The US is still in the process of trying to get a Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) in place to keep US troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014. As negotiations with the Afghan government continue to stall, Secretary of State John Kerry spurned questions about troop immunity, insisting that troops always operate under the same standard, and Afghanistan should expect no different from Japan or Korea in that regard.
Kerry’s comments sought to defer Afghan requests to maintain jurisdiction over US troops in the event of certain war crimes, while the US has insisted the troops retain full immunity, and was an effort to kill the debate by arguing that the pact was just standard boilerplate.
The comments were also flat out untrue, as US status of forces agreements vary wildly across the world, with jurisdiction different in almost every single pact, and full immunity is the exception, not the rule.
Indeed, Kerry’s comments were doubly wrong because the deals with Japan and South Korea actually both grant them some jurisdiction over US troops, and both nations have tried US troops in their own courts, the exact same standard the Karzai government has sought, and which Kerry has rejected.
Another country another occupation, japan empire is no longer there, South Korea is democracy! Italy is democracy, Hitler is no longer rules Germany, England and etc are democracy capitalism style, that's what USA is protecting, so goes for Afghanistan and protecting Hamid Karzai.
Is anyone listening to John Kerry's lies and misleading information he tries to sell to the American public? In 2012 seaman Christopher Browning and petty officer Skyler Dozierwalker was arrested by Japanese police and tried in a Japanese court for raping a Japanese woman on the Island of Okinawa. Kerry is the real modern day Pinocchio.
Kerry is worse than a Nazi and a Boer combined.
Immunity — Total secrecy
Our troops were invited into their nation by the Afghan rich ruling class, primarily to give worldwide protection to their poppy growing and heroin producing enterprise, it being the world’s largest.
So, above all things do the rich rulers desire for our troops to operate in total secrecy by gaining complete immunity, as it gains the same for them.
There are 2 possibilities: 1. Kerry is ignorant of the details of the many different SOFAs the US has negotiated over the years, in which case he should either fire his advisors or resign because it's is his responsibility to know and understand the agreements in force around the world.
2. Kerry is lying, willfully, and should be fired. Why government officials lie like this is beyond me. It's not like the correct information is not available to the public. Is it that those like Kerry really don't care what the public thinks – that we'll think his little "white lie" is cute? Like Clapper's little "untruthness?"
Why didn't the press who were there in front of his face immediately question Kerry's blatant prevarication? It's situations like this where the government official must be challenged.
I assume this means that US military personnel who commit crimes against the local populace- such as rapes, assaults, etc.- in Afghanistan will be whisked out of the country and away from the reach of local authorities as quickly as possible? After all, this is standard operating procedure in Japan and Korea, so of course it just wouldn't do to lower those gleaming standards.
Thanks for pointing out this disinformation by Kerry and our Government. Incidentally, I would be interested to know what happened to a previous sticking point in the SOFA negotiations between the Afghan government and our US Government: namely, that the Afghan government was insisting that under Afghan law there could be no indefinite detention of prisoners without a due process trial, while our US Government was insisting that indefinite detention was essential to retain prisoners too dangerous to release regardless of their guilt or innocence in a court of law (as with several dozen prisoners indefinitely detained in Guantanamo). Lately I have seen no press reports as to this standoff between Afghan due process and US lawlessness, so it appears that this issue has been resolved one way or the other. Or is it another case of US media not reporting embarrassing news?
Good catch richard young…………. I don't know what your catchn will change but we never know who will see it………………
Excuse me….????????????/