Obama takes lawfare approach to piracy

Fox News:

U.S. talks with pirates holding American ship captain Richard Phillips broke down this weekend, with Somali officials blaming a U.S. insistence that the pirates must be arrested, The New York Times reported.

Talks began Thursday with the captain of the USS Bainbridge talking to the pirates under instruction from FBI hostage negotiators on board the U.S. destroyer. A Pentagon spokesman said Saturday that negotiations to free Phillips were continuing.

Phillips was still held hostage in an enclosed lifeboat Sunday by four pirates being closely watched by the Navy and a helicopter in an increasingly tense standoff. The lifeboat is out of fuel and drifting.

Officials also say talke broke down after pirates fired on a small U.S. Navy vessel that had tried to approach the lifeboat.

It was the first such approach since the standoff began, and the vessel retreated to the Bainbridge without returning fire because the American boat “did not want to escalate the situation,” a U.S. official told The New York Times.

U.S. warships and helicopters stalked the lifeboat holding Phillips and his four Somali captors Sunday, while his crew briefed FBI agents about how they fought off the pirates who boarded their ship, the Maersk Alabama.

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Lawfare will bog down well before we are rid of pirates and will give them rights they are not entitled to. It will restrain our forces from taking effective action to end the piracy and will mean more victims. The French have already tried this approach and still have wound up having to sue special ops forces to free their citizens.

You defeat pirates by destroying their bases and their equipment.

As for the life boat, I suspect it has hard point cleats that can be attached to lines. Seals should be used to do that and then the lines would be attached to a helicopter that could lift the boat onto the deck of one of the US ships where the pirates could be disarmed and the captain freed. That should resolve any need for negotiations.