Propaganda

The museum visitors file past black-and-white photos from the early 20th century showing Tibetan children in filthy rags begging for food on the streets of Lhasa. They click their tongues at a display case with a wooden cage for imprisoning disobedient serfs and wooden blocks used for crushing fingers when the cage wasn't punishment enough.

Iran's Intelligence Ministry detained several journalists outside Tehran for allegedly receiving money from abroad, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. The ministry said in a statement that the journalists, who were arrested in an unspecified province, allegedly confessed that they had received money from abroad to publish materials deemed to be against national security interests, IRNA reported.

Worlds apart, but a few clicks away on the remote control, Western and Middle Eastern media presented starkly opposing views of the standoff over Iran's capture and release of 15 British sailors and marines. According to CNN, the 14 men and one woman had been subjected to "mind games, isolation, aggressive interrogations" at the hands of the Revolutionary Guard after their capture while on patrol last month in the Persian Gulf.

Since the end of the Vietnam war, the military's public affairs officials have tried to rebuild the Defense Department's credibility by putting distance between themselves and Pentagon efforts that use deception, propaganda and other methods to influence foreign populations. A 2004 memo by Gen. Richard B.

Venezuelan folk music, a Cuban documentary and heavy doses of government propaganda glorifying "21st century socialism" highlighted the first day of a new television channel that on Monday took over airspace of this nation's oldest and most popular station, a frequent critic of leftist President Hugo Chavez.

In March, he was declared captured. In May, he was declared killed, and his purported corpse was displayed on state-run TV. But on Wednesday, Abu Omar Baghdadi, the supposed leader of an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Iraq, was declared nonexistent by U.S. military officials, who said he was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terrorist organization.

lima, peru -- The appearance of donated cans of tuna with labels containing the image of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and a condemnation of the Peruvian government as "heartless" caused a political storm here Monday in the midst of an already controversial earthquake relief effort. "One has to ask who is behind this," President Alan Garcia said after a Lima newspaper reported that the polemical tins were being distributed in the quake-ravaged region south of the capital.

Tune in to TV Marti, and you can see anything from global news and hard-hitting documentaries to a sitcom with a bearded revolutionary wreaking havoc on a mythical island shaped a lot like Cuba. But after 16 years and nearly $200 million from U.S. taxpayers, a question nags at its critics and even some who support the pro-democracy mission of the propaganda outlet: Is anyone in Cuba watching?

A secret U.S. military program that pays Iraqi newspapers to publish articles favorable to the American mission appears to violate a 2003 Pentagon directive, according to a newly declassified document released Thursday. The information campaign run by U.S. troops in Baghdad and a Washington-based private contractor is the subject of a high-level military investigation. Last month, the top U.S. general in Iraq said a preliminary investigation into the program had found it did not violate U.S.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Friday criticized a U.S. military program that pays Iraqi newspapers to plant stories favorable to the American mission, and mistakenly said the Pentagon had shut down the program shortly after its existence was revealed. In his most specific comments thus far about the information operations program, -- carried out by U.S. troops and a private contractor -- Rumsfeld said the U.S.