Top Military Officer Gives Muted Response To Landfill Reports

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey gave a muted response Thursday to reports that cremated body parts of American servicemen have been sent to a landfill.

“I don’t know what right looks like in that regard,” Dempsey said when asked during a press briefing at the Pentagon if he believed the practice was morally wrong.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that from 2003 to 2008, the U.S. military would cremate portions of unidentifiable body parts from American servicemen. It would then give the ashes to a contractor that would in turn dump them in a landfill. The practice has since been abandoned in favor of leaving cremated remains at sea.

Dempsey, the country’s highest ranking military officer, noted that the routine was not necessarily very strange.

“The disposition of human remains that are separated from the principle portion, if you look into how it’s handled routinely in civilian life, there are procedures exactly that way,” Dempsey said. “We just took a decision in 2008 to do it at sea.”

The Washington Post story came just one day after the Office of Special Counsel released a letter to the President detailing a litany of alleged missteps at Dover Air Force’s mortuary, the entry point for American soldiers who have died overseas. The office cited incidents of lost body parts, dismemberment without familial consent and transporting military families’ fetal remains in plastic buckets and used cardboard boxes.

In response, the morgue has updated their guidelines and three mortuary personnel, including two civilians and one military officer, have been disciplined through reassignment.

Explaining that he was disturbed by the possible mistreatment of U.S. war dead, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has since announced that an independent investigation over the matter spearheaded by former Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona.

Panetta also said that he has asked Air Force Secretary Mike Donley to investigate an Office of Special Counsel claim that the morgue’s whistleblowers may have faced improper treatment from Dover personnel after bringing the story to light.