Delftsman

Rest of the story

I posted about this before, and it seems that the reporter that fed the young dupe soldier the question didn't even try to get the facts right. He saw an opportunity to get Rumsfeld in a "gotcha" that would raise a furor with the sheeple folks back on the home front, and he took it. Like the CBS fake documents fiasco however, it seems that it's coming back to bite the reporter in the posterior.

From the Washington Times:(emphasis mine)

"The reporter who managed to get a National Guardsman serving in Iraq to question Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld about why his unit's vehicles lacked sufficient armor coached the soldier using false information," NewsMax.com reports.

"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," NewsMax said.

"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.

Just another case of the MSM trying to move their own anti-war/administration agenda.