Looks like the media glorification of
those super-elite supermen American commandos is a bit exaggerated.
The elite of the elite, SEAL Team 6, supposedly the best of the SEAL
teams, the one tasked with assassinating Osama bin Laden in
Abbottabad, Pakistan, (which Obama ordered against advice in part
with an eye to his reelection battle in 2012) raided an al-Shabab
target on the Somalian coast in order to “take out” someone the
U.S. claims was behind or involved in the terrorist attack on the
Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in September. But the assembled
Islamoid fanatics fought off the SEAL Supermen, who retreated under
fire. The U.S. is being vague about whether they killed their target-
apparently they don’t know. At first they issued a boast that they
had seized their target- apparently they compose their
self-congratulatory statements in advance.
The target is a leader of al-Shabab,
and it is unclear whether the U.S. actually has hard information that
he was involved in the Mall attack or merely assumed he was-
al-Shabab is factionalized to the point where it has become
fratricidal. An American Jihadist member of the organization was just
murdered by his former comrades after a falling out. And al-Shabab is
split between Somalis whose ambitions are limited to controlling
Somalia, and foreigners who are global in their power lust.
For decades, the American propaganda
system has consistently presented the SEALs as some kind of awesome
super-warriors. There’s an entire genre of literature and other
media pushing this Supermen line. (To a lesser degree the Army’s
Delta Force got the same treatment, and before them, it was the Army
Special Forces, the Green Berets, hyped in this manner. Each of these
forces is basically a U.S. death squad, also tasked with
surreptitious and nasty sabotage operations. They also plant spy
devices. But overall, the SEALs have apparently beaten their
competitors in the public relations competition.)
But
the U.S. scored a consolation prize for itself. At the same time as
the Somalia raid, it sent a team of U.S. soldiers, FBI agents and CIA
officers into Tripoli, Libya, and grabbed a guy they’d been looking
for since 1998 who they blamed for the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya
and Tanzania, Africa, that year. (This guy is like, what, the sixth
“mastermind” of that?) All they had to do was violate Libyan
sovereignty. (They didn’t bother notifying the Libyan authorities.)
Looks like the word “extradition” has been excised from American
English. [See “International Law? What’s That? U.S. ViolatesAnother Nation’s Sovereignty- Again.”]
