Air Force dumped remains of war dead in landfill

Veterans Day is on Friday and the US Military has come under fire for dishonorably handling the remains of fallen soldiers.

The Dover Air Force Base has come under fire this week for two separate incidents– leading to public outrage and the Air Force's top general taking responsibility for the situation, the Associated Press reported.

The mortuary at Dover Air Force Base cremated the unidentified body parts of fallen service members and dumped the ashes in a southern Virginia landfill, Air Force officials said, the Washington Post reported.

The mortuary at Dover Air Force Base processes all of the United States' war dead returning to the US from war zones. According to ABC News, they carried out the practice between 2003 and 2008, but have revised their policy to bury these types of remains at sea.

This practice was limited to body parts that soldiers’ families did not want to receive, the Washington Post reported. Families weren’t informed of this disposal and it often happened when body parts came into the mortuary after the burial.

The mortuary had been the target of federal investigations of alleged mishandling of remains.

According to the Washington Post, Lt. Gen. Darrell G. Jones, the Air Force’s deputy chief for personnel, said that the body parts were cremated, incinerated, and then taken to a landfill by a military contractor. He said the procedure was similar to the disposal of medical waste and couldn’t estimate how many body parts had been handled in this manner.

“That was the common practice at the time, and since then our practices have improved,” he said.

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This Washington Post investigation comes only two days after three top officials at the Dover Port Mortuary knew about lost body parts at the mortuary but never did anything to fix the system. The officials were responsible for “gross mismanagement” at the facility and were disciplined but not fired, The Times reported.

On Thursday, Norman Schwartz, the Air Force's top general was questioned at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee about the mismanagement of lost body parts at Dover Mortuary, the AP reported. He told the congressional panel he took "personal responsibility" for what occurred in 2009, when soldiers' body parts went missing.

Schwartz said there are no doubts that Dover now handles all soldiers' remains correctly, "treating them with dignity and reverence, and that their families must be supported and respected," the AP reported.

"We could have done better," was the initial response from the Air Force's spokesman, CNN reported.

But is that enough to soothe the families of those soldiers killed in action, who have been disposed of in a landfill? Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill said the Air Force's response to the initial Dover Mortuary reports was "weak," and wants to see something else done, especially since none of the officers were dismissed.

McCaskill sounded off on the incident in a memo to he Secretary of the Air Force, Michael Donley, and Schwartz, St. Louis' Channel 4 broadcast station reported.

"OSC's report brings into question whether the Air Force Inspector General, in investigating Dover's Port Mortuary, was acting with an unbiased focus on the facts. Instead, the Inspector General may have acted to protect the Air Force at the expense of the facts. Questions regarding the independence and credibility of an IG are of the gravest nature and must be quickly investigated an resolved. I call on you to initiate an outside investigation into the independence and operations of the Air Force IG."

According to the military spokesman speaking to CNN on background, families of the fallen did authorize disposal of soldiers' remains, they just were unaware of how that would be done. The spokesman, Air Force Chief of Public Affairs Brig. Gen. Les Kodlick, also emphasized that the disposed remains consisted of "parts of bone and other DNA material," not entire bodies, CNN reported.