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Monday, 28 April 2008

DEET and Chemical Warfare
By Ros Davidson

When President Clinton appointed a special committee to look into Gulf War Syndrome, he told members to "leave no stone unturned" in getting at the causes of U.S. veterans' illnesses. One investigator took the president's words seriously -- and paid the price.

Two years after President Clinton appointed a special commission to investigate the causes of various illnesses collectively known as "Gulf War Syndrome," we're no closer to an answer. After holding a final set of public hearings last week, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses is now working on a final report that it's scheduled to present to President Clinton next month.

While the panel is not expected to change its earlier conclusion -- that the syndrome is caused primarily by wartime stress and not chemical arms -- it has called for the Pentagon to be banished from overseeing the investigation. Because of inaction and misstatements emanating from the Pentagon, especially its denials that U.S. soldiers may have been exposed to chemical weapons, "The well has been poisoned in essence, and the government's credibility continues to be questioned," said the panel's executive director, Robyn Nishimi, in a statement last Friday.

That statement is something of an irony to former committee investigator Jonathan Tucker, who was abruptly fired by Nishimi in December 1995 for reasons that the panel has never explained, except to say that Tucker resigned. Tucker said he was fired because he was too aggressive in pursuing evidence about exposure to biological and chemical weapons. Tucker had wanted to interview Gulf War veterans and government whistle-blowers as well as officials from various government agencies.

Tucker is the director of the chemical biological weapons non-proliferation project at the Monterey Institute for International Studies and until his ouster, he had been the sole senior policy analyst dealing with chemical and biological weapons on the panel's staff. A former arms specialist at the U.S. State Department and at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Tucker was in Iraq in January 1995 as part of a United Nations special commission investigating Iraq's biological warfare capabilities.

Robert Haley at the Southwestern University Medical Center at Dallas published a report about a week after the advisory committee's January report concluding that many veterans were suffering from three primary syndromes due to subtle brain, spinal cord or nerve damage, but not to stress. He said that the damage was due to exposure to a combination of PB, an antidote given to troops prophylactically to protect them from chemical warfare agents, DEET, an insect repellent, and various organophosphorous pesticides. His study has been criticized because it was based on self-reported data and was a fairly small sample, but I think it was at least suggestive of a link between exposure and nerve damage

Original title: A Lack Of Credibility

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