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U.S. Still Planting Stories in Iraq Media
By ROBERT BURNS
AP MilitaryWriter
02/21/06 "AP" -- -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was
mistaken when he said last week that the U.S. military had
stopped the controversial practice of paying to plant stories in
the Iraqi news media, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday.
Bryan Whitman, a senior spokesman, said Rumsfeld had been
incorrect in saying during an TV interview Friday that the
practice had been halted in the wake of negative publicity in
the United States. Rumsfeld made a similar assertion during a
speech at the Council on Foreign Relations that same day.
Whitman noted that Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in
Iraq, has said he saw no reason to stop the practice.
An official inquiry into the program by Navy Rear Adm. Scott Van
Buskirk has been completed but its results have not been
publicly released.
In his speech, Rumsfeld raised the issue as an example of the
U.S. military command in Baghdad seeking "nontraditional means"
to get its message to the Iraqi people in the face of a
disinformation campaign by the insurgents.
"Yet this has been portrayed as inappropriate — for example, the
allegations of someone in the military hiring a contractor and
the contractor allegedly paying someone to print a story — a
true story — but paying to print a story," he said during his
speech.
"The resulting explosion of critical press stories then causes
everything — all activity, all initiative — to stop, just
frozen," he added.
In an appearance Friday on PBS' "The Charlie Rose Show,"
Rumsfeld said he had not known about the practice of paying for
news stories before it became a subject of critical publicity in
the United States.
"When we heard about it we said, `Gee, that's not what we ought
to be doing,' and told the people down there," he said.
Although "it wasn't anything terrible that happened," Pentagon
officials ordered a halt to the practice and "they stopped doing
it," he added, according to a transcript provided by the show.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press
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