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Arlington cemetery’s lapses stun senators
Posted:
08/04/2010 2:32 AM
By DAVID GOLDSTEIN
The Star’s Washington correspondent
WASHINGTON | Under hostile questioning from senators, two former top officials of Arlington National Cemetery acknowledged Thursday that they had been aware of problems for years with unmarked and mismarked graves and mishandled remains. Former superintendent John C. Metzler said he accepted “responsibility for all my actions and for all of my team’s actions.” Metzler and former assistant superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, who answered some questions but took the Fifth Amendment on most, had been subpoenaed to appear at the hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Operations subcommittee. Both men were pummeled with questions about a futile, 10-year multimillion-dollar effort to digitize cemetery recordkeeping. Senators appeared amazed to hear that the cemetery still uses index cards in most cases to identify graves.Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who led the hearing, chided Metzler for not sounding “an alarm” in 2005 after urns with unidentified cremated remains were found in a cemetery landfill.
