[Pan_Yan]

I cede the field. I still don’t think the FBI should be negotiating with pirates, and I am more than a little concerned about how much operational control of a Navy mission they may have had. Clearly the USC shouldn’t be applied to agent of the government acting in official capacity, however I would be curious as to where that is defined.

[bvw]

You are right of course. The FBI is outside the chain of command of the naval commanders there, that alone creates friction, failures in communication, gaps in reaction — bad vibes. In such a situation even bad vibes are killing forces.

You can’t win on points of classroom and wood-paneled hearing room law here, that’s true. But that also is not the field.

Tell ODH to try holding a criminal trial in the middle of a prison yard when the inmates are out, and the guards are on strike. Maybe that would be an experience for him to use as a comparison.

The field in this case was one tiny boat and one big boat on a open sea, with killers and hostages on the small one. The law there is rescue. One word: rescue.

Like in that hypothetical trial in a wild jail yard — the law there would be one word too: survival.

ODH loves his law. But his kind of law as he loves it got 4 innocents killed.

[bvw]

Perhaps the FBI Team was doing what is called in interpersonal dynamics "overcompensating". They were being overly assertive, perhaps because they were like fish out of water on a Navy boat. They didn't know all the well established social conventions, body language, subtle verbal queues that develop in a tight working environment of a boat at sea. A man on an elite team from outside the Navy is going to have an out-of-place ego that is greatly bothered. It is natural to want to present as a dominant or strong assertive personality.

Who knows? What we do know is that things went wrong, and a good commander's role is to reduce what can go wrong. Having a non-Navy team on that boat added greatly to what could go wrong.