BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. We've just heard that the view from Iraq is increasingly obscured by an intensifying wave of violence there. The message coming from administration officials here hardly clarifies things. After rockets hit the Baghdad Sheraton on Thursday, even Fox News threw up its hands in frustration. Shephard Smith. [START TAPE]

SHEPHARD SMITH: We keep hearing that the situation is, is safe enough in most areas that they'll now be able to have this election. We, you know, we get so many different stories -- I mean somebody out there's telling some huge lies. [TAPE ENDS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Meanwhile, lies or no lies, the Bush administration strives to get its message out. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon is sending a group of Iraqi-Americans and former officials from the disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority to military bases throughout the country. Their mission: to spread the good news, and also, it seems, to stem the flow of bad news. In that same Post article, we learned that the U.S. Agency for International Development is virtually ending the distribution here in the U.S. of casualty reports from a risk-assessment contractor in Iraq called Kroll Security International. Bill Arkin is a military analyst for NBC and joins us now from his home in Vermont. Bill, welcome back.

BILL ARKIN: Thank you very much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, first explain to me what Kroll Security International is and who was getting these reports before the government clamped down on their distribution.

BILL ARKIN: Well, Kroll Security is one of a retinue of contractors in Iraq responsible for administrating the occupation, and their job is to keep track of where it is and isn't safe in Iraq for the occupation authorities as well as for other contractors. And also, Kroll was tracking casualties, which is of course, one of the sore points in the Pentagon. So once it was revealed that their reports were being distributed -- voila -- the Pentagon decided that the reports should no longer circulate, and USAID made them restricted.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is there any legitimate national security reason for perhaps limiting the distribution of the Kroll reports?

BILL ARKIN: The argument, if I understand it correctly, used by the government was that by circulating something which identified those areas of security weakness in Iraq, information was being provided to the insurgency or to terrorists where they might be able to focus their efforts.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, that seems pretty legitimate.

BILL ARKIN: Well, I think it is legitimate. The question has always been, in the area of security, whether or not terrorists derive their information from open sources and from information that circulates freely, or whether or not, when they are involved in terrorism and insurgencies, they don't case their targets and choose their targets on their own. There's no question that there are types of information that they might find useful. I think that what we see instead is a dragnet which restricts all information, including information that may be of interest to the public and may help us to understand the situation in Iraq.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So let's turn now to the other part of the story -- the visits by Iraqi-Americans to U.S. military bases to spread the good news that isn't getting out otherwise. A Pentagon spokesman was quoted in the Washington Post saying he wouldn't characterize the speaking tour as unusual. How usual do you think these sorts of efforts are?

BILL ARKIN: Well, I would have to say that, ironically and unfortunately, they are usual. A lot of our tax dollars do go into this kind of government-sponsored propaganda.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now back before the war started, we had a conversation on this show about something called The Office of Global Communications. This was a White House entity that was basically in charge of coordinating the PR efforts of all the government's departments in all the regions of the world -- to keep the various players talking off the same script. Is this office still active?

BILL ARKIN: [LAUGHS] It is, Brooke. It's now called the Strategic Communications Policy Coordination Committee, and I vacillate between, on the one hand, shaking my head and saying "What is it that these guys are doing? Because our reputation and the view of us in the Arab world couldn't be worse." But on the other hand you also have to say that people's view of the United States, especially when it comes to these military matters, is going to be governed by the facts on the ground, and not by some effort on the part of a White House organization or a U.S. government organization to influence how they feel.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you have any more specifics about what the Office of Strategic Communications is actually doing right now?

BILL ARKIN: Well, what we do know is that the Strategic Communications Policy Coordination Committee at the White House level is overseeing a, a broad effort to monitor and influence the Islamic press.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How are they doing that?

BILL ARKIN: Well, part of it is covert action on the part of the CIA to either buy or plant stories in the Arab press.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What's your proof that the government is actually bribing people to put editorials and commentaries in the Arab media?

BILL ARKIN: Well, I've obtained some of the contracts associated with the programs of the Strategic Communications effort, and many of them deal with what is called, quote, "influence operations." Those are operations to influence what's going on, and many of them deal with the public diplomacy efforts, trying to influence the way people think in that part of the world.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, Bill -- you seem so sort of shocked-shocked about what the Bush administration is doing. Don't all governments do this, and, and maybe shouldn't all governments do this to some extent?

BILL ARKIN: Again, I'm torn between being shocked that we spend our money on an effort that has been proven to be fruitless, and shocked that this is a dangerous sort of slush fund in which the Bush administration is manipulating American public opinion about what is the true state of our military in Iraq and elsewhere in the world. That's the danger, is the blowback to American public opinion.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Bill, thank you very much.

BILL ARKIN: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill Arkin is an NBC News military analyst and author of the new book: Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World. [MUSIC]