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.
Why would they lie? In the kumbaya world of the LA Times, it was noble of Obama to try and save those poor misunderstood pirates. We also know the SEALs got there Saturday night, so they had all day to take a shot if it presented itself. IMO they should have had authorization to take the first clear shot, and not wait until the pirates were ready to kill the captain. And, once again, I was giving Obama the benefit of a doubt until the pieces came together that show a clearer picture of what went down on Sunday.