November 8, 2011 - Federal investigators said Tuesday they uncovered “gross mismanagement” at the Dover Air Force Base mortuary that cares for America’s war dead after whistleblowers 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 whistleblower complaints.
The Office of Special Counsel on Tuesday ripped the Air Force for not taking the allegations more seriously and for not punishing senior mortuary officials more harshly.
Carolyn N. Lerner, the chief of the Office of Special Counsel, criticized the service’s handling of the investigation in a letter to Air Force Secretary Michael Donley. Lerner noted what she called “a pattern of the Air Force’s failure to acknowledge culpability for wrongdoing,” saying that it had managed to “stop just short of accepting accountability.”
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 now conducting a criminal probe there. read more>>>
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