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  • 2016-01-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Were the Remains of U.S. Soldiers Dumped in a Landfill? (en)
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  • On 13 January 2016, the web site Groopspeak published a report claiming that the military had dumped the remains of more than 250 soldiers in a landfill during the George W. Bush administration. While this claim is largely factual, the article may have left readers with a few misleading impressions: First, the Dover Air Force Base mortuary never threw entire bodies into a landfill. According to a Air Force officials, the procedure was limited to fragments or portions of body parts that were unable to be identified. Second, while Groopspeak acknowledged that there is no evidence that Bush was aware of the practice, the article insinuated that the former president was to blame, since his media blackout prevented authorities from discovering the practice. CBS notes, however, that the media was first banned from covering the return of fallen soldiers to Dover in 1991 under his father President George H.W. Bush: Lastly, Groopspeak claimed that this story hardly made a blip in the mainstream media. This simply was not true. The Groopspeak article was a summarized version of a report that was filed by the Washington Post in 2011. Shortly after Post published their article under the headline Air Force dumped ashes of more troops’ remains in Va. landfill than acknowledged, reports were subsequently filed by Fox News, the CBS News, Daily Mail, the New York Daily News, CNN, the BBC, and USA Today: The Dover Air Force Base mortuary stopped dumping the cremated partial remains of soldiers in a landfill in May 2008. Now, partial remains are cremated and then buried at sea: (en)
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