This is sad. It angers me.
I would be shocked to find that it was legal to bury any human remains at a landfill.
I consider it to be an insult to these men, to dispose of them in this manner.
As for small bone fragments that were identified later, I’m not really sure what the best way to dispose of them is. If the service member has already been buried, I’m not sure it would be necessary to fully exhume the grave each time another bone fragment was identified. It does seem to me another dignified way to dispose of those fragments might be honorable too.
Some folks will have to pardon me here if I find it beyond weird that the Washington Post would act as if they gave a damn about any of this. They have exploited the deaths of our troops for decades, for political gain. They have tried to destroy respect for them and our armed services. They have tried to aid the enemy any way they could. For the Washington Post to act like another disrespect for our troops was bad, is beyond hysterical.
I can’t help but think that what upsets the Washington Post staff the most here, is that they didn’t know the precise spot to tell rabid Lefties to go take a piss.
Too much of the American military has become a bloated, anti-Christian, career building, social engineering bureacracy. This kind of insensitivity is what you’d expect from the tax department, not Defence. This is what happens once the military leadership becomes more concerned about their stripes than the men they are responsible for leading.
see post #61
From the CBS story at http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57339029/274-soldiers-ashes-dumped-in-va-landfill/
This week, after The Post pressed for information contained in the Dover mortuary's electronic database, the Air Force produced a tally based on those records. It showed that 976 fragments from 274 military personnel were cremated, incinerated and taken to the landfill between 2004 and 2008.
An additional group of 1,762 unidentified remains were collected from the battlefield and disposed of in the same manner, the Air Force said. Those fragments could not undergo DNA testing because they had been badly burned or damaged in explosions. The total number of incinerated fragments dumped in the landfill exceeded 2,700.
There is a difference between sanitary waste and biohazardous waste. For example, in an operating room, if an appendage is cut off due to gangrene or other physical cause, the remains may not be treated as sanitary waste, but must be disposed of as biohazardous waste. Generally they are incinerated with procedures to document their proper disposal.
Blood and excretia from funeral mortuaries are disposed in compliance with OSHA regulations 29 CFR 1910.1030.
Biohazard disposal is generally regulated at the State level, but operations aboard military facilities might not always be state supervised or inspected.
Other issues arise regarding the permitting of the landfill. Generally explicit measures are taken at landfills regarding biohazardous waste. Additionally, full human corpses are not legitimately allowed in landfills.
Since cremated remains of servicemen already have provisions for burial, it seems bureaucratically it would be more cumbersome to dispose of the remains at a landfill than through mortuary services.
From the CBS report, it appears there were a large accumulation of human remains, which were body parts, blown apart in war, set aside to DNA test to identify the remains, but then discovered some percentage were no longer so identifiable by those procedures with certainty. The volume of such human parts accumulated to the point that they then were disposed of as bio-hazardous waste.
Once incinerated, as opposed to cremated, they were then disposed of as bio-hazardous waste vice human ashes from a crematorium.
It's a tough call.
For most situations, had the body parts been identified or even suggested as to their original identities, the surviving family members had probably already gone through a funeral and grieving period. Ressurrecting the disposal of remains would likely cause more grief than resolution with loved ones.
Meanwhile, if a family member simply isn't accepting the death and proper dedication to handling the situation, I suspect no amount of due diligence nor responsible action of those associated with it would escape accusation and angst from the family member as a substitute for their grief.