Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12/12/96, ©1996

Probe Sought of Gulf War Illness

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Seattle, Washington.; Dec. 12, 1996
By Ed Offley, P-I Military Writer 

Seattle-- Rep. Norm Dicks said yesterday he will press both parties in Congress for a full investigation into Gulf War syndrome, and into the conduct of senior
military commanders and Pentagon civilian leaders in handling the issue.

   ``We're going to get on top of this thing,'' said Dicks, D-Wash. He was
referring to warnings by independent medical researchers reported in the
Seattle  Post-Intelligencer yesterday that there is evidence of a genetically
altered bacterium in the blood of sick Gulf War veterans.

   The researchers said Iraqi biological warfare agents could be the cause of
illnesses suffered by thousands of veterans.

   Dicks' call for an investigation came on the same day as the Department of
Veterans Affairs acknowledged during congressional hearings that it had waited
more than five years to begin major research studies on the health effects of
exposure to low levels of chemical weapons.

   The delay, VA officials said, was because of the Pentagon's repeated - and
inaccurate - assurances that there was no evidence U.S. troops had been
exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

   ``I see major congressional hearings,'' Dicks said, after Congress convenes
in January. He said it is possible that a ``comprehensive'' select committee
might be formed to check all aspects of Gulf War syndrome, including military
technology, intelligence and health issues.

   Garth Nicolson, director of the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Irvine,
Calif., said he has tested the blood of hundreds of sick Gulf War veterans and their family members. In many of the samples, he said, he found a mycoplasma -
a primitive bacterium - that had been genetically altered.
   The only logical conclusion, he said, was that the germ had been
deliberately manipulated for use as a biological weapon.

   Biological weapons pose more serious health threats than chemicals,
Nicolson and other researchers said, because an infected person can pass the
disease on to others.

   Nicolson said he turned his research findings over to the Pentagon months 
ago.

   Dicks, a senior Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee and
the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, said evidence linking
biological warfare to sick Gulf war veterans appears ``plausible'' to him
because of the Post-Intelligencer's disclosure that the Pentagon had admitted
an inability to detect the germs in battlefield conditions.

   An angry Dicks said yesterday that he has written to Secretary of Defense
William Perry for explanation.
 
   ``I am writing Perry on why we don't have a capability to detect biological
weapons,'' Dicks said.

   Information that the U.S. military lacked such capability on the
battlefield as late as 1994 - three years after the Gulf War - came from
then-Deputy Secretary of Defense John Deutch, according to a Senate Banking
Committee report in 1994.

   Dicks said he also will ask the CIA to expand an ongoing internal
investigation into its handling of data on the Gulf War to include Nicolson's 
research.

   Yesterday, in the second day of congressional hearings on possible links
between chemicals and Gulf War illnesses, Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn.,
said VA treatment of sick veterans has been hampered by Pentagon insistence,
until recently, that there was no evidence of chemical exposure during the
1991 war.

   ``The VA has basically bought into that denial,'' said Shays, chairman of
the House Government Reform and Oversight subcommittee on human resources. ``You didn't listen to the veterans. Nobody was listening to the veterans.''
   Possible ties between chemical agents and the ailments afflicting thousands
of veterans have become a focus since the Pentagon acknowledged in June that
chemical weapons were present at Iraq's Kamisiyah weapons depot blown up by
U.S. troops in March 1991, possibly exposing up to 20,000 Americans.

   Susan Mather, the Veterans Affairs Department's chief public health and
environmental hazards officer, told the hearing that the VA has always
remained open to the possibility that U.S. troops were exposed to a wide
variety of hazardous agents, including chemical weapons.

   She said that while VA treatment of vets would not have changed had they
known of Kamisiyah earlier, ``it definitely would have made a difference in
our research program.'' She said research into the effects of low-level
exposure had previously been given a low priority.

   ``We recognize there is a gap in scientific knowledge,'' said senior VA
health official Frances Murphy, noting that researchers still know little
about links between low-level exposures to chemical agents and long-term health problems.

   The two doctors acknowledged that since the war ended in 1991 the VA has
not diagnosed one veteran as being sick as a result of chemical weapons
exposures.

   But the Pentagon's chief adviser on Gulf War illnesses, Bernard Rostker,
warned on CNN's ``Crossfire'' yesterday that it would be a mistake to
concentrate only on chemical weapons agents.

   Among other suggested causes being looked at are pesticides, pollutants
such as oil-fire fumes, anti-nerve gas vaccines administered to the troops,
biological agents and natural parasites.

   This report includes information from The Associated Press and the New York Times.