After writing the preceding post on piracy, I just now read a Voice of America report on today's Congressional testimony by the head of the U.S. Navy's Central Command.
In his testimony, Vice Admiral Gortney said the task force has encountered about 200 pirates. He said seven of them were delivered to Kenyan authorities Thursday for possible prosecution.Two hundred pirates encountered, seven delivered for possible prosecution. Yeah, that's a serious anti-piracy effort we've got underway. The article has a picture of a small boat full of pirates being boarded by German forces. Here's what should happen to those small boats when caught in obvious acts of piracy. Sink the boat. Machine-gun the survivors in the water. Repeat for all subsequent incidents until piracy ceases. After a few such encounters, would-be pirates will get the message. Problem solved. I know, we can't do that. Killing vicious criminals who represent a plague on shipping is just so uncivilized. We'll just hope we can intercept them and deliver them for possible prosecution. If we miss some and they kill any innocent victims, oh well, that's just too bad.
Rule of law is for sissies, I guess.
ReplyDeleteSummary execution was widely accepted international law for pirates for a couple thousand years. It was "rule of law."
ReplyDeleteIt's true. Piracy is one of very few universal crimes in public international law, meaning that any state that encounters a pirate can prosecute them (or not) regardless of jurisdiction. You might think we've come a long way since having a pirate hanged from the yardarm, but I completely agree that forceful recourses would be the wisest measure. And just because I hate euphemisms, I'll state clearly that I believe the policing warships should fire on the pirates without regard to whether it merely deters them, sinks them, or kills them.
ReplyDeleteHow is that different from letting cops shoot at anyone they think might be a criminal?
ReplyDeleteBecause piracy has always been a special case. Pirates have been considered "enemies of humanity," subject to, as Frodo mentioned, universal jurisdiction and summary execution.
ReplyDeleteAnd the cop analogy is a bad one. There's no need to guess at what pirates are doing. If a civilian boat packed with armed men approaches a merchant ship in a certain way, it is pretty easy to determine that they are engaging in an act of piracy. The closest analogy on land to pirates would be bandits that preyed on trade routes. They were often subject to summary execution as well. There was no need for universal jurisdiction though, since they were inside someone's territory instead of at sea.
Defenders of police brutality will tell you that there's no need to guess what a criminal is doing, either. Cops are often certain that they are chasing drug fiends, and yet they will keep running after them, instead of fire at them from a distance.
ReplyDeleteAgain, its a completely different situation for the reasons I already mentioned.
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