SMALL PORTIONS of unidentified human remains recovered from the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US defence department Pentagon headquarters in Washington and from the United 93 aircraft that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania were incinerated and dumped in a landfill site, the department has acknowledged.
It was the first time the Pentagon has said that some remains of the 9/11 victims taken to an air force base at Dover in Delaware ended up in a dump, The Washington Post reported on its website yesterday.
The US military has long borne what it regards as a sacred obligation to treat its fallen members and their families with utmost levels of dignity and honour.
Last November, the Post first disclosed that the Dover mortuary for years had disposed of incinerated portions of remains of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in a Virginia landfill. The practice involved unidentified or unclaimed body parts; it was not made known to troops’ family members.
The Air Force later admitted that it had dumped the incinerated partial remains of at least 274 service members in the landfill between 2003 and 2008, when the practice ended. At the time, officials said their records only went back to 2003 and that they did not know when the dumping began.
Yesterday, a new defence department review of the mortuary operations at Dover revealed that “several portions of remains” recovered from the 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon and the field where the United plane was brought down after passengers tried to wrest control of the plane from hijackers also ended up in a landfill site.
The review concluded that the remains “could not be tested or identified,” apparently because they were too small or charred to allow for DNA analysis.
Those remains were cremated first, then handed over to a “biomedical waste disposal contractor” which transported bags of the medical waste for incineration. Dover mortuary officials assumed at the time that “after final incineration, nothing remained,” Gen John P Abizaid’s report stated.
In fact, there was still residual material left over from the incineration, which the contractor then took to a landfill.
The mortuary changed its policy in 2008, and since then has buried unclaimed or unidentified cremated remains at sea.
The review is the latest report to scrutinise operations at the Dover Air Force Base mortuary, which even military officials acknowledge has suffered from gross mismanagement.