[Peace-discuss] US Aircraft and Elite Navy SEALs Defeat Three Somalis in a Lifeboat

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Ron Szoke and I discussed this a bit in this week's AWARE on the Air.  The 
reason for the great interest of the US in Somalia can be gleaned from looking 
at the map (or better a globe). Somalia -- like Serbia -- is on the approaches 
to the cynosure of US foreign policy, the Middle East. Killing African teenagers 
is the way CENTCOM works.  --CGE]

	US Aircraft and Elite Navy SEALs Defeat Three Somalis in a Lifeboat
	Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
	
The mounting hue and cry in the US press over the menace to civilization posed 
by Somali "pirates" is yet another Big Lie, to justify the latest chapter in 
America's imperial quest for African oil and other resources. US missiles and 
drones in the air, and perhaps US boots on the ground are all but inevitable, 
ordered to kill near-defenseless African civilians, by America's First Black 
President.

What a weekend for American foreign policy! The United States Navy, backed up by 
warships from 20 other nations, knocked off three Somali guys crouching with 
rifles in a lifeboat tied by a rope to a U.S. destroyer. To hear the U.S. 
corporate media tell it, the Americans had won a huge victory over the forces of 
evil. The sole surviving Somali was in custody – a 16-year-old who essentially 
gave himself up, earlier, after being hurt in a scuffle with the American cargo 
ship captain who is now celebrated as a hero of the seven seas and defender of 
United States national honor.

There is something obscene about a superpower whose media and population find 
great satisfaction, and some sick form of national catharsis, every time they 
manage to overcome a weak and desperate opponent.

Some dreaded seagoing Somalis began taking up piracy in 1991, when the Somali 
government disintegrated and there was no one to patrol the country’s coasts. 
About the same time, and not coincidentally, commercial fishing fleets from 
around the world took advantage of the lack of a Somali coast guard, to steal 
every fish they could find in Somali waters. That’s “robbery on the high seas,” 
the definition of piracy.

An estimated $300 million worth of Somali sea life is pirated by foreigners 
every year.

Other kinds of pirates nowadays often leave something behind – the piratical 
poisonous waste dumpers. They seem to be mafia-connected outfits that dump the 
radioactive waste from European hospitals into Somali waters, along with heavy 
metals and dangerous chemicals of all kinds. A survey by the Somali news agency 
Wardheer News shows that 70 percent of Somalis “strongly supported piracy as a 
form of national defense of the country's territorial waters."

Having seen their coastal waters pirated by foreigners since 1991, Somalis were 
then forced to endure the land and air piracy of the Ethiopians and the United 
States, who collaborated in late 2006 to invade the country and oust the only 
relatively effective government Somalia had had in 15 years. Occupied by 
Ethiopia with the backing of the American superpower, Somalis were stripped of 
the last thing they had on land or sea – their national sovereignty. The foreign 
super-pirates had taken everything.

But the Somalis kept fighting back, anyway, driving out the Ethiopians and 
making the Americans fume with rage. The Somalis refused to roll over and die, 
or beg.

Black U.S. Congressman Donald Payne’s airplane was targeted by mortars when he 
visited Somalia’s ravaged capital, Mogadishu, over the weekend. Payne opposed 
the U.S.-Ethiopia invasion of Somalia, but some of the Islamist fighters 
battling for control of the country may not make distinctions among the 
foreigners who pass through or over their land – and who can blame them?

Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations, a young Black woman named Susan 
Rice, is positively rabid when it comes to beating Somalia into submission. She 
was more gung-ho for the U.S.-Ethiopian invasion than George Bush. Susan Rice is 
no doubt searching for a military solution to "Somali piracy" – which would 
amount to more piracy by the same foreigners that have driven Somalis to such 
desperate measures.

www.BlackAgendaReport.com.