Pirates “Around the Clock”

Since Captain Phillip’s thwarted escape last night, it’s been reported that in addition to our ships speeding to the site, the pirates themselves are sending in reinforcements.

This could be a disaster and 0bama flipping off the question yesterday certainly didn’t help matters.

And no, the Administration cannot blame this particular incident or how they handle or mishandle it on George Bush.

This is one of those unforeseen events that Biden himself predicted. The President will have to act. And the world is watching.

I simply do not know what approace might move you to modify, if only a little, your approach…I have to tell you that there seems no rational reason for you to start your blog with the provocative comment “Suddenly the Obama administration has a foreign policy problem that does not permit simple blame-shifting to the previous presidency…..” Exactly WHAT would you have had Obama do. As it is, he has refrained from criticizing the previous administration for siezing habeas, for perpetrating torture, for illegal spying. What would you have him do when the wingnuts imply by their inane comments that he is responsible for the financial debacle, for our troops being in Iraq, et al? WHY is it necessary for you immediately attack the guy? I have plenty of reasons to criticize him but responding “we inherited this,” isn’t one of them.
Gug

Although I hate to criticize w/o knowing all the facts, I am now hearing that the captain escaped the life boat and was recaptured during the night. We now have destroyers that cost more then a WWII carrier and all their escorts combined and this almost sounds like a “Titanic” episode, only back then there was no night vision. If this whole episode lasted only a few secands before his recapture and the captain never got more then a few yards from this suposedly gas-less life boat then I would agree that no explantion as to not freeing him is needed. I would hope though that “eyes a multiple” were glued on that life boat 24/7 and some appropriate ready to react team, teams, gunners ect. were ready to take advantage within seconds.
Sometimes lots money time and don’t make for progress. As an example might I suggest (especially to those who remember what an F-106 is/was) to net flex or get yourselves a copy of Disney’s “The Absent-Minded-Professor “

http://www.amazon.com/Absent-Minded-Professor-Widescreen-Fred-MacMurray/dp/B00009Y3RC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1239381231&sr=8-1

and watch what occurrs in 1961 when Fred McMurrys lumbering Model T comes up on Washington DC’s threat radar. After watching that just think 40 years later to an event called 9/11.

The real hero is Captain Phillips. He’s more of a leader and a man than Obama could ever hallucinate.

The loser is Barack Obama. This one is his baby on his watch.

Note to Obama: It’s called being the President of the United States,. That’s the thing you lied and cheated your way to have.

Own it. And DO something, even if it’s putting your azz out to make a statement.

“… the new bosses won’t shoot, will they?”

The Obama problem in a nutshell. Obama thinks that just “Being There” suffices. No, darling. Sometimes you have to DO something. Yes, we understand, darling, that any action may put you in the extremely perilous situation of incurring some negative press or cause your popularity polling to dip. But, darling, our captain — he’s no longer the captain of a single ship, he’s become the American people’s captain — must be saved. And WITHOUT killing him! You may have to do something risky to your popularity, darling.

Dithering, as you are, won’t make the problem go away. As Mr. Batchelor notes above, the problem is escalating with more pirates enroute. You’ll have to risk that dip in popularity, which we know is more precious to you than any human being or vessel or even a nation’s pride in protecting its citizens who are hostages.

(I would love to know what Hillary and Gates are advising him to do. Those two won’t leak what they propose, although I wish desperately they would. But they, unlike The One, have class.)

Barack Obama: “I won!”

Ok, great, now it’s yours!

Loser!

It is truly galling to have to negotiate with lawless thugs like these, but for now, that would be the safest course of action. I’m hoping we are able to retrieve the crew.
For the long term, we need a plan.
I admit that I was one of the morons who had no idea these ships had no weapons on board! Good grief…out in the middle of the ocean where anything could happen!
Perhaps they should have the equivalent of air marshalls.

well that’s not good…more pirates are on the way.

Obama and Biden are ignorant blowhards who could care less about anything but themselves. Obama couldn’t even manage to make a stop in Normandy in honor of our fallen soldiers there-it was out of his way he said. Bullshit asshole. Stick it.

And Biden saying the US is safer now…oh really dipshit??

Is anyone else slightly concerned about incidents off somalia and these kinds of press reports and linsk to the current situation?
(BTW-I live in MPLS)

The FBI Reaching out to Somalians: Somalis Leaving Minneapolis area U.S. for Jihad.

Somalis Leaving U.S. for Jihad
By Patrick Poole
Pajamas Media | Friday, December 12, 2008

[Visit Pajamas Media pajamasmedia.com]

The funeral for Shirwa Ahmed last week in Burnsville, Minnesota, punctuated a growing national security threat metastasizing inside the U.S. — one Homeland Security and law enforcement authorities have quickly taken note of. Ahmed, who killed himself in a suicide bombing attack in Somalia in October, is just one of up to 40 men from the Twin Cities area who have disappeared and are feared to have returned to their homeland for training with the al-Shabaab terrorist group to wage jihad.

The FBI is investigating similar disappearances in other major Somali communities in Columbus, OH, Atlanta, Boston, San Diego, and Seattle. There are even reports coming from Europe, recently from Denmark, of Somali men returning home to fight with al-Shabaab and other terrorist organizations.

ABC News also reports that a Somali from Boston, Tarek Mehenna, a U.S. citizen, was arrested last month on his way to Somalia to wage jihad after being in contact with Daniel Maldonado, a Muslim convert currently in federal prison after pleading guilty to training at a Somali terror training camp after being captured in Kenya with a Somali terrorist cell.

Predictably, Somali leaders in many of these cities are claiming surprise and shock that anyone from their communities and mosques would be leaving the U.S. for jihad. But as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross explained in a Fox News report, there exists an active recruiting and transportation network in the U.S., including Minneapolis, for Somali-run terrorist training camps, many of which have recently reopened. In many instances, these same Somali leaders purporting ignorance and innocence for the local media are not only aware of these recruiting operations, but have actively participated in them.

A year ago I reported here at Pajamas Media (”Homeland Insecurity: Terrorist Fundraising in the Heartland“) on a November 2007 jihadist fundraising and recruiting event held at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Minneapolis, featuring two high-ranking representatives of the Eritrean-based Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS). The event was sponsored by local organizations. Homeland Security officials were warned in advance of the attendance of the two ARS officials, but no effort was made to prevent their entry into the U.S. They later conducted another event in the Washington, DC, area at the Days Inn in Falls Church, VA, which was also sponsored by Somali organizations in Virginia, Minnesota, and Ohio.

One U.S. Somali leader, Abdirahman Warsame, executive director of the Terror Free Somalia Foundation, expressed his amazement that the ARS officials would even be allowed to enter the country, let alone be able to openly conduct fundraising and recruiting for jihad:

This event was definitely intended to organize and mobilize the extreme elements of the Somali community here to support the armed struggle against the internationally recognized Somali government and oppose U.S. foreign policy. [Columbus resident Nuradin] Abdi was openly calling for jihad and directing supporters to use the underground hawala networks to circumvent U.S. controls to prevent terrorism financing overseas. These funds will be used to support the insurgency that is killing civilians, civil servants, and anyone who works for or with the government, in order to further weaken the country and open the doors for foreign terrorists to take control of the country. Why would this man be allowed in the U.S.?

A year later, however, the local media are scratching their heads in wonderment about what has been happening right under their noses. And the same Homeland Security and law enforcement officials who had taken a laissez faire approach to these fundraising and recruiting events are finally reexamining these activities. One Homeland Security official I spoke with last week even cited last year’s Minneapolis event as one of the tipping points in radicalizing certain segments of the local Somali community.

So why are authorities suddenly concerned?

In the past year developments within the Somali terrorist organizations have resulted in splits and functionalization, with the most radical element, al-Shabaab, the former armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union movement, breaking away and forging closer alliances with al-Qaeda. As a result, Somalia is quickly becoming a new safe haven for al-Qaeda. Al-Shabaab and its leaders were designated a terrorist organization by the State Department back in March.

The most specific concern of Homeland Security officials about the departure of Somalis and other American Muslims for the terror training camps in Somalia is not that they will be killed, as was Minneapolis suicide bomber Shirwa Ahmed, but that they will get trained in the Somali terrorist camps and return home to wage jihad against the U.S. from within.

And al-Shabaab has made clear its intent to attack the U.S. and kill Americans.

MEMRI has translated a video that recently appeared on numerous Somali websites — many of them run from the U.S. — in which al-Shabaab called on Americans and Europeans to join the jihad in Somalia. The video directly threatens Americans with extermination:

I’m telling the kuffar [infidels], the English people, the American people. … We’re coming for you! We’re going to exterminate you all!

Fox News also reported recently on an al-Shabaab statement vowing to “throw the West into hell.”

Back here in the U.S., many of these sentiments can be heard in many mosques preaching violence and hatred towards America, the country which gave hundreds of thousands of Somalis refuge. In Minneapolis, much of the focus is on the extremist Abubakar as-Siddique mosque, where many of the missing men appear to have been radicalized and recruited. So concerned are Homeland Security authorities about the potential radicalization from the mosque that its imam and youth coordinator were prevented from leaving the country last week to attend the hajj in Saudi Arabia.

In Columbus, several mosques openly preach against America and encourage jihad. One mosque, Masjid Omar Ibn el-Khattab, nearby the Ohio State University campus, was the center of the largest known al-Qaeda cell in the U.S. since 9/11. Three members of that cell have been convicted and are serving prison sentences for terrorism support, though at least 10 others known to be involved have not yet been charged. One of those al-Qaeda members, Nuradin Abdi, a Columbus Somali resident, was convicted and sentenced to 10 years after threatening to blow up a Columbus-area shopping mall.

Another U.S. citizen, Ruben Luis Shumpert, an ex-convict Seattle barber and Muslim convert, was killed in Somalia earlier this year while fighting with al-Shabaab. Shumpert fled the U.S. for Somalia in 2006 before being sentenced on gun and counterfeit convictions associated with terrorism. In a taunting phone call to FBI agents after he had fled, Shumpert vowed that he and his Somali terrorist associates “would destroy everything the United States stood for.”

Thus, as seen in these cases from Minneapolis, Boston, Columbus, and Seattle, fears by authorities of Somali terror spreading to the U.S. through the local Somali community are hardly unfounded. Why Homeland Security and FBI officials have been so slow to respond to this growing threat remains unanswered.

One area they are beginning to take action in is with the flow of funds from the U.S. to Somalia. As noted in a Somalitalk article on the Minneapolis event last year, the hundreds of attendees were instructed on how to illegally transfer funds through the virtually untraceable hawala money transfer networks based in the U.S. The Columbus Dispatch reported two weeks ago that banks in the Columbus area, which is home to the second largest Somali population in the U.S. behind Minneapolis, are closing accounts for these U.S.-based hawala operations concerned about their inability to track where exactly the money goes after the transfer overseas.

Amazingly, however, Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman and his Somali staff liaison, Abdirizak Farah, are pressuring the local banks to create alternatives to keep the money flowing back to Somalia.

For several years, the media and Homeland Security authorities have failed to take seriously the terrorist threat that has been growing in many communities. Now stunned by these disappearances in Minneapolis and other locations, they are finally beginning to take notice. Whether these very recent efforts will be able to dismantle the extensive terrorist support network here before the threat rebounds from the terrorist camps in Somalia back to the U.S. remains to be seen.

——————————————————————————–

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Missing Somali-Americans could be training as terrorists: FBI
Yahoo ^ | Dec. 4, 2008 | Yahoo

Posted on Friday, December 05, 2008 12:03:12 PM by Aunt

CHICAGO (AFP) – The FBI is reaching out to the Somali-American community amid reports that young men are being recruited to be trained as suicide bombers in Somalia, officials said Thursday.

“There are reports of kids missing from different parts of the country,” said FBI special agent E.K. Wilson.

Citing Department of Justice policy, Wilson said he could not confirm whether the FBI was actively investigating whether a terrorist recruiting cell was operating in the Somali-American community.

About 20-40 Somali youth are reported to have disappeared in Minneapolis where about half of the estimated 200,000 Somali-Americans reside.

Wilson said the FBI is assisting Somali authorities in investigating an October 29 suicide bombing but would not confirm reports that a Somali-American youth who was buried on Wednesday was the bomber.

“The FBI did facilitate the return of some remains after the bombing of a US citizen to Minneapolis. We are not confirming the identity or whether it was the bomber or a victims.”

(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com …
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Home |Login to Dashboard |About T2M |Subscribe |Contact Us Thu 27 Nov 2008 03:41
Young Muslim Somali immigrant men disappear from Minneapolis—some found in Somalia training to terrorize
Posted by: T2M
Categories: All Posts , Murderous Muslims

By AMY FORLITI
Associated Puff Piece Press Writer

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Young Somali men in Minneapolis have gone missing in recent months, and some members of the Somali community fear the youths are being recruited to return to their homeland to fight with terrorist groups.

One of the men who disappeared from Minneapolis is believed to have killed himself in an Oct. 29 suicide bombing in northern Somalia, according to a U.S. law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about the case. That official confirmed that the FBI and Justice Department were investigating.

Some strong words…

Obama`s response…..I “hope” the pirates “change” their minds.

Haven’t the Somali pirates heard that Obama is the world’s new Messiah? It would be so ironic for these apparently grass roots type Africans to call Obamessiah’s bluff.

Yes, it’s time for Obama to make a command decision. I believe if it has good reasoning and intentions behind it, ultimately whatever he decides and the outcome will not necessarily hurt him. And even if it does, what can he do about it? Is America really going to negotiate for days, weeks, indefinately with Pirates? If so, what a weak and dithering President and Administration. If this is how they react to a life boat of pirates holding one American, then I can only imagine the indecisiveness and timidness if it were a situation of 9-11 proportions.

This is hilarious.

Obama Reaches Out to ‘Moderate’ Pirate Community:

After maintaining his silence for two days, President Obama will soon make his first public statement about the pirate attack upon an U.S.-flagged vessel off the Horn of Africa. After several inquiries and a few well-placed bribes, Exurban League has received an early transcript of the President’s remarks:

http://exurbanleague.com/2009/04/09/obama-issues-statement-on-the-pirate-attack.aspx

Nations should never ever negotiate with pirates or terrorists. Too bad for Captain Phillips family but no ransom should be paid. Keep the long boat separate from the mother ship. These cowards are hiding behind the hostages. It is a risk we must take but we need to sink the mother ships irrespective of whether we lose the hostages or not.

Now the french are going to make barry look bad…

“Somalia: one killed in army operation to free French civilians from pirates”
http://www.france24.com/en/world

I did a long comment earlier, but it must have hit the spam filter.

Is anyone seeing a link between this pirate attack and the somalians who have gone missing from different US cities to train in Somalia to fight Jihad?

Breaking News…. this just in….

The pirates’ demands might not be so unreasonable after all. For the release of the Captain, after which they will paddle away singing the Banana Boat Song, they demand:

(1) iPods all around (w/steel drum island tunes only, no speeches); and

(2) A “big heap” of DVD movies, any titles, don’t matter.

These demands are non-negotiable.

According to POTUS, they are “watching the situation closely” while Michelle checks their Amazon account balance.

>>> They may very well have been tipped or guided to their target by Mombassa based sources.

No ship moves through the Suez, Hormuz or Bab-El-Mandeb without a number of individuals being a party to the fact. Secretaries, ship’s husbanding agents, military attaches, Suez Canal Pilots, drivers of victualling trucks, bar whores and all manner of folk know more about your ship, its route, cargo, destination and ETA than you do.

Do you really think all these people wish the West well?

Why didn’t the first US Navy ship arriving at the scene immediately send in SEALS (underwater) to grab the captain and disable/kill the pirate-terrorists? Any thriller writer like Clancy or Grisham would have thought of this. And it could have been done without the whole world getting involved. Now it’s too late with every ship on the oceans steaming to the scene—practically ensuring a tragedy.

Last night on Coast to Coast, George (host) interviewed Capt. Kelley Sweeney. He’s either currently active or retired Coast Guard and a 3rd generation mariner. He said there is no economy in Somalia. Up north on the coast, the pirates have created a thriving economy. They drive big cars; have built homes along the coast; others have followed and set up small businesses. He said women swarm to the sea ports hoping to marry a pirate (how romantic). They are not rag tag operators. He also said that it is under reported how many recreational boats have been seized and the victims just disappear.

don’t worry no matter what happens, it will be someone else’s fault,or the old standby I wasn’t aware of this at the time! I am pretty sure that it will be Hillary that gets blamed.
I am wondering if a smaller ship ,armed with special forces, would have been better than a gigantic one. I don’t beleive these pirates would hesitate to blow it up.

The Samoli pirates have given Obama and us [yes, us] the biggest chance to get rid of the Usurper.
Per chance that the worst case senerio happens and the loss of “CIVILIAN” life is the end result of Obama’s strategy of TALKING with the bad folks.
Then the family can demand by what actions Obama acted or failed to act.

This can be the shot across Obama’s bow, that even he will not be able to ignore or pass away.

he will blame BUSH..

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