<"I suspect [with] his previous flight experience, "

The reporter just assumed that the [with] should be in there?



That's an old reporter's tool when someone misspeaks or leaves out a word in a direct quote. In this case, the Navy Captain apparently left out the word 'with' so the reporter added it for clarity.

One famous example is:

"That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."
- Neil Armstrong as he stepped on the moon

Without the [a], the quote doesn't make much sense. Alternatively, reporters and editors sometimes use [sic] to represent a grammatical error that is part of a direct quote to show the mistake was made by the speaker, not the writer.

Of course, it's a tool that can be abused, as it might have been last week when [gay] was inserted into a statement by Senator Santorum when he wasn't speaking specifically about gays at the time.

If they want to, some commonly reporters' tricks can be used to make anyone sound bad. Consider the following example (deliberately exaggerated to show the point):

"Anyone who says 'blacks are inferior' is blatantly wrong. There is nothing about race that determines intelligence and character."

"Blacks are inferior", he said. He also stated that race "determines intelligence and character."

Two very different statements, aren't they?