Investigative journalist Yassin Musharbash, a reporter with the German newspaper Die Zeit, was the first to report on the documents. One plan: to seize passenger ships. According to Musharbash, the writer “says that we could hijack a passenger ship and use it to pressurize the public.”
Musharbash takes that to mean that the terrorists “would then start executing passengers on those ships and demand the release of particular prisoners.”
The plan would include dressing passengers in orange jump suits, as if they were al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and then videotaping their execution.
This is the kind of thing I have been harping on in past discussions about armed guards on boats. Pirates are one thing, but terrorists taking down a cruise ship and turning it into a floating propaganda execution machine is quite the other. So what happens when pirates sell Al Qaeda a boat? Or better yet, pirates use this tactic to motivate negotiators and ship owners to pay up. Meaning, they will just hand the boat over to AQ if they refuse to pay up. Quite the incentive huh?
Another thing that needs to be mentioned here is the rules for the use of force being practiced by the shipping industry, and the size and lethality of the force they use. I would think that there would be more incentive to have a higher number of armed guards on a vessel filled with people, versus a vessel that is just a tanker or cargo hauler. But strangely, you see quite the opposite. That cruise liners shun having a robust armed force, just because it makes the passengers ‘uneasy’. It is an game that the cruise liners play, and they are counting on hope and luck that they will not become victims of terrorists on the high seas.
Not only that, but an RUF should be implemented that is able to deal with potential threats that are as far out from the vessel as possible. Meaning use the radio to communicate with them, use flares to get their attention, use drones to fly out and see what they are up to, and do anything you can to determine who these folks are that posturing towards the vessel. It is all about OODA, and the ability to observe and have a sound orientation to process those observations and make good decisions is key.You have to be faster than the enemy with your OODA, you have be wary of an enemy getting inside your decision making cycle, and you must be wary of an enemy using Cheng and Ch’i to gain advantage.
You must have the means to decide if something is a threat, as far away from the boat as possible. Because the closer that vessel gets to your boat, the less time for decision making occurs. The enemy is then able to get inside your OODA loop, and that is not good. They will also use any means necessary to get close, to include wolf in sheep’s clothing or false flag tactics. They can also detonate a bomb if they get close enough, and the USS Cole attack is a great example of this. They could also have individuals already on board, and hijack it that way. Lot’s of ways for these folks to make this happen, and it must be taken seriously.
This is also not new if anyone remembers the hijacking of the Achille Lauro. This should come as no surprise that AQ would want to conduct a similar attack. Now imagine these guys hijacking a large cruise ship with over 6000 passengers? They could execute a prisoner every day and film it for several years. They could rig the whole thing to sink if threatened by hostage rescue folks. Let’s see, my fuzzy math would say that an attack like this would equate to more deaths than what happened on 9/11.
So with that said, there should be a small private tactical response team on every one of these large cruise ships to protect those thousands of folks. Something akin to what private nuclear plants have. The cruise ships should actually promote the level of security they have and let passengers know that they have a robust security force ready to take on pirates or terrorists. I know I would choose that cruise liner over one that does not have it. –Matt
US Coast Guard escorting a cruise liner.
Documents reveal al Qaeda’s plans for seizing cruise ships, carnage in Europe
By Nic Robertson, Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister
May 1, 2012
Editor’s note: This story is based on internal al Qaeda documents, details of which were obtained by CNN. German cryptologists discovered hundreds of documents embedded inside a pornographic movie on a memory disk belonging to a suspected al Qaeda operative arrested in Berlin last year. The German newspaper Die Zeit was the first to report on the documents.
On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards.
Buried inside them was a pornographic video called “Kick Ass” — and a file marked “Sexy Tanja.”
Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence — more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group’s most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.