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  • 2014-08-25 (xsd:date)
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  • Did the Obama Administration Break Precedent with Funerals for Generals? (en)
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  • In modern warfare it's rather uncommon for very high-ranking U.S. officers to be killed by enemy action. Nonetheless, such was the case when a two-star general, U.S. Army Major General Harold Greene, the deputy commanding general for the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, died on Aug. 5, 2014 after an Afghan army soldier emerged from hiding in a bathroom at Marshal Fahim National Defense University outside Kabul and opened fire on a delegation of U.S. and European military officers, fatally hitting Greene (who was making a routine visit to a training facility) in the back of the head. Gen. Greene was the highest-ranking American servicemember killed by hostile action since Lieutenant General Timothy J. Maude died a result of the terrorist airliner attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and he was the first U.S. general killed in combat since Maj. Gen. John A.B. Dillard died after his helicopter was shot down in Vietnam on 12 May 1970. Shortly after Greene was interred at Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 14, 2014, political rumors began circulating claiming that not only had President Obama broken precedent by failing to attend the funeral himself (Presidents Nixon and Bush supposedly having attended the funerals of Gen. Dillard and Adm. Robinson, respectively), but that he had declined to send even a token ranking member of his administration to represent the executive branch at the ceremony. Such rumors were wrong on both counts, including this one received in email in August 2014: Although neither President Obama nor Vice President Joe Biden attended Gen. Greene's funeral, a high-ranking Obama administration official was present. As the military publication Stars and Stripes noted in its reporting of the funeral, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel attended the ceremony and met with Greene's family: As for President Obama's allegedly breaking precedent by not attending the funeral himself, Byron York, one of the journalists who passed along some of the misinformation related to this issue, noted in a mea culpa Washington Examiner follow-up that: In regards to the coda of the example reproduced above, which claims that President Obama hasn't even ordered flags to be flown at half-staff, like he did for the deaths of singer Whitney Houston, as well as the former communist and South African President Nelson Mandela, President Obama did issue a proclamation ordering that U.S. flags on government buildings be flown at half-staff in December 2013 after the death of Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid politician who served as president of South Africa in the late 1990s. (That was a relatively uncommon gesture of respect for a deceased foreign head of state: the last dignitary whose death had been so honored in the U.S. was Pope John Paul II in 2005.) However, the claim that President Obama ordered U.S. flags on government buildings be flown at half-staff after the death of singer Whitney Houston in April 2012 is a long-running piece of political misinformation: the president issued a statement of condolence through his press secretary and nothing more; the gesture of flag-lowering was undertaken only at a state level by Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, Houston's home state. In March 2015, actor Charlie Sheen referenced this item in a rant about President Obama's appearance on ESPN for his annual tradition of filling out his NCAA tournament bracket. (en)
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