Edward Pitts' false concern

You will surely recall the infamous Mr. Pitts, whose intrusion into a Rumsfeld meeting with the troops has prompted shrill cries for Rumsfeld's resignation. As it turns out, the "issue" of uparmoring the vehicles of the Tennessee National Guard group that Pitts is embedded in was no issue at all.

GEN. SPEAKES: Very, very good question. The first point is that you'll recollect that one of the questions was the status of the 278 ACR; in other words, the date that we had the visit by the secretary of Defense, we had a question about their up-armoring status. When the question was asked, 20 vehicles remained to be up-armored at that point. We completed those 20 vehicles in the next day. And so over 800 vehicles from the 278 ACR were up-armored, and they are a part now of their total force that is operating up in Iraq.

Q When you say they're 100 percent up-armored, does that mean 100 percent of their requirement or 100 percent of their vehicles?

GEN. SPEAKES: Yes, what we did is there was a total of 804 vehicles that were identified as part of our up-armoring strategy. That's the wheeled vehicles that they brought north with them or drew when they got up in country. And so at this point the vehicles that they're operating, that they're driving, are all up-armored. There were a few vehicles that were put on heavy equipment transporters and moved up. The example would be, for example, the shop van, which is a large, essentially static vehicle. And it was taken up by a truck and dropped in position, but it was not operated on the way up there. So at this point, if you're in Kuwait and you're headed north up into Iraq, General Schoomaker's guidance is real clear: you're not going north of the berm, which means north of the border, in a non-up- armored vehicle, and that's our requirement. And so what you now have is an accountability process during the reception, staging and onward movement where every vehicle's accounted for and it gets up-armored or it doesn't go north.

And then the other question was, where are we with people who are operating up in sector right now? What we've been able to do is get enough up-armoring of humvees where, as I mentioned, our telephonic check yesterday with the theater said that when they need an up- armored humvee, they're using it. The estimate, frankly, just to give you an idea of the op tempo, is on any given day, about 50 percent of their humvees are in use. And so by that standard, you could see that we've got plenty of up- armored humvees -- either add-on armor or up-armored humvees -- to be able to operate to meet daily requirements. We're not satisfied with that, and that's why the guarantee is that essentially we're going to go ahead and replace every un-armored vehicle with an add-on armor or up-armored piece of equipment.

Q Are there soldiers who are in the sector right now who are scrounging around looking for extra things who aren't comfortable with what's been provided?

GEN. SPEAKES: Ma'am, I don't know the answer to that question. What I think that ought to be clear to every Soldier, is the Army's commitment to make sure that we provide them everything we can.

Q On the 278th, can you repeat this? At the time the question was asked, the planted question, the unit had 784 of its 804 vehicles armored?

GEN. SPEAKES: Here is the overall solution that you see. And what we've had to do is -- the theater had to take care of 830 total vehicles. So this shows you the calculus that was used. Up north in Iraq, they drew 119 up-armored humvees from what we call stay-behind equipment. That is equipment from a force that was already up there. We went ahead and applied 38 add-on armor kits to piece of equipment they deployed over on a ship. They also had down in Kuwait 214 stay-behind equipment pieces that were add-on armor kits. And then over here they had 459 pieces of equipment that were given level-three protection. And so when you put all this together, that comes up with 830.

Q At the time of the question -- summarize this, now -- that unit that the kid was complaining about was mostly armored?

GEN. SPEAKES: Yes. In other words, we completed all the armoring within 24 hours of the time the question was asked.

So Rumsfeld should resign because..........a reporter prompted a phoney question about a non-issue and the press blew it completely out of proportion without bothering to get one single fact straight!

Is it any wonder I have a blog I can't seem to get away from, even on weekends?

So many lies. So little time. (Hat tip to Powerline.)

UPDATE: More context.

UPDATE 2: Jason takes the Democrats to task for lying about body armor.

UPDATE 3: Donald Sensing picks up the story and points to more sources - The Tennessean and The Washington Times. Sensing also points out where the problem really lies (which has been pointed out before by others.)

Yet the Tennessean reported,
The Pentagon is spending $4.1 billion over the next year to add armor to vehicles in Iraq. [Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey] Sorenson said 35,000 of them need armored protection, of which 29,000 have been funded by Congress.
Got that? The Army's funding for armor is 6,000 vehicles short because John McCain won't choke up the money.

All of which is to say that it's business as usual on Capitol Hill: to seem rather than to be.

Stories like this tell you all you need to know about the major media. They simply don't care about the truth.