Well, Bush's buddies strike again. This time they have lost the body of an Australian soldier, Private Jacob Kovco.
This story by Mike Carlton in the Sydney Morning Herald tells all about it.
It makes you wonder how many of our own dead soldiers are in their proper burial places. Have grieving parents and spouses buried someone else's child or husband thinking they were burying their own?
This administration not only wastes our money on inadequate armor, bad food for the troops, and overpaid private contractors, they hire a company famous for its mishandling of the dead to bring home the dead to their loved ones. It's a disgrace, a damnable disgrace!!
In fairness, the blunder is probably the fault of the American contractor hired to transport the casket from Kuwait to Australia, a firm named Kenyon International.
Here the plot thickens. Kenyon's parent company, Service Corporation International (SCI), boasts that it is "the dominant leader in the North American death care industry". It is based in Houston, Texas. You will not be surprised, therefore, to hear that SCI's billionaire founder, one Robert Waltrip, is an old buddy of the Bush family and a big-money donor to the two Georges.
This is the same company that had the gross habit of replacing old corpses with new ones, and dumping bodies in the woods in FL to be eaten by wild hogs. Of course, they were also big contributors to the Bush political machine.
Back in 1999, when George jnr was beginning his run for the White House, SCI was embroiled in a grisly scandal known as Funeralgate. A whistleblower accused the company of "recycling" graves. Old corpses had been removed and replaced by new ones. At two Jewish cemeteries in Florida, bodies were exhumed and dumped in the woods to be eaten by wild hogs.
I am not making this up. The scandal ran through the Texas courts, reaching all the way to, yep, Governor George W. Bush. There were uncomfortable questions about the donations he had accepted from SCI....
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And who fixed this? Why, none other than Harry Whittington, the Texas lawyer shot by Deadeye Dick Cheney on that famous hunting trip in February.
This administration has no feeling or empathy for the living, or the dead. All they care about is letting their friends make money at the taxpayer's expense. This has got to stop!! It used to be that the Army's Graves and Registration section dealt with identifying and handling the dead soldiers, making sure that each one got proper treatment and indentification and was shipped home to their families. Now that seems to have been outsourced to a company famous for their incompetence and disrespect in handling the dead. How low can the Bush administration stoop? Literally as low as the grave. These monsters are picking our pockets as they dishonor the dead. How much longer are the American people going to put up with this callous behavior??
Update: This story says that Private Kovco got home, two days after the wrong body was shipped home instead. And he was properly greeted, as are all the Australian soldiers, not snuck in at night like the American soldiers..
A full military guard of honour has greeted the remains of Private Jake Kovco, the soldier killed in Iraq, at Sydney Airport.
In full parade dress and wearing black arm bands, about 300 officers from Private Kovco's regiment - the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment - formed a guard of honour from the doorway of the aircraft.
They saluted the silver casket as it passed.
Eight military pallbearers carried the coffin, which was draped in an Australian flag with a wreath of red flowers on top.
Led by a military chaplain and a lone bagpipe player, Pte Kovco's casket made its way to the side of the tarmac where his widow Shelley, his parents and other members of his family had a final chance to say goodbye.
Airport security and other staff came to a standstill as the procession passed.
I wish our boys, who have been "defending freedom", would get the same treatment. They deserve it.