Gulf War Illness and the Khamisiyah Cover-Up Claims

The Story

The 1991 Gulf War was a fast, lopsided victory. The illnesses came afterward.

Many of the roughly 700,000 U.S. troops who served came home with problems that routine tests couldn't explain. A federal research committee later described the typical pattern as 'a combination of memory and concentration problems, persistent headache, unexplained fatigue, and widespread pain,' sometimes with digestive problems, breathing symptoms and skin rashes. Veterans wanted to know what they had been exposed to. Among the suspects were the anti-nerve-gas pills they had taken, pesticides, oil well smoke and Iraqi chemical weapons.

GAO: the 'no exposure' conclusion 'was maintained until June 1996.'

On chemical weapons, the official answer was no. The Government Accountability Office reports that when the question came up in summer 1993, the Defense Department and the CIA concluded that no troops had been exposed, because there were no forward-deployed chemical munitions and any plumes from bombed facilities could not have reached the troops.

That answer had a problem, and its name was Khamisiyah. In March 1991, after the fighting ended, U.S. troops blew up munitions at this huge Iraqi depot, which had nearly 100 storage bunkers. In October 1991, UN inspectors found evidence there of rockets 'filled with a combination of sarin and cyclosarin nerve agents.' But, GAO says, the 'no exposure' conclusion 'was maintained until June 1996, when DOD publicly acknowledged that U.S. troops had destroyed stockpiles of chemical munitions at Khamisiyah after the war.'

Then the numbers started climbing. In June 1996 DOD estimated that 300 to 400 troops had taken part in the demolition. By September it was 5,000 within 25 kilometers, and by October 20,000 within 50. Computer plume modeling in July 1997 put the number at 98,910, and in 2000 at 101,752.

Congress was not impressed. A 1997 House committee report was titled 'Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses: VA, DOD Continue to Resist Strong Evidence Linking Toxic Causes to Chronic Health Effects.' In 2004 GAO examined the plume modeling and concluded that DOD's conclusions about exposure 'cannot be adequately supported.' The plume heights and hazard areas had been underestimated, and different models disagreed widely. The CIA did not concur with GAO's report, saying it did not have enough time to review the draft.

In 2008 the congressionally mandated Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses issued a major report. It found that the illness 'affects at least one fourth of the 697,000 U.S. veterans' of the war, and that it is not the result of combat stress. It named two exposures consistently linked to it: the anti-nerve-gas drug pyridostigmine bromide and heavy use of pesticides. Low-level nerve agent exposure, it said, could not be ruled out. The committee wrote that the veterans' health problems had been 'for too long, denied or trivialized.'

So, the verdict: the illness is real, according to the federal committee, and the early official denial of chemical exposure was wrong. What caused the illness, and how many troops were actually exposed at Khamisiyah, is still disputed.