by Ted Gup

About the author: Ted Gup, a journalism professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, is author of The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA.

It was a bad week for the truth. On February 19, 2002, it was reported that the Pentagon had set up an “Office of Strategic Influence” whose mission included the dissemination of half truths and lies to foreign reporters and others in the effort to sway public opinion, particularly in the Muslim world. Only two days later, as it happens, authorities received a gruesome videotape of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl having his throat slashed. The two events had nothing to do with each other, of course. Yet, in a sense they are connected. Pearl lost his life...