[edpc]

Were it not for the dates in question, they wouldn't have investigated the matter.

[ScottinVA]

But Bin Laden gets what amounts to burial with honors at sea.

BTW, whatever happened to that wrong-remains-in-wrong-graves flap at Arlington? Seems that just went quietly away, didn’t it...

[mrreaganaut]

I’m guessing that some federal rule/directive/catch-22 prevented them from doing anything else with the ashes at the time.

[seoul62]

I am rare to comment but this is a DISGRACE!!!!!! They can in this present day and age identify through DNA Ancient Egyptian Mummies Ancestral Links, and they cannot identify the war remains and just dump them in a landfill?????

[Dr. Scarpetta]

Very sad story for our military families ...

Wasn’t it possible for these unidentified body parts to be buried at Arlington, instead of a landfill...

[Eleutheria5]

Cheaper than those Unknown Soldier tombs, I guess. That eternal flame uses up a lot of natural gas./sarc

[exDemMom]

They said the procedure was limited to portions of body parts that were unable to be identified at first or were later recovered from the battlefield, and which family members had indicated could be disposed of by the military.

I think a lot of people are missing this sentence right here. These are body parts, not entire bodies.

When a servicemember is killed, a family member is designated to oversee the disposition of the remains. They are asked how they want body parts recovered later to be disposed of. They can have the casket opened and the parts placed inside, if they want. Or they can elect to have the military dispose of the parts. These choices are made at the time funeral arrangements are being made.

I have the impression that the woman featured in the WaPo story has some lingering resentment over the fact that her husband had selected one of his parents, and not her, to make his funeral arrangements in the case of his death. She, and whoever wrote the story, are making it sound like the military did things behind her back, without her permission, when, in fact, her issue is that she didn't agree with the choices one of her in-laws made.

As for the body parts being incinerated and discarded in a land fill, I can't really offer an opinion on that. Tissues removed from people in a hospital are typically sent to the morgue for pathological examination, then discarded by pretty much the same process. I haven't heard any arguments that the body parts from living people should be given funerals or anything...