The Somalia prime minister, Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, visited the camp after the violence and said he was "deeply sorry". He said an investigation would be held and promised harsh punishment for anyone found guilty.

International groups face huge challenges in distributing food inside Somalia. The worst-hit part of the country is a no-go area for most aid groups because it is controlled by al-Qaida-linked insurgents, who deny there is a famine and who have allowed only the International Committee of the Red Cross to enter.

More than 12 million people in the Horn of Africa are in need of immediate food aid. The UN says 640,000 children are acutely malnourished in Somalia, where the UN has declared five famine zones, including the refugee camps of Mogadishu.

Witnesses said two WFP trucks were delivering aid when the chaos broke out. WFP often tries to do what it calls "wet feedings" in Somalia – giving out already made food like porridge – to limit the chances that it will be looted. But in this case it was dry rations, Orr said.

Somali soldiers control just part of the capital and are poorly trained. ...

Private militias – most of them politically connected – are competing to guard or steal food. At least four competing militias have the run of government-controlled areas of Mogadishu.

The gunmen roar around in pickup trucks and wage battle over the wages they hope to be paid to either guard the aid or for the cash it will bring when it is stolen and sold. The insecurity amid the famine echoes the situation in 1992 that prompted deployment of a US-led multinational force to safeguard the delivery of food to Somalia's starving.

That international intervention collapsed in 1993 after two US helicopters were shot down and 18 servicemen were killed in the crashes and subsequent rescue attempt in the streets of Mogadishu.

Without the knowledge of much of the general American public, a secret force within the US military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries. This Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has generally been ignored by the mainstream media, and deserves further attention.

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that US Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency. By the end of this year, US Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120. “We do a lot of travelling — a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said recently. This global presence — in about 60 per cent of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged — is evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.

Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, [is] a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes US citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal “kill/capture” campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine”.

85 per cent of special operations troops deployed overseas are in 20 countries in the CENTCOM area of operations in the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. The others are scattered across the globe from South America to Southeast Asia, some in small numbers, others as larger contingents.

Last year, as an analysis of SOCOM documents, open-source Pentagon information, and a database of Special Operations missions compiled by investigative journalist Tara McKelvey (for the Medill School of Journalism’s National Security Journalism Initiative) reveals, the US’ most elite troops carried out joint-training exercises in Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Germany, Indonesia, Mali, Norway, Panama, and Poland.

That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad, even while many of their actual activities remain in the ever-widening shadows. Typical of the vision they are pushing was this statement from Admiral Olson: “I am convinced that the forces … are the most culturally attuned partners, the most lethal hunter-killers, and most responsive, agile, innovative, and efficiently effective advisors, trainers, problem-solvers, and warriors that any nation has to offer.”

US Special Operations forces are approximately as large as Canada’s entire active duty military. In fact, the force is larger than the active duty militaries of many of the nations where the US’ elite troops now operate each year, and it’s only set to grow larger.

Americans have yet to grapple with what it means to have a “special” force this large, this active, and this secret — and they are unlikely to begin to do so until more information is available.

Ray Jay wrote:Sure; I generally agree with you. But I do think you have to dig deeper.

If there is a famine in East Africa, and the food aid cannot get through, do we have a responsibility to do what it takes to force it through? Look at the brutality of Zimbabwe or Burma or North Korea . Can anyone make an argument that these states are better off without western interference?