Some scary, scary news reports about an Iranian cargo ship with (allegedly) radioactive sand being hijacked by pirates off the Somali coast.
On Aug. 21, the pirates, armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, stole onto the decks of the merchant vessel Iran Deyanat.
They ransacked the ship and searched the containers. But in the days following the hijacking, a number of them fell ill and died, suffering skin burns and hair loss, according to reports.
The pirates were sickened because of their contact with the seized cargo, according to Hassan Osman, the Somali minister of Minerals and Oil, who met with the pirates to facilitate negotiations.
[Russian sources claim she] was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.
Given the large number of deaths from the questing Somali pirates, it should be obvious that when the contents of the ship’s locked cargo containers finally descended onto the land, the death toll would be enormous. This ship was nothing more nor less than the long-anticipated Iranian attack on Israel.
We can talk about how horrible it is that Sarah Palin allows shooting wolves from airplanes, and how awful things this audience member said at a McCain rally, how uncouth it is for McCain to bring up William Ayers in this debate, etc.. And meanwhile the world out there is still dangerous, still full of men who want to watch the world burn, still eager to bring death and destruction on a mass scale to the innocent by any means they can…
But hey, I’m sure the community organizer is up to it.
UPDATED: Two readers with backgrounds in national security and naval affairs tell me not to worry and that the story is bogus. If they’re not worried, I’m not worried.