Consider the events GlobalPost correspondents reported just this week:

In Indonesia, Peter Gelling provided authoritative coverage of the country’s elite counter-terrorism force killing Noordin Top, the leader of Indonesia’s answer to Al Qaeda.

In Somalia, six US attack helicopters swept over a convoy of the Al Qaeda-inspired Al Shabaab fighters and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a leader who has long been wanted by the US in connection with the 1998 attack two US embassies in East Africa. GlobalPost correspondent Tristan McConnell reported from Kenya on how the attacks reveal a dramatic shift in US policy to confront Al Qaeda in the failed state of Somalia.

In Yemen, GlobalPost’s Laura Kasinof reported on the air strikes that killed scores of civilians fleeing fighting in Northern Yemen where the government forces appear to be succumbing to American pressure to step up the fight against “an increasingly active branch of Al Qaeda in the country,” as she wrote.

The US intelligence community is buzzing about evidence emerging over the summer that Al Qaeda leaders are gathering in Somalia and Yemen and trying to establish a new nexus for operations after Pakistan’s military finally stepped up the pressure on Al Qaeda in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

CIA director Leon E. Panetta publicly revealed this in briefings over the summer.

An early warning about this came from Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke at the Brookings Institute in the late spring, saying, “I am very worried about growing safe havens in both Somalia and Yemen, specifically because we have seen Al Qaeda leadership, some leaders, start to flow to Yemen.”

The concentration of violent jihadist campaigns in Yemen and Somalia illustrate that Al Qaeda is a movement not an organization, and the fact that they are scrambling to move base and being hit even as they do so is a sign that they are greatly weakened now eight years after the September 11th attacks.

As a country that has too often found itself confronting the futility of its force in the post 9-11 world, the patient, well-executed US Navy mission that freed Captain Richard Phillips came as a welcome ending to the five-day standoff.

Navy Seals shot three of the pirates saying that Phillips was in “imminent danger.” A fourth pirate was detained. It turns out that President Obama had given clear orders to use lethal force if necessary to protect Phillips. And in doing that Obama has successfully navigated his first significant international crisis. It was a small confrontation in relative terms given that Iraq and Afghanistan loom so large. But small failures can have big consequences as Presidents Carter and Clinton learned all too well in their first terms.

Obama said he is “resolved to to halt the rise of piracy.” And yesterday he backed up that resolve with action and saved the life of a man whose crew see him as a hero for sacrificing his own life to save theirs. We don’t have a chance to write about too many heroes these days. But the story of the drama in the Gulf of Aden gave us a chance to do just that.

In his day he went after them with everything he had.

In 1907, there was a famous naval standoff in which Barbary pirates held an American for ransom. It was a drama that riveted the nation and the world just like the one now playing out off the coast of Somalia.

The brigand was the legendary Ahmed er Raisuli, a Moroccan known as the last of the great Barbary pirates. The American held captive was Ion Perdicaris, who was being held for $70,000 ransom.

Roosevelt announced, “Pedicardis alive or Raisuli dead!”

And the slogan became part of the legend of the high seas and the American might that would protect its global shipping and commerce.

Roosevelt sent seven U.S. battleships across the Atlantic to the Moroccan coast, but in the end the hostage drama was resolved when the Moroccan government paid the ransom and Perdicaris was freed.

The story even became a Hollywood movie titled, “The Wind and the Lion.” But, OK, so in the 1975 Hollywood version the American businessman with the hard to pronounce last name was turned into a beautiful woman played by Candice Bergen and the pirate was Sean Connery.

Today’s real, live drama on the high seas with Captain Richard Phillips being held captive by Somali pirates also has all the makings of a Hollywood film, but perhaps with a more complex plot.

We haven’t yet heard Obama declare: “Phillips alive, or pirates dead!”

But we are certain screenplay writers are already circling like sharks around this story.

This time around the narrative seems to be not about the might of the U.S. Navy and the brash confidence of Teddy Roosevelt, but about the strange futility of American power in the modern world.

There are hulking Navy ships aligned against a small, out-of-gas lifeboat where pirates are holding captive an American who , if the story line is accurate, heroically endangered his own life to protect his crew and ship. And the Navy, it seems, can do nothing but wait.

It’s becoming more akin to “Dog Day Afternoon” than “The Wind and The Lion.”

It’s not over yet. The script is being written every hour on CNN, which has truly done an excellent job covering the story.

We’re pretty proud of our smaller team of reporters at GlobalPost who have also done an admirable job.

Our correspondent in Kenya, Tristan McConnell, has been on the story from day one. GlobalPost columnist HDS Greenway provided an authoritative history of America’s long battle with pirates. Tom Fenton in London commented on the failures of U.S. policy in Somalia that stand as the backdrop to the drama. And now our Boston reporter Stephanie Garlow has contributed an excellent profile of Phillips, who hails from Massachusetts and studied at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy here.

We call this kind of dogged, on-the-scene reporting GroundTruth, but the phrase seems off given that it is all unfolding in the high seas. So we’ll have to call it just plain, old truth.