Over the past several months amnesia seems to have spread among governments and television pundits. Though everyone has undoubtedly seen Pirates of the Caribbean, no one knows what to do with real-world pirates. They chose to forget over two millennia of historical precedent. Fortunately, with the case of Maersk, the US government did not take the same confused approach - though things were made much easier by the fact that the ship is American, rather than another country's.