Wednesday, May 10, 2006

We shoot at 'em so often we no longer keep track. Heading out fishing offshore last Friday afternoon, an interesting alert from the US Coast Guard came over the VHF: "Vessel in distress has reported being fired upon. Vessel reports that its engines are damaged.. . . [pause] . . . The vessel's name is Haitian Pride an- [click to silence]." Only a few months after the Coast Guard installed new machine guns on its boats, six months after enacting a policy of shooting out engines on boats assumed to be smuggling people or drugs, and after years of being cruelly aggressive toward Haitians, you might think that the radio operator should have been able to guess who was doing the shooting. I guess standards are slipping everywhere. 11:28:51 AM