Last week I discovered an astonishing piece of news. According to The Associated Press, The Lincoln Group, a public relations firm that works for American interests in the Middle East, has been awarded yet another multi-million-dollar contract.

Why do I have a problem with this? Last year, when I still thought Iraq had the potential to become a democracy, I wrote a column in which I described how our government undermined that potential by contracting the Lincoln Group to produce unattributed articles to rally support for the war effort.

Here’s how it worked: Translating “news” stories and analyses from the Pentagon’s P.R. department into Arabic, Lincoln would then hand off the stories to Iraqis, who were actually subcontractors. They would then approach an Iraqi newspaper publisher, claiming to be authentic journalists. The result was the publication of articles favorable to Americans, published by Iraqis, but in truth written by Americans. In others words, we planted stories. To paraphrase further, we are good at lying, at least until we’re caught.

I have nothing against an information war; getting out the proper message is an increasingly important part of attaining victory in today’s conflicts. A major reason Hezbollah emerged victorious in the recent war is because it convinced the Israeli and Lebanese people that they were, in fact, victorious.

I have no problem with spreading our message, provided it’s truthful and properly attributed. After the Lincoln incident was uncovered, it broke yet another bond of trust between the Iraqis and Americans. If you read an Iraqi newspaper with pro-American articles now, how could you be sure it wasn’t paid by for by the military?

However, the Lincoln Group is not the only entity that should have been held accountable for this debacle.

An initial call from the Senate to investigate the matter was boiled down months later into a mere internal investigation. At its conclusion, the Pentagon “had concluded that the U.S. military was not violating U.S. law or Pentagon guidelines with the information operations campaign,” according to www.sourcewatch.org. No policy changes were announced, no apologies were given, not even a half-hearted attempt to address the hypocrisy of America’s actions to the Iraqi people. Illegal or not, it doesn’t undermine the fact that the strategy was tactically stupid.

What is truly frustrating is that our approach to the information war has only gotten worse.

Iraqi journalists can no longer criticize their own government. Yes, you heard it right: Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government has written and passed laws – many of them paraphrasing Saddam Hussein’s old penal code to the point of plagiarism – that make it illegal to criticize the government. The laws passed, of course, without as much as a peep from our administration. Has it really gotten this bad? Has the time arrived to put Maliki in the same shameful category as Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Ahmed Chalabi?

Every day, Iraq takes a step down the chaotic spiral of anarchy, and when the people look for information to help keep them grounded, they get propaganda or contraband. I wonder why it seems so hard to win hearts and minds.