Credibility Gulf

...they show both numerous reports of chemical alarms sounding and an order from CENTCOM-the central command where Schwarzkopf was in charge-to ignore them...

...A Priori Assumptions Imagine a reporter who goes into a story with a hypothesis, then either discounts or tries to discredit any evidence-no matter how compelling-that contradicts that hypothesis...

...Yet just a few months later, the military began giving PB to some 400,000 male and female troops regardless of their health...

...Now the issue is gathering political momentum (with the Agent Orange debacle fresh in politicians’ minds), and you can be sure that eventually Congress will pass, and the president will sign, legislation to compensate sick veterans, even if no one can prove that their Gulf experience caused the illnesses...

...He signed legislation agreeing to compensate veterans for the health problems and birth defects believed to have been caused by the military’s use of dioxin-containing Agent Orange during the Vietnam War...

...military had been fighting for more than two decades-against its own soldiers...

...Yet there was no recordkeeping on who was exposed to what during the war or who fell ill with what symptoms at the time...

...Official policies are coordinated, then adhered to like glue...

...Despite the fact that PB can have side effects on myasthenia gravis patients, DOD did minimal testing on people without the disease: The studies were tiny and most excluded women and any men who were on other medications, smoked, or had health problems such as asthma...

...It was the mythlcal “perfect war...

...A report by a retired Army general concluded that many of the casualties were preventable: Commanders had failed to take basic anti-terrorist precautions, despite ample warning, and Pentagon policymakers had been lax in their intelligence gathering...

...particularly embarrassing was the fact that the Unit1995, Stephen Joseph testifed before the House Veteran Affairs Committee about the “hundreds of false chemical alarms” activated by dust, heat, smoke, low batteries, etc...

...The negligence evident in recordkeeping on PB was in fact part of a pattern...

...As early as 1993, an investigation by the Senate Banking Committee had challenged such assertions, suggesting that the United States’ own actions may have exposed its troops to low levels of chemical weapons when allied forces bombed Iraqi munitions facilities during the war and detonated Iraqi weapons immediately afterward...

...More recently, DOD said there may have also been a March 12 exposure...

...Arthur Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee...

...Military leaders and their troops have a relationship fraught with authoritarianism, paternalism, and, from the soldiers’ point of view, a great deal of faith-because they must entrust their well-being to their superiors...

...now they have to fight for the hearts of the soldiers who helped them do it...

...More than most bureaucracies, the military faces very public tests of its effectiveness...

...Assistant Secretary Joseph testified before the House Veteran Affairs Committee on March 9,199s: “There is no persuasive evidence of such exposure, even after much scrutiny...

...Christopher S hays huffed in a September House hearing...

...That was why it began grasping for an internal defense-a medical antidoteto exposures...

...The report also insinuated that the commanders and Pentagon officials had been less than honest about both the precautions they took and their estimates of the size of the bomb (they claimed it was 20,000 pounds, which meant any precautions would have been inadequate...

...Now you have a pretty good idea of how the Pentagon approached Gulf War illnesses...

...Research indicated that at smaller doses, and in combination with other antidotes, PB could serve as a prophylactic against the nerve gas soman...

...Military researchers and doctors could swear by their firstborn child that PB’s administration would be carefully monitored-but they were entirely dependent on commanders in the field to keep those promises...

...In response to written questions about what reports he was getting at the time, and how he responded, Powell says simply that at the joint staff level there were “periodic reports” that chemical alarms had sounded, but “that there was no official evidence in those cases of chemical agent detection.’’ One presumes, then, that there was no official response...

...So there was a contractand it was broken...

...The secretary [of defense] listens to the general counsel, who listens to the Justice Department...

...And, when it comes time for promotion, the Pentagon, like most bureaucracies, rewards team players...

...food and water were exposed to many of the same unpleasant things as the troops...

...If the dangers soldiers face in the future have less to do with traditional weaponry than invisible, long-term exposures, how will traditional medicine and science assess the health effects...

...The GAO recently assessed the U.S...

...The apparent stonewalling seems to have been an attempt to paper over bungling or negligence that would tarnish the Gulfvictory, as well as the careers and reputations of those associated with it...

...And some troops headed for the Gulf received as many as 17 different live viral and lulled bacterial vaccines simultaneously, as well as PB and other experimental drugs...

...The reluctance to revisit the historical record of a glorious triumph is understandablebut don’t Powell and Schwarzkopf owe their troops help in puzzling out what happened and preventing mistakes that were made from being repeated...

...three of four reserve units didn’t even have the needed gear...

...Nor was there any post-war follow-up on possible health effects of this toxic soup...

...It’s quite likely that some combination of these exposures could be making veterans sick...

...Stephen Joseph, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said this April, “surprise, surprise...

...Schwarzkopf‘s experience was that these alarms were taken seriously and immediately investigated and that there was never actual confirmation of actual chemical presence...

...Once again, wartime experience had spawned thousands of sick veterans, who came home not with bullet wounds or shrapnel in their flesh, but with initially invisible symptoms that could stem from physiological or psychological causes...

...One survey found that 63 of 73 veterans who had taken PB did not receive information...

...DOD said in its application for a waiver: “Recipients of [PB] . . . will be given substantial information regarding proper use of the drug and its risks and benefits...

...Credibility Gulf The military's battle over whether to protect its image or its troops BY AMY WALDMAN IN SEPTEMBER, BILL CLINTON ENDED A WAR the U.S...

...But DOD is particularly prone to such reactions, which makes the science worth studying in the story of Gulf War syndrome behavioral as much as biological...

...But the military’s resistance seems particularly vehement when to acknowledge such sicknesses could reflect negatively on its own performance...

...Future wars will again pose the risk of weapons of mass destruction...

...Then along comes not only a nasty set of Illnesses, but a plethora of investigators muddying the myth by churning up questionable decisions, vulnerabilities, and just plain mistakes on the military’s part...

...Given the mystery ailments veterans were reporting, and our knowledge of Iraq’s chemical weapon stockpile, why was DOD so adamant that troops couldn’t have been exposed...

...But he has some...

...Some proportion of them come home with a variety of illnesses.’’ The corollary to that hypothesis was a denial that factors unique to the Gulf War could be causing the health problems...

...Definitive scientific proof or not, Clinton was calling a truce...

...In May of 1991, the General Accounting Office noted that the Army active and reserve units it visited “had not been adequately trained or equipped to survive and sustain operations in a chemical environmend’ Soldiers were ill-prepared to function in unwieldy, claustrophobic protective gear...

...And, Korb adds, “God help you if you ignore the lawyers’ advice and you’re wrong...

...The most plausible suspect for the reported illnesses was exposure to chemical and biological weapons in the Gulf, yet that was the possibility the Pentagon most adamantly resisted...

...Doctors at Veterans Affairs’ hospitals took their cues from DOD...

...We can only speculate about the causes-where people . were, what they were exposed to.’’ Closed Mindset A Pentagon that for five years resisted investigation is suddenly very interested in such speculation-particularly into whether troops were exposed to low levels of chemical weapons and the possible consequences of that exposure...

...As one frustrated journalist said at an October Pentagon briefmg, “In the past two months, from that podium, [the number of soldiers possibly exposed] went from a couple of hundred Army engineers to a couple thousand, to 5,000, then 15,000...

...As a condition for granting the consent waiver, the FDA had insisted, and DOD had promised, that military commanders would inform their troops what they were talung and what the side effects might be...

...In the months preceding Operation Desert Storm, the Pentagon was well- aware that troops were illequipped to face deadly nerve agents...

...In February, for example, DOD and the CIA suddenly pulled around 1,000 documents off DOD’s Gulflink Internet site, citing “intelligence sensitivities...

...government policy that has existed since we wrote the first report . . . is that ‘it didn’t happen,’ They’ve been making admissions kicking and screaming every step of the way...

...So when the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses recently released a draft report concluding that there is no Gulf War “syndrome,” no single disease traceable to the Persian Gulf War causing the variety of symptoms that veterans have experienced-but also stating that DOD’s investigation has “lacked vigor, fallen short on investigative grounds, and stretched credibility”-you could see the handwriting on the wall...

...Overnight, a newly contrite Pentagon expanded its investigation team from 12 to 110 people...

...Edwin Dorn, undersecretary of defense, said in sworn Senate testimony on May ZS, 1994 “There were no confirmed detections of any chemical or biological agents at any time during the entire conflict...

...Despite all the revelations about both PB and troops’ underpreparedness for chemical and biological warfare, he says, via his spokesman, that in hindsight he “know [SI of nothing” he would have done differently to prepare troops for the presence of chemical and biological weapons...

...James Tuite 111, the lead investigator on the Banking Committee report says, “The U.S...

...DOD’s attitude did change somewhat when the Presidential Advisory Committee suggested removing the investigation from DOD’s jurisdiction...

...thus they couldn’t provide it to the troops they were responsible for...

...There’s more...

...Military leaders won the war in the Gulf...

...The CIA is trying to model wind patterns in Iraq in March of 1991 to determine whether nerve agents from detonated weapons wafted toward American troops...

...The inclination was to prioritize protecting the institution over protecting the troops...

...Even then, at least one subject stopped breathing...

...war-fighting capabilityl‘ In light of the Pentagon’s refusal to face-let alone learn from-the past, there is a growing disconnect between the soldiers who will endure the casualties that the GAO warns of, and their leaders, who sometimes seem to hold their reputations and careers more dear than their troops...

...It seems the Pentagon feared exposures of its own-to recriminations about its Mure to prepare troops adequately...

...I was saying, ’Just admit it.’ They said, ‘No, we’ll be liable’ . . . We had to fight it out through the courts...

...Powell also was charged with readying the mops for battle...

...DOD sees itselfin a public affairs war with the public and Congress, and it will do what it takes to win...

...All bureaucracies react to something that could cost them face much the way a sea anemone touched by a finger does-they close up and seal off...

...And we can be sure there will be health effects, because mops today are little better prepared in terms of detection capability, protective equipment, or medical antidotes...

...Whatever the etiology of Gulf War syndrome, it has strained that already fragile relationship, exposing the gulf between troops on the ground and the decisionmakers who often determine their fates...

...As of now, the FDA has no way to make sure that, with future waivers, DOD will better inform troops or conduct more careful medical surveillance...

...If Powell and Schwarzkopf haven’t been entirely forthcoming, it may be because they have been conditioned by years at the Pentagon-an institution not known for a “leave no stone unturned” philosophy...

...Powell was at the Pentagon during the war, and hence bore less direct responsibility for responding to reports of chemical detections...

...soldiers had to take the drugs under threat of court martial (although, because it was self-administered, congressional investigators estimate that a third of the troops in the Gulf did not take PB, or stopped taking it when they felt side effects...

...We have a hell of an obligation...

...We recognized early on after the war . . . that recordkeeping and reporting were less robust than we had hoped,” says Mary Pendergast, an FDA deputy commissioner...

...Were the military to deploy troops against chemical and biological weapons today, they would still be unprepared...

...Over the past few years, concerns have arisen that PB, in combination with other toxins troops were exposed to, may have something to do with veterans’ illnesses...

...To administer PB to the troops for a purpose other than which it had been approved, DOD had to obtain FDA permission...

...I’m a soldier, so I don’t say that with a whole lot of pride in my voice...

...The time frame for resolution will likely be much more compressed than for Agent Orange, because now policymakers and the public are wont to suspect the worst...

...it addresses high-level concern about the posting of “potential sensitive reports The Presidential Advisory Committee soon will deliver its final report on the military’s actions and disband, but as of now, no mechanism exists to ensure the committee’s recommendations for the future are taken...

...To be fair, the military’s toughness comes partly from the fact that a fit force is essential to mission performance, and tolerating unexplained sicknesses opens the door to malingering, fakery, even cowardice...

...Elquipment, training, and medical shortcomings persist and are likely to result in needless casualties and a degradation of U.S...

...Military leaders weren’t malicious, but they were careless...

...The Pentagon-led by John Deutch, now director of the CIA-summarily rejected the possibility...

...DOD, incidentally is pressuring the FDA to make permanent the interim rule that allowed the waiver of consent in the Gulf War...

...Only this year has the DOD agreed to look into that possibility...

...FDA Commissioner David Kessler wrote back that he was granting the waiver “[blased on [DOD’s] agreement to provide and disseminate additional information to all military personnel regarding the risks and benefits...

...DOD insisted it didn’t have time to obtain consent from hundreds of thousands of troops, and so the FDA agreed to waive the requirement...

...Their record has been unconscionable,” says Pad Sullivan...

...It dispatched the military’s Vietnam complex, sending institutional pride to new heights...

...The victory may have been swift, our casualties may have been few-but the conditions were anything but clean...

...Usually such permission requires the procurement of informed consent from those taking the drug...

...The information you need to tease all of this out is five or six years old,” says Dr...

...In doing so, they unknowingly exploded rockets containing chemical agents, possibly exposing themselves and other troops to low levels of those agents...

...In a DOD survey of 23 medical personnel, 16 said no information on the possible side effects of PB had been provided to them...

...When you send a large number of healthy young people to a very stressful environment,” Dr...

...Here, too, the military was lacking in up-to-date research or effective antidotes, so in desperation, it latched on to a drug called pyridostigmine bromide (PB), which is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for treatment of the neurological disorder myasthenia gravis...

...Former assistant defense secretary Lawrence Korb saw the same give-no-ground mentality in the early 1980s: “I had a big battle with the counsel at DOD about Agent Orange...

...A similar closing of the ranks emerges in DOD’s control of information...

...Since it failed one of those tests in Vietnam, exposing itself to years of abuse, humiliation, and low public esteem, the Pentagon has been especially defensive, and eager for redemptionwhich the Persian Gulf War provided...

...military’s preparedness for chemical and biological warfare and concluded, ‘Vnits designated for early deployment today continue to face many of the same problems experienced . . . during the Gulf War...

...The military also failed to record who took which drugs or vaccines, thus ignoring explicit FDA regulations and DOD guidelines on keeping records...

...And once again, the Pentagon had attributed it all to stress, resisted investigation, and withheld crucial information...

...There is also an eight-day gap in the logs between March 3 and March 12, 1991-when the detonations at Khamisiyah took place...

...There’s no surer way to discourage independent opinions...

...Intertwined with the institutional inclination toward self-protection is the individual tendency toward careerism: the desire to advance to a generalship, or from one star to two...

...Further evidence comes from a memo sent by Paul Wallner, staff director of a Pentagon panel on Gulf War veterans’ illnesses, to various DOD departments...

...Of course, until just a few months ago no one knew how cigarette smoking caused lung cancer either-knowing bow isn’t the same as knowing if: Regardless, the Pentagon’s stonewalling had long ago pushed the issue from the logic of the lab into the emotion of the political arena...

...The cover-up continues,” Rep...

...If the material truly were sensitive, DOD had committed a gross national security blunder: The documents had been sitting on Gulflink for months, allowing interested parties plenty of time to access them...

...Had Saddam Hussein used chemical or biological weapons, our troops would have been in trouble...

...Indeed, as the evidence and pressure began to stack up, the military went into damage control mode, much like a corporation facing a product liability suit...

...This same phenomenon surfaced in the investigation of the terrorist bombing at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia...

...DOD is attempting to reconstruct that detonation by harvesting the five-year-old memories of some 20,000 soldiers who were in the area...

...The allegations by two former CIA analysts that the CIA has withheld evidence of numerous exposures during the Gulf War have only added to the suspicions...

...That includes assembling the largest public affairs apparatus of any bureaucracy in the world, and at least occasionally, it seems, using a classification system ostensibly developed to protect national security to protect the figurative rear ends of DOD officials...

...The Department of Defense is engaged in probably one of the most serious cover-ups in the history of military affairs,” says Paul Sullivan, a Gulf veteran and founder of the National Gulf War Research Center...

...another lost consciousness...

...Spend a little time investigating what may have made veterans sick in the Gulf War, and its image as a “clean” war dissolves faster than soap...

...Technically, the Pentagon was right: Even today, the mechanism by which dioxin does its damage in the human body isn’t known...

...Conditions were unsanitary...

...And on the question of whether low-level exposures could be harmful, Powell stands by the Pentagon: “There would be no reason to believe that unless an individual were to come under a chemical attack that he or she has been exposed...

...The documents happened to contain information about Khamisiyah, so perhaps the sudden worry about premature declassification had more to do with damage control than national security...

...A few months later, the Pentagon acknowledged that the March 10 destruction of a pit, also at Khamisiyah, may have exposed still more troops...

...Schwarzkopf, unfortunate, isn't granting interviews now...

...The memo subject is the “Identification and Processing of Sensitive Operational Records...

...Not only that, but it now appears that while PB would have been effective against soman, it does not work against sarin-the chemical agent that Saddam had in large quantities-and may actually exacerbate its effects...

...In one fell signature, Clinton ended an acrid standoff between veterans and the Pentagon, which had first denied the use of dioxin, then resisted releasing its spraying patterns, then insisted that no one could prove that Agent Orange caused spina bifida...

...Its working hypothesis was that the symptoms would ultimately prove to be traceable to some known disease or to the ordinary stresses of wartime service...

...The reason, of course, is that this past June, the Pentagon acknowledged that on March 4,1991, American soldiers detonated a bunker full of Iraqi ammunition at a location in Southern Iraq commonly referred to as Khamisiyah...

...So from the start, the Pentagon took a hard line on Gulf War illnesses, insinuating that they were purely stress-related, or all in veterans’ heads...

...When the big dogs sign on,” says one longtime Pentagon official, “it becomes an item of religious or normative truth...

...If Schwarzkopf told Joseph that, he was lying: Paul Sullivan of the National Gulf War Resource Center obtained Schwarzkopf‘s command logs through the Freedom of Information Act...

...The result was quite possibly the largest administration of an experimental drug without informed consent in American history...

...The consequence of the military’s poor record keeping is that we are left in an epistemological bog that may make it impossible ever to determine conclusively what has made any individual veteran sick...

...who has butted heads with the Pentagon repeatedly on Gulf War syndrome, says that regardless of whether the ailments are attributable to stress or, as he believes is more likeb physiological causes, ‘We can’t just walk away...

...American troops hadn’t faced chemical weapons since World War I, so over the years the military had devoted decreasing attention to what seemed an abstract threat, putting few resources into engineering more sophisticated protective and detection gear...

...Given that, how can those who have volunteered for battle trust those who send them there...

...On “60 Minutes” in 199S, John Deutch, then deputy defense secretary, said troops had never been exposed to chemical agents “in any widespread way...

...You say there may be even more...

...When an Institute of Medicine report called the Gulf a “hostile environment,” it wasn’t referring to the Iraqis-but to extreme heat, humidity, rainfall, dust and sand, sandflies and other insects, smoke from oil well fires, leaded diesel fuel and fumes, pesticides and insecticides, chemical agent-resistant paints, solvents, and depleted uranium shells...

...Jay Rockefeller (DWa...

...the report concluded it was only S,000...

...Now we’re at 20,000...

...The fear of liability means no individual can publicly question or contradict the policy that has been set...

...And for the first time, DOD has budgeted millions of dollars to research the potential harm of low-level exposures...

...But the focus on sinister conspiracies obscures what may be a more persuasive explanation for DOD’s response, first to Agent Orange, and now to Gulf War syndrome: If there is such a thing as institutional stubbornness, the Pentagon has it...

...The first step in that failure was one of omission: the military’s inadequate preparation for chemical and biological warfare...