Vin Suprynowicz

On Feb. 22, one week ago, Bible missionaries Scott and Jean Adams, 70 and 68, of Marina del Rey, Calif., and traveling companions Bob Riggle, 67, and Phyllis Macay, 59, of Seattle, were shot and killed aboard the Adams’ 58-foot sloop The Quest by Somali pirates in the Arabian Sea between Somalia and Iran.

The four had been taken hostage when their boat was boarded by the pirates last Friday. Pentagon officials say the four were murdered during negotiations as the sloop was being shadowed by a flotilla of U.S. warships and drone aircraft.

The piracy and ransom game has been going on in those waters for years. This year alone, Somali pirates have mounted 54 attacks, hijacked 12 ships, and taken 228 crew members hostage, according to the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command.

Why? Because it pays. Because pathetic weak-kneed politicians order “negotiations” and payments of ransom.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Tuesday for “continued international progress toward confronting the shared security challenge posed by piracy.”

Pardon me, but … what? The “shared security challenge”? “Continued international progress”? What does that mean? Twenty-party talks in Brussels, which will come to nothing when the delegations from Montenegro and Sri Lanka walk out in protest?

This dame is supposed to be the successor to James Madison and James Monroe? At the battle of Trenton, Lt. James Monroe was wounded while charging and capturing a Hessian cannon. Except in her own bizarre fantasies, what has Hillary Clinton ever charged, other than lunch?

To utter such inanities if our Navy was tied up fighting Japan, or rusting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, might make some sense. But this little sailboat was being trailed by a United States guided missile cruiser and the giant aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise. This is like something out of the theater of the absurd. We built the U.S.S. Enterprise to haul bags of ransom money to scruffy African pirates? The U.S.S,. Enterprise is now some kind of seagoing Somali ATM?

How far has this nation fallen in 200 years? In 1805 and again in 1815 (see Messrs. Madison and Monroe, above), in the first action of U.S. troops overseas, our naval commanders Stephen Decatur and William Bainbridge, and a detachment of men dubbed “U.S. Marines” (perhaps you’ve heard of them) were sent to the coast of North Africa to stop the Muslim pirates there from capturing American ships for ransom, killing or enslaving their crews.

The small detachment of Marines, under the command of Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, led a frontal assault on a harbor fort at the Battle of Derna. O’Bannon raised an American flag over the fortress. The mention of the “shores of Tripoli” in the “Marines’ Hymn” refers to this triumph.

A new pasha was installed in Tripoli, who presented O’Bannon with a curved Mameluke sword. To this day Marine dress swords replicate the sword given to O’Bannon.

If the enormous expenditures the American public lavishes on the “defense establishment” mean ANYTHING, they should mean that American citizens can travel unmolested on any international waters they please, and that when Americans are murdered in cold blood on the high seas, those who commit such acts should expect all hell to break loose, considerably impacting the structural integrity of whatever homes they hail from.

Back in the spring of 1986, when we had a president with some character, determination, and understanding of how to command respect among such tin-pot stooges, the terrorist regime in Libya found out the hard way that bombing a nightclub in Berlin and killing two U.S. servicemen could have ramifications, when a flight of 18 F-111 strike aircraft showed up over their airfields and palaces one night and “got their attention.”

Our armed forces have the assets necessary to locate and sink the mother ships from which these pirate craft operate. We have the assets necessary to locate and destroy the ports from which they sail, whether it be via aerial bombardment, naval gunfire, or landing a detachment of demolition experts.

After these pirates are hanged, their homes must be destroyed, whereupon our Marines should barbeque their goats, and teach their surviving children to play baseball.

The alternative — psychoanalyzing these poor terrorists, determining how harsh parental punishments for bed-wetting may have clouded their psyches, assigning them public defenders, allowing them to make a mockery of our courts — is laughable, pathetic, and only likely to encourage more of the same.

Pirates on the high seas may be summarily executed when caught in the act. The Russians have done it off the coast of Somalia, of late, and seem to have had less trouble with this breed of murderers and thieves as a result.

Our current president responds to such acts of war, such outrages in the view of the world, by simpering about gay marriage and “collective bargaining.”

God forbid the Somali pirates wise up and form a union: Mr. Obama would probably put them to work carrying mass-produced “Oppressed masses” signs and busting up the Wisconsin state legislature.