Pirates or Terrorists on the High Seas?

The media's default response to just about any attack anywhere in the world is that terrorists had nothing to do with it. The word terrorist hasn't come up in the French riots in any press report I've seen. You can't get the press to call anyone in Iraq a terrorist, even after a ritual beheading. And now it may turn out that that attack on the cruise ship off Somalia was the work of terrorists, not pirates as the press originally reported.

Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer says authorities have not ruled out the possibility the attack was carried out by terrorists, who were targeting Westerners.

"If they were pirates who wanted to take the ship they wouldn't have used that methodology," he said.

"If they were terrorists who wanted to kill people on the ship - and it's not an American ship, it's a ship that's registered in the Bahamas - but it's based in Miami, and so there was presumably a supposition that it was an American ship."

Mr Downer says the Seabourn Spirit is a reasonably big ship, "so attacking it, even if you've got a rocket propelled grenade, and taking the ship over that seems to me to be a little improbable".

"But damaging the ship and killing people, which might have been their motive, that's something they could have easily done if the rocket propelled grenades had worked properly."

Pirates are not uncommon off the Somali coast, but typically they target freighters that carry only a handful of crew members.

(thanks to bWb)