FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - Pirates Attack Cruise Ship

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - Pirates Attack Cruise Ship :

"'There were at least three rocket-propelled grenades that hit the ship, one in a state room,' [passenger Edith] Laird [of Seattle] wrote. 'We had no idea that this ship could move as fast as it did and (the captain) did his best to run down the pirates.'"

Piracy on the high seas is a sort of crime that is seldom noticed by the press. Another is motor freight hijacking. And both have implications for the war on terror. Although both have been around for a long time, as long as there have been ships and trucks, they both offer lucrative opportunities for organized criminals. And terrorism is the ultimate organized crime.

Attacks on ocean liners are more likely to be noticed and draw a response from civilized nations, so they occur less frequently. Attacks on freighters often go unnoticed by any but those directly involved. From other news reports, it seems that there have been a number of freighters pirated in Somali waters recently, some still being held for ransom including shipments of food for famine relief in other African nations.

The Straights of Molucca see even more of this sort of activity. One of the favorites is shaking down the crews of oil tankers. It's hard for them to fight back when a single spark can send the whole ship up in flames. And, the volume of shipping and the narrow channels make evasive action of the type undertaken by the Seabourn Spirit problematic.

There are several ways in which piracy can dovetail with terrorism. One is, of course, the money - just as revolutionaries have traditionally used bank robbery and kidnapping as ready sources of funds. There is also the opportunity to steal things like explosives that might be awkward to buy without leaving a paper trail. At some point, a pirated ship may be turned into a floating bomb to explode in some port or, easier yet, to ram another ship and block a key channel to some busy port. A ship you don't have much invested in can also be useful for high-risk but lucrative missions like smuggling arms, drugs or illegal immigrants.

The fact that there is a lot of piracy on the high seas is helpful to the terrorist contemplating seaborne operations because it creates a crowd in which his operations can be hidden.