SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010
KLMNO Sunday OPINION DANA MILBANK
whistleblower T
In debt to an Arlington
he discovery was grisly: two hundred eleven instances of unmarked graves, misplaced headstones and even the dumping of human ashes in a pile of dirt. The Pentagon inspector general’s report this month on Arlington National Cem- etery’s mismanagement was shocking. But it’s just the beginning of the scandal at the nation’s most hallowed burial ground. There is good reason to believe there are thousands — perhaps more than 15,000 — such desecra- tions of our military dead and their families. How do I know this? Gina Gray told me — and she knows, quite literally, where the bodies are buried. You won’t find Gray’s name in the IG’s re-
port, but Pentagon sources have confirmed to me that virtually everything in it was a product of the allegations Gray made and the evidence she provided to investigators. Gray, a former Arlington public relations of- ficer who was fired in 2008 after she spoke out about how cemetery officials were acting improperly, went on a one-woman campaign to expose the wrongdoing at the graveyard. What she found was so appalling that the
Army’s actions so far amount to a “Band-Aid for a sucking chest wound,” she told me in her typically blunt manner. The inspector general detailed 211 problems in three sec- tions, but there are 70 sections at the cem- etery, she said. “In Section 27 alone there are over 500 problems, and that wasn’t one of the three they released in their report and yet they knew about it.” The IG also missed several mud-caked headstones that The Post’s Christian Davenport found lying in a streambed at Arlington this week. The 32-year-old Gray, who served in Iraq
before working at Arlington, is a classic whistleblower, and the government should be honoring her for the wrongs she righted at Arlington. Instead, a separate IG report on her firing has been bottled up for a year. It’s long past time for the Pentagon to get that report out and give Gray the recognition she deserves. I’ve followed Gray’s case with interest be- cause I was the one who — by complete acci- dent — started the whole controversy. When I went to Arlington in April 2008 to cover the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq, the deputy cemetery superintendent, Thurman Higgin- botham, decided to keep reporters (invited to cover the funeral by the family) too far away to see or hear. Gray, new in her job, knew that Higginbotham’s behavior wasn’t grounded in Army regulations. She argued with him. I reported the confrontation. Gray was fired. As a rule, the harder a government agency tries to keep the media away, the more dys- function that agency is trying to hide. The newly unemployed Gray used her free time to expose the dysfunction at Arlington — and the funeral coverage was the least of it. In the summer of 2008, she brought her findings to her representative, Jim Moran, to Sen. Jim Webb, and to Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin. All three offices checked with the Army and were given as- surances — false, as it turns out — that the matter was under thorough investigation. Even after the Army’s Criminal Investiga- tions Command concluded in May 2009 that Higginbotham made false statements to in- vestigators about accessing Gray’s e-mail without authorization, the Pentagon stalled. Finally, after Gray-inspired news accounts about Arlington’s problems began to appear, the IG last August began his investigation into the mishandled remains. Now that the separate IG report on the
cemetery mismanagement has vindicated her, Gray has more questions: Why hasn’t the Army fired Higginbotham (who is on ad- ministrative leave) and his boss, Superin- tendent John Metzler (who is being allowed to retire)? Why was Gray’s old job at Arling- ton given to Kaitlin Horst, daughter of Karl Horst, who, as commanding general of the Military District of Washington, operates the cemetery? What has become of the millions of taxpayer dollars supposedly spent on elec- tronic grave records at Arlington that don’t exist?
And, more important than all of those:
How many more remains have been mis- handled or misplaced at Arlington? Overall, Gray claims, Arlington has mishandled “a minimum of 5 percent” of those it has bur- ied. With 330,000 graves, “there’s a mini- mum of 15,000 errors.” Given Gray’s record, the Pentagon should
take that charge seriously. Gray, for her part, has finally found a new job in the federal government and doesn’t want her old job back. The back pay she might be eligible for is negligible. “Mostly what I want is an apol- ogy and an explanation,” she says, for “why for two years they knew about this and ig- nored it.” The Pentagon owes her that at the very
least.
danamilbank@washpost.com
Last month, a reader called to complain that he had been unable to alert the newsroom to a killing in Southeast. He’d telephoned The Post’s main number the previous day, he said, but “gave up” after listening to a lengthy recorded list of options that failed to in- clude local news. Inexplicably, the menu offers access to more than 20 departments — everything from death notices to foreign news — but doesn’t mention the sprawling Metro section. It’s The Post’s largest news staff, responsible for all local coverage. The an- ecdote points to a growing challenge. Through e- mail, online commenting and social networking, The Post has never had greater interaction with its audience. But increasingly, readers are complaining that when they most need to communicate with The Post, it’s simply too difficult. It’s not just news tips. In recent months, scores have contacted the om- budsman in frustration because they couldn’t find a way to notify The Post’s Web site about problems with content. Most weren’t aware of the tiny “Help” link at the bottom of each page, which invites them to “Submit a Ticket” to a service desk. But when a photo and caption are mismatched, or a story link is broken, that isn’t fast enough. About a week ago, Diana Kunkel of Chevy Chase expressed irritation after scouring the Web site for a way to report that an editorial page link hadn’t been updated. She ended up phoning The Post’s main number, she said, but “there was no ‘web master.’ And when I was forwarded to the operator, I was disconnected.”
I
triggering a sharp expansion of the national-debt burden and leaving at least one in 10 Americans without work. But if the big guys take less risk, what other institutions will shoulder it? Once you ask this question, the financial reform emerging from Con- gress acquires a new complexion. Some contro- versial measures seem surprisingly attractive. Some uncontroversial ones appear absurd. The first thing to recognize is that, however much we might wish otherwise, financial risk is here to stay. There have been crashes ever since the tulip bubble of the 17th century, and they are not going away. In a complex economy, currencies will fluctu- ate, interest rates will undulate and impossibly diffi- cult decisions will be made about allocating scarce capital to millions of families and thousands of firms. Finance consists of uncertain judgments about an unknowable future. Inevitably, financiers will periodically get burned. Nor is it possible to close down the casino. If Wall
Y
Street stopped taking bets on the future of the dol- lar, it would effectively force Main Street to take those same bets instead. Today, an exporter that fears that a strong dollar will harm its competi- tiveness can sell that risk to a financial firm. Abolish currency derivatives, and the exporter would have
Why we need hedge funds by Sebastian Mallaby
ou can’t blame Congress for wanting to squeeze risk out of the big Wall Street firms. In 2008, mishandled risk cratered the economy,
to retain that risk on its balance sheet. It would therefore have to set aside more capital as a buffer against currency uncertainty, locking up resources that might otherwise be used to build a factory and create jobs. Multiply that outcome across thousands of firms and dozens of types of financial exposure, and you begin to see how the financial sector con- tributes to the welfare of ordinary Americans. So the question isn’t how to abolish risk; it’s how to entrust it to responsible players. The crash of 2008 demonstrates that risk was shouldered by the wrong people. On the one hand, unsophisticated consumers took out crazy mortgages — this is why the proposed consumer protection agency makes sense. On the other hand, too-big-to-fail behemoths gambled recklessly, forcing the government to throw taxpayer dollars at them — this is why the much pilloried “Volcker rule” and “Lincoln amend- ment,” which would force some types of risk out of banks that have a government backstop, are also at- tractive in principle (though implementing them would be hard).
But it is not enough to prevent risk from building in the wrong places. Congress should also take a view on where the risk should go. Lawmakers should be asking themselves what type of financial vehicle survived the stress test of the recent crisis. Then they should encourage that type of firm. What firms am I talking about? Hedge funds. In
2007, when the mortgage market imploded, hedge funds were almost unique in avoiding disastrous losses; as a group that year, they were up 10 percent.
In 2008, when the Lehman collapse caused a seizure in the payments system, hedge funds lost money — but far less than everybody else. This wasn’t just luck. Because of their design,
hedge funds are the best risk managers in the world. Unlike the too-big-to-fail banks and investment banks, which are encouraged to be reckless by their government backstop, hedge funds have the great virtue of being small enough to fail. Over the past decade, about 5,000 went under, none of which re- quired a taxpayer bailout. Traders at big banks gamble with OPM — Wall
Street’s contemptuous term for “other people’s mon- ey.” Again, the incentives at hedge funds are better. Hedge fund managers risk their personal savings alongside those of their investors, so they have good reason to avoid gambling too hard. If hedge funds have healthy incentives, is Congress doing what it should? Unfortunately, it isn’t. The bills under consideration require hedge funds with more than a paltry $100 million in assets to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they threaten other burdens that will be especially oner- ous for smaller funds lacking armies of lawyers. This is an absurdity. Congress is creating obstacles for en- trepreneurial boutique financiers — precisely the players who must absorb the risks that were appall- ingly mishandled by too-big-to-fail behemoths.
Sebastian Mallaby, a former editorial writer for The Post, is the author of “More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite.”
R
A17
TOPIC A What’s ahead for same-sex marriage?
With a federal court considering a challenge to California’s Proposition 8, a 2008 ban on same-sex marriage, The Post asked what it would mean for the cause of gay marriage if the law is overturned.
SCOTT KEETER Director of survey research at Pew Research Center
There certainly could be a public opinion backlash if Proposition 8 is overturned in the courts, but it’s impossible to say how large it might be. Pew Research polling in 2003 and ’04 detected an uptick in opposition to same-sex marriage after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws against sodomy and the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the state cannot forbid same-sex marriages. By 2006 this surge in opposition had faded, but many proponents of same-sex marriage remain concerned about a backlash against their activism. In an August 2009 Pew Research poll, 42 percent of those favoring same-sex marriage said that supporters should not push too hard because doing so could create bad feelings against homosexuals; 45 percent disagreed. At present, the public opinion climate remains chilly for same-sex marriage. Still, opponents of same-sex marriage are a small majority rather than a large one (51 percent in a January 2010 Pew Research poll). While opposition to same-sex marriage tends to be more intense than support for it, acceptance of homosexuality more generally has been slowly increasing in the United States. Young people — who will hold the key to this issue in the future — are much more accepting of homosexuality, including gay marriage, than are older people.
JOE MATHEWS Senior fellow at the New America Foundation
This is a scary moment for those who believe in marriage equality. Same-sex marriage should be legalized in as many places as possible as quickly as possible. A court decision overturning Prop 8 could advance that goal or undermine it. It depends how the court decision is framed. If
judges strongly support overturning Prop 8 at each stage of the appeal, this emerging judicial consensus that gay-marriage bans are unconstitutional would speed acceptance of such unions across the country. But if Prop 8 is overturned by a narrowly and nastily divided U.S. Supreme Court, say 5 to 4, such a decision could conceivably do more harm than good. How? Public opinion is moving, albeit too
voters took away important protections from committed couples and loving families. Overturning Proposition 8 would not harm the cause of marriage equality. It would honor the American value of equal treatment under the law by allowing same-gender couples in California access to the same rights, responsibilities and privileges — no more and no less. We are a country with a history of enhancing the rights of our citizens. Overturning Prop 8 would reflect that history and provide an important safety net to thousands of families across California.
AYELET WALDMAN Author based in Berkeley, Calif.; her next novel, “Red Hook Road,” is to be published in July
ANTHONY BOLANTE / REUTERS
slowly, in favor of marriage equality. Same-sex marriage will win at the polls eventually. But a divisive court decision that gets too far ahead of the voters could prolong the fight for a generation or more — and give those who oppose such marriages a politically powerful argument: that a few judges are reversing the verdicts of voters in the 33 states that have passed ballot measures against gay marriage. The logic behind a Prop 8 decision matters,
too. As a journalist who observed the Prop 8 trial in San Francisco, I’ve been disturbed by the excessive interest that the presiding judge, Vaughn Walker, has shown in the libertarian idea that the state shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all. If he overturns Prop 8 on those grounds — that there should be no government-registered marriages — it might be a disaster for same-sex marriage. Secular straights would lose marriage rights. And conservatives would be proved right after all: Same-sex marriage is a threat to your marriage.
MORGAN MENESES-SHEETS Executive director of Equality Maryland
It is simply wrong that the question of equal rights would be put up for a majority vote. In California in 2008, a very narrow margin of
In November 2008, I had to explain to my children that even in a country that elected a president like Barack Obama, there were still people who believed that there was something wrong about the families of many of their friends. If Proposition 8 is overturned at trial, I can once again tell my kids that the Constitution guarantees that our most fundamental rights will not be taken away from us for arbitrary reasons and that it protects even those of us of whom the majority disapproves. What I won’t share with my children is the dread I feel. I believe the challenge will succeed in the trial court. But I have little doubt that those of us who support the rights of our gay loved ones to marry will be tragically disappointed once the case works its way to the Supreme Court. When the Supreme Court refuses to uphold marriage equality, as I fear is likely, that decision will become precedent for the myriad states in which there is no well-developed body of state constitutional jurisprudence. We will need a federal constitutional decision to compel them to act. It took 17 years to get from Bowers v. Hardwick, in which Justice Byron White could barely bring himself to contemplate the existence of gay relationships, to Lawrence v. Texas. My hope is that Judge Vaughn Walker decides this case on the narrowest possible grounds, affecting only California, and that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirms on those narrow grounds. Perhaps then the U.S. Supreme Court will do us the favor of simply passing on the case and waiting a few years until it is able to write an opinion that I will be proud to read to my children.
TOPIC A ONLINE: Responses from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Jarrett T. Barrios.
OMBUDSMAN ANDREW ALEXANDER Too hard to reach, too slow to respond
f a modern day Deep Throat phones The Post with a hot news tip, will the message get through?
Mary Jo Comer of Charles County had a similar complaint last Monday after trying to tell the Web staff that two stories in that morning’s newspaper weren’t showing up online. “Why is there no easy way to let the appropriate persons know when a glitch occurs?” she asked. Many readers have also complained that the Web site doesn’t offer an effortless way to report journal- istic errors. They’re right. A small “corrections” link appears under the site’s “News” section. But it pro- vides only an address for e-mailing correction re- quests (
corrections@washpost.com), or encourages readers to phone The Post’s main number and “ask to be connected to the desk involved.” Many have told me the process is simply too cumbersome. When readers somehow manage to get a message
to The Post’s Universal Desk, which processes all print and Web content, editors are quick to correct obvious errors online. But requests submitted through the normal e-mail address can linger for days before a decision is made on whether a correc- tion should appear in the paper, which would auto- matically trigger a correction online. In an era when inaccurate information can go viral, that de- lay is unacceptable. Senior Editor Milton Coleman, who oversees cor-
rections, acknowledged the problem and said a rem- edy is in the works to “streamline” the process so that “many, if not most, corrections will be made online before we make them in the newspaper.” The Post also should consider providing online readers with a more prominent link to report errors or technical glitches. Editors could be immediately alerted if ev-
ery page on the site clearly displayed a link urging readers to “Report problems on this page.” Raju Narisetti, the managing editor who oversees The Post’s online operations, said ideas such as these are being considered as part of a Web site redesign that is underway. He said a recent spike in reader complaints might be due partly to a “significant up- tick” in online traffic. Replacing “aging technology” and redesigning the site “should help reduce the current dissonance,” he added. The Post also should make it simple for readers
to offer news tips. Like other newspapers, it should establish a dedicated 24-hour “tip hotline” phone number. Its Web site should provide a simple one- click icon for sending tips. And a number should be established for texting tips. All should be promi- nently displayed in the newspaper and on the site. To survive amid today’s cutthroat media competi-
tion, Post customers need to be king. Those who can’t easily communicate with the Web site will quickly shift their loyalty. Those who can’t relay a news tip will go elsewhere. By the way, The Post did finally re- port that homicide in Southeast. A short story ap- peared online more than a day later. And the paper carried the story a day after that. But by then, it wasn’t really “news.”
Andrew Alexander can be reached at 202-334-7582 or at
ombudsman@washpost.com. For daily updates, read the Omblog at
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ ombudsman-blog/.
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