Four Americans killed by pirates off Somalia’s coast

Four Americans taken hostage by Somali pirates off East Africa were shot and killed by their captors Monday, the U.S. military said, marking the first time U.S. citizens have been killed in a wave of pirate attacks plaguing the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean for years.

The U.S. Central Command says negotiations had been under way to try to win release of the two couples on the pirated vessel Quest.

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Gunshots were heard, but when U.S. forces reached the yacht, they found all four hostages had been shot.

The yacht Quest was hijacked on Friday off the coast of Oman, and owned by Scott Adam and his wife Jean, a couple from California. Organizers of the Blue Water Rally yacht race said the couple had with them two other Americans, Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle, both from Seattle.

The Adams, who were members of the Marina del Rey Yacht Club in Marina del Ray, California, run a Bible ministry, according to their website, and had been sailing the world with a yacht full of Bibles since 2004. They had been distributing the Bibles to schools and churches in remote villages in areas including the Fiji Islands, Alaska, New Zealand, Central America and French Polynesia.

Robert K. Johnston of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena told The Associated Press that Mr. Adam — who last year earned a master of theology degree from the school — had sent friends emails detailing his international sailing trip. But Mr. Adam went silent Feb. 12 to avoid revealing the location of his yacht, the Quest, to pirates.

Mr. Johnston said that despite an adventurous spirit, the Adams were meticulous planners who knew the dangers they faced. The couple had sailed with a large flotilla to stay safe from pirates near Thailand earlier in the trip.

“They knew and we knew they still had to go by the Somalia coast,” he said.

Mr. Adam, now in his mid-60s, had been an associate producer in Hollywood when he turned in a spiritual direction and enrolled in the seminary a decade ago, Mr. Johnston said.

“He decided he could take his pension, and he wanted to serve God and humankind,” he said.

Mr. Johnston and Mr. Adam worked together to start a film and theology institute. Mr. Adam also taught a class on church and media at the school.

Craig Detweiler, a professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, who attended Fuller with Mr. Adam in the 1990s and early 2000s, also recalled his friend's adventurous spirit.

“It is safe to say all of his family and friends covet the prayers and concerns of the international community,” Mr. Detweiler said.

Two pirates died during the ensuing confrontation with U.S. Navy forces, and 13 were captured and detained. The remains of two other pirates who were already dead also were found. In total the U.S. said that 19 pirates were involved in the hijacking of the Quest.

The hijacking of their yacht came two days after a Somali pirate was sentenced to 33 years in prison by a New York court for the 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama. That case ended when Navy sharpshooters killed two pirates holding the ship's captain.

Pirates have increased attacks on ships off the coast of East Africa, but Americans have rarely been targeted. The last attack against a U.S. crew — in 2009 — ended with Navy sharpshooters killing two pirates and rescuing the ship's captain.

Pirates currently hold 30 ships and more than 660 hostages, not counting the attack against the Quest.

The best-known case of Westerners being held hostage in Somalia was that of Paul and Rachel Chandler, a British couple held for 388 days. The two, who were captured while sailing in their private yacht, were released in November.

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Wake up, Americans. Your economic dream is a nightmare

Our southern friends are living the American dream these days, a dream that’s removing them from reality. Their federal legislators, including the President, are imagining a brilliant future that cannot be. None of them, it would appear, wants to awaken Americans from this dream.

The dream? Economic recovery followed by the return of prosperity, built on borrowed money. And not just some borrowed money, but trillions and trillions of borrowed money.

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In this scenario, the rest of the world will keep lending to the United States, borrowing costs won’t rise, inflation will be banished, and the punishment that would befall almost any other country that ran such a lopsided budget will not strike the U.S.

Like all dreams, this one has lost touch with reality. In Washington, legislators seem to accept that amassing trillions of dollars of additional debt is a bad idea. Then they argue furiously about a mere 12 per cent of the budget that, even if half of it were to be eliminated, would still leave the government in a deficit position this year.

The discretionary part of the budget contains programs people count on, everything from education to the environment, food inspections to basic research, farm aid and student assistance. The other parts of the budget are debt, the military and the so-called entitlement social programs of health care for the poor and seniors and social security.

Two bipartisan non-governmental commissions have instructed the country in simple arithmetic: namely, that the budget can’t be restored to sanity without cuts to discretionary spending and entitlement programs, and tax increases. In the dreamland of U.S. discourse, however, no one wants to talk about cuts to entitlement programs or tax increases. Worse, just before Christmas, Congress and the President forged a deal that continued the fiscally ruinous tax cuts of George W. Bush, the ones so tilted toward the already wealthy, and pumped even more discretionary spending into the U.S. economy.

American friends who despair of dreamland discourse acknowledge that it will take a “crisis” to awaken enough people so serious action can occur, instead of the shadowboxing that passes for action.

What would constitute a “crisis”? The stock market is roaring; happy days have returned to Wall Street financiers. Interest rates are low. True, the unemployment rate is above 9 per cent, but that means 91 per cent of Americans are working.

Would a huge run on the dollar be a “crisis”? Would a serious surge in inflation? Or a nose-diving stock market? Or another housing plunge? Or all of the above? No one wants any of the above, but what will it take to awaken Americans from their dream?

It might have been thought that their President would try to alert them to the damage being done daily to their future, and to the serious shift in world power and influence away from a country so hobbling itself with debt.

Barack Obama has obviously calculated that the political risks are too great for candour, so he, too, operates within the dream by proposing some restraint on discretionary spending without touching the entitlement programs, the military or taxes. In this, he is complicit with Republicans in deforming the nature of the debate and ill-informing Americans.

He has obviously reckoned that, with the Republicans believing the problem can be solved by discretionary spending cuts alone, he isn’t going to do anything credible before the next election.

So health care for seniors and the poor continues to rise by 8 per cent annually. The bloated Pentagon budget will be a staggering $670-billion. Still, the Secretary of Defence says any cut of more than $9-billion would cripple the nation’s capacity to defend itself.

With a 5-per-cent national sales tax, of the kind every other industrial country has implemented, the U.S. would be halfway home to budgetary solvency. In dreamland, however, such a dose of reality is unthinkable.

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