"Bush administration officials and U.S. news media chiefs met on a rain-swept Civil War battlefield on Wednesday to honor four American journalists who died in Iraq and Pakistan while reporting on the U.S. war on terrorism. ... Honored were Daniel Pearl ... and three journalists who traveled with U.S. fighting units in Iraq this year -- Michael Kelly of the Atlantic Monthly and Washington Post, David Bloom of NBC and Elizabeth Neuffer of the Boston Globe. ... Not mentioned were the five journalists killed by U.S. forces in Iraq, or the Pentagon's unwillingness to release details about its shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad that killed two reporters and the Aug. 17 death of a Reuters TV cameraman, Mazen Dana. (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul) Wolfowitz declined to comment. 'I suspect what's happening here is that the Pentagon wants very much to continue its successful cultivation of U.S. journalists that began with the embeds,' John Stauber, co-author of the book Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, told Reuters in a telephone interview. ... Last month, top U.S. Army officers admitted using news coverage by embeds to achieve military goals in Iraq. A day before the April 8 shelling of the Palestine Hotel, tanks from the same unit carried embedded reporters on a "thunder run" through Baghdad to show the world that the city was under U.S. control."

The United States must drastically increase and overhaul its public relations efforts to salvage its plummeting image among Muslims and Arabs abroad, says a panel chosen by the Bush administration. "Hostility toward America has reached shocking levels," states a new report by the United States Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World. The report recommends a new White House office for foreign propaganda. In our book Weapons of Mass Deception we examine the failure of such efforts, which were predicted by observers such as Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News, who two years ago said "the United States lost the public relations war in the Muslim world a long time ago. They could have the prophet Muhammad doing public relations and it wouldn't help."