A Pentagon report released on Tuesday, February 28th, revealed that some unidentified body part remains from the September 11th crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, PA may have come under the corrupt hands of the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base. According to the report, the remains "could not be tested or identified" because they were either too small or irreparably damaged (The Washington Post). Dover has been under review since November after multiple investigations turned up missing body parts, a mutilated corpse, fraud, and other allegations (Whitlock).
The mortuary at Dover has been responsible for disposing of the unclaimed or unidentified remains of military troops for almost two decades. However, investigators found that the remains are oftentimes cremated, mixed with medical waste, incinerated, and then dumped into a landfill. Despite the discovery that this is common practice at Dover, General Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, reported that the victims' remains from Flight 93 were not disposed of in the landfill "as best we can tell." He did, however, relinquish that this did happen to the unidentified, partial remains for the victims of American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon (Whitlock). .
A memo from the Pentagon in March of 2002 requested that the military incinerate "fragmented remains" mixed with "non-biological materials" from the Flight 77 crash site. David S.C. Chu, the former undersecretary of defense for personnel, wrote the memo. Despite the fact that he has yet to comment on the matter, the memo did not specifically specify for those remains to then be disposed of in a landfill. The non-fragmented, but still unidentified, remains were cremated and buried at Arlington National Cemetery (Whitlock). .
"This is something we need to nail down," said Schwartz, as he and other members of the Pentagon sought to determine how many of the September 11 victims' remains were sent to the landfill (Whitlock).
