WASHINGTON — Federal investigators said Tuesday they uncovered “gross mismanagement” at the Dover Air Force Base mortuary that cares for America’s war dead after whistle-blowers reported horror stories of lost body parts, shoddy inventory controls and lax supervision.
The former mortuary commander and two other senior officials have been disciplined but not fired in response to separate investigations conducted by the Air Force inspector general, the secretary of the Air Force and the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency that also received the whistle-blower complaints.
The grisly findings at Dover echo a similar scandal at another hallowed repository for the military’s dead, Arlington National Cemetery. An Army investigation last year documented cases of misidentified remains at Arlington, dug-up urns that had been dumped in a dirt pile and botched contracts worth millions of dollars.
The Army Criminal Investigation Command and the FBI are conducting a criminal probe there.
The sloppy handling of troops’ remains at Dover and Arlington painfully undercuts what the military has long borne as a sacred obligation: to treat its fallen members and their families with utmost levels of dignity and honor.
“The ultimate requirement here is to fulfill our professional and moral obligation to ensure that our fallen are treated with the reverence and respect they deserve,” said Gen. Nor ton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff.
Three civilian whistle-blowers who work in the mortuary filed complaints last year alleging 14 specific instances of wrongdoing by their supervisors, including endangering public health, losing a dead soldier’s ankle and sawing off a deceased Marine’s arm bone without informing his family.
The whistle-blowers also complained that the Dover mortuary permitted an Army hospital in Germany to ship fetal remains in reused cardboard boxes back to the United States for burial instead of in more dignified aluminum transfer cases.
The Air Force inspector general confirmed many of the basic facts in the complaints and documented a pattern of troubles at Dover. But the inspector general did not uphold the 14 accusations filed against three senior mortuary officials, concluding that there was not enough evidence to show that they had personally broken rules or regulations.
The Air Force also found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Nevertheless, citing an overall finding of “gross mismanagement” at the mortuary, the Air Force said it recently disciplined the three senior officials.
Air Force officials said they have ordered record-keeping changes, extra security and other reforms because of the whistle-blower complaints, which stemmed from several incidents between 2008 and 2010.
At the Air Force’s request, a panel of public-health experts headed by former Surgeon General Richard Carmona also will conduct an independent review of Dover’s mortuary operations in the next 60 days.
Air Force sets up hotline
The Air Force has established a 24-hour toll-free hotline — 855-637-2583 — to answer possible questions from relatives about service members killed in action. The Dover mortuary processed more than 4,000 sets of human remains from 2008 to 2010, the bulk of them from troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
