THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 26, 1996 TAG: 9609260346
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 72 lines
The Defense Department's top health official, facing withering criticism from Congress, sought to explain Wednesday why it took five years for the Pentagon to admit that thousands of U.S. troops may have been exposed to chemical weapons in the Persian Gulf War.
In a tense hearing on Capitol Hill, members of the Senate Intelligence and Veterans Affairs committees chided Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, about the turnaround - with one senator calling for a ``shakeup'' of Joseph's office.
In a broadside typical of the prevailing sentiment on both panels, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., who called for the reshuffling, told Joseph that for five years ``the official response (to complaining veterans) has been, `It's all in your head - no problem.' ''
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., a member of the Intelligence panel, called the Defense Department's earlier rejection of the possibility that veterans were suffering from chemical weapons-related illnesses ``a shameful campaign of obstruction and delay.''
The department had insisted for years that U.S. troops hadn't been exposed to toxic weapons during the Persian Gulf War, but last week it said that at least 5,000 American soldiers may have been subjected to low-level exposure while blowing up an Iraqi weapons cache in 1991.
Joseph and Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer, undersecretary for health at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the administration now was sure that there is a probability that U.S. troops were exposed, and would reassess the way it handles complaints about gulf war disease.
Joseph said that under accepted medical procedures, there previously was no way to link the veterans' complaints to toxic agents unless they could determine first that soldiers actually had been exposed to chemical weapons and, second, that they developed symptoms immediately afterward. He said the discovery this summer that U.S. Army units had participated in the destruction of two Iraqi chemical weapons sites would prompt the department to alter fundamentally the way it approached the whole issue.
The department announced Wednesday it would reassess the studies it has done on the veterans' complaints, broaden its clinical investigation to include the troops exposed to chemical weapons and add $5 million to its spending for research on low-level exposure.
Officials said the increase will boost total federal outlays on such research to $15 million. The defense authorization bill for fiscal 1997 that President Clinton signed into law earlier this week requires the Pentagon to spend at least $10 million on such studies.
The administration went to considerable lengths Wednesday to explain why it did not until this year discover the exposure possibilities, even though a U.N. commission first raised the possibility in 1991.
Joseph told the panel that, incredible as it may seem to outsiders, the U.N. report initially was overlooked because intelligence officers had been primed to hunt for remaining Iraqi weapons bunkers rather than for destroyed ammunition.
``It was submerged in the avalanche of information,'' he said.
John E. McLaughlin, vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which assesses analyses compiled by U.S. intelligence agencies, reminded the panel that the question of whether there might be a so-called gulf war illness did not emerge until mid-1993.
As a result, officials said Wednesday, top administration officials did not become aware of the possible exposure of U.S. troops until this summer, when the U.N. commission reinspected the area in Iraq this past May and confirmed its earlier findings.
The Pentagon has also asked the CIA to compile a computer model showing how far from the Iraqi bunkers the fallout from the explosions would have traveled. McLaughlin said the model, expected to be completed in October, would help officials determine just how many troops might have been exposed to toxic agents. The Pentagon already has said it expects the latest estimate to be increased. by CNB