General Conway vindicated over USMC IED countermeasure work...

via Free Beacon

Democrats in the Senate pounced on the story to attack then-President George W. Bush over Iraq. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, flanked by other Democratic leaders, went before news reporters the day the story came out waving the newspaper in front of cameras as proof the president was failing to take care of American troops in a war.
Much of the information for the story came from a Marine Corps scientist, Franz Gayl, who had been put in touch with the article's authors by Erin Logan, a staff member for then-senator Joe Biden (D., Del.).
Ten years later, documents and emails obtained by a former director of operations for the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab in Quantico present a contradictory picture. The documents and emails show the Democrat-driven public accounts accusing the Marines of failing to protect their troops by delaying requests for armored vehicles between February 2005 until September 2006 were false and misleading.
The facts presented by Steve Chill, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq, reveal the Corps was already engaged in rapid development of needed armored vehicles for troops in Iraq.
But instead of buying off-the-shelf armored vehicles, the Marines instead chose an MRAP made from blast-hardened M1114 vehicles, known as up-armored Humvees.
The armored Humvee development program was already the highest priority for then-Marine Corps commandant Gen. James T. Conway, nearly a year before Gayl went public with his charges to Biden and the press.

Story here.

Maybe we've always had a 5th column in the Marine Corps but this scientist and the USNI Blog are something special....General Conway was working the problem but it got sensationalized instead...