The intent of this blog is to heighten awareness of the threat of international terrorism taking on the role of modern-day pirates to hijack ships carrying liquefied natural gas or other dangerous substances in order to use them as weapons of mass destruction, through the promotion of the upcoming major motion picture, Hunt of the Sea Wolves.
COTABATO CITY, Philippines — An extortion gang being linked to the Abu Sayyaf extremist group claimed responsibility for Thursday afternoon’s bomb attack in Midsayap, North Cotbatao that wounded five persons, including two children.
Midsayap Mayor Manuel Rabara said he received a call before the blast from a man who introduced himself as being from the al-Her Hajj.
John Chadwell:
The next time you pull up to the pump and can’t bring yourself to look at the price, don’t blame the oil companies, don’t blame OPEC. Blame Somali pirates. That’s right, pirates can affect the price of crude.
Attacks by pirates have forced Range Resources, an oil explorer that was going to drill in a semi-autonomous region of Somalia called Puntland, according to a Times Online story. The company has had to delay the drilling that had been scheduled for July.
Meanwhile, according to the story, company sares fell as the group said that civil unrest and an upsurge in piracy around the coast would make it difficult to ship the heavy equipment it needs to the drill site. Even though the president of Somalia appears to be supportive of the drilling program, the pirates may drump the deal.
JOLO, Sulu–Five people, including two children, died while eight others were wounded when pirates fired at a passenger boat sailing for Laminusa Island in Siasi town around Thursday night, police said Friday.
Supt. Danilo Bacas, spokesperson of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) police, confirmed the incident, which happened at 6:40 p.m.
Bacas said reports reaching them indicated that the passenger boat, which sailed from here, was cruising between Parang town and Tapul Island when armed men, numbering about 20, fired at it with automatic rifles.
John Chadwell:
Ron Shusett and I had our first story meeting yesterday with Shoreline Motion Pictures’ producers, Dennis Cox and Art Camacho and everyone came away very excited about the direction the script is taking. We agreed we’re not making a political statement about Iraq or Blackwater. Our goal is to tell a straightforward story and let the audience determine where they stand.
Perhaps that may be viewed by cynics as somewhat disingenuous, and I realize it will be nearly impossible not to inject personal biases, but we’re at least setting out on our writing journey with that in mind.
Ron and I want to tell the story of a good, but flawed man who because of circumstances ends up working as a private contractor for Blackwater. The story will be about the men who go to a war zone with the best of intentions - support their families and do a job they believe is both patriotic and honorable. Unfortunately, war - even the most honorable - has a way of changing men’s goals and their very souls. That’s the story we’re after. Time will tell if we pull it off.
Meanwhile, here is a synopsis of the story we hope to tell in Blackwater USA:
When police officer, Bob Kesh, is shot in the back by a child during a S.W.A.T. raid on a gang hideout, he ends up on disability. Out of a job, and because it is determined that he was ultimately responsible for his own injury, he has no benefits.
Happily married and with two kids, the family is strained as their savings are drained and they are about to lose their home and way of life. Kesh is too proud to take money from friends or family who offer to help, so he takes the first job he can find, working in a hardware store.
Then one day, his close friend who quit the same police department and joined Blackwater USA, tells Kesh that he has been working in Iraq for the past eight months as a bodyguard for high-level politicians and he made enough money to pay off his home and set up college accounts for his kids.
Out of financial desperation, but just as much out of pride and patriotism, Kesh decides to join Blackwater as a private contractor. Kesh and those he meets at Blackwater are former Special Forces or police. All consider themselves patriots and the best of the best.
After a quick indoctrination at a secret desert training camp, Kesh is flown to Iraq, but it isn’t the glamorous world of guarding politicians and business leaders. He quickly discovers the dark secret that has gone all but unnoticed back home.
There are thousands of private contractors in Iraq, and hundreds have died while escorting caravans of toilet paper, tires, fuel and kitchen equipment. The Iraqi civilians hate them and insurgents have placed a bounty on their heads. Caught in the middle of a civil war and outgunned, they can trust no one, and ultimately not even each other.
Politics and corporate profits turn them into pawns of expediency. Kesh is soon caught up in the madness of revenge and paranoia as every Iraqi man, woman and child becomes the enemy.
After four contractors are brutally murdered, burned and their bodies hung from a bridge, the outside world learns for the first time that there are thousands of private contractors fighting and dying in Iraq. However, they are not seen as heroes.
While the Defense Department and even the administration sees them as a vital part of the military, the media and even friends and family back home see them as out-of-control mercenaries, who have no regard for the lives of innocent civilians.
Each day is more insane than the last as the contractors find their missions changing from guarding civilians, buildings and equipment to combat missions. They are civilians in the role of soldiers, who are forced to kill. The glare of the media brings about a demand that they be tried as war criminals.
Kesh now must fight the internal struggle to keep his faith and his loyalty to family and country.
On April 26, 2008, the Islamist website Al-Ikhlas posted an article from Jihad Press, an e-journal reportedly linked to Al-Qaeda, which urges the mujahideen to establish naval terror cells. The article argues that gaining control over the seas and sea passages – especially around the Arabian Peninsula – is a vital step towards renewing the global Islamic caliphate.
It points out that such operations are feasible, because Yemeni groups have already carried out successful attacks against oil tankers, tourist vessels, and commercial vessels in the Gulf of Aden; and other jihad fighters have carried out “two successful attacks on Zionist-Crusader targets in the [territorial] waters of Yemen: …the attack on the American destroyer [USS] Cole in October 2000, and the [attack on the] French oil tanker Limburg in 2002.”
Indonesian fishermen have rescued eight Philippine sailors who were swimming the Malacca Strait after their boats were attacked by pirates, an official said Monday.
The piracy of the two boats carrying the Filipinos took place Friday evening in the busy waterway which is shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
“Their boats were attacked by pirates, and they were forced to jump into the waters, but each was given a plastic jerrycan,” Darori, an immigration official in Riau province, was quoted by leading news website Detikcom as saying.
Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam attacked army and navy personnel at a coastal base near Mannar in the northeast, the military and rebels said.
A flotilla of boats manned by the rebels’ Sea Tiger unit raided a security post at Kondampiddy in the early hours of today, the army said on its Web site. The rebels “fled toward the north with their casualties on board the sea craft” after coming under fire from the base, it said.
LTTE fighters killed three sailors in the attack, TamilNet cited Irasiah Ilanthirayan, the Tamil Tigers’ military spokesman, as saying today. The force seized arms and ammunition from the security post, he said.
MANILA, Philippines — Corruption, limited resources and low salaries of security forces are just some of the problems plaguing Philippine law enforcement efforts to bring terrorists to justice.
These were some of the findings contained in a US State Department Country Report on terrorism for the East Asia and Pacific Region released Wednesday.
The report concluded that the Jemaah Islamiyah regional terrorist network (JI), which has ties to Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, remains a serious threat to Western and regional interests, particularly in Indonesia and the southern Philippines.
“Limited financial resources, inadequate salaries, corruption, low morale, limited cooperation between police and prosecutors, and other problems in law enforcement have hampered bringing terrorists to justice,” the report said.
UNITED NATIONS — In the placid waters of Turtle Bay just off New York’s East River, diplomats at the U.N. are marshalling a maritime strategy to detect and confront armed pirates plying the treacherous coast of Somalia. Protecting international crew, ships and commerce from armed pirates has jumped to the fore as the marauders have recently seized and hijacked vessels from France, Spain and attempted to seize a Japanese oil tanker.
In extraordinary if not slightly unusual Security Council deliberations against modern day buccaneers, diplomats from the United States, Britain, France and Panama are pushing to pass a tough draft resolution authorizing armed naval patrols off the Somali coast. The resolution is rooted in continuing incidents of piracy and armed robbery against vessels in international waters off Somalia and the “serious adverse impact on the safe delivery of humanitarian assistance to the people of Somalia, and the grave dangers they pose to vessels, crews, passengers and cargo.”
Earlier this week, ABC reported that the investment firm Cerberus Capital was in talks to buy Blackwater for around $200 million, but Cerberus, which had apparently been exploring the deal since the beginning of this year, got cold feet as soon as the news went public.
It turns out that it’s part of a concerted push, The Times reports, to expand Blackwater’s business because “whatever the outcome of the US presidential election Blackwater, run by Erik Prince, the Republican former Navy Seal, may find itself without friends in Washington.”