Somali Pirates

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

With all of the increased pirate activity, this was the first ship flying an American flag that they went after.

Possibly, but it may have just been dumb luck.

I was surprised to hear yesterday in an MSNBC interview how few U.S. flagged merchant ships are out there and this table bears it out.

There are only 216 (as of 2007) U.S. flagged merchant ships in the world out of a total fleet of 32,976. And a fourth of those are oil tankers which I suspect (though it is just a guess) are significantly focused on taking oil out of Alaska.