This post is not intended to be a "slam" on the American military or Pentagon, but simply an address to a common wartime problem.

Whether it is called PR, propoganda, spin, or misinformation, military use of information is often confusing to the western recipient.
During combat, all information released to the public by the military is aimed, either directly or indirectly, at the enemy consumption.
This often causes the public to become irate over obvious "errors" or omissions that seem to be a fault in the military command or way of thinking.

I already addressed one example in another post:
The military will always understate enemy effectiveness in combat.
Because of this fact, we hear that Iraqi's can't shoot down our helicoptors..... they simply fall out of the sky at three times the expected accident and breakdown rate when we try to use them in combat.
This is not true of course, but we want the enemy to think it is.
The reason for this is simple, we don't want to encourage more enemy to try and bring one down.
These sorts of "white lies" are relatively harmless in the long run, but, it does damage the public trust in a very real way.
Yet a "smart" American, can usually guess at the factual picture if one bears in mind what the military is attempting to do.

When someone in the military announces that "they think" Saddam is dead, smile to yourself and ignore it.
When we display Saddams body to the world, he is dead, until then, we are simply trying to tell the enemy, "Hey, you can give up now, we already won!"
Does it work? Not often, but that doesn't mean we won't keep trying!
Even if Saddam comes on the air with the current days newspaper, someone in the military is going to say, "Ahhh.... I don't think it is him, if it's not a double, he must have made a lot of videos with false dates on newspapers to make us think he was still alive.... cause he's probably dead..... so they might as well give up."
See how it works folks?
Good.

Sometimes, this diffusion of information is a very important aspect of combat:
Yesterday, a UK fighter went down in Baghdad.
The reporters heard about it and ran for the nearest Pentagon spokesperson who answered, "Nope, all planes are accounted for, we are not missing any."
The reporters stopped and thought, "Well, wait a minute, the Iraqi's say that they shot one down."
So they went back to the reporters in Iraq, who, sure enough, had photos of the plane itself, and the pilot was captured!
When the reporters returned to the Pentagon?
"Nope, never happened."
So why would this occur?
For what insane reason would a Pentagon spokesperson look a reporter in the eye and lie?
For what gain?
Well, it is really quite simple from a military point of view.
That plane carried a pilot, and a co-pilot.
If they had the co-pilot, dead or alive, they would have shown him.
And since they didn't, the military assumes that there is a young man behind enemy lines, trying to stay alive.
If we can say, "Nope, there is no way that he is there.", it may cause any number of people to stop looking for him..... bettering his chance of floating down the river to safety.
Is it a good ruse?
No, but it is all that young man has.
A smart western viewer can easily see through this if one looks at the problem from the military viewpoint.