Wiping the historical record clean as it happens

The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books?-free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it ?'covert ops'?-it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's ?'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the cincs"?-the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)