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Pentagon plants stories in Iraqi
press
BY A CORRESPONDENT
2nd December 2005
The Pentagon has received a slap in
its face with American media reporting
that the US military was bribing Iraqi
press to plant favourable stories.
Reports said that dozens of reports
which appeared in the Iraqi press have
been actually written by American
soldiers at the Pentagon.
On Wednesday, Los Angeles Times
reported that the Pentagon had hired a
PR firm based in US to place its own
home-cooked stories in Irqi press. The
PR firm Lincoln promptly translated
the English "reports" to Arabic and
got them printed in Iraqi media to
cultivate a pro-US opinion stream. The
stories which appeared under Iraqi
bylines were actually penned by US
military staff.
Some "friendly" Iraqi journalists even
used to receive hundreds of dollars
month from Pentagon as "stipend" to
write positive stories about the US
military presence in Iraq, adds the
New York Times.
White House seemed concerned by the
apparent underhand action by Pentagon
in Iraq. White House official Scott
McClellan said that the White House
will seek more information on this
from the Pentagon. Pentagon officials
have not made any comment on the
issue.
The allegations come as yet another
embarrassment to the Bush
administration, whose popularity has
sunk in recent polls.
Without admitting anything specific, a
Pentagon official said in Iraq that
rebel leader Zarqawi too was using the
media to further his ends. "He is
lying to the people; we don't lie" he
said, tacitly admitting that the
military is talking to the press in
Iraq.
Recently, there have been reports that
the Central Intelligence Agency was
running secret prisons in Eastern
Europe and Asia to house detainees in
the War On Terror.
BY A CORRESPONDENT |
