Oh Great

And the renegade U.S. wants to go even farther into cowboy mode (Washington Post, registration required):

The Pentagon is promoting a global counterterrorism plan that would allow Special Operations forces to enter a foreign country to conduct military operations without explicit concurrence from the U.S. ambassador there, administration officials familiar with the plan said.

The plan would weaken the long-standing "chief of mission" authority under which the U.S. ambassador, as the president's top representative in a foreign country, decides whether to grant entry to U.S. government personnel based on political and diplomatic considerations.

The Special Operations missions envisioned in the plan would largely be secret, known to only a handful of officials from the foreign country, if any.

The change is included in a highly classified "execute order"-- part of a broad strategy developed since Sept. 11, 2001, to give the U.S. Special Operations Command new flexibility to track down and destroy terrorist networks worldwide, the officials said.

"This is a military order on a global scale, something that hasn't existed since World War II," said a counterterrorism official with lengthy experience in special operations. He and other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the proposal is classified.

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How long before our self-proclaimed right to kill anyone we want, anywhere we want, goes into all-out CIA/military black ops? Yes, there's now an Executive Order prohibiting assassinations; but if Bush can declare the fscking Geneva Conventions irrelevant, is he really going to pay any mind to a piddly little EO? I don't think so.

(via Just a Bump in the Beltway)