Freezing the Pirate's Assets Off

Our intrepid Secretary of State thinks she has the answer to the Somali pirate problem:

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday the Obama administration will take the unusual step of trying to seize pirate financial assets and property, as it works with shippers to thwart hijackers off the coast of Somalia.

The measures outlined by Clinton, part of a new U.S. diplomatic initiative to thwart sea piracy, are largely stopgap and symbolic moves while officials weigh more comprehensive diplomatic and military action.

The exploratory effort to track and freeze pirate assets will be difficult because of the highly localized and informal nature of their economy, which does not often use regulated portions of the international financial system, current and former officials said....

"These pirates are criminals, they are armed gangs on the sea. And those plotting attacks must be stopped," she said. "We may be dealing with a 17th-century crime, but we need to bring 21st-century solutions to bear."

Actually, I thought the 17th-century solutions were pretty good. We just found a tree, threw a rope over it, and added a couple inches of height to the captured pirates.

The idea that we can some infiltrate the financial system of a entity with no recognized government or banking system is ludicrous. If you want to interrupt their financial networks, how about interrupting the signals going from their heads to the rest of their bodies? Works every time it's tried.