Benghazi Response

"The president has made clear our preference for capturing terrorist targets when possible, and that's exactly what we've done in order to elicit as much valuable intelligence as we can and bring a dangerous terrorist to justice."
Caitlin Hayden, White House National Security Council spokeswoman

"It was a good thing. These men are the main reason we are facing issues like this, and they should be taken out of the country. Even my friends were happy to clean the country of those terrorists."
Tripoli businessman, Hassan

"As soon as it heard the reports, the Libyan government contacted the United States authorities to demand an explanation" for the kidnapping of a Libyan citizen".
Government of Libya

The government has every right to be concerned. Concerned, actually, about its country becoming a haven for international terrorists, let alone Libyan Islamist jihadists. It should be concerned to the point of hair-pulling distraction that it has been incapable of disarming the various militias that arose and have become a pestilence of violence and disordered disruption within the country with nothing holding them back, and no authority holding them to account.

It was well enough known that wanted terrorists felt assured enough of their safety to walk the streets of Tripoli with impunity. Now, it just so happens that one , Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Anas al-Liby, was snatched off a Tripoli street by U.S. commandos in another one of those lightning-strike raids that leave their enemies dazed. Something they learned by observation from the Israelis.

Libya's interim government -- like the government of Pakistan when Navy SEALS conducted an earlier strike on the compound close to an elite military base that housed Osama bin Laden and his family, dispatching him to an eternity of deathly penance -- is outraged at the presumption of America in assuming that it could penetrate and invade Libya's sovereignty without penalty.

That foreign jihadis do appears far less a matter of government concern.

Which is precisely the point that the Americans are making, in fact. If Libya remains incapable of cleaning out the human detritus in its midst, it will have the assistance of others, and perhaps a more gracious form of thanks might be considered in future operations. For there will be more such operations.

This one just happened to pinpoint the presence of a man who was a close confidante of Osama bin Laden. And who just incidentally planned and carried out with other criminal henchmen two deadly bombing attacks on U.S. embassies - in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in which 224 people were killed and over 4,000 injured.

Abu Anas was one of 20 al-Qaeda lieutenants considered co-defendants in a criminal indictment filed in a Manhattan court in 1997. He was placed on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list, post 9/11 and latterly had a $5-million reward posted on his head.

He can now handily be crossed off that list. And the intelligence he is expected to offer up to American security agents may be useful in aiding the U.S. in capturing and holding to account others of his associates responsible for the death and carnage they had planned and so ably executed.