The Washington Post reports on another budding source of outrage:
On Tuesday, a new Defense Department review of the mortuary operations at Dover [Air Force Base] revealed that “several portions of remains” recovered from the Sept. 11 attacks at the Pentagon and at Shanksville [] ended up in a landfill. The review, led by retired Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, did not quantify how many human remains from Sept. 11 were disposed of in this manner. It said 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, but then handed over to a “biomedical waste disposal contractor”….for incineration. Dover mortuary officials assumed at the time that “after final incineration, nothing remained,” 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.
Can we please please please just collectively decide not to care about this? If I’m reading this right, we’re talking about perhaps half a dozen “portions” so small they couldn’t be analyzed. In other words, maybe an unidentifiable few grams or so? Which were cremated and then incinerated. And then taken to a landfill instead of being tossed over the side of a ship.
Let’s all get a grip. This just isn’t a big deal. All we have to do is decide not to pop a gasket and get on with our lives. We can do that. We can.
