The following is an excerpt from a December 2011 article in The Washington Post.

Carolyn Lerner had the Air Force’s top four-star general boxed in.

Gen. Norton Schwartz was reeling from revelations that the Dover Air Force Base mortuary had lost and sawed off body parts and mishandled other remains of America’s war dead. In the glare of television cameras, the Air Force chief of staff was forced to issue mea culpas for the scandal in November.

Lerner, the newly installed federal lawyer whose tiny office uncovered the gruesome findings, was ready for a fight.

Lerner accused the Air Force of deflecting blame — and a mortuary official of lying and obstructing the probe by firing one of the workers who blew the whistle. When Schwartz declared that Lerner’s Office of Special Counsel had prevented the military from notifying the families of the dead service members for more than a year, she dressed him down to the news media.