SALON

Thursday, Jun 17, 2010 6:18 PM UTC

House committee’s Arlington hearing scheduled for June 30

The Armed Services Committee's hearing into problems at Arlington National Cemetery will begin June 30

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Topics: Arlington National Cemetery Investigation, War Room, U.S. House of Representatives,

House committee's Arlington hearing scheduled for June 30Army Secretary John McHugh, right, with Lt. Gen. R. Steven Whitcomb, during a news conference on June 10.

The House Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing June 30th on the unfolding scandal at Arlington National Cemetery. Army Secretary John McHugh and Lt. Gen. Steven Whitcomb, the Army inspector general, are slated to testify. The hearing follows an Army report released last week confirming a year of reporting by Salon.com showing burial mix-ups and contracting irregularities at the storied burial grounds. Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., said, “It is important for us to make sure the Army is taking all of the necessary steps to keep such egregious actions from ever happening again.”

Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon based in Washington, D.C. Read his other articles here. More Mark Benjamin.

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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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