September 5, 2013
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As the Obama administration presses ahead with its mission to punish
the Syrian government for its alleged gassing of civilians in suburban
Damascus, the particulars of the attack remain unclear. All too clear,
though, is the role of the United States as a supplier, supporter and
even employer of a wide range of weapons of mass destruction, including
sarin gas, resulting in the death and illness of not only those
considered our enemies, but our “heroes” too.
The 1960s and 1970s
Agent Orange
The
US military’s widespread and long-term use of the defoliant Agent
Orange to destroy Vietnamese jungles is among the best known and most
anguishing chapters in modern chemical warfare. Published articles had
demonstrated the health and environmental dangers of the chemical
components of Agent Orange (so called for the orange-striped barrels in
which it was shipped) for a full decade preceding the war. In 1952,
Monsanto (which along with Dow Chemicals was the principal manufacturer)
informed the government of the dangerous byproduct resulting from
heating the chemical mix—namely dioxin. Yet we proceeded to employ Agent
Orange, denying for decades the death and illness inflicted on
Vietnamese and Americans alike. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph
by AP photographer Nick Ut
documented, we used the incendiaries napalm and white phosphorus in Vietnam.
As Seymour Hersh revealed in his groundbreaking 1968 reporting, we provided the South Vietnamese with the
lethal arsenic-containing gas DM,
claiming it was a “tear” gas for riot control, though the Field Manual
clearly stated "not approved in any operations where deaths are not
acceptable.” Throughout the war, Hersh and others continued to document
the US use of gases, incendiaries and Agent Orange and other herbicidals
to destroy not only Vietnam’s jungles but its food supply—a crime
against humanity and nature.
Project SHAD
Totally
unknown till 35 years after the Vietnam War was the DoD’s Project
Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), a highly classified program, which
from 1962 to 1971 tested whether US warships and their troops could
withstand attacks from chemical and biological weapons. From overhead
planes and nearby aircraft carriers, the military aimed lethal gases at
ships carrying mostly unsuspecting sailors and marines. In the 1990s,
veterans stationed on SHAD boats reported respiratory conditions and
cancers only to be told by VA that nothing called Project SHAD had ever
existed. Finally, after CBS
broke the story in May 2001, the Department of Defense admitted to SHAD’s existence and its almost decade-long program of toxic testing.
Project Tailwind
In
1998, a CNN two-part Sunday night news report revealed that a special
commando unit in 1970 used sarin gas in Laos to kill American defectors.
The story about “Operation Tailwind” was researched, written and
produced by seasoned journalists April Oliver and Jack Smith, with help
from Pulitzer Prize-winning Peter Arnett, who narrated the broadcast.
Under pressure from Henry Kissinger and others, many claim, CNN
retracted the story, and fired Oliver and Smith, and Arnett soon after. (
Newsroom's
Aaron Sorkin recently explained on the Daily Show that he used
"Operation Tailwind” as the basis of the second season’s centerpiece,
Operation Genoa, a secret mission set in Pakistan, in which the US
supposedly used sarin against civilians. CNN's reporting, Sorkin told
John Oliver, offered an intriguing example of journalism gone awry with
compromising research and doctored videos.)
The story of Operation Tailwind has never been proven wrong, as Jennifer Epps
persuasively documented recently on the Daily Kos.
According to Oliver and Smith,
the story’s prime source, Admiral Thomas Moorer, read and signed off on
the script; and according to Reese Schonfeld, CNN’s co-founder, Moorer
stated in a legal deposition that he had said what the journalists
quoted him as saying. Even CNN’s attorneys Floyd Abrams and David Kohler
“found no credible evidence at all of any falsification of an
intentional nature at any point in the journalistic process….We do not
believe it can reasonably be suggested that any of the information on
which the broadcast was based was fabricated or nonexistent." The
attorneys asserted that high-level and reliable military personnel had
been confidential sources for the story. Yet the story was pulled and
the journalists fired.
The 1980s and 1990sReagan and Bush I's Dual-Use Double Dealing
The
1991 Gulf War followed almost a decade of the Reagan-Bush I
administration's active support of Iraq in its war against the newly
established Islamic Republic of Iran. The US supplied Iraq with
financing, intelligence and supplies for a protracted war with Iran, in
which chemical weapons played a significant role. “Iraqgate”—in which we
used other countries and their banks to transfer war funds and
materials to Iraq—became a considerable though fleeting scandal in
1989-'90. But Reagan’s and then Bush’s use of US government agencies to
funnel materials and technology that could be used to create and
disperse chemical and biological weapons remains a little known chapter
in the history of US warfare. Dual-use materials and
technologies—normally used for civilian purposes but with ready military
applications—were central to the program. Overseen by the Department of
Commerce, the secret program allowed massive export to Iraq items such
as agricultural toxin, and “crop duster” equipped helicopters,
ostensibly to kill weeds and insects, but used to kill people.
In
1983, as the State Department was reporting Iraq’s manufacture and use
of nerve gas, Donald Rumsfeld, Reagan’s special envoy to Iraq, was in
Baghdad negotiating the resumption of normal diplomatic relations with
Iraq, which were formalized soon after. In 1988, with clear evidence
that Iraq had used sarin and other nerve gases on the Kurdish village of
Halabja, killing up to 5,000 civilians, the US government did nothing:
The State Department advanced the bogus story that Iran was partly to
blame. In 1989, the Bechtel corporation, on whose board Rumsfeld sat,
won a contract with Iraq to construct a new chemical plant that expanded
its ability to produce sarin and other chemical weapons.
The 1994 “
Riegle Report”
issued by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs
chaired by Donald Riegle Jr, documented that the Commerce Department had
issued 771 licenses to US companies to export war-related products
including the chemical materials used to make mustard gas and sarin and
pathogens causing anthrax and bubonic plague. A
recent article in
Foreign Policy
has revealed that newly-declassified CIA files provide ample evidence
of the US’ close involvement with Saddam’s gas warfare program. “They
are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some
of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched,” authors
Shane Harris and Matthew Aid write.
Replacing Vietnam Syndrome with Gulf War Syndrome
On
Feb. 28, 1991, as the Persian Gulf War fighting ended, then President
George Herbert Walker Bush declared, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam
syndrome once and for all,” referring to the American public's dismay
over the decade-long Vietnam War in which almost 58,000 US troops died.
But ultimately Bush I’s Operation Desert Storm, a five-week war with
only 148 US battle casualties, spawned a real health syndrome from which
some 250,000 US veterans still suffer.
The 1991 Gulf War and our
more recent wars in the region have released a catastrophic cocktail of
chemicals, microbes and radiation. Depleted uranium (DU) —the byproduct
of uranium enrichment—made its debut in the Gulf War, the ordinance of
choice for bullets, grenades and cluster bombs. Extensive in vitro
research by Alexandra Miller and others has documented DU
altering genes and changing normal cells into cancerous cells. The increased incidence of birth defects and cancers in Iraq has been
widely reported and linked to DU. At home, veterans groups, advocacy groups for children with birth defects, and researchers have reported
higher rates of birth defects in children of Gulf War veterans, including facial and heart malformations.
The Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illness, a congressionally mandated panel of scientists,
has not ruled out DU as a contributor to Gulf War Illness,
the multi-symptom, multi-system disease afflicting a third of Desert
Storm veterans. Not surprisingly, researchers have reported
higher cancer rates of Gulf War veterans
and made linkages between DU exposure and cancer. But RAC’s 2008 report
found the clearest culprit of the extreme pain, chronic fatigue,
headaches, memory loss, and movement disorders prominent in GWI to be
US-released neurotoxins. RAC implicated a certain type of chemical
(acetylcholinesterase inhibitors) common to experimental anti-nerve gas
pre-treatment pills, bug spray and sarin, which troops were exposed to
when the US bombed munitions storage facilities in southern Iraq.
The
Pentagon has not denied the explosion of sarin, but has maintained the
gas could not have reached the troops, who were stationed at US bases in
Saudi Arabia. Recently, longtime Gulf War illness researcher,
epidemiologist Robert Haley and former military investigator James
Tuitte have shown weather satellite images of the plume’s course, ending
in the sky above the Saudi bases. The many nerve gas alarms that were
going off at the time, troops were told, were false alarms. But they
were not, the authors say, demonstrating a
direct connection between the number of nerve gas alarms troops heard and the severity of Gulf War Illness symptoms.
The
sarin explosions Haley and Tuitte write about occurred in January 1991.
On March 4 and March 10, we again bombed military facilities in
southern Iraq, exploding open pits of sarin-loaded rockets. The Pentagon
does not deny the deed, but its logs for the period between March 4
through March 10 are missing. (Its excuse: the individual who kept the
log was off for the week.)
The media coverage of Haley and
Tuitte’s findings was limited and brief. Now a big story has claimed the
world’s attention: another Arab dictator has purportedly killed his own
people with chemical weapons—and the US, as the leader of the civilized
world, says it cannot stand by.
We will “degrade” Assad’s
chemical weapons arsenal, secretaries Kerry and Hagel have stated.
Wasn’t that what we meant to do when we bombed Saddam’s weapon depots,
poisoning hundreds of thousands of American and Czech troops, and who
knows how many Iraqis and Saudis? The Syrian government may or may not
have done what the Obama administration is claiming. The US may or may
not bomb Syria. What is certain, though, is that the United States has
its own dark history with biological and chemicals weapons, which we
ignore at our peril.
Nora Eisenberg's work has
appeared in the Village Voice, Tikkun, the Los Angeles Times, the
Nation, and the Guardian UK. Her most recent novel, "When You Come Home"
(Curbstone, 2009), explores the legacy of the 1991 Gulf War.
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