I was willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, and the SEAL snipers were not on-scene until after dark Saturday, so Sunday appears to be the first viable tactical day to have a chance to take out the pirates without killing the captain in the process (lobbing a five-incher from the destroyer is not conducive towards that goal).
However, the LA Times reported yesterday that the snipers had many opportunities for shots but passed on them because of the constraint that they could only shoot if the captain's life was in danger - Obama wanted a peaceful resolution. By the time that happened, the shots apparently were far more difficult - it was dark and the lifeboat was pitching strongly up and down. IMO Obama should have authorized force at the first opportunity, and that is where he errored. I am a believer that in these situations, saving the life of the American as soon as you can should take precedence over some kumbaya goal of not killing pirates. And that is where he errored here.
I don’t necessarily trust the LA Times as a source of information on how many clear opportunities the SEALs had to take out the pirates. And we also just don’t know what was going on behind the scenes. This was a very sensitive incident, and there was certainly a lot of highly classified intelligence info involved in all the decisions. It’s not a good idea to assume we know what should have been done, when we have only a very small portion of the information available to the decision-makers.
I don’t think there was any “kumbaya goal of not killing pirates” here. President Obama knew that he was facing the first pirate seizure of a crew member of a US flagged ship, and having the situation end with the ship’s captain dead was certainly at the top of his “Don’t let that happen” list. We may not agree with many of his political views, but the man is not stupid. He wants to be a two term President.
Remember that they’d already gotten one of the pirates off the lifeboat and discovered he was a very young man who didn’t want to go back to his fellow pirates. I’m sure they were interviewing him intensively to try to find out more about the other pirates on the lifeboat and their psychological profiles and positions in the piracy organization. One thing that may have been considered is whether taking one or more of the remaining 3 pirates alive might have produced a treasure trove of intelligence that would help the US and international forces to put a serious dent in the Somali piracy industry. It was probably not a coincidence that these particular pirates (meaning the older ones) were the first to seize a US-flagged ship. If this was strategic decision by leaders of the piracy activities, to go after a US-flagged ship, they likely chose one or more very key people to participate in the mission, to maximize chances of a very high-profile success, and key people tend to have a lot of useful information in their heads.