Billmon covers an L.A. Times story on U.S. propaganda in Iraq:

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military “information operations” troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a . . . small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group . . . The Lincoln Group’s Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.

Now the thrust of the story — and of the outrage expressed by the anonymous Pentagon sources who passed out the paperwork on Lincoln’s little payola scheme — is the utter hypocrisy of preaching democracy and transparency while secretly bribing journalists to print government propaganda.