This is a hell of a way to mark Veterans Day on Friday. The Office of Special Counsel (OSC), thanks to whistleblowers, uncovered "gross mismanagement" at the Dover Air Force Base mortuary, which cares for the United States' war dead, after whistleblower James G. Parsons Sr. (a military autopsy and embalming technician) and two other mortuary technician-whistleblowers reported, among 14 cases of horrific indignities:
Losing a dead soldier's ankle and losing or misplacing three other sets of remains that had been stored in plastic bags.
Sawing off a damaged arm bone of a Marine so he could fit in his uniform and coffin, but not telling the family.
Permitting an Army hospital in Germany to ship fetal remains in reused cardboard boxes back to the U.S. for burial instead of in aluminum transfer cases.
Predictably, the Air Force disciplined by did not fire the mortuary commander and two other senior officials. Let's just hope that the whistleblowers are not now prosecuted under the Espionage Act for exposing what is clearly government abuse of the most unholy order.
The Office of Special Counsel (OSC)--an independent federal watchdog agency that receives complaints from whistleblowers and protects them against reprisals--was thoroughly bastardized under Bush, and sat without an appointed leader for the first two years of Obama's administration. Luckily, it is now under the helm of the very able Carolyn Lerner and she is rehabilitating the agency at an unfathomable speed.
Not only did the Air Force not fire the mortuary commander and two other mortuary supervisors, but also one of these mortuary officials, Keel, tried to obstruct the investigation by trying to fire Parsons and another whistleblower for cooperating with the probe. As if getting fired isn't bad enough retaliation against a whistleblower, it is now a precursor to prosecuting the whistleblower under the Espionage Act for embarrassing the Administration.
To add insult to injury to horror, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force Chief of Staff, said the Air Force knew about the problems as early as May 2010, but the Air Force waited more than a year (until last weekend) to notify the families because OSC had placed "certain constraints" on the their ability to notify the families. NPR gave truth to the lie, here. My former boss, Mark Cohen, who left the Government Accountability Project to be the deputy special counsel at OSC, called the Air Force's excuse "patently false" in one of the Washington Post's two front-page, top-of-the-fold articles:
The Air Force has shown as much, if not more, reverence for its image as it has for the families of the fallen.
This grisly scandal was foreshadowed by a similar scandal at Arlington National Cemetary, where
another whistleblower brought forth allegations of (and Army investigators substantiated) cases of misidentified remains, soldiers buried in the wrong graves, and urns that had been dumped in a dirt pile.
Kudos to the whistleblowers and to the OSC for trying to ensure that our falled are treated with reverence, dignity and respect, not treated like pieces of garbage.