[ben509]

The main narrative is the usual war mongering. You're doing it in your post.

These are criminal actions, as they're not endorsed by the state.

But it doesn't have to reach the scale of war to be bad. The broader narrative is We Have To Do Something. And that Something is always grant the government more power. Why is it a good thing, for instance, that we're taking "unprecedented" steps?

The US has been dealing with ransoms, piracy, extortion since its founding. "From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli," the latter was one of our first expeditions to deal with piracy.

As there is plenty of precedent for dealing with this stuff, we should be very skeptical when the government insists it needs new powers.