Covert Operations: "The Pentagon promptly denied the report, but the Post’s reporting seems to confirm recent allegations that the Bush Administration is heavily employing covert operations, run through the Defense Department to evade congressional oversight."

...

"Should the United States undertake operations that, if disclosed, endanger national security? Rarely, if ever, for two reasons:

• First, covert operations are almost certain to be disclosed. Covert operations violate the first rule of life in Washington: Don’t ever do anything that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post. The story by Bart Gellman helps drive the point home that, more often than not, covert operations eventually become public knowledge.
• Second, covert operations often fail because they are covert. Shielding programs from Congressional oversight allows for small programs to devolve into gigantic, often bizarre, schemes that would never pass muster with Congress. Writing about the Iran-Contra affair, Gregory Treverton warned of the danger from centralizing White House control over covert operations. “Excluding the designated congressional overseers,” Treverton wrote, “also excluded one more ‘political scrub,’ one more source of advice about what the American people would find acceptable.”

Given that the challenge posed by AlQaeda is, largely, an ideological bid for the hearts and minds of millions of Muslims perhaps one more political scrub might not be such a bad idea."

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)