thedrifter
03-12-03, 06:18 AM
The Poisoned Battlefield
Special SFTT Report
New Coalition Pushing Congress for NBC Defense Hearings
By Ed Offley
WASHINGTON - A newly organized coalition of activists charged on Thursday that the Defense Department is about to repeat its mistakes from the 1991 Gulf War that led to hundreds of thousands of delayed medical casualties.
The new group, led by longtime consumer activist Ralph Nader, announced Thursday that it is pressing for immediate congressional hearings into the adequacy of U.S. military training and equipment for defense against Iraqi chemical and biological agents.
Describing widespread reports of uneven training and obsolete NBC protective equipment throughout the U.S. military Democratic Rep. John Conyers Jr. charged that many units are ill-prepared to survive and function in a contaminated battlefield. "This is an issue that cuts across [political] party lines," Conyers said.
"Our troops have not had the training they need to fight a chemical-biological war while wearing protective gear," Conyers told a press conference in Washington, D.C. "Many commanders have not undertaken this type of training simply because they did not believe they would face such an attack."
He was joined by Rep. Jim McDermott, D-WA, another liberal opponent of U.S. military action in Iraq, who charged that a U.S. invasion force entering Iraq from Kuwait will have to traverse a "zone of death" that is still contaminated from depleted uranium (DU) munitions from the 1991 war. "We are preparing to march our soldiers through that," he said.
Both Conyers and Stephen L. Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, cited a November 2001 Army audit that found that service-wide mismanagement of NBC defensive gear had resulted in major shortages of critical equipment in working equipment. Robinson is a Gulf War I Army veteran and previously worked for the Pentagon's Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses.
Robinson charged that the Defense Department has employed tactics to "delay, deny and obstruct" efforts to assess the viability of current NBC defenses. "Lessons learned from 1991 must be considered before we fight another toxic war with Iraq without correcting the mistakes of the past."
Robinson conceded that the DoD has developed new and lighter chemical protective clothing and gear, but he warned that it is unlikely that all of the troops deploying to the Mideast will receive them. Thousands of the older chemical suits are known to be ineffective but the Pentagon has no way to locate them in the supply system, he said.
In another area, Robinson said the Pentagon has violated a 1997 Act of Congress requiring that all troops deployed to combat in environments such as Iraq be fully monitored for the medical impacts of exposure to chemical or biological agents or other toxic materials. He said the 300,000 troops in Southwest Asia at this time have not had pre-deployment blood samples taken, robbing the Pentagon of an effective "baseline" to gauge delayed medical reactions to service in the region. This will likely mean that another generation of veterans will suffer medical ailments that elude diagnosis, he said.
"I am neither pro-war nor anti-war," Robinson said. "But I am anti-making-the-same-mistakes-we-made-in 1991."
The Army report, "Support for Non-medical Chemical and Biological Defensive Equipment," stated at one point:
"Army leaders didn't know the conditions of many items of non-medical chemical and biological defensive equipment critical to survivability and success on the battlefield because existing guidance required unit commanders to report only the conditions of items officially designated as mission-essential. Senior leaders designated only 3 of the Army's 69 items of non-medical chemical and biological equipment as mission-essential. Consequently, units generally didn't report the operating condition of the 66 remaining items."
"Because the conditions of items such as chemical agent monitors and protective masks weren't reportable, unit commanders often overlooked the need to maintain and repair them. Accordingly, up to 90 percent of the monitors and 62 percent of the masks were either completely broken or less than fully operational [italics added]."
Retired Marine Co. Carl Bernard, a combat veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, said his greatest fear is that even a minor chemical agent attack in Iraq could sew panic even among the best-trained troops. "The first soldiers caught under a chemical attack - their reactions are going to be contagious," he said. Without teamwork and "unit cohesion," a military unit will not be able to function on the battlefield and its individual members will be extremely vulnerable, the colonel added.
"The unintended consequences of what we are about to do [in Iraq] bother me very much," Bernard said.
Conyers pledged to immediately take the group's message to his Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate and press for formal hearings on the issue. He also vowed to try and convene a meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to present the group's findings.
"This discussion should be taking place on the floor of the House of Representatives," Conyers said.
Nader, who ran for president under the Green Party banner in 2000, quoted President Bush from his Feb. 8, 2003 radio address: "Saddam Hussein has authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons" against invading U.S. troops.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com
Sempers,
Roger
Special SFTT Report
New Coalition Pushing Congress for NBC Defense Hearings
By Ed Offley
WASHINGTON - A newly organized coalition of activists charged on Thursday that the Defense Department is about to repeat its mistakes from the 1991 Gulf War that led to hundreds of thousands of delayed medical casualties.
The new group, led by longtime consumer activist Ralph Nader, announced Thursday that it is pressing for immediate congressional hearings into the adequacy of U.S. military training and equipment for defense against Iraqi chemical and biological agents.
Describing widespread reports of uneven training and obsolete NBC protective equipment throughout the U.S. military Democratic Rep. John Conyers Jr. charged that many units are ill-prepared to survive and function in a contaminated battlefield. "This is an issue that cuts across [political] party lines," Conyers said.
"Our troops have not had the training they need to fight a chemical-biological war while wearing protective gear," Conyers told a press conference in Washington, D.C. "Many commanders have not undertaken this type of training simply because they did not believe they would face such an attack."
He was joined by Rep. Jim McDermott, D-WA, another liberal opponent of U.S. military action in Iraq, who charged that a U.S. invasion force entering Iraq from Kuwait will have to traverse a "zone of death" that is still contaminated from depleted uranium (DU) munitions from the 1991 war. "We are preparing to march our soldiers through that," he said.
Both Conyers and Stephen L. Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, cited a November 2001 Army audit that found that service-wide mismanagement of NBC defensive gear had resulted in major shortages of critical equipment in working equipment. Robinson is a Gulf War I Army veteran and previously worked for the Pentagon's Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses.
Robinson charged that the Defense Department has employed tactics to "delay, deny and obstruct" efforts to assess the viability of current NBC defenses. "Lessons learned from 1991 must be considered before we fight another toxic war with Iraq without correcting the mistakes of the past."
Robinson conceded that the DoD has developed new and lighter chemical protective clothing and gear, but he warned that it is unlikely that all of the troops deploying to the Mideast will receive them. Thousands of the older chemical suits are known to be ineffective but the Pentagon has no way to locate them in the supply system, he said.
In another area, Robinson said the Pentagon has violated a 1997 Act of Congress requiring that all troops deployed to combat in environments such as Iraq be fully monitored for the medical impacts of exposure to chemical or biological agents or other toxic materials. He said the 300,000 troops in Southwest Asia at this time have not had pre-deployment blood samples taken, robbing the Pentagon of an effective "baseline" to gauge delayed medical reactions to service in the region. This will likely mean that another generation of veterans will suffer medical ailments that elude diagnosis, he said.
"I am neither pro-war nor anti-war," Robinson said. "But I am anti-making-the-same-mistakes-we-made-in 1991."
The Army report, "Support for Non-medical Chemical and Biological Defensive Equipment," stated at one point:
"Army leaders didn't know the conditions of many items of non-medical chemical and biological defensive equipment critical to survivability and success on the battlefield because existing guidance required unit commanders to report only the conditions of items officially designated as mission-essential. Senior leaders designated only 3 of the Army's 69 items of non-medical chemical and biological equipment as mission-essential. Consequently, units generally didn't report the operating condition of the 66 remaining items."
"Because the conditions of items such as chemical agent monitors and protective masks weren't reportable, unit commanders often overlooked the need to maintain and repair them. Accordingly, up to 90 percent of the monitors and 62 percent of the masks were either completely broken or less than fully operational [italics added]."
Retired Marine Co. Carl Bernard, a combat veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, said his greatest fear is that even a minor chemical agent attack in Iraq could sew panic even among the best-trained troops. "The first soldiers caught under a chemical attack - their reactions are going to be contagious," he said. Without teamwork and "unit cohesion," a military unit will not be able to function on the battlefield and its individual members will be extremely vulnerable, the colonel added.
"The unintended consequences of what we are about to do [in Iraq] bother me very much," Bernard said.
Conyers pledged to immediately take the group's message to his Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate and press for formal hearings on the issue. He also vowed to try and convene a meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to present the group's findings.
"This discussion should be taking place on the floor of the House of Representatives," Conyers said.
Nader, who ran for president under the Green Party banner in 2000, quoted President Bush from his Feb. 8, 2003 radio address: "Saddam Hussein has authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons" against invading U.S. troops.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com
Sempers,
Roger