Resolved: Pirates caught in the act should be hanged by the neck until dead.

Country that captures the pirates in their own courts? Or drumhead court martial?

So out of interest what would you guys do with the weapons once at port? I can think of very few nations that would be happy for lots of groups of armed foreign (mainly) men dropping into visit. You can say keep them on the ship but do you really think that would satisfy most governments?

And further do you also support the death penalty for all of those whom have been illegally dumping toxic waste of the cost of Somalia, and simultaneously over-fishing Somalian waters driving subsistence fisherman into desperation?

I actually think its pretty disgusting that you would argue for the murder of people who have pretty much lost everything else.

And as for the OP you cannot describe yourself as ‘normally against the death penalty’ you’re either for it or against it. What are your ‘normal’ objections to it and why don’t they apply in this case?

I’m against the death penalty because it’s too easy for someone falsely accused to be convicted without a chance for release later on since they’re dead.

I’m for shooting back to kill at pirates because they’re attacking you. It’s self-defense.

That’s nice, but not actually the death penalty.

As described in the OP the death penalty is about killing those that you’ve already captured, which I’m arguing is a whole other trawler of fish.

I actually agree with Oakminster (never thought I’d say that!) that shipping vessels shouldn’t be prevented from carrying their own arms, but I don’t think that’s enough to stop piracy. For one thing, most shipping companies don’t want they’re crews to be armed, and as mentioned above, it causes all sorts of complications in ports for those who do. Besides, as Mr. Excellent points out, it shouldn’t be the shipping crews’ sole responsibility to protect themselves.

It is easy to say that naval ships should just blow the pirates out of the water, and I don’t think anyone really objects to that, but sometimes pirates surrender or are captured anyway. It is currently illegal under just about every nation’s laws to kill people you have captured without giving them a trial. That’s why they are often released.

I suppose we could push to change international law so that it is perfectly legal to shoot prisoners without a trial, but I’m not sure why that would be a good idea. I’d rather see the prisoners given a fair trial in the capturing force’s home country, or if that is impractical (as I suspect it would be) a drumhead court marshal as Mr. Excellent suggests.

It is true that a lot of people have been practically forced into piracy, but it is also true that piracy further destabilizes Somalia. If imprisonment is not practical, the death penalty might actually reduce the number of deaths even among the potential pirates themselves.

We kill terrorists on the battlefield and try them when they’re captured. It hasn’t worked out perfectly, but I’m not sure “kill them in the water or let them go” is a better idea.

The most effective method of combating stateless private pirates is with Privateers. In other words, private sector forces, hired by the crown (the state), carrying letters of marque, (license to capture and kill) that are compensated for successful kill and capture. Since somali pirates have no cargo of their own, capture isn’t that profitable. Charging insurance companies for rescue can be.

Personally, if I could get state sanction for slaughtering pirates, I’d happily make a career change. And I kind of doubt that I’d have trouble finding recruits.

Various 10Knot vessels are available for .5-1M. 40Knot vessels are in the .5M range. Large ships burn fuel by the metric ton at the high end (3MT+), and in the tens of gallons per hour at the low end (25G/h). Fuel is the important cost for months at sea. Armaments are cheap. For example, RPG 7’s can be had 2500 or less, depending upon place of purchase. People are the highest cost. But in this field people cost absurdly little, in salary, (less than the median income). Deck guns capable of effective use beyond 500M (the end of useful RPG range) are the highest cost, and ammunition for them is not expensive unless it can be found from soviet or chinese sources.

But it’s not a long term business. Success means putting yourself out of business. :slight_smile:

It would make an awesome movie franchise, though! A cross between James Bond and Pirates of the Caribbean!

“Yar, Matey! Me name be Bond! Jack Bond! And I’ve a licence to keelhaul ye!”

Judging and executing criminals without a trial doesn’t sit well with me, no matter what the crime, who commits it, or where it’s committed. If Somalia weren’t such a total shithole of a country to be born, then piracy wouldn’t be an issue in the first place.

I don’t know what the solution should be, but I don’t think the OP presents a very good idea. What if the pirates are children? What if they were forced into service? What if they were brainwashed or mentally ill? Or all of the above?

Moreover, the deterrence factor of capital punishment is not going to deter Somalian pirates. When their options are either go home empty-handed and watch grandma or their child starve to death or die of treatable illnesses, versus risking their own death… well, which would you choose?

I think there is a sizeable moral difference between a theft that is committed out of need, and one that is committed out of greed. See the recent thread about the homeless guy who stole $100 from a bank for food, versus the rich guy who stole a lot more than that for greed. There was pretty much a consensus that someone who steals out of need deserves a shorter sentence than one who steals out of greed.

Well, I think there are three categories of bad guys:

1.) Those you can safely and securely detain for whatever period the appropriate justice system decides upon;

2.) Those who you’re at war with, or who otherwise pose a danger to life and limb, whom you cannot safely capture at all; and

3.) Those who you can capture temporarily, but you cannot hold on to, and who will return to threatening life and limb if released.

In the US criminal system, we apply the death penalty to people in the first category. I believe this is absolutely wrong. The public safety is just as well protected by keeping those guys in cages as it is by killing them; their death is something we choose to inflict, simply because we prefer it. That’s barbarism.

For the second category - obviously, we kill people in war all the time. And there are occasions on which police have to shoot people in order to protect themselves or others - that’s killing, but it isn’t the death penalty, and I don’t believe it to be unethical.

The third category is where it gets tricky. In the case of Somali pirates, there isn’t currently a justice system equipped or willing to detain them long-term - and these men are dangerous. Since they can’t be disabled through incarceration, they need to be disabled another way. To me, this is different from the conventional death penalty, which is applied to men who’ve already been permanently disabled through life-long incarceration.

As for the point that these men are poor, and have “lost everything” - I understand that, and I’m not unsympathetic. But that sympathy doesn’t mean we can let them continue to kidnap people and threaten their lives - if they won’t stop, they have to be stopped. And right now, our options for that are limited.

I question the motives of anyone who thinks that the first go-to method of stopping piracy is to kill the pirates. The most obvious (to me) method would actually be to improve the infrastructure of Somalia so that Somalians never get desperate enough to resort to piracy simply to feed their families.

I seem to recall reading on these here boards, with cites, that it is against almost all nations laws to have armed civilians docking in their ports, or in fact for non-military ships to have arms on board.

But I could be mistaken.

If I’m NOT, this is why scads of home grown Q-boats aren’t out sinking Somali pirate skiffs right and left.

Sri Theo- That mindset you are showing would indicate that if I have lost my job and my house in the recent economic troubles, that it is perfectly ok for me to rob YOUR house. You do realize that, right?

After reading this thread earlier today I happened upon a relevant video: Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Adow travels to the heart of modern-day piracy in Somalia’s Puntland.

For what it’s worth, I do want a trial for these men, albeit one of an unconventional form.

And this is precisely why I want the focus to be on capturing and trying pirates at sea wherever it can be done safely, rather than just blowing them out of the water outright. I agree that folks in the categories you listed, and more besides, shouldn’t be harmed - and the drumhead court-martial should focus on discovering such mitigating factors.

Possibly piracy, but it might not be entirely my choice. Outfitting a pirate crew isn’t the most expensive endeavor in the world, but it does take money to procure small boats, a “mothership” that can ferry them out to deep water, guns, men, and so on. If boats keep getting scuttled and men keep dying, the investment becomes less attractive.

Agreed, but I also think there’s a huge moral difference between that same thief and one who steals for the same reasons, but does so by holding a knife to the shop-clerk’s throat and screaming “give me all your bread!”, and occasionally actually gets a clerk killed.

I also think it’s important not to overstate the Victor Hugo thing - these pirates are not all gun-toting Jean Valjeans. For a lot of these guys, piracy is a way to make a lot of money, gain a lot of status, and so on. They like it.

I agree with you that we need to put in a lot more aid - that’s the medium-to-long term solution to the problem, and many more besides. But in the meantime, we do have this piracy problem that needs to be addressed - not least, because endemic lawlessness from piracy and militias does not create a great climate for development work.

So, I’d say we should at least consider doing both things: Kill pirates at sea, whilst also trying to develop Somolia on land such that piracy (with its attendant risk of death) becomes less attractive, people get a chance to build institutions, and so on.

By the way - you mentioned that you question my motives. What do you believe my motives to be?

Yes. That sounds likely to work. A good first step would be asking Aslan for help; I’m sure he could send us on a quest to find the appropriate fruit from the Garden in the West that would make it possible to make Somalia a paradise.

In fairness to rachelellogram (btw, great username), what’s she’s proposing is fairly orthodox economic development and nation-building/counter-insurgency thinking. It’s one of the reasons, for example, that we used the Marshall Plan to dump a lot of money into Europe after WW2, even the former Axis nations. Of course, we also wanted strong states that could resist Soviet expansion - but that’s sort of the point. If you want healthy states with institutions that aren’t corrupt and that are viewed as legitimate, you really need a certain baseline level of not-dirt-poorness. Hence the massive reconstruction aid.

The problem in Somalia is that the situation is so bad, so violent, that bringing in aid (or conventional for-profit business) is very difficult. The situation is so bad, in fact, that it’s spilling into international waters. And so we have this problem - what do we do to manage that spillover until we can find a way to help Somalia get somewhat less broken?

ETA: In other words, Athena would be a lot more helpful here than Aslan. She’s better with the tricky, nuanced stuff.

This is where we have failure to communicate. If the pirates do not wish to be blown out of the water, all they have to do is refrain from acts of piracy. If they are willing to arm themselves and engage in piracy on the high seas, they assume the risk of armed resistance. “Blowing them out of the water” is much safer for the targets than any attempt at capture.

And fuck rebuilding their hellhole of a country. Not our job. If they put as much energy into that as they do into piracy, they might actually accomplish something useful.

How about we acknowledge the fact that Somalia doesn’t exist? Break the country up along tribal lines (or warlord lines). It’s what they want anyway. Then tell each tribe, “You raid into another tribe you die.” Back it up with real force. Then you can take aid into a tribe’s territory and they’ll know it’s aid for them and them alone. That’ll take some of the incentive out of it. Right now, they’re figuring, “With the aid coming aid, my tribe can eat enough to live for a couple of days (along with all the other tribes), or I can steal that food and my tribe will eat well for a month. Why not?”

Too expensive, and if they did as others have said a lot of ports wouldn’t let such armed ships in. I also think you are seriously underestimating the kinds of defenses that would be needed; a machine gun and a few guys with rifles on a huge cargo ship wouldn’t necessarily stop pirates from sneaking on board and killing them by surprise. Some pirates already operate by sneaking on board, stealing stuff and leaving before the crew even knows they are there. So you are talking about enough troops to completely defend 21,000 ships from boarders - that’s a lot of expensive soldiers, almost all of whom will never see combat.

On top of all that, I suspect one result would be bored mercenary thugs machinegunning the occasional random fishing boat for kicks and claiming they were just killing pirates. Just look at how Blackwater/Xu acted in Iraq. And the same problem goes with the privateer idea; you’ll have the privateers killing random people and claiming they were pirates.

This. Once it is known you are going to kill everyone if they surrender, then they won’t surrender, ever. And they’ll make a point of taking any hostages with them. “Surrender or die” works much better as a threat when you don’t kill all your prisoners.

Hostis humani generis

It’s “our job” if we want the side effects of Somalia being a disaster to stop (assuming we can fix it that is; I doubt we can). And no, them putting the same effort into Somalia wouldn’t repair the place; piracy is much easier than fixing a nation.