Notorious figures....

"whose links to the US government would be embarrassing if disclosed". Apparently they may be found in a new covert-operations organisation being created in the Pentagon, focused on "emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia". (Eh? And there was I thinking the new government in Georgia was a plot thought up by the CIA. Serves me right for reading the Guardian..) Interestingly, the new organisation (which has been operating for two years) seems to have been carefully designed so as to avoid both the requirement to inform Congress of intelligence operations and also to inform Congress of military deployment orders.

But then, when you don't even need to ask'em for the money, who cares?

"Pentagon officials said they established the Strategic Support Branch using "reprogrammed" funds, without explicit congressional authority or appropriation."

Well, this development may explain a hell of a lot. And it's also interesting to see that Rumsfeld placed it under a defrocked immigration officer. Mind you, some of the description there reads like the Doonesbury CIA intern:

"But four special operations soldiers who provided information for this article, directly or through intermediaries, said those assigned to work with them included out-of-shape men in their fifties and recent college graduates on their first assignments."