NEW YORK, Feb 19: The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy-makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, said the New York Times on Tuesday.

The plans, which have not received final approval from the Bush administration, have stirred opposition among some Pentagon officials who say they might undermine the credibility of information that is openly distributed by the Defence Department’s public affairs officers, the Times said.

The military has long engaged in information warfare against hostile nations for instance, by dropping leaflets and broadcasting messages into Afghanistan when it was still under the Taliban rule.

But it recently created the Office of Strategic Influence, which is proposing to broaden that mission into allied nations in the Middle East, Asia and even Western Europe. The office would assume a role traditionally led by civilian agencies, mainly the State Department, the paper said.

Many administration officials worried that the United States was losing support in the Islamic world after American warplanes began bombing Afghanistan in October. Those concerns spurred the creation of the Office of Strategic Influence.

The small but well-financed Pentagon office, which was established shortly after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, was a response to concerns in the administration that the United States was losing public support overseas for its war against terrorism, particularly in Islamic countries.

The paper said that one of the office’s proposals calls for planting news items with foreign media organizations through outside concerns that might not have obvious ties to the Pentagon, officials familiar with the proposal said.

However, the Times said that “the new office has also stirred a sharp debate in the Pentagon, where several senior officials have questioned whether its mission is too broad and possibly even illegal.”

Those critics say they are disturbed that a single office might be authorized to use not only covert operations like computer network attacks, psychological activities and deception, but also the instruments and staff of the military’s globe-spanning public affairs apparatus.

Mingling the more surreptitious activities with the work of traditional public affairs would undermine the Pentagon’s credibility with the media, the public and governments around the world, critics argue. “This breaks down the boundaries almost completely,” a senior Pentagon official told the paper.

Moreover, critics say, disinformation planted in foreign media organizations, like Reuters or Agence France-Presse, could end up being published or broadcast by American news organizations.

As part of the effort to counter the pronouncements of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and their supporters, the State Department has already hired a former advertising executive to run its public diplomacy office, and the White House has created a public information “war room” to coordinate the administration’s daily message domestically and abroad.

Secretary of Defence Donald H. Rumsfeld, while broadly supportive of the new office, has not approved its specific proposals and has asked the Pentagon’s top lawyer, William J. Haynes, to review them, senior Pentagon officials said.