Print Contact Articles by Subject 9-11 Archive 2012 Who Really Recovered the Remains in Shanksville?

Who Really Recovered the Remains in Shanksville?

March 3, 2012

The FBI took control of the crash scene. [Wallace] Miller had charge of a provisional morgue six miles away. Across the county, at Seven Springs Mountain Resort, he would meet with families of most of the victims.
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 15, 2001

Miller was among the very first to arrive after 10:06 on the magnificently sunny morning of September 11. He was stunned at how small the smoking crater looked, he says, "like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it." Once he was able to absorb the scene, Miller says, "I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes, because there were no bodies there. It became like a giant funeral service."
- Washington Post, May 12, 2002

"I wouldn't know how there would be any possibility how any remains would get to Dover… As far as I know, nothing else left here except the DNA samples."
- Wallace Miller, Coroner of Somerset County to AP, February 28, 2012

Jim Svonavec, whose company worked at the site and provided excavation equipment, told me that the recovery of the engine "at least 1,800 feet into the woods," was done solely by FBI agents using his equipment.
- Christopher Bollyn, "Controlled Press Ignores Questions about 9-11", September 17, 2004

When the Pentagon released the report about the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base on February 28, in which it said that unidentified human remains from Shanksville and the Pentagon were disposed of by cremation and deposited in a landfill, it was sure to raise an uproar of protest.

During the probe of the mortuary, which has a long history of disposing of human remains improperly, a 2002 memo surfaced that stated that remains from the attack on the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93 near Shanksville had been dumped in a landfill.  This is what the Pentagon report said (p. 11) about the human remains from the 9-11 crime scenes:

Prior to 2008, portions of remains that could neither be tested nor identified ...were cremated under contract at a civilian crematory and returned to DPM [Dover Port Mortuary]. This policy began shortly after September 11, 2001, when several portions of remains from the Pentagon attack and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site could not be tested or identified.

These cremated portions were then placed in sealed containers that were provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor. Per the biomedical waste contract at that time, the contractor then transported these containers and incinerated them. The assumption on the part of DPM was that after final incineration nothing remained. A DPM management query found that there was some residual material following incineration and that the contractor was disposing of it in a landfill. The landfill disposition was not disclosed in the contractual disposal agreement.

When I read last November how the Dover mortuary had disposed of the bodies of 274 U.S. servicemen by dumping their bodies in a landfill, I suspected that the unethical and criminal practices at the Dover mortuary had probably begun with the remains of the 9-11 victims that had been taken there in 2001. 

Wallace "Wally" Miller, the coroner of Somerset County, disputes the report's finding that human remains were taken from Shanksville to Dover AFB.  "I wouldn't know how there would be any possibility how any remains would get to Dover," Miller told the AP on February 28.  "As far as I know, nothing else left here except the DNA samples."  The key qualifying phrase here is "as far as I know."  As the county coroner, Miller had legal responsibility for the crash scene but that is not the way it worked out in reality, and Miller knows that very well.  I have met Wally Miller and raised the matter about the reports that remains had been taken to Dover with him in 2006 or earlier. 

Clearly this is a matter that must be investigated.  It is a matter of how the evidence from 9-11 was handled - and destroyed.  This matter cannot simply be left to claims and counter-claims in the press about what did or did not happen to the remains from Shanksville.  The 9-11 victims' relatives and Miller obviously want to believe that everything was done properly, but was it?  We need to have a complete accounting of who really recovered the remains in Shanksville and where they were sent.  Where are the records?  Who were the people involved?

When I first met Miller at his funeral home, I learned that the FBI had asked him to go along with their demand that they take control of the crash scene, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on October 15, 2001.  It was thanks to some local workmen who were painting his porch that this information was divulged to me and my wife as we interviewed Miller.  They prompted Miller saying, "Tell them what the FBI told you."  The FBI had asked Miller if he was going to be a "team player" or something along those lines, and go along with the FBI taking control of the crash scene.

So, that's how it occurred.  The FBI took complete control of the real crash scene, which was in the woods beyond the crater.  There were no remains in the reclaimed mine, where the crater had been blasted, because nothing really crashed there, except an air-to-ground missile.  The debris that was seen in the crater was junk that had been buried in the reclaimed mine, reportedly old Coca-Cola machines.  The aircraft debris field was located several hundred meters in the woods, especially around the property of the Hoover family.  This was the closed area in which only FBI personnel was allowed. 

The FBI was using heavy equipment lent to them by Jim Svonavec, the owner of the reclaimed mine, who told me in 2004 that even his company personnel were not allowed to be in the debris recovery area, which he said was at least 1,800 feet into the woods.  These reports indicate that the real debris field extended over a very large area of the woods in which only FBI personnel was allowed.  Even the people who owned the property and lived there, such as Barry Hoover, were not allowed to enter the area.  Meanwhile, Wallace Miller, the coroner, was kept busy six miles away manning the provisional morgue.  How much oversight could Wally Miller have of the recovery of human remains if he was 6 miles away?

WHO DESTROYED THE EVIDENCE?

Wally is a nice fellow, but he thinks that everybody plays by the rules.  He doesn't think about destroying evidence, especially when that evidence is human remains.  He allowed the federal authorities to take control of the crime scene that was his responsibility and jurisdiction under the laws of the state of Pennsylvania.  I had read that human remains had been taken from Shanksville to Dover AFB for identifying.  I read that the identifying process at Dover was being done by several FBI agents working at the mortuary.  I called Miller sometime before May 2006 and asked him about the ethics of his having signed death certificates for bodies that had been identified by others at Dover AFB.  He got angry at me for having asked this direct question, but he cannot say that he has not heard that such things could have occurred. 

What one needs to take into consideration is that the debris field contained the human remains and evidence of mass murder.  It was not a crash that brought down Flight 93; it was a missile.  The FBI needed to have complete control over the crash scene in order to hide the evidence of this mass murder from the public - and Wally Miller.  There would be several things that needed to be hidden:  the evidence of the missile and exploded plane, and the number and condition of the bodies.

What the FBI did at Shanksville is the same thing it did at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon:  it hid evidence that it did not want to be divulged and destroyed evidence that did not fit the pre-scripted story.  That human remains from the Shanksville crime scene were thrown away by FBI agents working at the Dover mortuary is just another grim example of how the FBI destroyed evidence from 9-11.  Who were these FBI people working at the Dover mortuary and who was controlling them?  This should certainly not be difficult to find out for a military or police investigation team.  When they say that their records only go back to 2003, I don't believe it.  This is only an attempt to erase the issue and claim that it cannot be investigated.

What needs to be done is a full-throttle investigation of the FBI personnel who were involved in the recovery of human remains in Shanksville and exactly who was working with these remains at Dover AFB and wherever else they may have been sent.  FBI personnel were responsible for the destruction of a great deal of evidence from 9-11, such as the steel from the Twin Towers.  This all happened under the command of Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff, who was responsible for collecting the evidence and prosecuting the criminals behind 9-11, and his superior, Attorney General John Ashcroft.  These two men, the director of the FBI, and all the agents involved in the criminal destruction of evidence need to be arrested and charged with having been part of a conspiracy to destroy evidence and obstruct justice. 

Note:  For more information on the 9-11 deception at Shanksville, I recommend reading my articles:  The Hollywood Fantasy of Flight 93, Was Flight 93 Shot Down?, Eyewitnesses Saw Military Aircraft at Scene of Flight 93, and The Shanksville Deception of 9-11.

Sources and Recommended Reading:

Bollyn, Christopher, "The Shanksville Deception of 9-11", Bollyn.com, February 4, 2010
http://www.bollyn.com/the-shanksville-deception-of-9-11-2

Bollyn, Christopher, "Controlled Press Ignores Questions about 9-11", September 17, 2004
http://www.bollyn.com/controlled-press-ignores-questions-about-9-11-2

Gibb, Tom, "Coroner's quiet unflappability helps him take charge of Somerset tragedy", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 15, 2001
http://www.post-gazette.com/headlines/20011015newsmaker1015p2.asp

Perl, Peter, "Hallowed Ground", Washington Post, May 12, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A56110-2002May8&notFound=true