Reading the first (confused) reports, it looks like the US Navy took the ship once the pirates murdered their four American hostages. Some pirates are actually in custody, apparently: which means that their home base could be theoretically traced back.
I kept quiet about this situation while it was going on, but now that it’s ended in atrocity allow me to be a little cold here: if we want to discourage piracy and murder, there is precisely one way of doing that – and that’s encouraging a healthy fear of the consequences of one’s actions. Dope these guys up, find out where they live, send a punitive expedition. Burn every boat and docking facility. Burn the local leader’s house. Gibbet the surviving pirates in front of the ashes.
And shrug when when the ‘international community’ hypocritically complains.
As I said: cold. But if pirates think that they can murder civilians with impunity, they will murder civilians with impunity. They do murder citizens with impunity, in fact. They won’t stop simply because we ask them to. Tell them to, sure; ask, no.
Moe Lane
UPDATE: AoSHQ has more.
Your solution missed one thing: Upload the videos of the executions.
Why are we still calling these guys pirates? To me, piracy is just their tactic. Aren’t these “pirates” just Islamic terrorists with “boats”?
Shell the towns they operate from. Everyone in that town knows where the goods are coming from, and no one does anything about it. Make it so horrible that anyone considering piracy has to worry about being lynched by his neighbors.
Howabout giving a hand wringing speech and extend a helping hand to erradicate the poverty which drove these puor souls into priracy? Or just sending in the Marines. I vote for the latter. The former is more like what TOTUS will do.
The British Navy HAD a policy that worked for 300 years. Rope & Yardarm for pirates, cannon for pirate ships, Marines for pirate strongholds. Why do we keep turning our back on the things that work?