This is for all you hard-working, honest people who encounter problems in your professional lives.
Case Study #1: You are accused of war crimes
You are accused of leading a group of Marines who massacred 24 innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, in retaliation for a roadside bomb that killed one of your men and injured two others. No one disputes that the civilians were killed. Testimony draws a horrific picture of gratuitous violence and Marines run amok. All the charges against your other men have been dropped, but you are now being held accountable as squad leader. What do you do?
Redefine: Massacre.
Wuterich said that he didn’t consider killing 24 people a massacre and that he did what he did to protect his Marines from what he perceived to be a threat.
“I remember there may have been women in there, may have been children in there,” he told 60 Minutes. “My responsibility as a squad leader is to make sure that none of the rest of my guys died … and at that point we were still on the assault, so no, I don’t believe [I should have stopped the attack].”
Case Study #2: You want to use a controversial weapon
Your standard Hellfire antitank missiles are simply not getting the job done, going through buildings and out the other side without causing nearly enough casualties. You’d like to use the thermobaric missiles which suck the oxygen out of the air, shred internal organs and crush victims, but the weapons have been condemned by human rights organizations. Your Ministry of Defense spends 18 months debating whether they can be used without breaking international law. What do you do?
Redefine: Thermobaric.
Eventually, they decided to get round the ethical problems by redefining the weapons.
“We no longer accept the term thermobaric [for the AGM-114N] as there is no internationally agreed definition,” said an MoD spokesman. “We call it an enhanced blast weapon.”
The redefinition has allowed British forces to use the weapons legally, but is undermined by the publicity of their manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, which markets them as thermobaric.
Case Study #3: You want to sell some junk ammunition to the US government
You’re an up and coming star in the arms trading business. You have some ancient ammunition to sell to the DOD to fulfill your $300 million government contract, but it has a ‘made in China’ problem. You check with the US State Department, but there’s no way the US government can buy ammunition made in China. What do you do?
Redefine: China.
So he had one of his financial backers, Ralph Merrill, help take care of the problem.
On or about April 25,2007, RALPH MERRILL sent an electronic communication to EFRAIM DIVEROLI and DAVID PACKOUZ, which referenced attached photographs showing methods of “cleaning wooden crates.” Attached to the communication was a photograph showing a person scraping the words “MADE IN CHINA” off of a wooden crate.
Diveroli then filled out forms for the Army indicating that the ammo was from Hungary rather than China.
Class dismissed.
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