Gulf allies 'all faced chemical exposure'

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,11816,1274905,00.html

 

Gulf allies 'all faced chemical exposure'

 

James Meikle, health correspondent

Tuesday August 3, 2004

The Guardian

 

US investigators researching illnesses suffered by

veterans of the first Gulf war yesterday insisted that

all troops and civilians in the area might have been

exposed to low levels of chemical agents.

 

Material was blasted into the environment by bombing

attacks on Iraqi chemical plants and munition centres

during the war, and by demolition by allied forces

afterwards, witnesses told Lord Lloyd's independent

inquiry into claims by British veterans that they had

been made ill by their service.

 

None of the witnesses from US congressional

investigations attempted to quantify the exact levels

of exposure, but Robert Haley, from the University of

Texas, who has both examined veterans and studied

animal experiments, is today expected to say that

low-level agents do in fact cause detectable brain

injuries.

 

" All persons in the theatre may have been exposed, "

said Keith Rhodes, chief technologist for the

government accountability office (GAO), an

investigating arm of the US Congress.

 

The GAO said recently that the US government's models

for assessing the number of soldiers who might have

been exposed to agents from the plume caused by the

destruction of a weapons bunker at Khamisayah, in

southern Iraq, after the war could not be supported.

The US government estimated that just over 100,000 US

troops may have been exposed, and the Ministry of

Defence in Britain has admitted that 9,000 British

troops may have been exposed.

 

But Dr Rhodes said: " The concern for you all is that

your MoD completely relied on [uS] department of

defence modelling, so any estimation of exposure, or

any estimation of concentration of material, or any

estimation of who was or who was not under the plume,

is at the mercy of the department of defence model. "

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He added that Dr Haley's work was showing

" physiological damage to veterans as a result of

low-level exposure " .

 

James Tuite, an adviser to an earlier investigation of

Gulf war illnesses, said that there was growing

credible scientific experience, in addition to

substantial anecdotal evidence, that " sub-acute levels

of airborne chemical warfare agents were present

within the theatre of operations " .

 

About 14,000 chemical agent alarms deployed by US

forces sounded on average two to three times a day

" for a total of approximately 42,000 alarms per day

for 42 days " - up to 1.76m alarms during the war. Yet

the US department of defence asserted all were false

alarms, and argued that exposure to chemical weapons

for unprotected people was " painful, debilitating and

often deadly " . There had been no such effects seen in

the Gulf, the US government had said.

 

Christopher Shays, a Republican who chairs the

congressional sub-committee on the issue, said in a

written submission to the Lloyd inquiry that the GAO

study was significant. " Caught using bad science to

support worse policies, the department of defence can

no longer defend the proposition veterans' illnesses

are not related to battlefield exposures. We shared

that battlefield with British troops. The GAO findings

have profound implications for them, and for civilian

populations in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran. "

 

Bernie Sanders, an independent member of the House of

Representatives from Vermont, said: " To say to someone

who is ill, who may be dying, who cannot go to work

.... because we do not understand your illness, we

cannot compensate you, or that you are different from

someone whose war wound we understand, is very

upsetting. "