Scandal grows at military mortuary

The U.S. military's respect for its fallen is legendary. Or, rather, it used to be.

In recent months, Americans have been startled by a series of revelations about the mismanagement of graves at Arlington National Cemetery and other military burial grounds, as well as the mishandling of the remains of men and women who died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Last week, the scandal broadened with a report by the Office of the Special Counsel that several supervisors at Dover Air Force Base, the nation’s largest military mortuary, retaliated against four civilian workers who blew the whistle on egregious breakdowns in caring for the bodies of the war dead.

The whistleblowers called attention to lost body parts and other basic failures in the handling of remains at the mortuary. The Air Force also later confirmed, in the wake of media reports, that the mortuary cremated body parts of the war dead and dumped the ashes in a landfill in King George County, east of Fredericksburg, from 2003 to 2008.

The Air Force disciplined and reassigned but did not fire the three top supervisors involved in the problems at the mortuary. Officials also concluded there was no evidence the three had sought to silence the whistleblowers.

But the Office of the Special Counsel, which is now urging the Air Force to take more substantive action against the supervisors, found that the whistleblowers did suffer for speaking up. The supervisors tried to fire two of the workers and suspended or placed the others on indefinite leave, the office learned.

Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, who has called for a review of the findings, stated the obvious: “Reprisals against employees are unethical and illegal and counter to Air Force core values.”

Those words need to be put into action, with the prompt removal of all the individuals responsible for the mismanagement at Dover and the reintroduction of basic, traditional safeguards to ensure the appropriate treatment of those who have sacrificed their lives for our nation.

By and large, the military shows enormous respect for its fallen. But these continuing revelations are disturbing, and the latest raises — again — the question of just how extensive the mismanagement is.