Here's a novel idea: shoot them. Is that against the rules? Are ships not allowed to carry armed guards without going through a forbidding rigmarole when they come into port? Then change the rules. Somalis are laughing themselves all the way to the bank, at the entire Western world's expense. The only measure that will bring an end to these profitable entrepreneurial start-ups is live ammunition. That's what a Somali pirate understands. People who live by brute force respond to brute force, and not to being lectured that they shouldn't board boats that don't belong to them. Only when their colleagues set off for a tanker and never come back will the hijacking begin to ebb. After all, piracy on the high seas is an old problem. What did we used to do? Not help them back into their boats with enough granola bars for the paddle home.

"Just shoot the bastards" as a doctrine should obviously be applied sparingly. Nevertheless, high-minded devotion to due process has repeatedly translated, as the archbishop would say, into justice not being "seen to be done". Slobodan Milosevic died of natural causes with far better facilities than most three-star London hotels while wrapping the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia around his pinkie for five years. The trial of Liberia's tyrant Charles Taylor was finally wound up in March after more than three years of burlesque.

Little wonder that Obama clearly preferred the more expedient option in the kill-or-capture mission in Abbottabad. Imagine the circus if bin Laden were put on trial.  Rather than a one-off event that his followers have to get over, a protracted trial would extend the period of Islamist rage and turn the al-Qaeda leader into a fundraising cause célèbre. Imagine the grandstanding in the dock, the European hoo-ha about whether he got the death penalty. Under critical international eyes, American authorities would be running around making sure Osama got dye for his beard and plenty of halal chicken. And with extravagant security a trial would be expensive. Sorry to pull rank, but I was in Manhattan on 9/11, and I think we've already paid enough for this jerk.