SEALs, just like Rico said

R.M. Schneiderman has an article in The New York Times about the liberation of Captain Richard Phillips:

United States Navy personnel rescued the captain of an American cargo ship on Sunday by killing three Somali pirates who had been holding him hostage for four days. Right before his rescue, Richard Phillips, the 53-year-old captain of the Maersk Alabama, was being held in an eighteen-foot lifeboat in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia. The pirates were armed with AK-47s and small-caliber pistols, according to Vice Admiral William E. Gortney, who spoke from Bahrain to reporters in Washington.
Just after dark on Sunday, snipers on the USS Bainbridge saw that one of the pirates was pointing an automatic rifle at Captain Phillips, and that the captors’ heads and shoulders were exposed from the capsule-like lifeboat. President Obama had previously authorized the use of force if the commander on the scene believed the captain’s life was in danger, so they fired, Admiral Gortney said. The lifeboat was about one hundred feet from the Bainbridge when the shots were fired, a little after 7 p.m. Somalia time (seven hours ahead of Eastern time). The vice admiral said he did not know Captain Phillips’s location at the time the shots were fired, but given the length of the lifeboat, he was less than eighteen feet from the snipers’ targets.
Captain Phillips was pulled out of the water— details were not clear on whether he had jumped in— and he was transported to the Bainbridge, where sailors delivered him a note from his wife, Andrea. “Your family is saving a chocolate Easter egg for you,” she wrote, according to Vice Admiral Gortney. “Unless your son eats it first.”
According to John Reinhart, the Maersk Line president and chief executive, Mr. Phillips told him by telephone: “I’m just the byline. The real heroes are the Navy, the SEALs, those who have brought me home.” President Obama, making his first comments on the situation, praised Mr. Phillips’s “selfless concern for his crew”, who had been freed when the captain let pirates take him off his cargo ship. “His courage is a model for all Americans,” Mr. Obama said.
But American officials acknowledged that the deadly ending of this incident, which began on Wednesday, could lead to more confrontations with Somali pirates, who are currently holding more than 200 hostages. “This could escalate violence in this part of the world,” Vice Admiral Gortney said. Mr. Obama added that the United States needs help from other countries to deal with the threat of piracy and to hold pirates accountable. Only three of the original four captors were in the lifeboat when Mr. Phillips was rescued.
Admiral Gortney said that a small Navy vessel had made multiple trips back and forth between the Bainbridge and the lifeboat, carrying food and water to Captain Phillips and the pirates, and delivering clean clothes to the captain.
On Saturday night, the Navy fired warning shots at the lifeboat, followed by a brief exchange of fire, the official said. Hours afterward, the one pirate who was reportedly injured boarded the supply boat and surrendered to Navy personnel.
Around the same time, the Navy managed to attach a line to the lifeboat and began towing it away from shore. Mr. Phillips was being held in a covered part at the back of the lifeboat, the official said, and one pirate typically stayed with him under cover. The lifeboat had gotten as close as twenty miles to shore, drifting after running out of fuel off Gara’ad, Somalia. In Somalia, Abdirahman Muhammad Faroole, president of the Puntland region, where some of the pirates were thought to be from, said that, on Sunday afternoon, American officials whom he’d been talking to throughout the crisis abruptly told him to stop pursuing negotiations with tribal elders affiliated with the pirates. Mr. Faroole was told the Americans “had another action” planned, and said it was no longer necessary for him to work with the elders.
The Justice Department will be reviewing evidence to decide whether charges will be brought against the surviving pirate.
In Underhill, Vermont, Captain Phillips’s hometown, Alison McColl, a Maersk official assigned to Mr. Phillips's family, said, “This is truly a very happy Easter for the Phillips family. Andrea and Richard have spoken, and you can imagine their joy, and what a happy moment it was for them,” Ms. McColl said.
Some drivers going by the Phillips household were honking their horns as they drove by out of support and happiness. One of the Phillips’s next door neighbors, Becky Tierney, closed her eyes as she expressed relief about Mr. Phillips’ fate. “We are so glad that he is safe and we are so glad that this is over," she said. "This town has never been through anything like this, not even close.
The pirates— allegedly demanding $2 million in ransom— seized Mr. Phillips on Wednesday and escaped the cargo ship in a motorized lifeboat.
A standoff between the pirates and the United States Navy then ensued until Saturday when negotiations between American officials and the pirates broke down, according to Somali officials, after the Americans insisted that the pirates be arrested and a group of elders representing the pirates refused. The negotiations broke down hours after the pirates fired on a small United States Navy vessel that had tried to approach the lifeboat not long after sunrise Saturday in the Indian Ocean.
The Maersk Alabama, a 17,000-ton cargo vessel, pulled into port in Mombasa, Kenya at 8:30 on Saturday evening with its nineteen remaining American crew members. “The crew was really challenged with the order to leave Richard behind. But as mariners they took the orders to preserve the ship,” said Mr. Reinhart, president of Maersk. When the crew members heard that their captain had been freed, they placed an American flag over the rail of the ship, whistled, and pumped their fists in the air.
More than 250 hostages are being held by various Somalian pirate groups, including the sixteen crew members of an Italian tugboat captured on Saturday. In Galkaiyo, Somalia, one pirate named Ali said the American Navy rescue won’t discourage other Somali pirate groups at all. “As long as there is no just government in Somalia, we will still be the coast guard,” he said, adding: “If we get an American, we will take revenge.”

Rico said it would take the SEALs, and it did... (But if these pirates are from Puntland, does that make them Punts?) But there's always another side to things, of course: