Senator rips former Arlington cemetery leaders - Military News | News From Afghanistan, Iraq And Around The World - Military Times

Senator rips former Arlington cemetery leaders

Former Arlington National Cemetery Superintendent John Metzler told lawmakers Thursday that operational problems at the facility were due to staff and budget cutbacks.

Metzler’s former deputy, Thurman Higginbotham, took the 5th Amendment and was booted out of the hearing.

Yet while Metzler took full responsibility for the hundreds of problems uncovered last month by the Army Inspector General, he largely rejected Army findings of mismarked graves and contracting issues at the center of failed efforts to digitize burial records in the face of aggressive questioning by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.

McCaskill, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Reform Committee’s contracting oversight panel, was not buying Metzler’s explanation.

“This is not complicated,” McCaskill said loudly. “It’s called keeping track of who you buried where. That is not a complicated task. And the notion that you come in here and act like you didn’t know about it until a month ago is offensive. You did know about it. And you did nothing. And you knew about it, Mr. Higginbotham. And you did nothing.

“And families have been hurt for no good reason,” McCaskill said.

Kathryn Condon, named to the new position of executive director of the Army National Cemeteries Program in the wake of the shocking June IG findings, said that none of her provisional oversight group’s research into the 211 discrepancies uncovered by the Army Inspector General has discovered problems “other than erroneous administrative markings on the burial maps.”

But, she said, “I am confident that there are probably other map errors.”

The subcommittee believes there are far more. In a publicly released memo outlining the problems, the subcommittee noted that the 211 identified errors were located in just three of the cemetery’s 70 sections, and pointed to a 2004 contractor survey of 300 gravesites in two other sections that found “many” locations where cemetery records didn’t accurately reflect the current status of a gravesite. In one, the cemetery said the gravesite was reserved for a future occupant when it had actually been occupied for four years.

To his credit, Metzler, while touting his long service to his country, the complexity of operations at Arlington and shortfalls in staffing, took the blame — obliquely — for the multiple issues at Arlington.

“It is very painful for me that our team at Arlington did not perform all aspects of its mission to the high standard required,” Metzler told lawmakers in a sometimes halting voice. “I was the senior government official in charge, and I accept full responsibility for all my actions and for all of my team’s actions. And I want to express my sincere regrets to any family for whom these failures may have caused pain.”

One of the officials with oversight over Arlington similarly expressed regret.

“Our combined efforts fell short of what the Army and the nation expects of us,” said Claudia Tornblom, a deputy assistant Army secretary for management and budget, who formerly was responsible for policy oversight of the civil works program and budget at the cemetery. “I deeply regret this.”