Pentagon Condemned For Gulf War Probe Panel Calls For Independent Inquiry Into Illnesses

A special White House panel has condemned the Pentagon for its investigation into whether American troops were exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and has called for an independent inquiry into more than 15 incidents in which nerve gas and other chemical agents were detected by American troops.

In a draft of the final report, expected to be delivered to President Clinton next month, the panel said the Pentagon has lost so much credibility on the issue that the new inquiries should be taken away from the Defense Department and given to outside investigators.

The panel, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, said the Defense Department’s investigation of chemical exposures in the gulf war has “severely undermined public confidence” because it has “lacked vigor, fallen short on investigative grounds and stretched credibility.”

“The Department of Defense has conducted a superficial investigation of possible chemical warfare agent exposures,” the report said, “which is unlikely to provide credible answers to veterans’ questions.”

The draft is the result of the most independent and far-reaching investigation of the actions of the Pentagon in dealing with the claims of American soldiers that they were exposed to clouds of Iraqi chemical or biological weapons during the war.

The report, portions of which still are being rewritten, does not resolve the mystery of why tens of thousands of gulf war veterans are ill.

Members of the White House panel said they believe that while clusters of gulf war veterans were exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons and some may be sick as a result, the evidence does not show that chemicals wafted over most of the soldiers who are reporting ailments. “Theaterwide contamination is highly unlikely,” the report said.

Copies of the draft were made available to The New York Times.

The Defense Department, which has denied allegations that it has withheld information from gulf war veterans about their health, said it would have no comment on the report until the president receives it.

The committee, which includes several prominent doctors and scientists, concluded there is “overwhelming” evidence that chemical weapons were released when American troops blew up a massive Iraqi ammunition depot near the southern Iraqi village of Kamisiyah in March 1991, shortly after the war. Thousands of American soldiers were deployed in the vicinity of the blast.

“The committee concludes that for nearby troops, exposure should be presumed,” the report says. “The releases at Kamisiyah suggest the need for a thorough investigation of other sites for which reliable detections exist or where information indicates c.w. agents could have been present.” “C.W.” refers to “chemical warfare.”

About 80,000 of the 700,000 American troops who served in the gulf have requested special medical examinations to determine whether they were made sick by their service. Many have complained of a variety of ailments, including digestive problems, chronic fatigue and memory loss, that have collectively come to be known as gulf war syndrome.

Like other expert panels that have studied the issue, the White House committee said that little research had been done on the health effects of low-level chemical exposures and that the Pentagon’s medical record-keeping was so inadequate that it was impossible to gauge the health of gulf war veterans.

The committee said that based on current scientific evidence, “it is unlikely the health effects reported by gulf war veterans today are the result of exposure” to chemical agents. It noted, however, that “the amount of data from either human or animal research on subclinical exposures is minimal,” and the panel said it supported new research on the health effects of low-level exposure to chemical weapons.

A member of the committee, Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview that the draft was being rewritten to make clear that there was the possibility that clusters of soldiers at Kamisiyah and elsewhere might have been made sick because of exposure to chemical weapons.

“There’s irrefutable evidence that we’ve got chemical exposures,” Caplan said, “and there’s reason to suspect that chemicals are playing a role” in the illnesses of veterans.

But Caplan, who would not discuss other details of the report, said chemical weapons do not explain the health problems reported by soldiers who were hundreds of miles from the areas where there were reports of chemical detections. “The patterns of illness,” he said, “the patterns of health complaints are not consistent with just chemicals.”

The available scientific evidence suggests that soldiers would only suffer from long-term health effects from exposure to chemical weapons if they had had violent symptoms at the time of the exposure. Pentagon records suggest that few Americans soldiers reported those sorts of acute symptoms during the war.

The White House committee said the research into the health effects of low-level chemical exposure should have begun years ago and that the Pentagon’s “intransigence in refusing to fund such research until summer 1996 has done veterans and the public a disservice.”