Truth Trickles Out: Unit Cited in Question
to Rumsfeld Had Armor
The truth trickles out. "It now appears that the premise of the question that caused an uproar around Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was, so to speak, off base," FNC's Brit Hume noted Tuesday night in reminding viewers how two weeks ago National Guardsman "Thomas Wilson said to Rumsfeld, quote, 'our vehicles are not armored, we do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north,' into Iraq." But, Hume relayed, "according to senior Army officers, about 800 of the 830 vehicles in Wilson's Army regiment, the 278th Calvary, had already been up-armored" at the time of his widely publicized question. Some Hearst newspapers reported that fact last week and since then it has trickled up the media stream into NewsMax, the Washington Times and FNC, but not the other networks or major newspapers.
The night of the December 15 Pentagon briefing on the armor situation, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather was oblivious to the revelation as he delivered this short item which repeated the National Guardsman's charge: "The U.S. Army said today it will spend more than $4 billion in the next few months in a belated effort to ensure that all its vehicles in Iraq have armor to protect troops inside. The promise came one week after a soldier complained to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld about having to scrounge in trash heaps for makeshift armor."
At that briefing, Army Major General Stephen Speakes, U.S. Army G-8, Force Development, also noted that the remaining vehicles in the Tennessee's National Guard unit were up-armored within 24 hours of the question being posed. Other networks ran clips of Speakes' explanation of the levels of armor and how they are applied, but nothing on the premise of the question which Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts boasted of placing with the National Guardsman.
In his e-mail back to his editors after the event in Kuwait, Pitts leveled the charge about armor in recounting that in talking with members of the Guard unit with which he was embedded, "before hand we worked on questions to ask Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor their vehicles going into combat have. While waiting for the VIP, I went and found the Sgt. in charge of the microphone for the question and answer session and made sure he knew to get my guys out of the crowd."
For more on the Pitts question, see the December 10 CyberAlert: www.mediaresearch.org
For his e-mail in its entirety, as posted by Romenesko on the Poynter Institute site: poynter.org
For the transcript of the December 15 DOD session, "Special Defense Department Briefing on Uparmoring HMMWV," see: www.defenselink.mil
Hume seemingly picked up the disclosure from Greg Pierce's December 21 "Inside Politics" column, which cited a NewsMax.com article:
...."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."
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For the Sunday, December 19 NewsMax.com article, "Rumsfeld's Questioner Wrong About Unit's Armor," attributed to "Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com staff," go to: www.newsmax.com
In fact, that Friday Maryville newspaper article was not original and was attributed to "wire services": www.thedailytimes.com
Hearst Newspapers reporter Stewart Powell deserves the credit for first recounting what Speakes revealed deep into the December 15 briefing. I checked a bunch of Hearst papers for the story and couldn't find it in several, but did locate it in the December 16 Beaumont Enterprise. An excerpt from, "Unit's armor finished up after query of Rumsfeld," the story by Powell who works out of Hearst's Washington bureau:
Within 24 hours after a low-ranking soldier challenged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about armor shortages in Iraq, protective armor had been added to every vehicle in the soldier's unit, senior Army officers said Wednesday.
Army Maj. Gen. Stephen Speakes and Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, senior members of the Army's combat systems development and acquisition team at the Pentagon, said protective armor plates were added to the last 20 vehicles of the Tennessee-based 278th Regimental Combat Team's 830 vehicles shortly after the confrontation with Rumsfeld.
The generals said it was part of routine, pre-deployment preparations in Kuwait before the unit proceeded into Iraq.
"When the question was asked, 20 vehicles remained to be up-armored at that point," Speakes told a Pentagon briefing. "We completed those 20 vehicles in the next day....In other words, we completed all the armoring within 24 hours of the time the question was asked."...
Speakes said Wilson might not have known that the Army was working under "an existing program" to add armor to the last of the unit's vehicles when he questioned Rumsfeld. By the time Wilson's unit headed into Iraq, Speakes said it had 252 vehicles with bolt-on armor plate produced as $7,000-to-$11,000 add-on kits in the United States and shipped to Kuwait for installation.
Another 459 vehicles had less protective, locally fabricated armor plate installed by GIs in Kuwait -- armor known to GIs as "hillbilly armor." Wilson's question referred to that type of ad hoc armor. The unit picked up another 119 armored Humvees upon arrival in Iraq that had been left behind by departing combat units, Speakes said....
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