A rumour is swiftly spreading in the eastern Iraqi city of Kut that 40 men alleged to have looted a local textile factory are to be executed by US Marines and their heads put on spikes at the city gates.

"Don't tell them it isn't so," Lt Col Erik Grobowski of the Marines told staff of the embryonic TV Kut who asked their new "masters" how they should report the disturbing rumours on the evening news.

"We're here to kick ass and we don't want folks to think they can get away with murder, so let them think the Marines are prepared to top 'em all if they step out of line," he said.

The Marines are helping a 12-strong team to establish a television station in Kut to disseminate information about post-war Iraq - something the citizens are hungry for after being fed a diet of propaganda for years.

But the project is proving to be a difficult balancing act. The TV team are mostly former employees of the now defunct information ministry and objective newsgathering is an alien concept.

While the Iraqis are desperate for news, the US military are determined to control the way that news is delivered.

Conveniently for the military, the TV Kut team were too busy installing a new computer in their office to notice a heated demonstration going on outside led by Shi'ite clerics calling for the troops to leave town.

For most local TV stations the rowdy protest would be a lead item on the evening news, but Lt Col Bob Zangas, a civil affairs officer with the Marines, said it would be best to leave the event untouched.

"Covering the demonstration doesn't really fit into our philosophy," he admitted. "It is just likely to cause more trouble."

Lt Col Zangas, 43, who studied journalism at college, would rather his underlings exercise their new-found freedom on rather more simple and helpful items such as an amnesty call for arms to be handed into the military, an edited version of the Koran, an information bulletin on the harvest season and a warning that the military will be destroying unexploded ordnance at the airfield tonight.

But, as one member of the team explained, the credibility of the station is at stake. "In the past, the local television station was used to spread the lying promises of the regime," he said. "People will only take us seriously if we are seen to tell the truth and effect some change."

Lt Col Zangas decided to go to work on the textile factory story. "It will give us a chance to show that the military is doing its best to clamp down on vigilantes determined to ruin the peace and a chance for you to find out about fact-gathering," he told the staff. After jump-starting their pick-up truck, a four-man crew was dispatched with a 20-year old video camera to the factory. But after just half an hour of interviews, TV Kut got much closer to the truth of the story than the Marines wished.

The military burst into the factory on a tip-off that Saddam's Ba'athists and Fedayeen fighters had been using it as a weapons and food dump.

For more than four and a half hours they scoured the site, smashing down doors and breaking equipment including telephones and calculators. The resulting find was just a few Kalashnikovs owned by the factory guardsmen.

"There's no way we can broadcast this," a perturbed Lt Col Zangas, head in his hands, said as he stepped over broken glass. "This is systematic damaging of property by the Marines and it's skirting the edge of the law."

The journalists had their story but were told by the Marines that it could not be broadcast. Instead they were sent back to base to continue the more mundane tasks of editing the Koran into manageable chunks and, as religious leaders have demanded, censoring images of naked flesh from the adverts and soap operas currently being broadcast from Dubai and Kuwait.

Meanwhile unwitting locals gathered at the factory gates waiting for the afternoon's entertainment of executions to take place.

In many ways it feels like little has changed.