Pentagon Probing U.S. Propaganda

Rumsfeld Unsure If Practice Of Planting Stories In Iraq Papers Has Ceased

(CBS/AP) 
Rumsfeld also said he had no problems with a deal that would let a United Arab Emirates company take over operations at six major U.S. seaports. The plan has met with stiff political opposition in Congress.

He called the UAE a good military partner in the fight against terror.

"Nothing changes with respect to security under the contract. The Coast Guard is in charge of security, not the corporation," Rumsfeld said.

Earlier Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Rumsfeld had been incorrect in his statements Friday that payments for positive stories in the Iraqi media had been stopped after negative publicity in the United States.

An official inquiry into the program by Navy Rear Adm. Scott van Buskirk has been completed, but its results have not been released.

In his New York speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign-policy think tank, 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 said, according to a transcript provided by the show.