Thus proving the old adage of "the truth hurts." It hurt the feelings of the recipients, so they retaliated against the speaker of it. Truth is an absolute defense in a slander case, and there is no slander here.

This paragraph reminded me of a 6 month sentence I served on the Army CAT preparing twice a day briefs for the Army senior leadership:

"The commander’s immediate subordinates, usually one- and two-star generals, listen to the CUA in a semi-comatose state. Each briefer has about one or two minutes to impart either information or misinformation. Usually they don’t do either. Fortunately, none of the information provided makes an indelible impact on any of the generals."
I never ceased to be amazed at how when a slide carrying some incredibly important issue would be interrupted by some star-wearing G-staffer to comment. Rarely was the comment one of substance, but most often one demonstrating amazing skills at ignoring all substantive data to focus on looking for errors in basic math or font pitch.

"Excuse me, but on slide 24 it showed a total of 67,345 troops in theater, yet on slide 32 it shows 67,348. Which one is it??"

or

"The font of the 3rd bullet down appears to be 2 points smaller than the other bullets."

Such comments were always followed my mummers of approval and congratulation by their peers sitting high above the action officers in their alcoved balcony; and general head-shaking and exchanged glances of "WTF?" between the action officers below.

Yet build a slide that points out that the decision to concentrate all CASEVAC at Bagram and Kandahar was leaving a vast territory where SOF forces were operating far outside the Golden hour and it is pulled from the brief during rehearsal. "This would embarrass both the aviation and medical generals." By all means, besides, I should have been focusing on checking the math and font pitch on my regular slides...

I know Larry and he is a very sharp officer who cares deeply about the mission. He is a bit quirky and doesn't play the game very well though. He probably overlooks critical issues like minor math and font errors as well.