More Evidence That the Clinton Team Is Covering up the Truth About Saddam’s Use of Chemical Weapons on U.S. Troops

(Washington, D.C.): On 25 September
1996, the Center for Security Policy
published a Decision
Brief posing the provocative
question: Is Clinton Hiding
Evidence of Saddam’s Chemical Warfare
Attacks on U.S. Troops in Order to Sell
the Chemical Weapons Convention?
The question was prompted in large part
by extraordinary investigative reporting
Philip Shenon, a staff writer for the New
York Times. Particularly gripping
was a front-page Times article
published by Mr. Shenon on 20 September
1996 under the headline, “Many
Veterans of the Gulf War Detail Illnesses
From Chemicals; Soldiers Stories at Odds
With Pentagon Account.”

As noted in the Center’s Brief
last month, Mr. Shenon has
uncovered evidence that virtually
everything the Clinton Administration has
said on the question of whether American
troops were exposed to Iraqi chemical
weapons has been misleading or simply
wrong. Cascading revelations
calling into question the
Administration’s party line that “no
American troops were made sick from
exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons during
the Persian Gulf war in 1991″ have
recently compelled its spokesmen to
acknowledge that some exposure
may have occurred after all. As a result,
the U.S. government is now reluctantly
examining a possibility it has
steadfastly denied for several years —
namely, that there could indeed be
some connection between such exposure and
various maladies loosely known as Gulf
War syndrome.

While the Clinton Administration now
grudgingly admits that American
destruction of Iraqi facilities and
weapons bunkers may have caused troops
downwind to be exposed to Saddam
Hussein’s chemical agents, it
persists in denying that Saddam used
chemical weapons offensively against U.S.
troops. Mr. Shenon’s report of
20 September suggests, however, that this
contention may be as untenable as the
Administration’s earlier assertions.
Notably, he cited interviews with former
members of the 24th Naval Mobile
Construction Battalion who say they were
subjected to an Iraqi Scud
missile-delivered chemical attack over
their base near Jubail in northern Saudi
Arabia early on the morning of 19 January
1991, the third day of the Gulf War.

The veterans’ claims are bolstered by
information obtained by Mr. Shenon
indicating that toxic chemical agents
were detected in the area on that day by
U.S. and British personnel. He also
revealed that 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’ on the morning of
19 January. The troops were nonetheless
told at the time that the explosion
overhead was the result of an aircraft’s
sonic boom, not a Scud missile, and to
keep quiet about their concerns regarding
chemical warfare use.

In a subsequent article published on
19 October 1996, Mr. Shenon offered
further documentation of this
Ostrich-like response on the part of
commanding U.S. officers. He quotes a
Czech chemical weapons specialist
assigned to Desert Storm, retired Warrant
Officer Vaclav Hlavac, as saying:

“…[Iraqi] nerve gas and
blister agent was first detected
on January 19, 1991….[Hlavac]
said Czech soldiers hurriedly
pulled on their gas masks and
chemical warfare suits. But the
U.S. troops stationed nearby did
nothing, he said, because their
commanders were not convinced
that low levels of the agents
could harm the soldiers….’After
about half a day [of
Czech-American consultations on
the presence of chemical agents],
one of the American
officers confirmed that, yes, we
measured the chemicals, but he
said that the Americans didn’t
want to sound an alarm because
there were only low levels of the
chemicals and it would cause
panic among the soldiers.'”

As the Center noted in its 25
September Decision Brief:

“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.”

What Did the Clinton Team
Know, And When Did They Know It?

In another stunning front-page article
published today, Philip Shenon offers
further reason to believe that the
Clinton Administration has deliberately
suppressed relevant information long
available to it. He cites two
highly regarded CIA analysts who
sacrificed their promising careers in
U.S. intelligence to establish the truth:

“Patrick and Robin Eddington
say…they turned up evidence of
as many as 60 incidents in which
nerve gas and other chemical
weapons were released in the
vicinity of American troops
[during Operation Desert Storm]. ‘The
evidence of chemical exposures
among our troops is overwhelming,
but the Government won’t deal
with it,’ said Mr.
Eddington….Government officials
overseeing the investigations of
Gulf War illnesses ‘are
continuing to lie, are continuing
to withhold information.'”

Mr. Shenon recounts that:

“During the [Gulf] war, Mr.
Eddington was responsible for the
analysis of satellite photographs
from southern Iraq. It was clear
before the war began, he said,
that the Iraqis had moved
chemicals onto the battlefield. ‘It
was very clear that the Iraqis
intended to use them,’ he said.
Mr. Eddington said his office
received reports from various
intelligence sources that the
Iraqis had begun to use chemical
weapons against the United States.

“‘In several
specific circumstances, there was
a statement that a particular
chemical attack was taking place
at a particular moment. You’d ask
management: ‘Hey, what’s the
story? Is this for real?’ And I
remember being told at the time: ‘No,
Centcom says it didn’t happen,
false alarm.’‘”

What’s Going On Here?

According to today’s Shenon article:

“…[The Eddingtons’]
investigation raised concern at
the highest levels of the
Pentagon and the CIA. Mr.
Eddington said he was told twice
by a supervisor last year that
[John] Deutch, who was then
Deputy Secretary of Defense and
the official responsible for the
investigation of Gulf War
illnesses, called to express his
alarm over the couple’s
inquiry.”

Mr. Eddington’s research must have
been closing in on extremely sensitive
information to receive such a reaction
from Dr. Deutch. After all, he evidently
received no similar warning from his
superior when, in 1994, he
authored a letter published in the Washington
Times explicitly alleging there was
a government “cover-up”
concerning the exposure of U.S. troops to
chemical weapons in Desert Storm.

This year, the warnings about
unwelcome inquiries and whistle-blowing
apparently turned to retribution. Patrick
Eddington was made the target of a
criminal investigation — an action
reminiscent of the Clinton
Administration’s intimidating response to
unwelcome revelations about Filegate by
two Secret Service agents. And Robin
Eddington was passed over four times for
routine promotions. In a
statement that could as easily explain
the low quality of some CIA products
under now-Director John Deutch as the
reasons for her career foundering, Mrs.
Eddington told Mr. Shenon: “The
Agency promotes people who don’t rock the
boat, and that’s why you have this
pervasive mediocrity ingrained in most
levels of management.” href=”96-D107.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾

There Goes a Pillar of the
Clinton Case for the CWC

The Center for Security Policy
believes that there is another
consideration at work in the Clinton
Administration’s dissembling about Saddam
Hussein’s chemical weapons use in the
Gulf War. As the Center put it on 25
September:

“…The motivation for such
misrepresentations may be the
Clinton Administration’s high
priority effort to sell the
Chemical Weapons Convention
(CWC). 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.

“…[The Administration’s
reluctant, belated] admission
[that U.S. forces may have been
downwind from destroyed Iraqi
chemical weapons facilities and
bunkers] 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
the Chemical Weapons Convention.
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.”

The Bottom Line

Clearly, no further
consideration can be given by the Senate
to ratification of the CWC without a
thorough investigation of what the
executive branch knew about chemical
weapons use against U.S. personnel in
Desert Storm and when it knew it — and
until an informed debate occurs about the
implications of such use for a treaty
that falsely claims it will rid the world
of chemical arms.

– 30 –

1. Ironically,
this unflattering portrait of John Deutch
contrasts with the effusive praise
accorded him in another front-page
article that appeared in the New York
Times two days before. In this
connection, see the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled ‘There
You Go Again’: New York Times’ Tim
Weiner’s Dubious Opinions Passed Off as
‘News’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_106″>No. 96-D 106, 29
October 1996).