Vets: Nerve Gas Detected
Two military chemical weapons specialists told Congress Tuesday that their units made confirmed detections of nerve agents in the vicinity of U.S. troops in Kuwait during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but said their superiors never followed up on their reports.
Testifying before a House sub-committee, Army Maj. Michael F. Johnson and Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. George J. Grass said in both cases they took pains to verify the detections and to make sure they were reported up the chain of command.
Both men said, however, that the detections were ignored at the time, and that no one from the Pentagon hierarchy ever questioned them about what they had discovered.
Their stories appeared likely to add to doubts about the Pentagon’s insistence that all such detections by U.S. chemical teams either could not be confirmed or were later proven inaccurate.
Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., the subcommittee chairman, said the incidents bolstered suspicion by lawmakers that top military officials - and the Pentagon’s civilian leaders - simply were not aggressive enough in pursuing the mystery of Persian Gulf War illness.
“You are all voices in the wilderness that nobody is listening to,” he said.
The issue has been controversial because many of the Gulf war veterans who have been suffering from illnesses that they believe they acquired during the 1991 war contend that their illnesses stem from exposure to toxic chemicals in Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.
Although the Pentagon has begun investigating those allegations more fully, top Defense Department officials have insisted for years that they knew of no such exposures. They have said that virtually all such detections by chemical warfare teams have proven to be false.
On Tuesday, however, Johnson and Grass insisted that they had taken steps to verify the detections they reported, and told lawmakers that they heard of dozens of other instances in which U.S. chemical specialists found firm evidence that toxic agents were present.
Johnson headed a special chemical weapons team that joined forces with a British unit in investigating a tankful of mustard agent at a girls’ school in Kuwait City in August 1991, while Grass said his unit found a nerve agent in a freshly cleared minefield in the area.
xxxx Trouble in Britain, too LONDON - The British government announced Tuesday that it would study complaints of illness among veterans of the Persian Gulf War and acknowledged that it had furnished Parliament incorrect answers to questions about the matter in the past.