The World for Ransom: Piracy Is Terrorism, Terrorism Is Piracy - Rilegato

Burgess, D. R.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1616141735 ISBN 13: 9781616141738

Casa editrice: Prometheus Books, 2010

Riassunto

Pirates today are gangs of seaborne brigands with rocket launchers, who bear a striking resemblance in appearance and actions to terrorists. This compelling study shows that the case for linking piracy and terrorism goes much deeper than shared imagery. In fact, from a legal standpoint piracy may offer civilized society the key to fighting international terrorism.

Drawing both from historical examples and the present-day situation in the Gulf of Aden, the author proves that piracy and terrorism are the same crime. If the international community took the logical step of defining terrorists as pirates, these thugs would no longer find a safe harbor and they could be captured wherever they are found under the customary law of universal jurisdiction. Moreover, the current maze of legal restrictions that hampers the prosecution of both pirates and terrorists would be eliminated. Examining measures taken by states over one hundred years ago to stamp out piracy, the author constructs a model law for terrorism based on piracy. He then suggests how such a law for terrorism might transform the hunt for al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. It would provide both a precedent and a legal framework for future trials and would facilitate the capture of suspected terrorists around the world.

In a lively narrative that includes fascinating historical research as well up-to-date information on the current effort to combat piracy, this lucidly presented book provides a coherent, practical blueprint for tackling, and perhaps resolving, the international menace of both piracy and terrorism.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

D.R. Burgess, JD, PhD (New York, NY) is an assistant professor of legal history at Yeshiva University and the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law. He is the author of The Pirates' Pact: The Secret Alliances Between History's Most Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial America and Seize the Trident: The Race for Superliner Supremacy and How It Altered the Great War. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Legal Affairs, American Bar Association National Security Law Report, and other periodicals.

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THE WORLD FOR RANSOM

PIRACY IS TERRORISM, TERRORISM IS PIRACY By D. R. BURGESS

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2010 D. R. Burgess
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-173-8

Contents

Dedication..........................................................................................7Acknowledgments.....................................................................................9Foreword............................................................................................11Introduction: Beyond the Law........................................................................171. "At War with All the World"......................................................................292. Piracy and the American Experience...............................................................833. A New Hybrid: Political Piracy and Maritime Terrorism............................................1194. The Pirate Muse..................................................................................1755. Trial and Error: The Definition of Terrorism.....................................................1956. A New Terrorist Law..............................................................................241Conclusion: Rule of Law.............................................................................261Appendix: Significant Incidents of Piracy & Maritime Terrorism, 1961–2010.....................267Glossary............................................................................................271Bibliography........................................................................................275Index...............................................................................................283

Chapter One

"AT WAR WITH ALL THE WORLD"

The Republic was under siege.

Reports filtered in from provincial governors, each more harrowing than the last. They told of entire fleets sunk within sight of shore, their hulls doused with hot pitch and set alight, until the horizon glowed orange. Captains returning to the city spoke of roving bands that appeared suddenly in the night, stormed aboard their vessels, and cut the throats of their crews. In Ostia empty barges sat in desolate rows along the docks, waiting for shipments that would not come. Broken and discarded amphorae, clay jars that should have been filled with wine, honey, or oil, were dry.

The lifeblood of Roman commerce had dried up also. There would be no Grecian wine, no Syrian wool, no African wood. The Egyptian trade was the hardest hit of all. From there came the wheat, papyrus, and building stone that served as the foundation for Rome's dazzling architecture. Not a single Egyptian shipment had arrived for weeks.

Many in the Curia felt this loss keenly. With paper in short supply, scribes were reduced to recording their oratory on wax tablets, the same ones Roman children scrawled their first letters upon. Food tasted bland; the spice merchants were out of stock. Worse still, wives complained that Arabian perfumes could no longer be found, not even on the black market. Rome was beginning to smell.

Dire as this all was, it was nothing compared to the political firestorm developing in the Senate. A young, brash general by the name of Gnaeus Pompeius had offered to solve Rome's pirate problem once and for all, if only they would give him command of the fleet and unlimited power to devise whatever tactical solutions he saw fit. It was a dangerous proposal: Pompeius, or Pompey, was an ambitious man. His successes on the battlefield in Hispania had made him a popular hero; the citizens displayed their affection by electing him consul.

Some in the Senate believed that the pirate menace was nothing more than a pretext for Pompey to claim another triumph and thus position himself for his ultimate goal: dictatorship of Rome. Surely, they argued, the state was great enough to deal with a small band of brigands. Not so, others said. Look at the condition of our docks, our fleets. Look at our reputation abroad. The Republic is being made to look ridiculous.

The argument had reached stalemate in the Curia when one senator rose to speak. Marcus Tullius Cicero was a young man, still in his thirties, but his reputation as an orator of consummate skill was already known. One year earlier he had been elected aedile, the youngest ever awarded that high office. The other senators paused to listen.

He rose, he said, in defense of Pompey, and to illuminate the Senate on the menace confronting it. The danger to Rome was no pretext. Piracy was much more than a threat to trade, he told them, and pirates themselves were much worse than robbers. Small in numbers they may be, but the effects of their actions were vastly disproportionate to their size. "We are faced," Cicero told the Senate, "with a war that is ancient, widespread, and shameful." Warming to his theme, he went on: "What province is free of pirates? What cargo is safe? ... Should I talk of those illustrious cities, Cnidus, Colophon, or Samos, and many more captured by pirates, when you know your own port city fell to pirates? ... Or should I even mention the misfortune and devastation of Ostia when you were all eyewitnesses to the capture and destruction of a fleet under the command of the consul elected by you, the Roman people?" A threat to trade was a threat to Rome's very existence, for the Republic's stature hinged on its ability to maintain its seas, keep contact with its satellites, secure its trade routes, and protect its allies. Piracy threatened all of these objectives. "I say to you," Cicero thundered, "that you could not even reach your allies by sea, since your army dared not sail the seas from Brundisium [for fear of pirates] except in dead of winter." Pirates were not common criminals, for no ordinary criminal could pose such a dire menace to the state as a whole. They were a scourge that must be eradicated, by whatever means necessary.

The Senate gave Pompey his command. Under his successful leadership the pirates were driven from the seas, and the first legal definition of piracy was inscribed in Roman law. Pirates were hostis humani generi, enemies of the human race. They remain so by law today.

* * *

I have chosen to contentiously title this part "Piracy Is Terrorism," just as the second on modern terrorist law is titled "Terrorism Is Piracy." This is not to invite charges of Cartesian circularity, but rather to emphasize a critical point of this book: in its acts and motivations, in almost every known manifestation throughout its history, piracy shares crucial similarities with modern international terrorism. Chief among these is the concept of state versus nonstate warfare, so-called private war, whereby bands of brigands divorce themselves from their nation-state and launch attacks against it or other states. In the case of piracy, the states responded forcefully, and in the pirate wars from Republican Rome to the nineteenth century we find a crucial precedent for understanding and waging our own fight against terrorism.

Before that argument can be made, however, we must first separate the reality of piracy from the carefully constructed myth that has obscured its significance as a precedent and rendered the pirates themselves as jolly, comical figures whose only significance is offering an outlet for adolescent fantasies. Much work has recently been done to debunk romanticized images of piracy, with mixed success. While scores of historians have repeatedly emphasized that most pirates were neither romantic nor attractive, Hollywood and the publishing world continue to generate reams of drivel reinforcing the stereotype—eye-patch, parrot, and all. When I first began arguing for a link between the two crimes, piracy and terrorism, in 2003, I found to my dismay that my most ardent supporters were those who were eager to, as one phrased it, "make Bin Laden walk the plank." When my articles hit the Internet, responses came back from otherwise well-known and reputable blog sites with titles like "Argghhhh Qaeda" and "Rum, Osama, and the Lash."

The sea change, if one might call it that, came in 2008, when the long-festering problem of Somali piracy exploded across the headlines. Suddenly piracy was no longer amusing. An unintended but welcomed consequence of piracy's sudden reemergence in our century is that its contemporary iteration is stark and unsentimental—just as it was, in truth, in 1700.

While the Johnny Depp/Long John Silver/Captain Blood effigy can now be easily dispensed, other myths of piracy are harder to break. The most common of these, and the most common objection to comparing piracy to terrorism, is that piracy is all about robbery. Many notable jurists also share this view, and it has become almost a mantra for those seeking to limit the definition of piracy in our own century. Most, however, do not realize that they are actually echoing the words of a seventeenth-century English judge. At the trial of a pirate crew at the Old Bailey in 1696, Justice Charles Hedges declared, "Now Piracy is only a Sea term for Robbery, Piracy being a Robbery committed within the Jurisdiction of the Admiralty; if any man be assaulted within that Jurisdiction, and his Ship or Goods violently taken away without a Legal Authority, this is Robbery and Piracy." But Hedges had his own reasons for limiting the definition thus, as we shall see.

In fact, piracy has never been only sea robbery. In the Roman example outlined above, piracy was a private war that threatened the very foundation of the Republic. Whatever the motivations of the pirates themselves, states have long defined the crime of piracy as a form of quasi war against the nationstate. This is the reason for piracy's status as a crime of universal jurisdiction, meaning pirates may be captured wherever they are found, by anyone who finds them. Their extranationality, coupled with the disproportionate threat their actions posed to trade, alliances, and empire, have given pirates a unique hybrid status in the law: neither ordinary criminals nor recognized military combatants, but a combination of the two. It is precisely this status that I argue should be awarded to twenty-first-century terror organizations.

The purpose of this chapter is to trace the thread of the pirates' war against states, and the corresponding growth of international custom, law, and military practice in response. Far from sea robbery, piracy represented a fundamental challenge not only to states but to the idea of statehood itself. Pirates defied and threatened the mores of societies, their laws and social hierarchies, their trade and relations with foreign powers, their colonies, their militaries, and their sovereignty. As a war against all the world, fought with every means of intimidation and depredation, piracy was the first and only example of such a conflict until our own war on terror.

ENEMIES OF THE HUMAN RACE: PIRACY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Since the first traders left with ships filled with casks of wine and grain, pirates have waited offshore. Thucydides writes of the Cretan ruler Minos's attempts to "clear the Aegean" of pirates who lurked in the myriad shoals and islets surrounding the city-state, "in order that his revenues might come in." Plutarch credited a similar endeavor to that industrious Hellenic hero, Jason of the Argonauts. Sometimes the pirates were even bolder. The first recorded example of a pirate raid occurred during the reign of Ramses III (1198–1167 BCE) when Egypt found itself overrun with Libyan pirates emerging from boats and sacking cities along the Nile delta.

Yet, like bacteria, piracy flourished best in neglect. The pattern of its history, from the ancient Rhodians to the Barbary corsairs of the nineteenth century, is a wave chart of surge and decline, determined by the relative vigor of the nation-states in condoning, ignoring, employing, or stamping out the pirates. The very first records of piracy are, in fact, records of a state's attempts to destroy them. Even as the early city-states were forging trade relations with one another, renegade pirates threatened those relationships and occasionally even brought the states to the brink of war. What one finds is that paradox persists until the nineteenth century: while piracy as a profession never entirely vanishes, pirates themselves dispersed, disbanded, and disappeared at the first sign of an aggressive state response. Like Minos, the Athenian ruler Pericles undertook the task of policing the Aegean in 470 BCE. In the intervening time the Dolopes of Scyros and the Thracian Chersonese, two tribes of sea marauders, had returned in force. Pericles invited delegates from all over the Greek world to meet in Athens and formulate a plan of attack—an early example of international cooperation to stamp out piracy—and sought the alliance of the warlike Spartans. So successful was this policy that Thucydides would write that during Pericles' later reign the only region where it was still necessary to carry arms at sea was north of the Corinthian Gulf, hundreds of miles from where the Thracian pirates once flourished.

Yet, as would happen again and again in the coming centuries, war and destabilization undermined the temporary reprieve and piracy returned. The Peloponnesian War decimated the Athenian navy, and no ships were left to police the sea. This task fell to Rhodes, which inherited Athens's title as primary city-state of the Aegean. Rhodians were free traders in the most draconian sense: any threat to Rhodian trade was tantamount to an act of war. As trade and foreign relations were intricately interwoven, Rhodes followed Pericles' example and entered into numerous agreements with neighboring city-states to protect their ships and root out the pirates. One such treaty, between Rhodes and the Cretan city of Hierpytna, still survives. It is astonishingly detailed, declaring that if pirates enter Cretan waters, Rhodes pledges its navy to stamp them out. Hierpytna in turn agrees to assist the Rhodian navy. Captured pirates and their vessels would be given to Rhodes as spoils of war, and any captured booty divided equally between the two cities.

And what of the pirates themselves? Most congregated into settlements: some joined by shared tribal bonds, others by shared profession. A few gathered around charismatic leaders, as with the pirate Pentathlus in the Lipari Islands. Those heterogeneous communities not bound by tribal or ethnic linkages quickly developed their own set of rules and mores, which one historian described as "a communistic organization, eminently suited to a piratical community of this type, and imitated to some extent after many years [specifically, in the 1690s] in the colony of pirates in Madagascar." It is an interesting connection, for it reveals that even in the Hellenic period pirates already had begun to view themselves—and were viewed by others—as standing apart from, and in opposition to, established communities. Freed from the laws and social hierarchies of their city-states, they made their own. The Roman historian Livy writes of one such "pirate colony" where members were evenly allocated to the fleet and the fields, with all land held in common and all plunder divided equally among the freemen. It was precisely this sort of activity that eighteenth-century authors writing of their own pirates dubbed "a world turned upside down" and decried as challenging the very foundations of organized society.

This view of pirates as outliers matured yet further in Republican Rome. "There was," one jurist has written, "an implication of impropriety to that way of life. It had nothing to do with political motivation or criminality ... [but] instead with the place of an antiquated way of life in a new commercial and political order." But the Cilician pirates who threatened Rome were more than a peripheral annoyance. Nestled in the southern slopes of the Taurus mountain range, where the mountains reached the sea at Cilicia Tracheia, Cilician bands had developed over centuries into tightly knit familial units that passed the seamanship and skills of piracy from father to son, much as the Barbary corsairs in a later era. For many years—indeed, a shockingly long period—the Cilicians flourished with little or no retaliation from Rome. It was not until 102 BCE that the Senate commissioned one of its own, Marcus Antonius (grandfather of Cleopatra's lover,Mark Antony), to stamp them out. His force was small and untested, and evidence suggests the pirates repelled him easily. Several decades later another Roman nobleman, Lucullus, took up the task. By now the Cilician pirates had allied themselves with the powerfulMithradates, transforming Rome's private war into a genuine conflict. Lucullus met the combined navies of the Cilicians and Mithradates and, in a series of pitched engagements, defeated both handily. Lucullus returned to Rome and was instantly awarded a triumph.

The immediate result of Lucullus's victory was to reestablish Roman dominance of the sea, but it did little to ameliorate piracy. It may, in fact, have accomplished the inverse. Much as it would after the Anglo-Spanish wars of the sixteenth century, piracy adapted and transformed to meet a new reality. Rome's dominance over the region, won by near-constant wars of conquest, had engendered an ever-widening class of subjugated peoples: refugees and outliers who lay on the wrong side (metaphorically and sometimes actually) of the burgeoning empire. New villages and towns sprang up along the coasts, populated by a heterogeneous mix of the displaced and destitute. Naturally, many took to piracy—as both a means of employment and a means of revenge. This infusion of new blood revitalized the Cilician pirates. Nor were their new recruits merely the dregs. "No doubt," one historian writes, "the refugees provided them [the Cilicians] with many of their boldest leaders, men who knew the more distant coasts and could lead profitable raids."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE WORLD FOR RANSOM by D. R. BURGESS Copyright © 2010 by D. R. Burgess. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Prometheus Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1616141735
• ISBN 13: 9781616141738
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 312
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Germania