www.CostaRicaTicas.com

Here's another way to handle this problem. The author is a retired US Army colonel who was the Security Officer for the UN Forces in Somalia from 1993-2002, and handled many successful hostage negotiations. He deserves respect and needs listening to. He re-iterates my position that the solution won't be at sea but on land.

www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/opinion/19long-1.html

Here's a map of recent pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden and Somalia's Indian Ocean coast. To put it into perspective, this is 4X the size of Texas:
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/04/17/ ... rates.html

All the attention has been focused of late on the Somalian pirates but there's much worse places in the world for this banditry and one in particular presents a much more complex equation: South East Asia. This is because the Malacca Strait is much narrower (more of a choke-point), there are 20,000 Indonesian islands for the pirates to operate from, world-wide indifference, and official collusion at all levels. If you Google "SEAsia piracy in modern times", you'll get 7,000 hits. Key sites include one from Asia Times (including a list of what piracy is), Zmag has an interesting article, and Youtube has a video ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUbR21Z4DAE ). An equal problem in that area is people smuggling, which has reached such horrifying dimensions that the Australian Prime Minister had a speech on it (he called these inhumane brutes "scum").
www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/43216692.html 3rd item

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"A man accustomed to hear only the echo of his own sentiments, soon bars all the common avenues of delight, and has no part in the general gratification of mankind"--Dr. Johnson
"Amen, brother"-ED

In the song Bobby Magee made famous by Janice Joplin, there is one stanza where she sings, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose . . .”

That same theme was the topic of Viktor Frankl’s book Man Search for Meaning one of the most important books of our time. Only when you have nothing, when everything is taken from you and you have nothing to lose, only then are you totally unconstrained.

JazzboCR has found an OpEd which points out the veracity of his posts above. If people have nothing to lose they are unpredictable and can be extremely violent until they meet their basic needs. Once they have something to lose, their behavior becomes more predictable and reliable and they can be reasoned with.

Good find.