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| Rumsfeld's Questioner Wrong About Unit's Armor |
| Sunday, December 19, 2004 |
The reporter who managed to get a National Guardsman serving in Iraq to question Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about why his unit's vehicles lacked sufficient armor coached the soldier using false information.
In fact, by the time Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts rehearsed Spc. Thomas "Jerry" Wilson on what to say to Rumsfeld, the Pentagon had already up-armored 97 percent of the vehicles in Thomas' 278th Regimental Combat Team, senior members of the Army's combat systems development and acquisition team said Thursday. Further undermining the premise of Pitts' question, orders to up-armor the last 20 of the 278th's 830 vehicles were already in the pipeline when he engineered the bogus inquiry.
According to the Maryville, Tenn., Daily Times - a rival to Pitts' paper - Army Maj. Gen. Stephen Speakes and Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson said during last week's Pentagon briefing that routine pre-deployment preparations before proceeding to Iraq included adding protective armor plates to the last 20 vehicles of the Tennessee-based 278th Regimental Combat Team's 830 vehicles.
"When the question was asked, 20 vehicles remained to be up-armored at that point," Gen. Speakes said, in comments completely ignored by the major media.
"We completed those 20 vehicles in the next day," he said. "In other words, we completed all the armoring within 24 hours of the time the question was asked," Gen. Speakes added.
The eye-opening revelations by Gen. Speakes and Gen. Sorenson first gained national exposure on FreeRepublic.com late Friday.
In a Dec. 8 exchange during a question-and-answer session in Kuwait, Spc. Wilson asked Rumsfeld, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?"
Unaware that Wilson's questioned was based on false information, the Defense Secretary replied, in part: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have."
Pitts later admitted that the idea to question Rumsfeld about the unit's armor was his, and that he thoroughly coached the National Guardsman on what to say.
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posted by J.R. @ 4:37:00 PM   |
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