The Pentagon said it is looking into a newspaper report that said the US military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by US troops to burnish the US image in Iraq.
"If all of the elements in that story were accurate, there are some things in there that I find troubling, and that's why I've asked for the facts," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.
"It was news to me," he said.
The Los Angeles Times said the articles were written by US military "information operations" troops, translated into Arabic and placed in Iraqi newspapers with the help of a defense contractor called Lincoln Group.
It said many of the articles were presented as unbiased news accounts trumpeting the work of US and Iraqi troops, denouncing the insurgents, and touting US efforts to rebuild the country.
The report, citing records and interviews, said the US military had paid Iraqi newspapers to publish dozens of the stories since the effort began this year.
Iraqi staff of the Washington-based Lincoln Group sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives in their approaches to Iraqi media outlets, masking their connection to the US military, according to the report.
Whitman said the report was troubling because the practices it described appeared to be in conflict with the Pentagon's overarching information policy. But he would not be more specific.
"That's what we want to look at: what they're doing and under what authority they believe they are executing some of these things," he said.
The United States of America...bringing something like democracy to a country near you.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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I am kind of surprised that this is news and seemingly unexpected......
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
This is about a billion times better than the death squads, secret prisons, and various corruptions that usually make up our scandals in Iraq, though, so I'm not all that concerned, to tell the truth.
(Not to mention that paying journalists to be nice to us is also better than killing them, which was apparently under consideration as our alternate plan.)
Registered: Mar 1999
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I really only found this story interesting because one of my peeves is hypocrisy and in a true democracy, which we're allegedly spending lives and treasure on, we really shouldn't be doing this sort of thing.
And it just seems to indicate to me the poor way this whole adventure has been thought through.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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Da_bang80
A few sectors short of an Empire
Member # 528
posted
Are you sure Pres. Bush isn't really Osama in disguise? or Saddam? Or Jong Il? or Adolf Hitlers clone?
Propaganda's always been a huge part of warfare. Making the good guys seem good and the bad guys seem bad. Rally the masses to your cause and whatnot. I'm not at all surprised to hear about this.
-------------------- Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I cannot accept. And the wisdom to hide the bodies of all the people I had to kill today because they pissed me off.
quote:Zaki said that if his cash-strapped paper had known that these stories were from the U.S. government, he would have "charged much, much more" to publish them.
quote:Originally posted by Da_bang80: Are you sure Pres. Bush isn't really Osama in disguise? or Saddam? Or Jong Il? or Adolf Hitlers clone?
Propaganda's always been a huge part of warfare. Making the good guys seem good and the bad guys seem bad. Rally the masses to your cause and whatnot. I'm not at all surprised to hear about this.
Of course he's not.
Just because he a terrible president doesn't necessarily mean he's a terrible human being. I don't think of him as terrible human being. I think of him as just a man with a misplaced sense of mission, who has good interpersonal skills but lacks the wherewithal to facilitate the office he currently holds.
I find many of his decisions problematic. In part because Mr. Bush seems to seems to have walled himself off from dissent.
In essence becoming the President-In-A-Bubble.
This comes from a Seymour M. Hersh article in the New Yorker
quote:----
Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.
----
The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: "I said to the President, 'We're not winning the war.' And he asked, 'Are we losing?' I said, 'Not yet.' " The President, he said, "appeared displeased" with that answer.
"I tried to tell him," the former senior official said. "And he couldn't hear it."
And Dan Froomkin, a columnist at the Washington Post ask what seem to me to be a series of good questions.
quote:What does it say about the president of the United States that he won't go anywhere near ordinary citizens any more? And that he'll only speak to captive audiences?
President Bush's safety zone these days doesn't appear to extend very far beyond military bases, other federal installations and Republican fundraisers.
Tomorrow, Bush gives a speech on the war on terror -- at the United States Naval Academy. Then he attends a reception for Republican party donors.
Today, he visits a U.S. Border Patrol office, then attends a Republican fundraising lunch.
Yesterday, he spoke at an Air Force base and a Republican fundraiser.
Before leaving the country on his recent trip to Asia, Bush made one last speech -- at an Air Force base in Alaska. A few days before that, he spoke at an Army depot in Pennsylvania. When he delivered a speech on Nov. 1 about bird flu, it was to an audience of National Institutes of Health employees.
The best chance ordinary citizens have had in ages to be anywhere near the president comes Thursday at 5 p.m., when the Bushes participate in the Pageant of Peace tree lighting ceremony on the Ellipse. But it won't exactly be a policy speech -- and anyway, tickets to that event were distributed three weeks ago.
I guess where I'm going with this line of reason is that my disappointment that there seems so little real debate on a national level about the direction of the United States wants to go in or about the direction the current adventure in Iraq is taking us or whether it's the right thing to do in the first place.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by B.J.: I find it hilarious that the LA Times is being critical of someone else not doing unbiased stories. Hipocracy at its best....
B.J.
Do elaborate on what you mean.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Oh, come on. The LA Times is one of the most biased papers out there. Just because they usually agree with *your* world view doesn't mean they're being objective.
Registered: Jul 2002
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Da_bang80
A few sectors short of an Empire
Member # 528
posted
Well, I guess I'll start calling him Bubble-Bush then. Does anyone else wonder sometimes about whether or not he's to create some law keeping him in power indefinately? Something about how he's not going to leave office until his middle-east agenda is complete. Bubble-Bush might just be a real life Emperor Palpatine. And let's not forget Darth Cheney. But that's just speculation.
-------------------- Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I cannot accept. And the wisdom to hide the bodies of all the people I had to kill today because they pissed me off.
It was actually a pretty good speech. At least the part I saw on MSNBC.
[ December 01, 2005, 11:18 AM: Message edited by: Jay the Obscure ]
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by B.J.: Oh, come on. The LA Times is one of the most biased papers out there. Just because they usually agree with *your* world view doesn't mean they're being objective.
I don't actually read the Times. Although I did work there for a period.
I would however, love to debate examples rather than the 'come on you know what it's like' critique.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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