How the administration wants to deal with pirates:

President Obama did not issue a statement on the tragedy. White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the administration was "obviously outraged by the actions of the pirates."

"And the president, as you know, I believe, has expressed his sincere condolences to the families of the victims," Carney said at a press briefing. "But beyond that, I don't want to get into details."

"This deplorable act firmly underscores the need for continued international progress toward confronting the shared security challenge posed by piracy in the waters off the Horn of Africa," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement Tuesday.
...
"Well, one of the challenges -- I'm not sure we can do something about it, but one of the challenges with pirates is if you capture them, what do you do with them?" Clapper said. "The international legal mechanisms for prosecuting, trying and convicting pirates turns out to be rather problematic. That's not obviously something we, the U.S., can do something, but that is a problem for the international community."
'International progress' and the 'international community' means "We sit around playing games, and when we capture some of the pirates they get a nice trial. Somewhere. Sometimes."

There is a simple solution to this: kill them. They take hostages, make it a simple "Release them and you live; harm them and you die" and then carry it out. Every time. You catch them in the process of an attack you don't try to capture them, you sink the damn boat; you find their mother ship, you sink it. They say "We will kill hostages if you trouble us!", you say "If you do this, we will find our home port and destroy it." And then do it.

But that would require a President and cabinet who care more about stopping this than about playing games with 'world opinion' and 'social justice'. And have the balls to carry out the actions.