Tuesday, October 23, 2007

I didn't know Mongolia had a merchant marine!

Yet, it does. Along with a group of other countries like Liberia and the Bahamas, Mongolia is a favoured nation for shipping companies looking for "flags of convenience." And today, the US signed a mutual assistance pact with Ulan Bator. But the issue is serious ... seems North Korea has been using Mongolian flagged ships to smuggle the parts it needs to add to the nuclear weapons it already has; so now the US has permission to board such ships without warning.

Maybe Dubya needs to do something about pirates -- real pirates who are disrupting legitimate trade and exacerbating the illegal immigration problem. Only wish he'd done this before 9/11. It is disturbing it came to this but the US already has such pacts with other convenience countries. Canada should consider it too -- the last thing we want to be is a conduit for WMD.

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