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Post by pdh54 on Apr 15, 2015 10:14:18 GMT 8
Interesting...Wonder if they will be able to follow through with this. The Pentagon said Tuesday it would exhume and try to identify the remains of nearly 400 sailors and Marines killed when the USS Oklahoma sank in the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The ship capsized after being hit by nine torpedoes during the Dec. 7, 1941. Altogether, 429 sailors and Marines onboard were killed. Only 35 were identified in the years immediately after.
Hundreds were buried as unknowns at cemeteries in Hawaii. In 1950, they were reburied as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific inside a volcanic crater in Honolulu.
The military is acting now, more than 70 years after the men died, because advances in forensic science and technology as well as genealogical help from family members have made it possible to identify more remains, said Lt. Col. Melinda Morgan, a Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency spokeswoman.
Officials plan to begin the work in three to six weeks, Morgan said. They aim to identify the remains of up to 388 servicemen within five years.
In 2003, the military disinterred one casket at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific based on information provided by Ray Emory, a Pearl Harbor survivor who has spent years doggedly scouring documents.
Many remains were comingled when buried, and the military was able to identify five servicemen from that casket. But the coffin also contained the remains of up to 100 others who haven't been identified.www.foxnews.com/us/2015/04/14/pentagon-plans-to-identify-hundreds-killed-in-pearl-harbor/?intcmp=latestnews
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Post by JohnEakin on Apr 16, 2015 9:57:26 GMT 8
The fact that DoD feels the need to finally issue a policy is a good sign, but there are some problems with this.
First, parts of the actual memo are gibberish - must recover 50%, 60% makes no sense. These folks don't have a clue what they are doing.
It is also obvious that they intend to continue to use "classic forensic" identification techniques. After the way they botched the ID of the ten Unknowns from Cabanatuan Grave 717, their chances of identifying 388 Unknowns using mitochondrial DNA are slim to none. The technology they are using can not sort out a large number of remains with any degree of confidence and forget about using it for re-association of remains.
They didn't specify if they plan to exhume additional USS Oklahoma Unknowns or if these are the ones they exhumed several years ago and have been unable to ID. That was such an Asian fire drill that it shut down all exhumations for years. No reason to think that anything has changed.
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