If you blasted George W. Bush for Guantanamo, you have some blood on your hands.
On November 19th, 2008, INS Tabar destroyed a suspected Somali pirate vessel. All news-reports from the time were silent on the fate of survivors:
Indeed, who cares about the pirates? Well, those, who despise George W. Bush for Guantanamo, ought to care. Because the hapless sailors sunk by India's Navy are not any more "pirates", than the residents of Guantanamo are "terrorists". For whatever reasons, neither group has been convicted of anything — and so, by the prevailing logic, they must all be innocent. Thus, a person with self-consistent beliefs (self-consistency being the primary — if not the only — requirement for respectable thought) must care equally for the fate of alleged terrorists living in Guantanamo and that of alleged pirates fed to fishes in the Gulf of Aden.
Well, the Guantanamo detainees receive near-universal
sympathy, because they are either completely innocent (and some of them
probably are) or guilty only of opposing America's Imperialism
— a noble cause for anti-Americans inside and outside the
country.
On the other hand, the pirates' practices and motivations have not been "Hezbollized" yet — nobody has proposed, for example, we view their trade as "income redistribution" or "foreign aid to Somalia". Not yet...
Without elite's guidance, people are succumbing to the natural reaction to banditry and have little, if any, concern for the pirates.
Now, I'm not going to blame the Indian Navy for sinking the ship. If they sincerely believed it to be the pirates' "mother ship" and felt threatened (or even shot at), they were justified in firing their own (far superior) weapons.
But why not check for survivors after a sound victory? Indeed, had the opponents been some other country's (cough-Pakistan-cough) Navy, not pulling them from the water would, likely, have constituted a war crime! So, why have not the sailors of a world-beloved country (not the evil Bush-commanded goons, no) checked for survivors?
Simple answer: they were afraid to find some. Indeed, the world-wide mongering of hate towards America in general and Bush in particular over Guantanamo has made one thing very clear: you don't want to be stuck with prisoners of dubious legal status. And the legal status of the captured alleged pirates would've been much the same as that of the alleged terrorists held in Guantanamo. And no court currently exists with accepted jurisdiction over either group of suspects.
To avoid being stuck with such inconvenient prisoners, Indian Navy decided to take no prisoners.
If you've participated in the above-mentioned hate-mongering of America, you must now — as a penance — go and burn Indian flag in front of their embassy or consulate. Post videos on You-Tube.
The worst part of this story is that the alleged "pirate mother-ship" turned out to have been a Thai fishing trawler. Only one person of the 16-people crew survived (thanks to local fishermen) after several days in the sea... The lives of the other 15 are on the conscience of those, who made arresting and holding suspects so much more troublesome, than simply letting them die.
Following the ill-fated pirate attack on Maersk Alabama, NATO's crackdown resulted in freeing some ships and preventing some of the new attacks from succeeding. But, in all cases reported so far:
the perpetrators were let go! Says one report:NATO forces rescued 20 fishermen from pirates who launched the latest attack in the Gulf of Aden, but let the Somali hijackers go because they had no authority to arrest them.
Now, to this "Western thinker" letting the suspects go, however idiotic, is better than killing them without any trial or investigation. But detaining them — in a place like Guantanamo, if need be, until legal framework can be hammered out — seems like the best option...
Curiously, my colleague, who happened to be a supporter of Obama, has not been arm-twisted to add the same disclaimer by the University's administration...