy Incident

The tactical agility of pirates has long been something worth observing. It seems this took about a day.

Pirates in Somalia said Wednesday they are ferrying ammunition and men to the 30 hijacked vessels still under their control, and they threatened to kill more captives following the violent end to a hostage standoff that left four Americans dead.

This is a well written article, which later reports on an interview with EU spokesman Paddy O'Kennedy and a pirate in Somalia.

Pirates once were believed to be disgruntled and financially motivated Somali fishermen angry that international trawlers were illegally fishing Somalia's waters. Now criminal gangs dominate the piracy trade, and have begun systematically torturing hostages, including locking them in freezers.

"What we're seeing is that because of the business model the pirates have adopted is so lucrative that you're now getting organized criminal gangs involved as opposed to fishermen who just decided to have a go at piracy," said Wing Commander Paddy O'Kennedy, spokesman for the European Union's anti-piracy force.

"Criminal gangs are more violent than your average fisherman who's turned to piracy," O'Kennedy said.

A pirate in Somalia who gave his name as Adowe Osman Ali said fellow "soldiers" had ferried the reinforcements to hijacked ships in their hands on Wednesday in a bid to deter more hostage rescue attempts. He said after Tuesday's incident, captains of hijacked ships have been ordered to tell navies not to approach or hostages would be killed.

"In the past, 20 or so soldiers used to guard every ship but now the numbers are ranging between 60 and 70 soldiers," said Ali, a pirate in the coastal village of Gara'ad.

"We are more alert than anytime before," he said. "In the past, we allowed the foreign navies to approach us but now we have warned them to not get nearer to us."

Also see Katherine Zimmerman discussing the links between pirates and Al Shabaab. In that story, I got a nice laugh out of Secretary Clinton's comments about what folks concerned about piracy should do...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted that those concerned about piracy should "contribute to AMISOM by providing material, financial, and logistical support."

Wow.

In testimony last week, Secretary Gates mentioned during one of the hearings he has over 10,000 lawyers in the DoD, describing it as excessive. Well, I hear anti-piracy is manpower intensive, so why not send the JAG Corps to VBSS school and then forward to man the VBSS boarding teams until we can find a better policy for Somalia.

I'm only sort of joking, sort of.