New allegations that the U.S. military has been running a secret campaign to plant articles in Iraqi newspapers should come as no surprise to those paying attention.

For those who missed it, the Los Angeles Times reported in an articleWednesday that the Pentagon had secretly paid Iraqi journalists to publish stories written by U.S. soldiers. The report said the one-sided stories were falsely presented as unbiased accounts produced by independent journalists. The articles were allegedly translated into Arabic by the Lincoln Group, a U.S. defense contractor that also helped to place the articles in Baghdad newspapers.

It's no wonder that U.S. military officials are using these loathsome tactics to manipulate information in Iraq. After all, they watched (in admiration?) as the Bush administration distributed print and video "news" stories in the United States without identifying the federal government as the source. Perhaps our military officials were taking notes as Bush operatives paid American journalists to promote administration policies, a practice since renounced as "covert propaganda" by the Government Accountability Office.

Besides, this isn't the first time the military has moved to blur the boundaries between military public affairs and psychological / information operations in an attempt to promote warfare in Iraq. It isn't well known, but the CIA and Pentagon employed similar tactics - part espionage, part PR campaign - to sell the war to a wary U.S. public as far back as 2001.

Don't believe it? Then please read the excellent article by James Bamford in the recent edition of Rolling Stone magazine. Titled "The Man Who Sold The War," this article pulls back the curtains on the shameful, and largely successful, efforts by the CIA and Pentagon to manipulate the media in order to achieve their pro-war goals.

The article focuses on the work of "a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon." Read it and you'll learn that Rendon's firm, the Rendon Group, is the leader in the strategic field known as "perception management." You'll also learn that the Pentagon awarded Rendon a $16 million contract "to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda."

According to Bamford, the Rendon Group "has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help 'create the conditions for the removal of (Saddam) Hussein from power.' "

Bamford writes: "By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas - knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly."

The Lincoln Group's covert campaign to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media and to pay friendly Iraqi journalists monthly stipends appears to be part of this same manipulative scheme. Incredibly, some U.S. military officials don't seem to be bothered by this latest attack on journalism in a country where thousands of U.S. soldiers have died in the name of democracy.

Daniel Kuehl, an information operations expert at National Defense University at Ft. McNair in Washington, told the L.A. Times, "I don't think that there's anything evil or morally wrong with it."

If enough others feel the same way, perhaps Rendon's vision of the future will come to pass. It's a future in which Washington's "security-intelligence" complex will be authorized to present false information to the media in the name of patriotism. It's a future in which Rendon and others trained in information warfare will "control the context" of the news to suit the government.

If that prospect doesn't alarm you, you've simply underestimated the critical importance of a free press in a democracy. Thomas Jefferson was not so deceived. He was not exaggerating when he said "..were it left to me to decide, whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

Tim Leslie is a freelance writer in Corvallis, Ore., and the editor of iCorvallis, a community journalism Web site.