Halliburton bribery

In Nigeria, earlier this week, authorities detained ten Nigerian and expatriate Halliburton staff for questioning after raiding its Lagos office. The Houston based engineering firm KBR, a former Halliburton subsidiary, pleaded guilty last year to charges in U.S. court that it paid $180 million in bribes between 1994 and 2004 to Nigerian officials to secure $6 billion in contracts for the Bonny Island liquefied natural gas project in the Niger Delta.

No way!

The rich were illegally getting richer under the reign of King George the II?!?

Say it isn't so...

KBR and Halliburton reached a $579 million settlement with the United States, but Nigeria, France and Switzerland are conducting their own investigations. Albert "Jack" Stanley, the former KBR chief executive officer who worked under the Dick Cheney when he headed Halliburton, pleaded guilty in 2008 to charges stemming from a scheme to bribe Nigerian officials for work on the Bonny Island plant.

Score one for the Swabbies

His Majesty's Royal Navy scored one over the pirates off of the coast of Tanzania last Friday. The HMS Chatham, on pirate patrol, spotted a larger vessel towing two attack boats. The crew and their commander maintained a watch on the suspected pirate group and launched an attack at dawn.

According to NATO reports cited by the BBC, prior to boarding the boats, the suspected pirates were observed throwing items, including their weapons into the sea. The Royal Marines boarded the larger craft, ten Somalis and a large amount of fuel were found on board. The Somalis surrendered and the two smaller boats were destroyed. Both smaller boats had been fitted with powerful outboard engines and also had large supplies of fuel.

The BBC quoted the commanding officer of HMS Chatham, Commander Simon Huntington. He said he was "extremely pleased" the warship had "successfully disrupted a pirate attack group operating in the Somali Basin and prevented them from mounting attacks against merchant shipping." NATO noted the ten Somalis were left with only enough fuel in the larger vessel to return to Somalia.

A win for the pirates?

The Maran Centaurus

The Greek-owned oil tanker Maran Centaurus was ransomed for between $5.5 million and $7 million by East African pirates. It carried two million barrels of Saudi Arabian crude oil valued at more than $156 million. Theoretically they paid pennies on the dollar to get their cargo back. Reportedly $5.5 million in cash was dropped directly on to the deck of the hijacked ship.

The Centaurus was taken about 700 miles northeast of Seychelles, an island country north of Madagascar. The captors subsequently docked the tanker along the Somali coast in the pirate town of Xaradheere, located in central Somalia. The crew promised to share part of the ransom with the pirates of Xaradheere in exchange for docking the tanker, according to the Wall Street Journal. On board at all times were pirates with rocket propelled grenades and twenty-eight hostages.

Unfortunately for the pirates, it was not quite as easy money as it seemed. The pirates fell prey to the old saw, there is no honor among thieves. Despite their apparent generosity, the pirates allegedly gave the crew about $400,000 to divide among themselves because they had been cooperative, the buccaneers fought amongst themselves. The Journal reported that according to residents of the town, by nightfall at least three pirates lay dead in the street. None of the crew were harmed.

Arrrgh, matey! Busted.

USS Vella Gulf

The United States Navy seized sixteen pirates in two separate incidents in the Gulf of Aden off of the coast of what used to be Somalia. Thursday an American helicopter patrolling from the USS Vella Gulf fired warning shots at gunmen in two small boats that had opened fire and tried to board the Indian-flagged vessel Premdivya. Bad idea messing with US Navy, the pirates surrendered posthaste.

In a separate incident the Associated Press reports seven other pirates armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, tried to board the Marshall Islands-flagged vessel Polaris using a ladder from their skiff, but were captured by the USS Vella Gulf. All of the pirates were subsequently transferred to the USNS Lewis and Clark.

"Associated Press Television News footage from aboard the Lewis and Clark showed some of the men, handcuffed and wearing leg shackles and white jumpsuits... They were given a meal, a blanket, a towel and a bar of soap, but they were not allowed to talk to each other. U.S. forces assisted by a translator were trying to get information from the men, such as their ages and nationalities. The men were then taken to a holding area surrounded by razor wire and guarded."

The limits on Empire and anti-pirate action are tricky as we have referenced for you previously. The United States recognizes no sovereign government in the country once called Somalia. The nationalities by which these pirates refer to themselves have more to do with tribes and clans than countries recognized by the United Nations. (Don't get the Clarion Content started on the distinctions that must be made between a nation and a state or a country.) The United States, facing this jurisdictional difficulty, has previously stated it would hand over suspected pirates to Kenya. We are not really sure what the logic there might be.

The A.P. also reported that the Russian navy said that its nuclear-powered heavy missile cruiser Peter The Great interdicted and seized ten pirates closing in on an Iranian-flagged fishing trawler. The Russian say that the pirates were caught with automatic rifles, grenade-launchers, illegal narcotics and a large sum of money.

The London-based International Maritime Bureau said since the beginning of January, twenty-two vessels had been attacked, and three hijacked. It said calm, good weather made it easier for the smaller pirate skiffs to ambush ships. It also said seven ships have been released recently, possibly pushing pirates to try to "replenish their stocks."

*all links were added by the Clarion Content. (Links do not imply endorsement.)

Bad, bad, bad

Once again the United States military was involved somewhere it had absolutely no place being and the consequences were horrific blowback for civilians. The United States military was and is helping the Ugandan, Congolese and South Sudanese military attack the long struggling vicious rebels, the Lord Resistance Army or LRA. The LRA is legendary for slaughtering civilians and impressing children into service. They have been fighting and living off the land for more than twenty years, back and forth across the Ugandan border with the Congo (Zaire) and Sudan leaving mayhem and tragedy in their wake.

The United States military aligned under King George the II and the rubric of counter-terrorism with many a kleptocrat's army and/or security services. In Uganda, it is quite likely their intentions were beneficent insofar as the LRA has been a scourge for those living within its reach. The Pentagon also probably felt that Uganda/Congo needed to be pushed as far back from the edge of utterly failed states as possible, disorder implicitly hurts the Empire, see the fingers and toes being burned in Waziristan and Puntland.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the combined militaries offensive against the LRA which began with airstrikes on December 14th has resulted in a tragic slaughter,

"hundreds of other fighters from the LRA have butchered, bludgeoned, and burned their way across an area the size of Belgium. More than 900 people are estimated to have been killed, most of them hacked to death with machetes or beaten by clubs. Hundreds of children have been abducted and 133,000 people have fled their homes, the UN says. The push against the rebels has been 'catastrophic' for civilians, UN humanitarian chief John Holmes said Tuesday after visiting one of the areas hit hardest by fighting."

Nonetheless, interestingly the Monitor reports Holmes and the UN support continuing the fight to destroy the LRA. Not everyone agrees, the New York Times says, "the operation has been widely criticized by human rights groups as essentially swatting a hornet’s nest...Faradje, [a town near a national park in Eastern Congo,] still has the whiff of char. Around 150 people were killed Christmas Day. Several other villages, some more than 100 miles away, were simultaneously attacked. In one town, after the rebels killed 80 churchgoers, they ate the villagers’ Christmas feast and then dozed among the corpses, according to Human Rights Watch, which documented the massacre."

The NY Times says what it calls the "failed" plan was personally authorized by Bush II. It says local Congolese villagers have started arming themselves in self-defense because there is no one else to protect them. It argues that in the past this has worsened the conflict the American military was hoping to end.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the UN has been little help in ending the conflict either, "Doctors Without Borders, one of the few NGOs still working in the area, has officially attacked the UN mission for not doing enough to defend the population, an accusation that [it] denies. The feeling of betrayal among locals is undeniable, however. Many say that if the UN is not fighting against the LRA, they must be helping them." Locals even rioted against and tried to storm the UN base last year.

It is a mess that the American military now looks complicit in making worse. The more of the counter-terrorism policy of the Bush-Cheney regime that is revealed the more Soviet it looks.

Pirates win a round

The MV Faina

Pirates freed a Ukrainian vessel, the MV Faina, yesterday after being paid what was reportedly a $3 million ransom. The ship had been held captive since September. This ship had received considerably more attention than most pirate seized cargo ships because its cargo was discovered to be thirty-three tanks and numerous caches of different types of small arms purchased by the Kenyan government. (Various sources indicate that the Kenyan government had planned on selling the weapons to the breakaway government of southern Sudan.)

The pirates reportedly over the last several months removed as many of the small arms as they possibly could. They had no cranes nor other method for removing the tanks. The tanks, too, were likely to be far less useful to their craft, piracy, than shoulder fired rockets and grenade launchers, machine guns and their ilk.

Three million bucks and a fat load of small arms, good news for the pirates, bad news for the forces of order. Before you decide to quit your job and become a pirate, know that Andrew Mwangura of the East African Seafarers Assistance Program, a ­Kenyan-based piracy monitoring group, said that up to 100 pirates were on-board and splitting the ransom. The ransom demand had been negotiated down from $35 million, initially.

Read a partial list of ships still held captive here.

Pirates who can't swim

Unfortunately for five Somali pirates they hadn't practiced their backstrokes enough recently. The five died when their small boat overturned as they were leaving behind the ransomed Saudi Arabian oil tanker Sirius Star. Reports say that their share of the reported $3 million ransom was lost with them. Whoops.

A Saudi Oil Ministry official reported the ship was steaming for Damma, on Saudi Arabia's Gulf coast. The Saudis reportedly paid the ransom via parachute drop. The Liberian-flagged ship, owned by the Saudi state oil company, Aramco, was reportedly carrying $100 million in crude oil.

Read the full Associated Press article here.

Don't mess with Her Majesty's Navy

Royal Navy Type 22 frigate


Don't mess with Her Majesty's Navy. You'd think pirates worldwide might have learned this lesson a couple hundred years ago. Perhaps they have forgotten since? Yesterday the Brits on the Royal Navy Type 22 frigate, HMS Cumberland issued a reminder to a group of Somali based pirates attempting to hijack a cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden 60 miles south of the Yemeni coast. The pirates seeing the Brits approaching in two Royal Navy assault craft made the mistake of opening fire instead of turning tail and running. Whoops! Bad idea. In the ensuing firefight three pirates were killed, no British Marines were even wounded, and the remainder of the pirates lost the will to fight quickly and surrendered quietly. The Royal Navy described the boarding of the Yemeni flagged fishing dhow as "compliant".

Serious Pirate issues

While the eyes of many newswatchers are on one pirate captured ship, the Russian frigate Neustrashimy, a vessel that has been seized off of the coast of Somalia, that contains scads of small arms, munitions and up to 33 Ukranian tanks, destined for the government of Kenya, the Clarion's veteran pirate watchers have spotted something that appears far more diabolical.

Certainly, it is bad news to hear about the Russian flagged vessel that has been seized, and it is worse news to hear local warlords were doing everything they could to offload the small arms from the ship before it was surround by United States and Russian naval vessels. The Clarion's sources report that another act of piracy may have resulted in the capture of something far more dangerous. Read more here. The speculation raised about the cargo of this other pirate-seized ship ranges from nuclear waste to nerve gas and beyond. All that has been reported so far is that several of the pirates got sick, lost their hair and died within days of seizing this Iranian ship and busting open sealed containers in the cargo hold in an attempt to determine what their booty was. The ship has not been recaptured by authorities, nor have the pirates demands for ransom been met.

Pirates

Piracy is alive and well as the Clarion has been warning for some while now, and not just in the Straits of Malacca.

Somali pirates (wonder if they self-identify as Somali, esp. since they are reportedly based out of Puntland) released a German cargo ship and their hostages after being paid a ransom Tuesday. The ship was originally seized in the Gulf of Aden on May 28.

Click here for an interactive map of reported pirate attacks in 2008.

Down on America

Or more pointedly, down on life in America?

The Clarion has another statistic (via the Economist) to make you feel better, and grateful.

In Nigeria, fewer than 5% of those arrested are ever brought through the criminal justice system, most are simply extorted for bribes. Innocence or guilt is not relevant.

The founder of a Nigerian NGO, Prisoners' Rehabilitation and Welfare Action says in twenty years she has never seen a prisoner who has not suffered physical or psychological torture by the police.

The Lie we don't believe any more

The Clarion has heard from many continued supporters of the invasion of Iraq.

"It didn't matter that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction."

"It didn't matter that Iraq didn't have ballistic missiles with the range to reach North America."

"It didn't matter that (this time) Iraq had not attacked any of its sovereign neighbors."

"It didn't matter that the United Nations didn't support the invasion."

"It didn't matter than many of America's allies from the first Gulf War, didn't support the invasion."

"It didn't matter that Iraq was in no way connected with the attacks of September 11, 2001."

"It didn't matter that Iraq was not allied with Al-Qeda."

"It didn't matter Iraq was not harboring any Al-Qeda operatives."

Why didn't it matter? What is the rationale? (ex post facto, of course.)

"Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator. The man was unfairly imprisoning, torturing, mass murdering his own people. Such evil had to go. It was America's duty and right, alone, if necessary."

Where are these supporters of the Iraq invasion today? Why are they not clamoring for an American invasion of Zimbabwe? Robert Mugabe is an evil dictator. He is imprisoning, toruring and mass murdering his own people in an effort to maintain his personal power. His exploitation of the country has been without limits, almost without parallel, this side of Kim Jong-il.

Where is the outrage? Where is hue and cry for the imminent invasion of Zimbabwe on behalf of its suffering people? Does the color of the skin of most of Zimbabwe's citizens somehow make them less valuable to America? Is it their country's lack of fossil fuels? Pre-Mugabe, Zimbabwe was once the "Breadbasket of Africa."

Why is it less valued?

King George?

Viceroy Cheney?

Senator Lieberman?

Senator McCain?

Senator Obama? (Who opposing the Iraq invasion, from the beginning, has an opportunity to weigh in differently...)

The Clarion's view, on both Iraq and Zimbabwe, war is admission of failure. Victory is peace.