WASHINGTON — The Pentagon continues to struggle to clarify confusion created by an independent report that said unidentified body parts of some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks were incinerated and dumped in a landfill. Top officials promised a full accounting to the victims’ families.
Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the chief of staff of the Air Force, told reporters that only some remains from the attack on the Pentagon — but not remains from the plane crash site in Shanksville, Pa., “as best we can tell” — were ordered incinerated by the Department of Defense in what he described as a common practice at the time.
His words were at odds with the independent report, released on Feb. 28, into failings at the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The report said that the mortuary had body parts of some Sept. 11 victims from both the Pentagon and Shanksville incinerated and then dumped in a landfill — a startling disclosure that was the latest to tarnish the reputation of Dover.
The independent report said that the Sept. 11 remains were cremated under contract at a civilian mortuary, returned to Dover, placed in sealed containers and then given to a biomedical waste disposal contractor, which incinerated them and put them in the landfill.
On Feb. 29, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta pledged that the Sept. 11 victims’ families would be given complete information on what happened as soon as the Pentagon could assemble the records, which he said would be sometime within the next few weeks. “We fully understand and want to address the questions families might have about the previous disposition policy that ended in 2008,” George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement.
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