Editorials: Pinocchio syndrome
PINOCCHIO SYNDROME Thousands of men and women who served in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq in the course of the Gulf War have reported falling ill. Their symptoms-among them, chronic fatigue, joint...
...She wrote books on early English and published two books on her congregation, Second Sowing and The Sacred Heart in the Life of the Church...
...Once again, there seems to be plenty of evidence contradicting these denials...
...Sound familiar...
...May she rest in peace...
...Research on the Gulf War syndrome is long overdue...
...For years after the war in Vietnam ended, officials misled, misrepresented, spoke with a certitude they did not possess, and outright lied about the effects of exposure to Agent Orange...
...The Pentagon said no, and offered other explanations: the veterans were suffering from postwar stress, psychiatric disorders, hypochondria, or perhaps the effects of an experimental vaccine given to protect them against chemical and biological weapons...
...In May 1994 the secretaries of defense, veterans affairs, and health and human services told Congress in a joint letter that "there is no classified information that would indicate any exposures to or detections of chemical or biological agents...
...Many suspect they were exposed to Iraqi chemical or biological agents...
...A third book on her congregation's work in Asia, based on the time she spent in Japan, is awaiting publication...
...Last month Sister Margaret Williams, the daughter of Commonweal's founder, Michael Williams, died at the age of ninety-four at the retirement home of the Religious of the Sacred Heart in Albany, New York...
...these veterans deserve to know the source of their illnesses, and where possible they deserve appropriate treatment...
...Evidently Pentagon and military officials are more interested in protecting the image of a "famous" victory than in the health and well-being of the soldiers who secured it...
...Pentagon officials persistently denied MARGARET WILLIAMS, R.S.C.J...
...An independent commission along with congressional prodding and testimony has finally pried loose this information from a reluctant and dissembling bureaucracy...
...Defoliation strategies in Vietnam exposed tens of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese to Agent Orange, a highly toxic pesticide whose health effects were also dismissed by the Pentagon...
...as of October the number had been adjusted upward to 20,000...
...A distinguished scholar and author, with a master's degree in English literature from Oxford, Sister Margaret taught at Man-hattanville College for thirty years...
...The Gulf War "syndrome" is as troubling if not as devastating-at least so far...
...Last June, the Pentagon finally admitted that 300-400 soldiers may have been exposed to chemical weapons...
...Once again, government officials joined in dismissing the fears of veterans, in this case denying that there was any evidence that chemical weapons had been detected at all, much less that exposure to them had caused the veterans' unexplained symptoms...
...Their symptoms-among them, chronic fatigue, joint pain, memory loss, headaches, digestive problems, and insomnia-are elusive and so far unexplained...
...The connection between exposure to chemical weapons and the Gulf War syndrome remains needlessly elusive...
...From the first hours of the war in January 1991, when American equipment detected chemical weapons, to postwar reports in October 1991 by United Nations weapons inspectors, evidence exists that chemical weapons were either used by the Iraqis or that Iraqi arsenals were set off by the American military {see, New York Times, January 2,1997...
...there was any evidence either at the time of the war in 1991 or after the fact that exposure to chemical or biological weapons had occurred...
Vol. 124 • January 1997 • No. 1
