Invincible U.S. Navy SEALs Repulsed By Al-Shabab

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.”]