A new Washington Post
story confirms that Rumsfeld has set up a new paramilitary intelligence operation inside the Department of Defense:
The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.
Rumsfeld's lawyers have decided that this new "Strategic Support Branch" can operate with virtually no Congressional oversight:
Under Title 10. . . the Defense Department must report to Congress all "deployment orders," or formal instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to position U.S. forces for combat. But guidelines issued this month by Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone state that special operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations . . . before publication" of a deployment order, rendering notification unnecessary. Pentagon lawyers also define the "war on terror" as ongoing, indefinite and global in scope. That analysis effectively discards the limitation of the defense secretary's war powers to times and places of imminent combat.
Also, although the DoD is collecting human intelligence in the same manner as the CIA, it doesn't feel the need to follow any of the legal restrictions put in place to check the CIA's power:
"Operations the CIA runs have one set of restrictions and oversight, and the military has another," said a Republican member of Congress with a substantial role in national security oversight, declining to speak publicly against political allies. "It sounds like there's an angle here of, 'Let's get around having any oversight by having the military do something that normally the [CIA] does, and not tell anybody.' That immediately raises all kinds of red flags for me. Why aren't they telling us?"
So, essentially, Rumsfeld runs these special operations units without any oversight whatsoever. And he runs them anywhere in the world that he sees fit.
What we have here is not a legal institution subject to the checks and balances of a lawful democracy, but rather, an extralegal paramilitary force with no accountability to the government or law.
What we have here are death squads.