More Gulf Lore

Our March cover story, "Gulf Lore Syndrome," garnered a greater than usual amount of reader commentary, both positive and negative. Here is a sampling of those letters, along with author Michael Fumento's response.

From the June 1997 issue

(Page 5 of 6)

After my article went to press, two new pieces of evidence came along indicating that the vets truly are suffering psychosomatic ills. Naturally, both were twisted by the press to make it seem as if they were organic. One was from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and appeared as a series of articles in the January 15 Journal of the American Medical Association. Janie Angus mentions this in her letter. The other was mentioned in the congressional testimony of Department of Veterans Affairs Under Secretary for Health Kenneth W. Kizer on January 21.

The Dallas study, not incidentally, was funded by Mr. Conspiracy Theory himself, H. Ross Perot, who is determined to show that GWS is real. It claimed to have found various neurological and other problems in Gulf War vets from a Seabee unit and correlated these with exposures to various chemicals, such as insecticides and the flea collars some of the men wore. The main problem with this study is that it's based entirely on self-reports in terms of both illness and exposure.

As such, what the researchers found is exactly what you would expect to find if the main cause of GWS were psychosomatic illness and epidemic hysteria. That is, the soldiers reporting the most problems also reported the most exposure. Perfectly healthy soldiers would say, "No, I'm absolutely sure we were never gassed." Those with aching joints and dizziness would say, to use the classic line quoted in one USA Today scare story, "I know in my heart I was gassed." Which is to say the soldier has absolutely no physical evidence that he was.

The material that Kizer provided had the same drawback. Again, it relied entirely on self- reports. Men who were closest to the munitions-dump blast at Khamisiyah and who have been told over and over and over again that they should be unhealthy--because, as we now know, the bunker contained nerve gas weapons--have a higher rate of complaints for certain illnesses. Of the 81 soldiers who were within a 50-mile radius of Khamisiyah, 28.4 percent reported various types of muscle and joint pains, compared with 18.4 percent of soldiers questioned who were outside that radius. These soldiers' joints were not x-rayed, and they were not given other sophisticated medical tests. They were simply asked, and they answered.

Kizer desperately tried to make all this clear in his testimony. Yet The New York Times, in the lead paragraph of its story on the subject, translated this into, "For the first time, a federal agency acknowledged yesterday that there appears to be a direct link between the release of toxic chemicals in Iraq in 1991 and one of the many different symptoms that have come to be called gulf war syndrome." So it goes.

Bob Newman asks if I expect readers "to believe Gulf War vets are claiming that heart attacks and AIDS, to name but two ailments, are caused by GWS." At least two congressmen are on record as saying that heart attacks among Gulf War vets were quite possibly caused by the alleged syndrome. Any number of reporters have made the same claim. As I noted in the article, we have already seen herpes blamed on GWS. Can AIDS be far behind?

Now, before I go into any of the conspiracy theorists' claims as to what is causing GWS, let me point out that, logically, to implicate something as a cause of a disorder, you must first establish that the disorder exists. None of these letter writers challenged the data--nor the five national panels of scientists who evaluated those data--that indicate that, but for a few psychosomatic symptoms, Gulf War vets are having exactly the amount of illness you would expect them to have. Trying to figure out the cause of GWS is as fruitful as trying to deduce who assassinated President Eisenhower and why they did so. These letter writers want us to ignore that whole section of the article and just go straight to their conspiracy theories. That said, here goes.

Regarding the alleged land mine explosion Newman refers to: This came out in the testimony of Maj. Randy Lee Hebert in December congressional hearings. Hebert has Lou Gehrig's disease that he's convinced is GWS. Never mind that 30,000 Americans who have never been near the Gulf are diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease each year. Hebert claims a chemical mine burned two Marines in his unit with blister agent. Maybe this happened; maybe not. But what's the point? Yes, we know chemical weapons were in the theater at the time. It also remains true that, as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf told Congress recently, there is no evidence of a single soldier suffering at the time of the war from a chemical weapons attack--much less 60,000 to 80,000 of them.

The Duke study Newman mentions was also funded by (surprise!) Ross Perot. Funny thing, but where Perot money goes, proof of GWS seems to follow. The study was considered and rejected by both of the national panels that met after it was released, the Institute of Medicine and the Presidential Advisory Committee. It wasn't a hard decision. The poor chickens at Duke were given chemicals in amounts much larger than any that Gulf War vets received. Every day the animals were given four times the dosage of pyridostigmine bromide veterans were prescribed, and given it not for two weeks but for two months. They were given 10 times the DEET dosage that even a heavy bug repellent user would slather on. Finally, the chickens' daily permethrin dose was 7 million times what a soldier would have absorbed each day from his uniform, which is where the troops' exposure came from. All this experiment proved was what toxicologists have always known--that enough of anything will hurt you and even more will kill you. Little wonder that of the five birds exposed to all three of these chemicals, three keeled over and went to that great chicken bucket in the sky. That's a symptom not of GWS but of acute poisoning.

Newman seems to think that if the Pentagon engaged in some cover-ups--as it did with the atomic testing and LSD--then logically it must be guilty of any cover-up of which it's accused. No, sometimes the government lies, and sometimes it tells the truth. Either way, one must make the case, and not merely cite past actions. Indeed, Agent Orange (the subject of a whole chapter in my book Science Under Siege) is one of those cases where the Pentagon repeatedly told the truth but no one seemed to care. Agent Orange is similar in many ways to GWS in that it was blamed for any and all illnesses of Vietnam vets and their offspring. Just as Gulf vets talk about mysterious Scud missile explosions, some Vietnam vets talk about the day they were covered with an "orange powder" from the sky. Agent Orange was a clear liquid. The only vets found to have high levels of exposure to Agent Orange were those who sprayed it. Their health has been monitored for decades. Like the Gulf War vets, they have cancers and heart attacks and children born with birth defects-- and they have them at exactly the same rate as vets who didn't go to war.

Regarding the chemical detectors, as I noted in my article, they are intentionally made to be extremely sensitive. It is not considered a "failure" when they go off in the presence of smoke or dust instead of chemical weapons. It's considered a false alarm. A failure is when you're hit with poison gas and the detector doesn't go off. Newman would have us believe that chemical weapons produced "hundreds of dead camels, sheep, and goats" he claims he saw in Kuwait. Again, nobody questions that chemical weapons were in the theater.

Nobody questions that the Iraqis used such weapons against the Kurds before the war. But assuming the report of the dead animals is accurate, and assuming they died from chemical weapons poisoning, neither camels nor Kurds could threaten to retaliate against chemical weapons with nuclear weapons, as the Americans did. Thus it hardly follows that the Iraqis had permission to use these things against the Allies.

I will address Sherman Bell point by point.

Point 1: Bell is misunderstanding the medical text he consults. "Normal" in this case doesn't mean it's usually there (in the genital tract), it means that when it's found, that's where it normally is.

Point 2: This is the Duke study, which I already addressed.

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