DOD Still "Paying For Play"

Planted "news" about the successful U.S. military campaign is still being provided to newspapers and other media in Iraq. I never expected us to stop the activity, but if you are gonna announce that you have stopped, you might want to actually stop.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that he was mistaken when he stated last week that the U.S. military had stopped paying Iraqi newspapers to publish pro-American articles.

Rumsfeld had said in a television interview Friday that the U.S. military had ceased paying to place positive stories in Iraqi media after criticism in Congress and press. Rumsfeld made similar comments the same day to the Council on Foreign Relations.

"I just misstated the facts," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing yesterday.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said the military command in Iraq was still paying to plant positive stories, even as U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Scott R. Van Buskirk investigates the practice.

On "The Charlie Rose Show," aired by PBS, Rumsfeld said: "The press got it, then the Congress starts calling for hearings and fussing about this and complaining about that, as though it was something terrible that happened.

"It wasn't anything terrible that happened. When we heard about it, we said, 'Gee, that's not what we ought to be doing.' And we told the people down there, and they -- they told the contractor who did it -- it wasn't a military person -- and they stopped doing that," Rumsfeld added in the interview.

Rumsfeld should have simply kept his mouth shut about the program. His logorrhea, awash with quaint-isms, usually charms the press, but he sometimes doesn't know when to quit.