Pirating is a Lucrative Business

In what continues to be a very interesting story, the U.S. Navy is reportedly engaged in negotiations with the pirates that took control of a U.S.-operated container ship. The ship (the Maersk Alabama) with a crew of about 20, was seized by four or five pirates about 200 miles off the southeast coast of Somalia. It was reported that the crew of the ship was able to take one of the pirates hostage, but that the pirates had also taken the captain of the ship hostage. One of the crew members of the ship, Ken Quinn, was able to call into CNN and had this exchange with host Kyra Phillips:

Phillips: Can you tell me the situation right now?

Quinn: Right now they want to hold our captain for ransom and we're trying to get him back. We have a coalition that will be here in three hours. So we're just trying to hold them off for three more hours and then we'll have a warship here to help us.

Phillips: Can you tell me where your captain is in proximity to your cargo ship? where is the -- who was he with? what type of boat is he on right now?

Quinn: He's in the ship's lifeboat. When they board, they sank their boats so the captain talked them into getting off the ship with the lifeboat. But we took one of their pirates hostage and did an exchange.
What? Huh? Okay. I've got to go.

Phillips: Ken, can you stay with me for just two more seconds?

Quinn: What?

Phillips: Can you tell me about the negotiations, what you've offered these pirates in exchange for your captain?

Quinn: We had one of their hostages. We had a pirate we took and kept him for 12 hours. We tied him up and he was our prisoner.

Phillips: Did you return him?

Quinn: Yeah, we did. But we returned him but they didn't return the captain. So now we're just trying to offer them whatever we can. Food. But it's not working too good.

Phillips: Are you in control of the vessel right now?

Quinn: Yeah. they are not aboard now. We're controlling --

Phillips: So can you see that lifeboat with your captain, with the pirates? Is he okay? Is he still alive?

Quinn: yeah. yeah. He talks on the -- he's got one of our ship's radios. We talk to him.

Phillips: So what is it that the pirates want now in exchange for your captain?

Quinn: I've got to hang up.

So it sounds, from this exchange, as if the crew had planned a prisoner swap...the captured pirate for the captain of the ship, but that something went wrong which led to the pirates getting their man back without the return of the captain. Now, with the arrival of an American warship on the scene, it looks as if negotiations will continue to take place for the safe return of the captain.

I found an interesting article on this topic by Jeremy Scahill which dives beyond the normal media coverage of pirates as a randomly striking group of sea gangs. Scahill writes:

But this type of coverage of the pirates is similar to the false narrative about "tribalism" being the cause of all of Africa's problems. Of course, there are straight-up gangsters and criminals engaged in these hijackings. Perhaps the pirates who hijacked the Alabama on Wednesday fall into that category. We do not yet know. But that is hardly the whole "pirate" story. Consider what one pirate told
The New York Times after he and his men seized a Ukrainian freighter "loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition" last year. "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits," said Sugule Ali:. "We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard." Now, that "coast guard" analogy is a stretch, but his point is an important and widely omitted part of this story. Indeed the Times article was titled, "Somali Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money." Yet, The New York Times acknowledged, "the piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago…as a response to illegal fishing."

and further:

Take this fact: Over $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are "being stolen every year by illegal trawlers" off Somalia's coast, forcing the fishing industry there into a state of virtual non-existence. But it isn't just the theft of
seafood. Nuclear dumping has polluted the environment. "In 1991, the government
of Somalia collapsed," wrote Johann Hari in The Independent. "Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since -- and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas."

It seems as though pirating has become a more lucrative business venture than fishing. From the Washington Post article I initially reference above:

Last year, private shipping companies paid roughly $150 million in ransom to pirates

Obama Administration Again Delays Release of the "Torture Memos"

The ACLU has been trying (for over a year) to get various memos and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). These memos are the infamous "torture memos" which detail how the Bush Administration attempted to give legal authority to their decisions surrounding the treatment and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody.

For obvious reasons, the Bush Administration was very resistant to the requests from the ACLU and now that the Obama Administration has taken power, there have been murmurs that they will end up releasing these controversial memos. Despite these murmurs and court-ordered deadlines by which the Administration would have been forced to either release the memos or give reasons to why they would continue to keep them sealed, the Obama Administration has asked for a total of four extensions to these deadlines. The most recent deadline of April 2 has now been extended to April 16.

Scott Horton has recently reported that there is conflict within the Obama Administration regarding the release of these documents and considerable push back from Republicans and John Brennan. Horton writes:

Brennan is a protege of former CIA director George Tenet and although he expressed some reservations about waterboarding, he was a defender of other
Tenet-era torture programs. Now ensconced as a senior counterterrorism advisor, he has become the principle advocate of the “don’t look back” mantra with respect to the misdeeds of the Bush years. And in this, Brennan’s principal concern is the protection of Brennan and Tenet–but in the process he has emerged as Dick Cheney’s clear champion.

The disclosure of the OLC memoranda presents a key policy fork in the road for Obama. If he is faithful to his commitment to transparency and to end torture, the government will have to come clean with these memos. If Obama keeps them under wraps, the public will have good reason to question his undertaking to end torture–and good reason to question whether a Cheney “shadow administration” actually has the power to influence policy.

Not only is Brennan apparently leading this opposition, but Horton also reported today that Republicans are threatening to vote against some of Obama's nominations if he doesn't keep these memos sealed:

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era.

Alarming, but per usual, Glenn Greenwald hits the nail on the head in his analysis of this situation today:

If the Obama administration releases these memos in largely unredacted form, they will deserve credit for doing so. These memos, which an anonymous Obama official told Newsweek were quite "ugly," are virtually certain to fuel calls for investigations and prosecutions and erase all remaining doubt in the eyes of the world how directly and knowingly involved in the torture regime were our highest government officials. Disclosure will require a fair amount of political courage, and if they do that, credit ought to be given.

Conversely, a refusal to disclose these memos, or disclosing them with so many redactions as to render them meaningless, will be absolutely inexcusable. It doesn't matter how loudly John Brennan screams or how many nominations Republican Senators threaten to filibuster. Put simply, there is no legal authority for these memos to remain secret -- ongoing concealment is itself an act of profound lawlessness -- and, beyond that, keeping them secret will constitute the most extreme complicity yet on the part of the Obama administration in the last administration's war crimes. It was Obama who chose to place someone like Brennan in a position of high authority in his administration. That Brennan is now working with Bush-following Republicans to hide evidence of war crimes is, quite obviously, no excuse for continuing to hide it.

This is indeed a big test for the Obama Administration and if they are to assert their commitment to the principle that "no one is above the law", they will release these memos which will be essential to continue to build a case against the law-breakers of the last eight years.

Media Photographs the Return of a War Casualty for the First Time in 18 Years

For the first time in 18 years, the media was allowed access to a military base in order to photograph images of a returning U.S. soldier who was killed in combat. The body of 30-year-old Air Force Staff Sgt. Phillip Myers arrived at Dover Air Force Base last night with his family in attendance. Myers was killed on April 4, 2009 after being hit with an improvised explosive device (IED) in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. He was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery last year.

This marks the first time the media has been granted access to a military base to photograph images of United States soldiers who have been killed in combat since the ban was put in place by President George H.W. Bush in 1991. There have been a few exceptions over the years, but the ban has largely remained in place since the beginning of the first Gulf War. Since his inauguration, President Obama asked for a review of the ban and the Administration has since decided that they will allow families to decide whether to allow media presence.

Reversing the policy of a blanket ban on photographing the coffins of U.S. soldiers returning home is a positive development and interestingly comes at a time when the Obama Administration is pushing to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Members of the media should not be banned from documenting the realities of war whether it be photographing flag-draped coffins of returning U.S. dead, or the results of a bombing campaign that has caused civilian casualties overseas. If the American people are asked to support a war effort, they should be able to see all the results of that effort.

While this is a positive step for the rights of the media, there is still a long way to come. The process of embedding reporters with the United States military has had a devastating effect on objective war coverage and should be the next practice that is abandoned.

Time Warner Cable Expanding the Practice of Consumption-Based Internet Billing

For the past several months, Time Warner Cable has been conducting a study on Internet usage in the town of Beaumont, Texas. Beaumont has been used as a testing ground for Time Warner Cable's plan to see if it is feasible to charge Internet users for how much data they consume. Currently, companies charge a flat-fee for Internet usage meaning that once you pay for access, there is no limit to how much information you can download or consume online. The only limiting factor, is your connection speed. Under this new system, customers would subscribe to a plan with a cap on how many gigabytes you are allotted within a month. Time Warner Cable would then meter your service and if you go over your allotted gigabytes, you would be charged a fee similar to how cell phone companies charge for going over the allotted minutes of your cell phone plan.

According to this article in Business Week, Time Warner Cable customers would be charged between $29.95 and $54.90 per month for plans that would be capped at 5GB (gigabytes), 10GB, 20GB, and 40GB. For each gigabyte that customers would go over their plan, they would be charged an extra $1. The article I reference above quotes a recent study by Sanford C. Bernstein that suggests that a family on the 40GB plan that streams 7.25 hours a week of online video could end up paying $200 per month on broadband fees.

Time Warner Cable counters these figures by claiming that customers do not typically use that much online data. They point to their study in Beaumont, Texas which monitored 10,000 broadband customers. Time Warner says that about 14% of those tested exceeded their plans and racked up an average of $19 dollars in monthly fines. Time Warner has found this system to be favorable and beginning this month, they are expanding so-called "consumption billing" to Austin and San Antonio, Texas, Rochester, New York and Greensboro, North Carolina. Why make this change in billing? CEO Glenn Britt of Time Warner Cable says:

"We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business."

Some, myself included, are quite skeptical of this reasoning and find consumption billing to be problematic. Nate Anderson recently wrote a piece in which he also shares skepticism in the reasoning from Time Warner Cable:

My own recent conversations with other major ISPs suggest that the average broadband user only pulls down 2-6GB of data per month as it is. One the one hand, this suggests that caps don't really bother most people; on the other, it indicates that low cap levels aren't needed to keep traffic "reasonable" since it's actually quite low to begin with. The shift toward metered pricing can't help but benefit TWC's cable business (unless consumers truly revolt), since low caps will ensure that Internet users think twice before doing data-intensive activities on the Internet such as streaming files from Hulu or downloading HD movies and TV episodes from Amazon and iTunes. TWC's own cable video service may prove more compelling than the online alternatives because it has no "caps" or additional fees for watching too much TV.

One of the important points that is listed above, is that consumption billing will ensure that the online habits of customers will change. The downloading of music and movies as well as watching television programs online will most certainly be affected as customers will be mindful of going over their monthly limit. Time Warner Cable makes it sound like these actions are necessary in order to support their broadband infrastructure, but as Anderson points out, "cable Internet is a bargain" for the operators:

Cable's physical plant has been in the ground for years; even hybrid fiber-coax systems have been widely deployed for some time. Internet access simply runs across the existing network, and one of cable's big advantages over DSL is that speeds can be upgraded cheaply by swapping in new DOCSIS headend gear, with DOCSIS 3.0 the current standard.

It certainly makes one scratch their head and wonder if these actions are being undertaken with the public interest in mind or with Time Warner Cable's bottom line in mind.

A Visual Breakdown of the Financial Crisis

Digby posted this earlier today and I thought I would repost it here. Below is a visual account of the financial mess that has taken over the country. It isn't perfect, but it can be of help for people who learn visually. You can visit the creator's website by clicking here.

Glenn Beck: "I was wrong"

Yesterday, Glenn Beck said that he was wrong. That America is not on the road to Socialism or Communism, but on the road to "non-violent fascism".

"The people who said 'fascism is coming under Bush' and the people who are saying 'fascism is coming under Obama'...you're both right!"

The only thing that is more intimidating than this thought is the size of the screen behind Beck.

I also enjoy how Beck mentions that this is not a type of fascism that we saw under Hitler, but more "fascism with a happy face". Perhaps Beck should have drawn "happy faces" on the images of Nazi's marching behind him while he was making his point.

Stephen Colbert on Glenn Beck's Antics

Yesterday I posted about Glenn Beck's odd, creepy, and contrived behavior on his Fox News program. Last night, Stephen Colbert once again chimed in on Beck's antics:

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