Salon Investigation: Arlington National Cemetery

The online Salon site brings out another, the forth, report on a long time and well hidden problem at our Arlington Nation Cemetery:

Cremated remains dumped in Arlington landfill

A headstone stands at grave 5253. Cemetery records suggest workers found an unidentifiable urn in the cemetery's dirt landfill and buried it here.

More burial mix-ups unearthed at the troubled national cemetery

Records at Arlington National Cemetery suggest that workers found an urn of cremated remains that had been dumped -- presumably accidentally -- in a dirt landfill, reburied those remains as an unknown soldier, and kept the whole thing quiet.

With the publication of this article, Salon has now disclosed four separate cases in which the cemetery discovered unmarked remains due to burial glitches, mostly poor record-keeping. In a fifth case, the cemetery accidentally buried the remains of one service member on top of another in the same grave. Salon's reporting has led the Army to launch an investigation of record-keeping problems at the cemetery.

Gravestones simply marked "Unknown" are easy to find scattered throughout the sprawling acres of perfectly aligned headstones at Arlington. In addition to the famous Tomb of the Unknowns, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unknown soldiers buried there, dating back to the Civil War...>>>>>

Cuts of the other reports follow under this one with links to read fully.