The American soldier who asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the lack of armored vehicles in Iraq told TIME magazine that he formulated the question himself, yet nationally syndicated conservative radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Michael Reagan continued their attempts to discredit the question by suggesting that a reporter planted it. Rumsfeld has faced significant criticism for his response to the question, which was posed at a December 8 “town hall” meeting in Kuwait.

In an interview (dated December 20 but first posted online December 19 and to appear in the December 27 print issue) with National Guard Specialist Thomas “Jerry” Wilson, billed as the soldier's first public account of the incident, TIME magazine noted Wilson's claim that he “came up with the pointed question himself.” He asserted that Chattanooga Times Free Press embedded reporter Edward Lee Pitts urged him to ask Rumsfeld “intelligent questions,” noting that he refused to soften the language after Pitts “suggested a less brash way of asking the [armor] question.” On December 19, Editor & Publisher printed excerpts of the Wilson interview.

Wilson's explanation does not contradict Pitts's account. On December 8, Pitts wrote in an email that along with the troops, he “worked on questions to ask Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor their vehicles going into combat have. While waiting for the VIP [Rumsfeld], 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.” In his email, Pitts described his role in helping the soldiers get their questions asked -- but he also appeared to suggest that Wilson had formulated the question on his own: “The solider [sic] who asked the question said he felt good b/c he took his complaints to the top.”

Nonetheless, on December 20, conservative media figures continued to assert that Wilson had asked Rumsfeld the question at Pitts's behest. On FOX News' Hannity & Colmes, Reagan labeled Wilson a “stooge,” falsely claiming that Wilson had “admitted it [to being a stooge] himself.” On The Rush Limbaugh Show, host Limbaugh referred to Wilson's question as a “planted question about up-armoring vehicles that was rigged by a reporter.”

When news of Pitts's December 8 email first broke, numerous conservative pundits attacked Wilson and Pitts in an attempt to discredit the substance of the question. On the December 9 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Limbaugh said Pitts “planted this question with the National Guardsman. ... [who] was willing to accept the praise that was heaped on him by the media without saying a word about this.” On December 10, he attacked Pitts, claiming: “The effort here is to destroy Rumsfeld. The effort here is to destroy the U.S. military. This guy pulled a great sneak trick.” On the December 9 edition of FOX News' Hannity & Colmes, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter accused Pitts of formulating the question and then claimed that was “a little bit creepy”; co-host Sean Hannity claimed it was evidence of the media's “anti-military bias.” And in a December 15 syndicated column, Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell III said that Wilson “was actually serving as a ventriloquist dummy” for Pitts, who “whispered that question into the soldier's ear.”