All posts tagged "Arlington National Cemetery"

The Trump administration admitted his planned 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery will harm historic sites but insisted the project move forward.

The National Park Service conceded that the monument would adversely affect the cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, and several dozen other historic sites, according to a document obtained by the Washington Post. Officials wrote that the "adverse effects cannot be fully avoided," but argued the arch could not be built anywhere else, The Post reported.

"The administration is being very transparent in their overt hostility to public input and the regulatory process and the result will be to permanently disfigure one of the nation's most revered and richly symbolic cultural landscapes," Charles Birnbaum, the founder of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, said in a statement....

The Trump administration erased language criticizing slavery and the Confederacy from a memorial sign and website at Arlington National Cemetery.

According to a Monday article by the Washington Post, the changes are part of a broader effort to reshape how the Civil War is portrayed. The Confederate Memorial was a 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914.

The statue was pulled from the military cemetery in 2023 after Congress ordered the removal of names and symbols honoring the Confederacy from U.S. military property. The bipartisan Naming Commission recommended taking the statue down amid backlash over its imagery, which included an enslaved woman carrying the infant child of a white officer and an enslaved man following his owner to war, according to The Post....

In a new Substack article, former Republican strategist Rick Wilson expressed his sympathy for Donald Trump's speechwriters whose attempts at "penning history" end up scrambled into "word vomit" by a president whose sole concern is to air his own grievances.

Wilson dissected Trump's Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery that the author called "repulsive" and blatantly lacking the "solemnity" that the country deserved in honor of its fallen heroes.

"If you read the transcript, you can see where some well-meaning, underpaid White House ghoul tried for a moment of grace and uplift, to no avail. They tried to do their job and give America the solemnity it deserves on that day. There were lines intended to honor the lives of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who made the ultimate sacrifice."...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors on Thursday charged a Marine Corps reservist with shooting at four military buildings around Washington, including the Pentagon, and also said he appeared to be trying to build a bomb.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Sixty years after vanishing on the battlefields of the Korean War and 20 years after being shipped back in a coffin, the remains of a US soldier have been identified using DNA testing.