Propaganda: America's psychological warriors

By Floyd J. McKay
Special to The Times

Aficionados of the movie "Casablanca" will recall the roguishly corrupt police inspector Louis Renault, played by Claude Rains, who upon "discovering" that gambling was taking place at Rick's club, proclaimed that he was "shocked, shocked."

You had to think of that when the White House announced that it, too, was "shocked" that a Pentagon contractor was bribing Iraqi journalists and posting propaganda in Iraqi newspapers without identifying the source.

The people "shocked, just shocked" were the same people who paid at least two American journalists to write pro-administration columns and produced for compliant local television stations so-called "news reports" that were nothing more than propaganda.