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Why Obama ordered the Navy to kill three Black teenagers

Depending on how old you are, you may, or may not, remember stories about Somali “pirates” that emerged around 2009. One story that got international attention happened over five days in April 2009.

Four Somali teenagers took over the American Maersk Alabama cargo ship and took its captain, Richard Phillips, hostage in one of the life boats until the U.S. Navy showed up and killed three of the teenagers. They captured the leader and brought him to the U.S. where he was tried and sentenced to 33 years in prison. Below is a letter I recently mailed to Abdulwali Muse:

March 25, 2021

FCI Terre Haute, FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION, P.O. BOX 33, TERRE HAUTE, IN  47808

ATTN: Abdulwali Muse, register #: 70636-054

Brother Abduwali,

I recently read more about what led to you serving your current sentence. What happened to you shows how unfair the U.S. justice system is, especially to Black people…wherever they’re from.

I co-lead the 613-819 Black Hub, an Ottawa, Canada-based Black advocacy group. We work on issues of systemic anti-Black racism and discrimination and, although we act very locally, we think globally. We think about why we only found out about you because of the movie Captain Phillips. We think about why the movie, as its title illustrates, is focussed on the white man’s experience instead of you and your friends’. We wonder why we heard lots about Somali “pirates” attacking ships, apparently out of greed, but little of how, for many years earlier, countries illegally fishing off Somalia’s coast and dumping toxic waste depleted the fish stocks and robbed Somali fishermen of their livelihood.

We ask why they tried you as an adult when your mom said you were 16 at the time…And why did they sentence you to 33 years in prison, for a crime where no one was killed except your friends, in a country whose own president gets off free after inciting a treasonous insurrection that left five people dead?

We have stories here of young brothers ending up dead after turning to activities that put them in harm’s way because they felt they had no other choice. Eighteen-year-old brother Manyok Akol, shot dead in Jan. 2020, rapped under the name FTG Metro and spoke about how he and his friends had few choices in their west end Ottawa neighborhood.

But things changed last year with George Floyd’s death and the pandemic.

Anti-Black racism has been exposed in a way that can never be reversed – because Black activists won’t let it be. Here in Ottawa, we’re fighting to get our city council to freeze our police budget and invest in social services, like housing and employment. I’m mentoring a young brother who’s a refugee from Rwanda and wants to go into nursing. This Saturday I have arranged for him to speak to a local Black surgeon to help the brother expand his ambitions and perhaps aspire to becoming a doctor himself. People of African descent are spreading positive Blacktivity all over the world. And we will not be stopped. 

Stay strong my brother.

Barack Obama was president in 2009, having been elected for this first time in November 2008. In his 2020 book, The Promised Land, Obama wrote about the incident and the deaths of the three teenagers – which he authorized:

“The news elicited high fives all around the White House. The Washington Post headline declared it AN EARLY MILITARY VICTORY FOR OBAMA. But, as relieved as I was to see Captain Phillips reunited with his family and as proud as I was of our navy personnel for their handling of the situation, I wasn’t inclined to beat my chest over the episode…I realized that, around the world, in places like Yemen, and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of the boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen), had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them – send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filing their heads. And yet, the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.”

If Obama wanted to save these kids, why didn’t he commute Muse’s 33 year sentence like he reportedly did for 214 federal prisoners in August 2016, about five months before he left office?

Did countries then, and do they now, have rules to ensure that their companies don’t buy fish for us to eat that were caught illegally? Do we ask the stores where we buy our fish the same thing? Do countries have similar rules about where their toxic waste gets dumped? If they have such rules, do they enforce them?

Why were young men like Muse immediately labelled as “pirates” when, initially, they were simply trying to protect their livelihood?

The 2013 movie Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks, is based on the memoir by the real Captain Richard Phillips, A Captain’s Duty. Although Phillips is portrayed as a hero who risks his life to save his crew, lawsuits filed by some of his former crew suggest a different story. In October 2013, the lawyer for nine of the 23-member crew who sued the company that owned the ship gave the Business Insider a different picture of Captain Phillips: “To make him into a hero for driving this boat and these men into pirate-infested waters, that’s the real injustice here. The movie tells a highly fictionalized version of what actually happened.”, said attorney Brian Beckcom. Phillips was not named in the suit.

I tried to find out how much money Columbia and Sony paid Phillips for the rights to his book but even the mighty Google couldn’t tell me.

Muse’s story is an international version of what has been happening to young Black men in the U.S. and Canada for decades. Systemic anti-Black racism leaves few choices that herd them down the path to criminality. The systemic racism is ignored but they’re harshly punished for their crimes. Then their pursuit and capture is turned into lucrative entertainment through TV shows like COPS and movies like Captain Phillips.

There often isn’t a bright side, but there is one to this story…

For his role as Muse in the film, Somali-born, Minneapolis-based actor, Barkhad Abdi, was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and a Golden Globe Award. And he won a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor. Abdi was born in the Somali capital, Mogadishu but fled to Yemen with his family when he was six or seven, when the Somali Civil War broke out. In 1999, Abdi and his family relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where there is a large Somali community. He sold mobile phones at his brother’s shop at a mall, worked as a limousine driver at a relative’s chauffeur company and as a DJ before landing the movie role. Neither he, nor his three friends who played the other pirates, had ever acted before.

Adbi has since appeared in several other films, made his directorial debut with the Somali film Ciyaalka Xaafada, and directed several music videos. He now splits his time between Los Angeles and Minnesota.

After the Maersk Alabama hijacking, shipping companies instituted new security measures that have reduced attacks to nearly zero.

So ships deliver their goods to us unhindered as the world continues ignoring where our toxic waste is dumped as long as it’s not in our backyard.

But we will not be ignored.