Bombshell Exclusive: Scientists Link Gulf War Illness to Chemicals From U.S. Bombings

The 20-year mystery over Gulf War Illness, also known as Gulf War Syndrome, is finally close to being solved. The Reno Dispatch is the first news outlet to report that two shocking new peer-reviewed scientific research studies explain the enduring controversy over what caused many of the illnesses among literally hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans.

The first study confirms what many veterans already believed: weather patterns carried a massive toxic chemical cloud resulting from the U.S. bombing of Iraqi chemical weapon storage facilities a long distance before these chemicals ultimately fell on U.S. troops. 

This is being dubbed by some as the largest example of "friendly fire" in American history, because the so-called nerve and blister agents that dropped on American troops were supplied to Iraq by the U.S. before the Gulf War. These chemicals were then bombed by U.S. forces, which lifted them into the atmosphere and dropped on our own troops. 

The second study confirms that Gulf War Illness reports were higher at the places where the sarin fell. 

“Our peer-reviewed scientific findings bring us full circle by confirming what most soldiers believed when they heard the nerve gas alarms. The alarms were caused by sarin fallout from our bombing of Iraqi weapons sites,” James J. Tuite, who led the first study, said in a statement.

Tuite, a former special agent with the U.S. Secret Service, first came to this conclusion while heading the initial investigation into Gulf War Illness for a U.S. Senate committee in 1994. Over the years, he continued collecting evidence as national security adviser to Senator Robert Byrd, President pro tempore of the Senate. But Tuite now has the science to back up his assertions.

Gulf War veteran Paul Sullivan, a highly respected veterans advocate who works at Bergmann & Moore, a law firm that handles veteran disability claims, tells me, "For more than two decades, no one believed us when we said we are sick, and no one believed us when we said we were exposed to chemical weapons, including sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas. Now we finally have overwhelming scientific evidence that must immediately force the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to provide healthcare and disability benefits, including presumptive benefits for chemical exposures."

Sullivan adds, "Veterans need to urge our President to make sure no more of the 250,000 sick Gulf War veterans wait for care and compensation from VA."

The new findings, which are contained in two papers published together in the journal Neuroepidemiology, are hugely significant for Gulf War veterans. Why? Because prolonged exposure to sarin and mustard gas, for example, results in long-lasting adverse health effects, and this new scientific evidence should enable afflicted Gulf War veterans to file new disability healthcare claims with the VA.

Gulf War Illness too often goes unrecognized and untreated by the department. According to a 2011 VA report, only 55 percent of the 36,794 Gulf War Illness claims filed by 1990 – 1991 veterans under a 1994 law were approved by the VA. But those numbers stand to significantly increase as a result of these new studies, whose findings also have profound implications in Syria, where government forces have accused the rebel forces of using chemical weapons. 

President Obama said he is skeptical of these claims. Many believe it is the Syrian government that is preparing sarin chemical warfare agents for use in that nation's civil war.

In the first Gulf War study, civilian weather satellite images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reveal a massive fallout cloud rising from the bombing of Iraqi chemical weapon storage facilities near Muthanna and Falluja, Iraq on the third night of the air campaign, January 18-19, 1991. 

The fallout plume then traveled more than 350 miles and stalled over U.S. troop positions in northern Saudi Arabia, triggering thousands of nerve gas alarms.

At the time, chemical warfare agent detection experts from four different countries detected sarin and blister agents within U.S. troop positions. Weather charts obtained for the newly published study confirm favorable northerly winds heading from destroyed Iraq chemical warfare agent targets and toward U.S. troops.

In 1991, the military assumed low-level nerve agents in the fallout from the bombing caused the repeated alarms and detections. But when the war ended, intelligence experts dismissed the possibility of long-distance transit of these chemicals. 

"The thousands of detections were left unexplained because the military incorrectly assumed a fallout cloud could only move along the surface and would have caused massive Iraqi casualties,” said Tuite. “The new evidence confirms how high explosive bomb blasts propelled the chemical agents through the calm nocturnal boundary layer into higher atmospheric layers where high winds carried them over the long distances.”

The second study, led by Dr. Robert Haley, chief of epidemiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, analyzed data from an epidemiologic study of 8,020 randomly selected Gulf War-era veterans. Haley concluded that hearing a nerve gas alarm was strongly associated with the likelihood of developing the chronic brain symptoms known as Gulf War Illness.

In addition, Haley concluded, the more frequently nerve gas alarms were heard by our troops, "the greater the chances of coming down with Gulf War illness later. This dose-related risk was extremely steep and highly significant given the large size of this statistically valid sample of veterans."

The phenomenon of a large nighttime explosion penetrating the calm surface air and traveling long distances by high atmospheric winds is actually well recognized by scienctists, Tuite noteds in the study. For example, it is the accepted explanation for how radioactive fallout from the nighttime explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986 was first detected two days later in Sweden, more than six hundred miles away.

Most importantly, these two new studies could potentially help tens and maybe even hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans who've suffered from this mysterious illness, which an ever-increasing among of scientific studies say is neurologically based, rather that psychosomatic, as the VA still contends. Many veterans may finally get the healthcare they have earned and deserve. 

Gulf War veteran and veterans advocate Anthony Hardie says that for more than 20 years, "many of us Gulf War veterans have associated our chronic and debilitating multi-symptom illness with chemical alarms and other hazardous exposures during the Gulf War. Today, research now also firmly links our illnesses with the sounding of Gulf War chemical alarms and an array of massive quantities of low-level Iraqi nerve and, perhaps for the first time, blister agents."

Hardie says Haley's research findings are made "all the more plausible given a large body of existing research linking Gulf War veterans' illnesses to organophosphates, the class of closely related chemicals that includes nerve agents, pyridostigmine bromide nerve agent protective pills, and pesticides."

But Hardie emphasizes that VA still has "no proven effective treatments for the roughly one-third of us veterans who remain ill and disabled from our Gulf War service. How much more will it take for the President, Congress and the VA to provide us the real help we still desperately need?"