Schwarzkopf’s Notes Part Of Illness Probe Senate Panel Continues Quest For Facts On Gulf War Syndrome

The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Thursday won permission to examine the personal Persian Gulf war logs of retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf in its search for clues on whether U.S. troops were exposed to chemicals or other toxic agents during the 1991 war.

Schwarzkopf, the venerated senior commander of allied troops, said he would allow congressional and Pentagon investigators to look at the volumes “to their hearts’ content.” But he angrily rejected implications that he would have covered up information on such exposures.

News of the request came on the first day of the 105th Congress’ hearings on the issue, and offered fresh evidence that Capitol Hill critics, including committee chair Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and ranking minority member Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., suspect the military still is concealing facts that bear on the search for causes of the so-called gulf war syndrome.

“This is a very serious matter, and a very serious log, which was evidently not at the disposal of (the CIA or the Department of Defense),” Rockefeller said at the hearing.

Gulf war syndrome is the generic term for the variety of illnesses and ailments that thousands of gulf war veterans have complained of since returning from the conflict.

As one possible explanation, investigators have been seeking for years to piece together the incomplete data on the exposure of the 670,000 U.S. troops to nerve gas and other chemicals and dangerous agents during the war.

Rockefeller and Specter believe they may find more clues in Schwarzkopf’s volumes of notes, which were compiled by an officer who sought to record every detail of every conversation the general had between August 1990 and August 1991. The record consists of 550 pages of typewritten notes, and 241 supplements. It totals 2,250 pages of material.

In particular, the senators hope they can find information to fill in a gap in records on chemical exposures during an eight-day period in March 1991 when U.S. engineers blew up nerve gas weapons in an Iraqi storage facility in Kamisiyeh, Iraq. U.S. troops compiled data on such chemicals on a laptop computer, but there are large gaps in the data, including for the 8-day period.

At the Pentagon, spokesman Kenneth Bacon told reporters he thought the inquiries about the logs were “a wild goose chase, frankly, on your part, and on the parts of Senator Rockefeller and Senator Specter.” He noted that only this week, the president’s advisory commission on the gulf war syndrome had reported that “there’s been no cover-up.”

Schwarzkopf has repeatedly denied there was any such nerve gas exposure of the troops, and asserted Thursday that officials would find no indication of one in the volumes at his office in Tampa, Fla., where he now lives.

He has retained personal control of the notes over the objections of critics who contended that since they were compiled by a military officer, they are government property. The Pentagon’s inspector general ruled in 1994 that the general was entitled to keep them.