Did a Reporter Set Secretary Rumsfeld Up with a Scripted Question?

The Drudge Report has a copy of an internal memo by Edward Lee Pitts, reporter for the Chattanooga Times-Free Press, in which Mr. Pitts boasts of prompting that Tennessee National Guard soldier to put Donald Rumsfeld on the spot the way he did. In other words, that soldier did not ask that question about the armor on the Humvees independently. The reporter put him up to it.

We have three issues here:

1. Did that reporter engage in improper management of the news?
2. Was the soldier's expressed concern accurate, or did the soldier and/or the reporter make it up out of the whole cloth?
3. Is the soldier's complaint valid?

In case you missed it, the soldier complained about having to scavenge for scrap metal and glass to improvise better armor for their Humvees, and he wanted to know why the Humvees didn't come already armored. And when he had asked that question, the soldiers around him gave a loud cheer. That cheer is the most important piece of evidence that that soldier did not make up what he said--because Mr. Pitts did not admit to inducing any of the other soldiers to give any loud cheer, nor has anyone else stepped forward even to suggest this. If that soldier had made anything up, the other soldiers would have greeted his remark with absolute silence. That's how a crowd usually greets an utterance that is outlandish and beyond their understanding. Instead they cheered--so it's a concern that they shared.

Still, this goes to show how low this nation's press corps has sunk. During WWII, such a thing would never have happened. No reporter would ever have put a soldier or seaman up to bypassing his chain of command and ragging on the SecDef or CINCLANT or CINCPAC or SHAEF or any other ranking military or civilian leader.

Quite aside from these two issues, however, is the question of validity. In point of fact, any soldier using government-issue weapons and armor has soon learned to improvise improvements to his weapons and armor from whatever he could find in the field. Already Rush Limbaugh has heard from veterans of Operation Overlord ("D-Day") who describe how they used to cut up the German beach obstacles to improvise front-mounted blades on their tanks so that they could drive their tanks through hedgegrowth more readily. They didn't wait for the Pentagon to send them "better equipment"--they made their equipment better from whatever they had ready to hand. And in fact, I predict with 95% confidence that if anyone were to search diligently enough any soldier's mail that might survive from the legions of Gaius Marius, the seven-times consul of Rome who reinvented the whole "GI" concept for the Roman Army, they might find similar tales of improvisation during the Jugurthine and Germanic Wars of 110-100 BC.

So is their complaint valid? Not necessarily. Of course, Old Rummy wasn't going to blow them off--he's a first-rate guy, and those are his boys, and he'll do what he can reasonably do for them, and so will the President. But to suggest that our army is ill-equipped, and to judge that just from this complaint, is, frankly, child's talk.