Pirates Getting Even Bolder

One of their latests "attempts" was an American flagged cruise ship.:

The luxury American cruise ship teeming with hundreds of tourists just might have been too much for the Somali pirates to resist.
But the bandits, riding in two skiffs and firing rifle shots at the gleaming ship, were outrun in minutes when the captain of M/S Nautica gunned the engine and sped away in the Gulf of Aden, a spokesman for the company said Tuesday.

Still, the implications had the pirates hijacked the ship add a new dimension to the piracy scourge as NATO foreign ministers groped for solutions at a meeting in Brussels and the United Nations extended an international piracy-fighting mandate for another year.

The potential for massive ransom payments from the families of hundreds of rich tourists on a pleasure cruise may encourage similar attempts, especially following the successful capture in recent weeks of a Ukrainian cargo ship laden with tanks and a Saudi oil tanker.

And the brazen attack also raises questions: What was a cruise ship doing in the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden? How many such targets are sailing these seas, and how can they be protected?

Even the pirates' motives were in question: they could simply have been testing the defenses of the massive ship, rather than making a real effort to hijack it.

Hey, has anyone thought about having the Navy SEALS, British SAS and other commando units skilled in ship takedowns actually, you, deployed to the area?

I just saying....