- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,11816,1274905,00.html
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