Two separate events involving loss of life; one tragic, one rejoiced, carry more similarities than first impressions might suggest.

One is Linda Norgrove an innocent aid worker killed in Afghanistan while going about her daily life trying help the Afghan people. The other is the mass murderer Osama Bin Laden.

The major overlap in both of these episodes is the way the American military PR machine botched the announcements of how these events unfolded.

These two very different scenarios were both handled very badly by an information machine too keen to get the good news story out with being in full possession of the facts or in the case of Linda's death trying to cover up a mistake.

At first it was claimed that she was blown up by terrorist grenade. Then the story was changed and she was killed by a suicide bomber eventually the US commander of the mission held his hand up and admitted that Linda had in fact been shot by one his own men by mistake.

Now tragic mistakes happen and this indeed was a tragedy but hostage rescues are dangers exercises to undertake and more often go wrong than they do right.

The mistake the military PR machine made was not waiting for the full facts to emerge before disseminating the story. When officials from government start back tracking and changing the truth they are guilty of at worse cover up of an unpleasant truth and at best incompetence of how to effectively communicate a story. This episode caused a lot of unnecessary grief for the Norgrove family who not only had to deal with her tragic death but had to put up with the uncertainty of how and why she died.

To have this happen once is unfortunate but to basically make the same mistake twice shows that whoever is running the US military's PR is not exactly on the ball.

In similar circumstances to the Norgrove case a helicopter raid on a compound although granted with a very different end mission in sight.

This operation was a success and ended up with Osama Bin Laden being shot and killed by US forces.

But rather than wait and get the true story across of what happens, a series of half truths were communicated to the world's media followed by the inevitable contradictions leaving the whole episode clear as mud.

What really happened? First he was killed in fire fight, then he was killed with his wife who he was allegedly using as a human shield. Then it emerges that this too was nonsense and that in fact he was executed, unarmed.

Now the moral rights and wrongs of this course of action are sure to be debated. But what cannot be doubted is that the good news element, the death of the world's most wanted man, was almost wrecked by inept PR machine who could not wait to get the story out even though it was only liberally concerned with the facts.

In the information age there is a pressure for instant information like never before, in even the most top secret of operations information cannot be kept from the media for long.

But bad information causes more information than no information a basic simple rule of effective public relations that the US military have failed to grasp. It causes uncertainty and only serves  conspiracy theorists not the truth.