Grave offenses at Arlington National Cemetery

[babylonsister]

Grave offenses at Arlington National Cemetery

A criminal investigation and allegations of misplaced bodies and shoddy care have roiled the famous burial ground

Editor's note: This is the first article in a special Salon investigation of America's renowned cemetery.

By Mark Benjamin

Reuters/Larry Downing

A U.S. Army soldier visits the gravestone of Sgt. Ryan P. Baumann, 24, of Great Mills, Md., in Section 60 of the Arlington National Cemetery. Baumann died in 2008 in Afghanistan.


July 16, 2009 | An elegant white sign at Arlington National Cemetery informs visitors they are inside "our nation's most sacred shrine." Run under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army, Arlington is the final resting place of John and Robert Kennedy, Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Earl Warren, and the nation's military royalty from the Civil War to the Iraq war. More than 4 million people visit Arlington every year to tour the legendary grave sites, which include those of "Maltese Falcon" author Dashiell Hammett and big-band leader Glenn Miller, and watch a specially trained U.S. infantry soldier march silently in guard of the Tomb of the Unknowns. Arlington shelters the remains of more than 320,000 service members and holds nearly 30 new funerals a day. As visitors head out into the sacred grounds, the cemetery asks, "Please conduct yourselves with dignity and respect at all times."

Behind the pristine lawns, the dignity of, and respect for, Arlington National Cemetery are tattered. An Army investigation this year found that the de facto boss of the cemetery, Deputy Superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, made false statements to Army investigators as they probed what they later classified as wire fraud at Arlington — a female employee's computer had been tapped into without authorization, and she had been impersonated online. An internal Army memo and an interview with a former Army employee also suggest that high-level Army officials knew for months about problems at Arlington but failed to act. Three former public affairs officers have recently testified under oath about a hostile work environment at Arlington. One was fired after speaking out. The other two quit in disgust.

Sadly, Arlington's internal problems have materialized on the grounds themselves. Despite nearly 10 years and countless dollars spent on computerizing its operations, the cemetery still relies mostly on paper burial records that in some cases do not match the headstones. "There are numerous examples of discrepancies that exist between burial maps, the physical location of headstones, and the burial records/grave cards," the cemetery admitted in a 2008 report to Congress.

And in a relatively remote area of the cemetery, where 600 service members from Iraq and Afghanistan are laid to rest, personal mementos placed on graves are left out to rot in the rain for days, ruined by workers with power washers, or thrown into a trash bin.

"The aesthetics of the cemetery are deceptive," says Gina Gray, an Army veteran of eight years who served in Iraq and who was the cemetery's public affairs officer in early 2008, before she was fired over a clash with her boss. "To the naked eye, it is a place of sacred beauty and a tribute to our nation's heroes," says Gray, who has been rehired as an Army contractor at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia. "But if you scratch below the surface, you will find that it's really just window dressing. They've put these pretty curtains up to hide the ugliness on the inside."

more...

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/07/16/arlington_national_cemetery/

[MADem]

1. I think I believe the PAO completely. The Peter Principle on Steroids!

ONE EEO complaint can be an aberration--two in a row suggest a pattern. Also, when "the boss" lies under oath, he's got something to hide:



While cemetery Superintendent John Metzler is the titular head at Arlington, Higginbotham runs the show, say current and former employees. A tall and imposing man, Higginbotham has worked at the cemetery since 1965. He started as a security guard and worked his way up to deputy supervisor in 1990. In his current position, he has earned a reputation for running the cemetery with an iron fist. (Higginbotham declined to talk to Salon.)

One of Higginbotham's failures, say employees, has been his inability to rectify disturbing discrepancies between burial records and information on headstones. For years, Arlington has struggled to replace paper-and-pen burial records with a satellite-aided system of tracking grave locations. "My goal is to have all the gravesites available online to the public, so people can look up a grave from home and print out a map that will show exactly where the gravesite is," Higginbotham told Government Computer News in April 2006. Such systems are standard at other cemeteries, like the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, nearly identical to Arlington in age and size. Yet an effort begun in 2000 to set up a similar system at Arlington remains unrealized.....In her sworn testimony in the fall, as part of her equal opportunity complaint, which is still pending, Gray stressed "an elitist mentality among cemetery officials.'' Kara McCarthy, who held Gray’s job at the cemetery from early 2007 until March 2008, also testified. She said Higginbotham and other top officials at Arlington "could do whatever the hell they wanted, and they did, because they had been getting away with it for years." McCarthy said she also left the cemetery after a year because of the "hostile work environment."

....In his testimony, Higginbotham describes himself as in charge. "The day-to-day operation of Arlington National Cemetery is my responsibility," he said. He stated he had little interaction with Gray and less to do with her termination. "I had no direct involvement with her on a day-to-day basis," Higginbotham said under oath. "I was not involved in this." He added that Gray was "not subjected to a hostile work environment."

As it turned out, Higginbotham had been worried about Gray, fretting in an e-mail that he could be the victim of a "conspiracy." He was apparently determined to learn what he could about her.

In October, a friend of Gray's who had worked at Arlington e-mailed Gray's Army account to say hello. An hour later, the friend received an e-mail with Gina Gray's name on it. "I see you've moved on," the e-mail read. "A lot of drama going on at ANC." The note was signed, "GG." Yet Gray had been locked out of that e-mail account since the day she was fired in June. She had not sent it.

"I felt sick," Gray says, when she heard about the e-mail impersonating her. "I felt like somebody had broken into my house and gone through my things." Gray alerted the Army's Criminal Investigation Command....

[babylonsister]

2. I think they need to fire Higginbotham's ass for illegal

breaking and entering, for starters. They need an honest person in this position with competence and the ability to work with an IT team to modernize the system. Sounds like a real mess over there.

[MADem]

3. Wire fraud....that's the ticket. The IT system was technically "his," and he technically

has the right to monitor it (after all, he supervises his IT people). I am, of course, using shorthand--the IT system belongs to the US government, but as a supervisory agent he was within his rights to examine the system for non-work-related material. That's why, when you put your little card in your DOD computer to fire it up, it says (when the frigging cards work) that use of the thing implies consent to monitoring.

It's part of the reason (aside from pure mendacity and fraud) that all of the Bush White House had frigging YAHOO accounts and brought their laptops to work--they didn't even use the USG system.

Where (among other times) the jerk in this story crossed the line is when he sent out emails in the PAO's name.

And then lied about it.

They probably want some butter over at ANC....because the toast has gotta be done.

My guess? This guy will be allowed to retire after more than forty years with the cemetery. He'll probably see few if any consequences, though perhaps there will be an EEO finding against him.

It's not terribly fair, but I'm betting that's how it will play out.

[babylonsister]

4. If he was responsible for the system in place, he should be

fired just for that considering the condition it's in and his gross incompetence. They're missing bodies, don't know where some are, etc. It's a travesty in this day and age to have messed up the works at Arlington so completely through ignorance. And then there's the cover-up...

[MADem]

6. DOD IT is sorta-kinda stovepiped. At the end of the day, he has an element of

responsibility and authority over the system, but he's also an end-user of it. DOD has a separate authority that oversees, upgrades, and provides a certain amoount of management of the system as it intersects with other agencies within the DOD.

He's not expected, as a department/division/directorate/agency (call it what you will) leader, to know the nuts-n-bolts of the system, that's for his "IT" expert who reports to/advises him. There's also an inspection protocol in place that will tell him if there's any glaring discrepancies in the system.

However, it's clear here that what he did was abuse his authority. He obtained the password to not just SPY on his subordinate (sketchy, but actually legal), he sent out emails IN HER NAME. That's where he went over the line demonstratively.

I'm not even getting into the graves registration and satellite mapping issues (which I believe are a problem--people don't just make that kind of stuff up for shits and giggles)--I'm sure some poor investigator assigned by an IG is already up to their ass in the minutiae of national cemetery operations management. Times like this, I'm so glad to be retired--this sounds like a short straw I'd draw, in the heat of the summer, with all the anger, hate, resentments, half-truths, outright lies, and sorting of the wheat from the chaff!!! Gaaaaah!

If they haven't put this guy on admin leave and thrown a senior officer or DOD civilian in there temporarily to "clean shit up" that is what needs to happen. I think this guy ought to see if he can resign to escape charges of gross incompetence...if I were advising him, I'd say "Cut the best deal you can, you miserable jerk, and get the hell out of there." He's definitely stayed too long at the fair.

As for the PAO who took all that abuse, and reported him? She needs a flag in her record--one that says "Promote this gutsy kid ahead of her peers." She did a tough thing.

[southernyankeebelle]

5. OMG My Parents are Buried there.

I will have to call my family that live in Maryland and get them to check out what the heck is going on. I several friends that are buried there and have been to alot of funerals there. This is shocking to hear. I never would have thought this would have happened.