Daily View: Reaction to SAS in Libya
The detention of a British SAS unit sent to Libya has been described as "humiliating" by many newspapers, after the team were detained by rebel fighters near Benghazi. The SAS soldiers and MI6 officer were released after two days.
says the SAS "has now suffered the most damaging blow to its reputation in its proud regimental history".
"The role of the SAS is to fight, not to make peace, and to put the regiment's soldiers in a position where, for reasons of diplomacy, they are required to surrender their weapons without so much as a whimper is not what they are trained to do... But it is not the SAS that should hang its head in shame over this fiasco: it is the idiots who authorised the operation in the first place."
who helped capture the SAS officers and explained why the unit aroused so much suspicion.
"We fired into the air, and said 'Hands up, don't move'. They did as we said. It was not very difficult, we just asked them to move away from their bags to the side, and they did... "We do not want to make enemies but this is no way to make friends, dropping in, in the dead of the night, with espionage equipment, recording devices and multiple weapons and passports."
, says the incident showed the "gung-ho and arrogant attitude" of the SAS, at a time when the government has highlighted the elite unit's growing importance.
"Official secrecy surrounding SAS operations is acknowledged by many senior defence and military officials to be a nonsense, characterised in practice by hypocrisy and inconsistency... The potential for more transparency, without endangering lives, should be one of the lessons to come out of it."
"A monumental cock-up" is how The Independent's Mary Dejevsky describes the mission and she calls for those responsible to be held to account.
"Let's start with the basics: Who on earth dreamt up this catastrophically misconceived mission and who signed off on it? And I don't mean only which department, but names - real names."
The Mirror quotes a former SAS soldier who says the mission "was badly planned and under-resourced." The paper calls the incident a "fiasco" which has put the government under the spotlight.
""Defence Secretary Liam Fox tried to distance himself from the bungled Âoperation. But an ex-SAS soldier told how it exposed shocking gaps in the Tory-led ÂGovernment's Âcommitment to our armed forces."
