— Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at Fort Benning, Ga., on Friday. He acknowledged Marines urinating on Taliban corpses or soldiers posing with the mangled bodies of suicide bombers are “a very, very small percentage of the great work that our men and women do every day across the world.” But, he added, “they show a lack of judgment, a lack of professionalism, and a lack of leadership on the part of some of our men and women in uniform.”
“These days, it takes only seconds for one picture to suddenly become an international headline. And those headlines can impact the mission we’re engaged in, they can put your fellow service members at risk, they can hurt morale, and they can damage our standing in the world.”
