The sea is a domain increasingly beyond government control, vast and wild, where laws of nations mean little and secretive ship owners do as they please — and where the resilient pathogens of piracy and terrorism flourish.
— William Langewiesche
People may assume that today's seas are much more civilized than those of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. No so, as we are surprised to find, today's high seas are as unbridled as ever. Under the "flags of convenience", ship owners can choose whatever nation's flag they prefer, so Liberia, Panama, even land-locked Mongolia, which boast the laxest regulations, became the flag nations of most ships.
A ship's ownership can be utmost difficult to find out. In a scheme comparable to Enron, the real ship owner can operate through multiple shell companies located in different countries, and his operations abide by every single regulations and laws, so do those cabal ships of Bin Laden.
It is said Osama bin Laden controls twenty freight ships, dubbed "al Qaeda Navy". Because of those murky "flags of convenience" operations, it is impossible to spoor any one of them. It is Uncle Sam's big headache. However, Langewiesche argues, the United States Governments can do little about it, although it already did a lot, but the payback of those measures are quite questionable.
Under the "flags of convenience", Aging, dying, dangerous, and precarious ships can still operate at the high seas, impeccably legal. This is the story of Kristal, a moribund tanker build in 1974, only one step from grave. To squeeze the last drop of profit from it, the owner still make it carry cargoes around the world. No oil company dares to charter it, fearing the ghastly prospect lest the ship fails. However, it still suits to carry molasses, a substance readily dissolves into the seawater, and leaves no ecological disaster. So the Kristal was filled with molasses, and departed India for England. West of Spain, an excruciating storm proved to be too much for the dying Kristal, it broke in two, eleven sailors drowned.
Under the current maritime regulations, it is almost impossible to catch a loose atomic bomb hidden in a cargo container onboard a freighter, or to catch pirates who can change flags and names as will at sea. The story of Alondra Rainbow, which was pirated at Strait of Malacca, depicts how easily pirates can predate on freighters passing the narrow Strait, and how easily the pirates can cover up the crime, and disappeared without a trace. Modern pirates use satellite telephones, Internet, all kind of modern gadgets. It is no trivial task to police the seas.
Overall, William Langewiesche limned a dismay picture of the current anarchy of maritime shipping, the arduous task to fence off terrorism from sea, and the Sisyphean efforts to police the seas. No wonder the cover picture of the magazine is so grim and tumultuous a seascape.
Some noteworthy facts: on December 6, 1917, in Halifax harbor of Canada, a French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian freighter. The French ship caught on fire, drifted to the city's waterfront, and blew up. Witnesses said that the sky erupted with a cubic mile of flame, and that for the blink of an eye the harbor bottom went dry; more than 1,630 buildings were completely destroyed, another 12,000 were damaged, and more than 1,900 people died.
In Cioia Tauro, Italy, October 2001, an Egyptian-born Canadian citizen was found living in a cargo container, which was equipped with "a bed, a toilet, a heater, a water supply, a cell phone, a satellite phone, and a laptop compute". Investigators found cameras, passports, and security passes for a myriad of airports, and airline tickets from Montreal to Cairo, via Rome. A top lawyer, Michele Filippo Italiano, successfully secured his suspicious cargo-container passenger, who is never to be found again.