Petting the Somali Pirates -- Pt 2

The situation with the latest ship hijacked by Somalis can't possibly come out well, and each new development only complicates the matter and makes a poor outcome all the more certain.  And this is on top of decisions that were made by the ostensible hero so far, the ship's captain, that shouldn't be made immune from questions under the familiar righteous bleat of "Don't blame the victim!"

In a sense, aside from the captain being shot or thrown to the sharks by the pirates, the worst that can happen has already happened, and that is that the military, with the prospect of being joined by a similarly close-mouthed bunch called the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has  already thrown the impermeable  cloak of supreme authority and  SELF-IMPORTANCE over the whole scene, so that only what they want to get out, of everything that they can control, will get out, and that will be not much.

  It helps them, and also the pirates, but very few others that they are in an unusually good position to do this, close to 400 miles out in the Indian Ocean.   They are so far out, in fact, that a group of other pirates in a captured German ship turned back after trying to get there to act as a shield for their buddies, claiming -- though there is reason to be skeptical about this, as there is about most other reports so far in this matter -- that they couldn't find the spot.  Wherever the lifeboat with the captain and his four detainers are, plus one and now possibly more American waraships,  it's  far from the eyes of determined, prying, inquisitive  civilian reporters -- provided that that genus still exists anywhere in the American media, and there are reasons to think that, under the purging of the Bush admins and their corporate friends, it no longer does.  This means that the only information that these authorities will allow to be released will be the non-informative dribs and drabs common to any American military affair in this era.  That is shown by the announcement already that none of the 19 crewmen still on board  the Maersk Alabama will be available to news reporters after the ship arrives in Mombasa, Kenya tomorrow.  What really happened will be kept under tight wraps, and meanwhile it will be "washed," "sanitized," and "heroized" into the bland pap of the "official" version that won't be any good to anyone, as far as dealing with such situations is concerned.

So most likely it will be a long time yet  before we get the actual answers to questions such as how good of a watch did the ship's crew keep for possible pirates even in the dead of night?   Did they know when the four pirates threw up a grappling hook and successfully got a grip, and if so, what measures did they take against this?  Did they try to make a quick grab of the  hook and throw it back into the sea, preferably while a man was two-thirds of the way up the high, perpendicular freeboard.   Or, failing that, did they take a good sharp ax to the line as it bent over the rail? Or, failing that, did they use the tactic that has most often been successfully employed in this instance, of keeping off the scalers with well-aimed, hard blasts from firehoses?   To combat that the pirates have taken to shooting at places on the ship that are vulnerable to fire so as to keep the hoses busy elsewhere, but that hasn't been reported in this case.   But then hardly anything has, about what went on during the taking and then the untaking of  the ship.

And such questions are just for starters.