- Washington - The National
Gulf War Resource Center (NGWRC), the nation's leading Gulf War advocacy
organization, issued the following statement regarding a new Department
of Veterans Affairs (VA) report showing extraordinarily high death rates
among some Gulf War veterans exposed to chemical warfare agents near
Khamisiyah,
Iraq in 1991.
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- "The NGWRC thanks VA Secretary Anthony Principi
for releasing the new Gulf War statistics that show a dramatically higher
death rate among a segment of Khamisiyah veterans initially notified by
the military of exposure to sarin chemical warfare agents, who then
received
a conflicting statement from the Pentagon saying they had not been
exposed.
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- "The NGWRC asks VA to immediately launch medical
research into the circumstances of the Khamisiyah veterans' deaths as well
as to broaden research regarding the illnesses among many other Gulf War
veterans.
-
- "The Department of Defense (DoD) sent letters to
nearly 100,000 veterans in 1997 saying they were exposed to chemical
warfare
agents at Khamisiyah in 1991. However, in 2000, DoD sent letters to 34,000
of the originally notified veterans saying DoD made an error and they
weren't
exposed in 1991 as a result of better modeling data. Also in 2000, DoD
sent letters to a different group of 34,000 veterans saying that they were,
in fact, exposed to chemical warfare agents in 1991 but that there were
no long-term health effects from the exposure.
-
- "VA statistics show that the 34,000 veterans who
were sent letters in 2000, saying they weren't exposed, are ten times more
likely to be dead than the 100,000 other veterans who were sent letters
by the military in 1997 and 2000 retaining their status as exposed.
-
- "By subtracting dead veterans and adding live
veterans
to the Khamisiyah population, DoD's model methodology is clearly flawed.
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- "The VA report, the first non-Pentagon analysis
of deaths among Khamisiyah veterans, is convincing evidence DoD has not
yet offered full accountability for the large number of Gulf War veterans
who have fallen ill since 1990.
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- "The mind-set that there is no problem, must end
immediately," said NGWRC President and Gulf War veteran Mike
Woods.
"It took five years for DoD to admit anyone was exposed to chemical
warfare agents during Desert Storm. Now DoD appears to be playing an
insidious
shell game with exposed veterans."
-
- "Congress should fulfill its oversight duties by
calling for the closure of the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf
War Illnesses (OSAGWI), given the continued evidence that all it does is
issue flawed public relations materials rather than oversee credible and
long overdue research," said Woods. "This data is not
new.
Why it took more than a decade to release to the VA, which promptly
publicized
it, is utterly inexcusable," he said.
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- The NGWRC has called for independent oversight of
investigative
and research efforts since its inception in 1995. Amont the NGWRC's
goals is a full declassifiction of all government reports and documents
related to toxic exposures, symptoms, and diagnoses, troop locations, and
deployments dates.
-
- "It is time to turn the information over to the
VA, which is clearly more capable of releasing real data, no matter how
troubling it might be," said Charles Sheehan-Miles, a novelist and
co-founder of the NGWRC. "Then VA and independent scientists
can begin the long-neglected and much needed objective medical research
on behalf of ill Gulf War veterans," Sheehan-Miles concluded.
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- "The Pentagon may be able to fool third world
countries
with Strategic Spin but Gulf War veterans are not buying it," said
Woods.
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- http://www.ngwrc.org
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- View full report: (requires
Adobe Acrobat reader)
- http://www.ngwrc.org/pdf/gwvisreport.pdf
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