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by James Corbett
GRTV.ca
1 March, 2012

A new report released on Monday by the Pentagon reveals that some of the unidentifiable remains from victims at the Pentagon and Shanksville sites on September 11th were disposed of in a landfill.

The details come from the findings of a review committee examining operations of the Air Force Mortuaty division at Dover Air Force Base. In the report, it is noted that before 2008, disposal of unidentified remains was delegated of by subcontractors. The guidelines at the time called for the contractors to incinerate the remains and dump the ashes in landfills.

In a press conference earlier this week, Pentagon spokesman John Abizaid confirmed that this section of the report applied to the remains of some of the victims of 9/11.

This is not the first controversy to arise regarding the disposal of remains of 9/11 victims. In 2003, New York City Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch wrote that he was virtually certain that human remains from the World Trade Center had been left at the Fresh Kills landfill, where debris from the buildings had been taken to be sifted.

In 2005, the New York City Medical Examiner officially ended the process of identifying remains from the debris of the World Trade Center site, with only 1,585 victims being identified by their remains.

In 2007, victims’ family’s worst fears about what happened to the unidentified remains were confirmed by Eric Beck, , a senior supervisor of the recycling facility that sifted the debris, who swore in an affidavit that some of those remains ended up in a mixture that was used to pave roads and fill potholes in New York.

In 2008, Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Federal District Court in Manhattan threw out a case by victims’ family members who were petitioning for the right to continue searching the landfill for the remains of their loved ones.

In 2010, the city relented and the search began again for human remains, this time using new methods and technologies. The remains of 20 more victims were soon discovered in the rubble.

The mystery of why the city fought so hard to prevent the victims’ families from continuing their search for their loved ones is compounded by the entire operation to remove and destroy the evidence from ground zero as quickly as possible.

By September 29, 2001, just two weeks after the attacks, over 130,000 tons of debris had been removed from the site. In all, 185,101 tons of structural steel was hauled away from ground zero, most of it sold to the Chinese firm Baosteel, which purchased it at $120 per ton, significantly below the average price of $160 paid by local US steel mills.

Of the 185,101 tons of steel, almost all of it was scrapped, with FEMA saving just 150 pieces of steel for further study. The Building Performance Assessment Team tasked by FEMA with writing the WTC Building Performance Study was not even allowed access to the site, or to collect steel samples from the salvage yards.

Even more remarkably, as firefighters like Erik Lawyer have pointed out, the destruction of evidence represented by this so-called clean-up of the site in fact violated numerous specific guidelines about the preservation of crime scene evidence for further investigation.

In the wake of the latest revelations regarding the dumping of 9/11 victim remains in landfills, the Pentagon is being forced to justify their conduct and guidelines and pressure is mounting for those in charge of this desecration to lose their job.

So far, no one has lost their job or even been reprimanded for the frequent and flagrant violation of protocols and crime scene requirements regarding the disposal of 9/11 evidence.

At this time, there is still no word from the FBI or New York city officials how they were able to discover nearly intact passports from the World Trade Center site on the day of 9/11 but have yet to account for nearly 1,000 human bodies.