Common Dreams
by William Fisher

12/05/05

"Congressional leaders who have often touted Iraq's new 'free press' as a sign of progress in that troubled country were angered by the Pentagon's admission last week that it has been planting and paying for Iraqi newspapers to publish 'good news stories' written by the military and 'placed' in Iraqi media by a Washington-based public relations firm. ... Earlier, Secretary Rumsfeld, under intense criticism, closed the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence, a short-lived operation to provide news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign journalists in an effort to influence overseas opinion. Now, critics say, some of the proposals of that discredited office are quietly being resurrected elsewhere in the military and in the Pentagon...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1205-33.htm


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp