Our boys and girls are not even safe with this unclear agreement. The article continues "U.S. commanders have not publicly described in detail how they interpret the agreement's vaguely worded provision that gives them the right to self-defense."
It is not good that there is wiggle room, as the article continues "A spokesman for Bolger would not say whether the U.S. military considers the Iraqi order on July 2 valid. Since it was issued, it has been amended to make a few exemptions. But the guidelines remain far more restrictive than the Americans had hoped, U.S. military officials said. ...."
Brig. Gen. Heidi Brown, the commander overseeing the logistical aspects of the withdrawal, said in a Friday interview, "It's been an interesting time, and I think we've sorted out any misunderstandings that were there initially."
One U.S. military official here said both Iraqi and American leaders on the ground remain confused about the guidelines. The official said he worries that the lack of clarity could trigger stalemates and confrontations between Iraqis and Americans. "We still lack a common understanding and way forward at all levels regarding those types of situations," he said, referring to self-defense protocols and the type of missions that Americans cannot conduct unilaterally."
Another failed policy of W's is the Terrorist Assassination program that Cheney illegally ran.
The article "Truth Commission Needed to Examine Cheney, Assassination Squads, Cover-Ups" at
http://www.juancole.com/2009/07/truth-commission-needed-to-examine.html
states "It turns out that the secret CIA program that Leon Panetta cancelled, and which former VP Richard Bruce Cheney ordered hidden from Congress, was in fact an assassination squad focusing on al-Qaeda figures.
The problem with assassination teams is that they are extra-judicial. They are killing people who have not been proven to have done anything wrong. The long litany of mistakes that security organizations have made in recent years, targeting innocents, should form a legion of cautionary tales about just killing people."
The article notes an individual as the article continues "Maher Arar, for instance, might as well have simply been shot down like a dog as shackled and sent for torture by the Baath Party in Damascus. He was innocent. Murat Kurnaz might have as easily had two bullets put behind his right ear as to have been arrested and sent for "interrogation" to Guantanamo. Then there was that little Khaled el-Masri 'oops' moment, which would have been even more embarrassing to the US government if he had been shot between the eyes by a US government sniper. I could go on and on (the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo now appear to have been clueless innocents, and Bush-Cheney appears to have wanted to sentence them to life imprisonment without a trial; they could have as easily just been shot on sight.)
The article agrees with those who want the previous administration pay for its crimes as it states, "Cheney is a traitor for his role in outing Valerie Plame (and yes, he had Irv Lewis Libby, his chief of staff, try like hell to out her; it is not relevant that Bob Novak took the information from Armitage first). He hid covert operations from Congress. He contemplated assassination squads and for all we know ran some. If Congress doesn't want to look mean-spirited or to risk disillusioning the public with government by prosecuting the former vice president, let's at least have a truth commission that gets documents declassified and lays out his full role so we don't have to wait until 2039 to judge it.
The only thing worse than impunity for crimes is a decades-long cover-up of those crimes from the American people. Complete sunshine on Richard Bruce Cheney's misdeeds is the minimum necessary to work against them being repeated by the next administration."
The article "CIA Assassin Program Was Nearing New Phase" at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/15/AR2009071503856_pf.html
notes that we could have been the source of Cheney's assassins and that it was getting close to being implemented as the article states, "CIA officials were proposing to activate a plan to train anti-terrorist assassination teams overseas when agency managers brought the secret program to the attention of CIA Director Leon Panetta last month, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The plan to kill top al-Qaeda leaders, which had been on the agency's back burner for much of the past eight years, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight because of proposals to initiate what one intelligence official called a "somewhat more operational phase." Shortly after learning of the plan, Panetta terminated the program and then went to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers, who had been kept in the dark since 2001."
