The Los Angeles Times is reporting a rift is growing within the Pentagon over the military distributing misinformation to the media as part of psychological operations. The paper has uncovered incidences where the military has sent spokespersons to major news networks to deliberately lie about military operations in Iraq in an effort to deceive the Iraqi resistance. In one case, on Oct. 14, a Marine spokesperson appeared on CNN from Fallujah and said “Troops crossed the line of departure.” CNN was soon reporting the battle for Fallujah had begun. In fact it wouldn’t begin for another three weeks. The military claimed it wanted to see how Iraqi fighters responded to the so-called news report. Several top officials told the LA Times that they see a danger of blurring what are supposed to be well-defined lines between the stated mission of military public affairs and psychological and information operations. One senior defense official told the paper “The movement of information has gone from the public affairs world to the psychological operations world. What’s at stake is the credibility of people in uniform.” But the Bush administration has defended the use of py-ops. One official told the paper, “Information is part of the battlefield in a way that it’s never been before. We’d be foolish not to try to use it to our advantage.”