Navy SEALs 3; pirates 0

[unixronin]

Captain Phillips is coming home.  The pirates who attacked his ship ... not so much.

MOMBASA, Kenya (AP) -- An American ship captain was freed unharmed Sunday in a swift firefight that killed three of the four Somali pirates who had been holding him for days in a lifeboat off the coast of Africa, the ship’s owner said.

[...]

“The negotiations between the elders and American officials have broken down.  The reason is American officials wanted to arrest the pirates in Puntland and elders refused the arrest of the pirates,” said the commissioner, Abdi Aziz Aw Yusuf.  He said he organized initial contacts between the elders and the Americans.

Two other Somalis, one involved in the negotiations and another in contact with the pirates, also said the talks collapsed because of the U.S. insistence that the pirates be arrested and brought to justice.

We get that you didn’t want your pirates arrested.  OK, we didn’t arrest them.  Let us know how “dead” is working out for you instead.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I understand the Japanese High Command was much in two minds after Hiroshima. There was debate as to whether they should actually surrender. "Perhaps they had only one," was one school of thought. "We might consider a peace settlement on favorable terms." Then we dropped a second one on Nagasaki ... and they sued for unconditional surrender.

I don't underestimate the human cost of those two bombs, but they did their job, and saved by some estimates as many as a million lives. We will never know how many offensives by the Soviet Union were deterred by the knowledge not only that the US had nuclear weapons, but that we were demonstrably prepared to use them at need.