On the recordMarch 8, 2011
The pirates are back. These are not the Blackbeard, eye-patched, hook-for-a-hand, peg-legged kind of pirates from the Hollywood movies. The modern-day pirates are skilled, rich, violent, armed with automatic weapons, and are driven by a business that is generating up to $7 billion a year. My constituents from Texas, Bill Rouse and his wife Judy, have navigated the oceans for years. Recently, they and another group of international navigators and sailors decided that Somalia and the Somalian pirates had made the seas too dangerous to sail in that region, forcing them to transport their ships and boats by barges to safer ports. Bill said that we cannot allow a bunch of thugs to take an entire ocean away from the world. And that is exactly what these pirates are trying do. They have taken control of parts of the ocean and are trying to mock the most powerful nations on Earth, including ours. Days before the ill-fated American ship Quest left for their journey, Bill asked Scott Adam to join them in transporting their boats. Adam, the skipper, said of the Quest, the Quest was circumnavigating the globe, and it was a lifelong quest. And they continued on their trip, although it turned out to be doomed, in the Indian Ocean. Just a week after Scott Adam and three other Americans were captured, they were executed pirate-style after Somali pirates captured the ship the Quest.
