In a deliberately hand wringing piece, the Washington Post reports on the acknowledgement of remains from 274 soldiers in landfill!
“The Air Force dumped the incinerated partial remains of at least 274 American troops in a Virginia landfill, far more than the military had acknowledged, before halting the secretive practice three years ago, records show.
“The landfill dumping was concealed from families who had authorized the military to dispose of the remains in a dignified and respectful manner, Air Force officials said. There are no plans, they said, to alert those families now.
“A separate federal investigation of the mortuary last month, prompted by whistleblower complaints, uncovered “gross mismanagement” and documented how body parts recovered from bomb blasts stacked up in the morgue’s coolers for months or years before they were identified and disposed of.
Though the investigations following the WTC deaths involved detailed forensic investigation of, in some cases, quite small pieces of tissue that proved to be the only identified remains of a victim, the circumstances here are wholly different. There is, we assume, no question of who died. Tissue fragments that might be a limb or part of a limb might be ‘repatriated’ to permit burial of the victim “intact” but where delay is inevitable, seemingly over a period of weeks or months, the distress of a delayed funeral seems to be the greater concern.
Raking over the issues at this late stage makes for a good story but perhaps causes unnecessary distress to victims families and others. Should the story be laid to rest?
Both burial and cremation end in a version of landfill, though the location is rather different from the industrial landscape of a landfill site. However, comparison is not unrealistic. And who might have had an operation in earlier years, perhaps an appendicectomy? How about a haircut? Or nails? How far do we go with this? Were those tissues retrieved to be interred with a reconstructed or intact body? Of course it was not, though we did witness some hysteria following the Alder Hay incident here in the UK that resulted in the Human Tissue Act.
Let it go.