Maj. Gen. Harold Greene was killed in Afghanistan was not snubbed by the Obama administration.
According to Media Matters and Snopes, this was made up.
The White House sent Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to his funeral. NPR also wrote: “Attending Monday’s service will be Broderick Johnson, chairman of the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force, an Obama initiative to empower boys and men of color. Joining Johnson will be Marlon Marshall, deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, and Heather Foster, an adviser for the office.”
There’s a viral e-mail going around claiming that Greene’s funeral was ignored.
It reads: “This is beyond outrageous, and should be taken as a blatant slap in the face of every military member and civilian that knows and understands the tradition, honor, and respect that comes with military service. In what can only be a gross oversight, or else a belligerent middle-finger, 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.”
It was also reported by Media Matters that a journalist with the Washington Examiner apologized for saying that to Obama administration official attended his funeral.
“I was wrong. It turns out Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel did, in fact, attend the Greene funeral, a fact I should have known. Before sending out the tweet, I made a couple of perfunctory checks to see whether Hagel had attended, didn’t see him in the news coverage I read and passed on the information without further checking. If I had looked into it just a bit more, I would have seen, for example, a Stars & Stripes article that specifically mentioned Hagel’s presence. Once I saw that, I sent out two tweets correcting the mistake,” said Byron York.
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