Mansoor Ijaz spoke on Fox News this weekend about the potential threat of seaborne terrorism. Scary stuff and apparently under-addressed.
During the past year, piracy attacks in the South Pacific have become much more sinister in nature. No longer are pirates boarding tankers or other maritime vessels for the purpose of taking cash, kidnapping crews for ransom, or seizing and selling the cargoes. Recent piracy incidents are now occurring because those boarding the vessels only spend a few hours at the helm to develop the necessary skills to navigate them — a bit like the 9-11 hijackers attending flight training schools — and then take the captains and co-captains with them when they abandon the tankers.Posted by Alan at October 11, 2003 10:52 PMNow add to this alarming development the theft of as many as 10 tugboats during the past six months in the South Pacific (which could easily be used to tug a disabled bomb-laden tanker into a busy harbor.) Next add the kidnapping and subsequent release of deep-sea diving experts from prominent resorts in Southeast Asia who authorities have been told were forced to train terrorist operatives how to dive — but curiously not how to resurface — and we have an increasingly serious terrorist threat to maritime security.
Keep in mind that, according to the UN, 80% of the 6 billion tons of the world's traded cargo is transported by ships. Imagine the damage to regional or even large segments of the global economy if a key choke point — the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, or the Straits of Malaca in the South Pacific — were blocked by a chemical or liquified natural gas tanker either set ablaze by terrorists, or worse, laden with radioactive materials and then detonated to create a massive dirty bomb explosion. Recall the October 2002 torpedo attack against the French tanker, the MV Limburg, near Yemen. That, in my judgment, was a calibration run to determine whether external attacks on a tanker were more effective then setting charges directly to the hulls. Clearly, the training for a maritime attack is under way and is intensifying as every day passes.
One of the great tragedies of the post 9-11 period has been the utter complacency of lawmakers in Washington to even understand what the threats are, much less deal with them. There has not been a single hearing, either open or closed, that I know of in Congress to address maritime threats, or to present the data I've presented here, or to make the American people aware of the consequences of an attack on maritime interests far away from our shores.
We are still stuck on airline hijackings and the use of aircraft as terrorist instruments when al-Qaeda leaders, according to my sources, have moved far along in their designs to disrupt the global economy. They've internally handed over airliner attacks to the second and third-tier al-Qaeda operatives who were just trainees when 9-11 happened. The 9-11 attacks were about symbolism, with a secondary emphasis on economic disruption. The next set of attacks will emphasize economic disruption with only an eye to symbolism.
via Fox News (requires registration)