IS CLINTON HIDING EVIDENCE OF SADDAM’S CHEMICAL WARFARE ATTACKS ON U.S. TROOPS IN ORDER TO SELL THE C.W.C.?

(Washington, D.C.): In the course of
Bill Clinton’s address to the UN General
Assembly yesterday, the President
announced that — despite the U.S.
Senate’s refusal to approve ratification
of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)
two weeks ago — he “will not let
this treaty die.” A report published
last week by the New York Times
engenders suspicion that Mr.
Clinton may, however, be prepared to let
American military personnel suffer
grave illnesses, and perhaps in the
future actually die, rather than
disclose evidence of past chemical
weapons attacks against U.S. forces —
evidence that might prove inconvenient to
the Administration’s sales job on the
CWC.

The Times’
Revelations

On 20 September 1996, the Times
gave front-page treatment to a superb and
quite lengthy piece of investigative
reporting by Philip Shenon entitled,
“Many Veterans of the Gulf War
Detail Illnesses From Chemicals.”
Under the subheadline “Soldiers
Stories at Odds With Pentagon
Account,” appeared, among others,
the following, disturbing revelations:

“While the Pentagon
continues to insist that it has
no evidence that American troops
were made sick from exposure to
Iraqi chemical weapons during the
Persian Gulf war in 1991, more
than 150 veterans of a Naval
reserve battalion have come
forward with details of what many
of them describe as an Iraqi
chemical attack that has left
them seriously ill.”

“Members of the unit, the
24th Naval Mobile Construction
Battalion, say something exploded
in the air over their camps in
northern Saudi Arabia early on
the morning of January 19, 1991,
the third day of the gulf war. In
minutes, many say, their skin
began to burn, their lips turned
numb and their throats began to
tighten. Several say
chemical alarms began to sound as
a dense cloud of gas floated over
their camps.”

“Pentagon officials continue
to insist that they have no
evidence of other large-scale
exposures. They said they had
reviewed the incident involving
the 24th Battalion in Saudi
Arabia and found no sign of
unusual illnesses.”

“In a statement prepared in
response to a reporter’s
questions, the Pentagon
confirmed that a review of its
battle records showed that the
loud noise heard by members of
the 24th Battalion on Jan. 19,
1991, was probably the explosion
of an Iraqi Scud missile.
That contradicts initial reports
from battalion officers who
insisted in 1991 that the noise
had been a sonic boom produced by
a jet fighter or bomber passing
overhead.”

“Chemical weapons
were detected in the camps in
northern Saudi Arabia on January
19, in the areas around the city
of Jubail, where the 24th
Battalion was stationed. Newly
declassified combat logs
maintained by an officer working
for Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf,
the American commander in the
war, reported a ‘chemical
attack at Jubail’
early on the morning of January
19. A separate entry shows that a
British soldier reported that
night that chemical-detection
paper had registered ‘mustard
positive,’ a reference to mustard
gas.”

“Harold J. Edwards, a
reservist who was a member of the
24th Battalion, remembered using
three chemical detection devices,
which are known as M-256 kits, to
measure the air after he heard
the explosions that morning. Two
of the three tests, Mr. Edwards
said, showed that mustard
gas was wafting over the
reservists. ‘It’s damn
hard to mess up those tests,’ he
said.”

“Mr. Edwards said he
immediately reported the
mustard-gas detection to his
superiors in the camp. But the
next morning, he said, the word
came back from the officers that ‘nothing
had happened, forget it, don’t
say anything.'”

“Other members of the
battalion say they quickly came
to suspect that the military was
trying to hide the truth of what
had happened that morning. Their
suspicions began, they said, when
officers in the 24th Battalion
told them that the blast that
morning had been caused by a
sonic boom from a jet fighter of
bomber passing overhead. The
reservists said they were ordered
not to discuss the matter
again.”

If commanders deliberately misled
their troops about the nature of the
threat they faced, that action might be
understandable, if not justifiable, in
the interest of preventing wholesale
panic under enemy attack. It is an
altogether different thing, however, if
civilian and military authorities persist
in misrepresenting the facts years
afterwards for any reason whatsoever.

There Goes a Pillar of the
Clinton Case for the CWC

Particularly insidious is the
possibility that the motivation for such
misrepresentations may be the Clinton
Administration’s high priority effort to
sell the Chemical Weapons Convention.
After all, the CWC’s proponents have long
argued that Desert Storm proved that it
was not necessary to have an in-kind
deterrent in order to dissuade chemically
armed adversaries from using toxic agents
against American forces. While the
rationale for this contention varied —
with some arguing that an overwhelming
conventional capability did the trick
while others maintained that the threat
of nuclear attack was the U.S. hole card
in deterring chemical attack — the
bottom line was consistent: Saddam
Hussein’s forces did not use chemical
weapons against Coalition personnel.

This spring, the party line began to
crack. Five years after the end of
Operation Desert Storm, the
Administration was obliged to acknowledge
that American forces were inadvertently
exposed to chemical agents in the course
of destroying Saddam’s bunkers and
stockpiles. This admission was itself
something of a problem for the Chemical
Weapons Convention: It established that
the sorts of covert chemical arsenals
that will abound, with or without the
CWC, will pose a threat to U.S. personnel
— even if such weapons are not used
offensively against U.S. forces.
That danger will only be compounded as
the CWC creates a false sense of
security, encouraging reduced investment
in chemical defensive equipment and
technology.

Disclosure of the fact that
chemical weapons were actually employed
in attacks on American forces,
however, would be a body blow to CWC.
Specifically, it would undercut claims by
the treaty’s advocates that the
effectiveness of other forms of
deterrence permit the United States
safely to deny itself the right to
maintain a modest chemical retaliatory
capability.

In light of the latest evidence, an
honest debate should be held to consider
whether or not an in-kind deterrent
provides the only reliable means of
dissuading first-use of chemical weapons
against American and allied forces.
Such a debate may well conclude that the
decision to liquidate the entire
U.S. chemical stockpile must be
revisited. The very fact that such a
debate is now in order, however, is a
further argument against a Chemical
Weapons Convention that would permanently
deny the U.S. a chemical retaliatory
deterrent.⁽¹⁾

The Bottom Line

President Clinton’s stated
determination to resume the fight over
the CWC suggests that, if he is
reelected, this issue will be back before
the Senate next year. Against that
eventuality, the Senate would be
well-advised to get to the bottom of the
emerging story of offensive chemical
weapons use against U.S. forces in the
Gulf War — and the implications of that
story for the Chemical Weapons
Convention. In the process, it
should determine whether a
deliberate effort has been made to
suppress information directly relevant to
an evaluation of the wisdom of this
accord, and hold fully accountable any
and all government officials deemed
responsible.

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1. For detailed
discussions of other arguments against
the CWC — including its unverifiability,
lack of global coverage, ineffectiveness
and unjustifiable costs to U.S.
businesses — see, for example, ‘Inquiry
Interruptus’: Will the Senate Get to the
Bottom of the Chemical Weapons
Convention’s Fatal Flaws? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-P_83″>No. 94-P 83,
19 August 1994) and Center-Sponsored
Debate Helps to Illuminate the Chemical
Weapons Convention’s Fatal Flaws
(No. 96-P 77, 1
August 1996).