The Workday Liberal

According to Donald Rumsfeld on a couple of occasions last week, once he became aware that the Pentagon was planting positive stories in local Iraqi media, he ordered the practice to stop.

"When we heard about it we said, `Gee, that's not what we ought to be doing,' and told the people down there,"

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 [Charlie Rose] show.

Yet today we hear that what the secretary of defense said last week is actually no longer operative.

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.

We must draw one of two conclusions here. Either the U.S. military command in Iraq is willfully disobeying an order by the secretary of defense, or secretary Rumsfeld lied repeatedly about this program being discontinued. Given the track record of this administration I draw the conclusion that Rummy was being deceptive.

How odd that in the course of decrying the loss of the propaganda war to our enemies that Mr. Rumsfeld would wind up shooting himself in the foot for the whole world to note. The reason we take so many black eyes in the propaganda war is precisely because time and again our leaders are shown to be absolutely devoid of honesty.

Even as they whine about losing the propaganda war, they prove to be dishonest!