It may be a new year Pilgrims, but we slide faster and faster down the rabbit hole!

All of you folks who served our country in uniform will surely love this news item in the NY Times..:

New Rules in Iraq Add Police Work to Troops’ Jobs
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

BAGHDAD — In late November, around the time the security agreement between the American and Iraqi governments was ratified, an order came down to Company C at its Sadr City outpost.

In accordance with the agreement’s new rules on searches and detentions, troops from Company C of the First Battalion, 35th Armor Regiment, were to begin operating under a policy called “warrant-based targeting.”

Up to that time, First Lt. Jamen K. Miller’s platoon had been the most prolific in the company when it came to arrests, seizing more than half of those captured in the past seven months. But he soon found himself explaining to an Iraqi officer that, yes, a certain man his platoon had declined to arrest was a bad guy, but that nothing could be done yet without a warrant.

“The gears of the system,” Lieutenant Miller said of those first few days, “looked like they were coming to a halt.”

In many ways, Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite quarter in northeastern Baghdad, is on the front line of the recent security agreement. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, American forces have relied heavily on mass arrests without charges of people suspected of being insurgents.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis were detained and some held for years, in a practice that Americans insisted was necessary but that was strongly condemned by human rights groups and Iraqis.

But starting Thursday, American soldiers will be required to secure arrest warrants, a change welcomed as an important step toward Iraqi sovereignty but one that also raises concerns that the longer and more complicated arrest process could jeopardize recent gains in safety here.

Still, insurgents are taking cover in the vast slums of Sadr City and the holdouts are being tracked down, one by one, though it is not entirely certain how all of this will work in the new year.

“It’s all being defined as we go,” said Maj. Rich Ramsey, who works on a task force that is addressing some of the changes with the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, in Baghdad.

After years of quick-response raids, American troops are having to adjust to gumshoe work, which involves lots of conversations with civilians about who has done what in the neighborhood. Though a judge makes the decision on what is needed for a warrant, it typically requires at least two sworn statements by witnesses to a crime, American officers said.

Many of these witnesses will have to testify before Iraqi investigators, judges or members of the security forces, depending on a trust that has been violated countless times in the past, often violently.

An Iraqi who had been kidnapped this year told Lieutenant Miller recently that he would sign a statement against his captors, as long as his identity was kept from any Iraqi. That will probably cease to be an option now that Americans must conduct all operations with Iraqi forces.

Obtaining warrants can be a frustratingly long process. First Lt. Guy L. Allsop of Company C said that he had submitted 18 warrant requests since the agreement had been passed. Weeks later, one had been approved.

After an arrest, the detainee has to be turned over to Iraqi authorities within 24 hours, and the Iraqis have to bring the case to a judge, who rules on whether the detainee should be held or released.

Some Iraqi Army officers said they worried about the new rules.

Sure sounds to me that rather than tie every American soldier's right arm behind his back, it might be time for the United States to close up shop and get the hell outta Dodge City! I thought that Bubba was dumb, trying to treat terrorist attacks as 'tort cases', but these new rules foisted upon our combat troops in harms way ---- are the work of bureaucratic nimrods, both Iraqi and American!