Those symptoms don't look like chemical weapons exposure to me. It sounds like radiation sickness, I wrote.
This article quotes an expert who agrees:
Chemical experts say the reports sound inconsistent with chemical poisoning, but may reflect the effects of exposure to radiation.
"It's baffling," said Jonathan Tucker, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "I'm not aware of any chemical agent that produces loss of hair within a few days. That's more suggestive of high levels of radioactive waste."
Still, even though the reports sound damning, the sources of the information may have reason to attract us to Somalia:
"I'm not saying it's impossible that this has happened, but I'd take anything they say with a great deal of salt," said J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University. "They have made fanciful claims before in the hopes of attracting U.S. and other international attention."
Pham said that the 14 provisional governments that have ruled Somalia since 1991 have all relied on foreign aid for support and profit and could be trying to attract attention by inflating the current crisis.
"Would it be beyond them to raise the specter of WMDs in order to attract resources and international assistance? The only source of revenue for this government is foreign aid," he told FOXNews.com.
So it could be a smoking gun found in the hands of the Iranians. Or a smoke screen trying to suck American money into the impoverished anarchic region.
I assume we are working hard to determine what is going on there.
UPDATE: What puzzles me about the incident is the relative lack of press coverage compared to the Ukrainian ship holding T-72s. I'm not worried about al Qaeda getting main battle tanks. Nor do I think that the small arms in the ship are particularly tough to come by in the Horn of Africa. The article also reports we have the pirate-held ship surrounded by a half dozen ships. Are we also watching Iran Deyanat? Are we feigning lack of interest or are we really uninterested? And if uninterested, do we know we don't have to be interested or are we asleep at the switch? The latter seems highly unlikely. It is all very puzzling.
