Captain McCarley said the mission had nothing to do with killing American defectors.

The complaint noted that the Iraqi service has also "located, intimidated and killed Iraqi defectors and dissidents living abroad."

In several public appearances, Gaddafi threatened to destroy the protest movement, and Al Jazeera and other agencies reported his government was arming pro-Gaddafi militiamen to kill protesters and defectors against the regime in Tripoli.

The rule was unwritten but nevertheless very real: CIA does not kill Soviets in the Soviet Union; RGB does not kill Americans, or even Soviet defectors, in the United States.

The article asserted that the United States military dropped lethal nerve gas on a Laotian village in 1970, during the Vietnam war, as part of a secret mission to kill American defectors.

Many reports indicate that the human rights violations under the leadership of Kim Jong-il are continued by Kim Jong-un, ordering to kill defectors, conducting public executions and sending people to political prison camps.

In general, the Monarch and his ministers must work together to kill the rebels and defectors, while the rebels can cooperate to kill off the ministers before attacking the Monarch.

And here's an interesting question today's newspaper accounts don't address: Why would there be a commando raid to kill American defectors instead of bringing them back to be court-martialed?

But yesterday, less than a month after CNN and Time jointly charged that America secretly used nerve gas on a mission designed to kill defectors during the Vietnam War, they took it back.

Smart armies don't kill defectors, they show them off: happy, safe, and well fed.