Gulf allies 'all faced chemical exposure' (GW1)

[DoYouEverWonder]

August 3, 2004

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.

<snip>

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."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1274648,00.html

[soothsayer]

1. Why does the US always abandon veterans that it sickens?

I really don't get it. The powers that be hate us cannon fodder, I guess.