No way to treat the dead or the living

A HUGE hat tip to Kat for this report from the Sidney Morning Herald. If you hadn't noticed, the Australian military recently lost the body of one of its soldiers being flown back from Iraq, with a huge subsequent outcry which has seriously damaged their Prime Ministers image.

I simply cannot add extra snark to this, but the facts themselves are truly shocking:

LOSING Private Kovco was not a good look. The Prime Minister was desperately sorry and very sad. It was just one of those incredibly unfortunate things.

The Defence Minister announced that it was a terrible, unacceptable mistake.

The Chief of the Defence Force was very upset. Everything was being done to establish the facts.

And on it went. A Government which so efficiently sends live soldiers to war should have devised a foolproof system for bringing dead ones home again, but not so. The Kovco family had every right to give John Howard an earful.

In fairness, the blunder is probably the fault of the American contractor hired to transport the casket from Kuwait to Australia, a firm named Kenyon International.

Here the plot thickens. Kenyon's parent company, Service Corporation International (SCI), boasts that it is "the dominant leader in the North American death care industry". It is based in Houston, Texas. You will not be surprised, therefore, to hear that SCI's billionaire founder, one Robert Waltrip, is an old buddy of the Bush family and a big-money donor to the two Georges.

Back in 1999, when George jnr was beginning his run for the White House, SCI was embroiled in a grisly scandal known as Funeralgate. A whistleblower accused the company of "recycling" graves. Old corpses had been removed and replaced by new ones. At two Jewish cemeteries in Florida, bodies were exhumed and dumped in the woods to be eaten by wild hogs.

I am not making this up. The scandal ran through the Texas courts, reaching all the way to, yep, Governor George W. Bush. There were uncomfortable questions about the donations he had accepted from SCI.

Happily, the whistleblower was paid off and everything smoothed over in time for Dubya to win the Republican presidential nomination. SCI later paid compensation of $US100 million to its victims' relatives.

And who fixed this? Why, none other than Harry Whittington, the Texas lawyer shot by Deadeye Dick Cheney on that famous hunting trip in February.

This is the crew handling our fallen soldiers. I don't suppose anyone told John Howard any of this. They never do.

The idea that anyone would give these people responsibility for the bodies of fallen heroes is mindboggling.

Who handles the return of fallen U.S. soldiers?