SALON

Wednesday, May 5, 2010 11:06 AM UTC

Arlington National Cemetery chief is out

John Metzler Jr.'s departure comes after Salon revealed numerous burial mistakes and contracting irregularities

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Topics: Arlington National Cemetery Investigation, War Room,

Salon’s Mark Benjamin reported late last night that John Metzler Jr., the superintendent of Arlington National Cemetery for the past two decades, is stepping down — possibly under pressure from Army Secretary John McHugh.

Mark has done some exhaustive reporting on the national cemetery over the past year, breaking numerous stories about misplaced graves, unidentified bodies and contracting irregularities and prompting the Army to launch an investigation. You can read all of Mark’s Arlington work here.

 

Steve Kornacki

Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More Steve Kornacki.

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Salon began investigating burial operations at Arlington National Cemetery in the spring of 2009. In a series of reports since, then Salon has exposed cases in which officials found unknown remains in graves that were supposed to be empty, buried a service member on top of another, and discovered

an urn in a dirt landfill, only to mark it as "unknown" and quietly bury it in an isolated corner of the cemetery. The series also documented hundreds of missing headstones in one historic section of the cemetery.
In response to these and other revelations, the Army launched an investigation. In June 2010, John Metzler Jr., Arlington's superintendent, and his deputy, Thurman Higginbotham were stripped of their their authority, and Army Secretary John McHugh appointed a commission led by former Sens. Bob Dole, R-Kansas, and Max Cleland, D-Ga., to oversee the cemetery.

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