Gulf War Veterans, The Silenced After Service

Gulf War vets: VA trying to silence claims of illness
The Arizona Republic
Paul Giblin
September 20, 2014

Approximately 37 percent of the 700,000 U.S. troops who deployed to the war suffer chronic multisymptom illness, according to "Gulf War Update," a VA newsletter issued in March of this year.

The head of a national committee that studies the health of Gulf War veterans says senior Department of Veterans Affairs officials are obscuring scientific evidence that points to war-related illnesses among an estimated 250,000 veterans who served in the 1990-91 conflict often called the First Gulf War.

VA officials are trying to suppress the number of veterans who would be eligible for treatment and compensation to keep down costs and waiting lists for care, said committee Chairman James H. Binns, a Vietnam veteran and Phoenix business executive involved in the medical equipment industry.

Binns made his claims in a four-page letter to former interim VA Secretary Sloan Gibson, White House deputy chief of staff Rob Nabors and congressional leaders on June 3 and during a private meeting with new VA Secretary Robert McDonald on Sept. 10.

"The duplicity reaches the highest levels of the department and obstructs hopes for better health of an entire generation of veterans," Binns wrote in the letter.

In response to the group's call for more attention to Gulf War vets, VA officials instead are working to eliminate the congressionally mandated committee's independence by replacing its members with hand-selected new members, Binns told The Arizona Republic.

Hundreds of thousands of veterans, who now primarily are in their 40s, suffer health problems associated with the Gulf War, Binns said.

The conflict, led by the United States, countered Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait. Coalition planes bombed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's military relentlessly for more than a month, then ground forces raced through Kuwait into Iraq in four days.

The skies above the battlefield were blackened for days with smoke from burning oil wells.

The Gulf War committee and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies have concluded that Gulf War illness exists and that it likely was caused by exposure to neurotoxins from oil-well fires, anti-nerve-gas pills, pesticides and chemicals released from low-level chemical weapons damaged in the destruction of Iraqi facilities.

About a third of those involved in the ground war suffer from a variety of ailments including respiratory conditions, unremitting pain, memory loss, intestinal disorders and skin rashes, which have combined to ruin careers, Binns said.

"These sick veterans have no effective treatments, but remedies can likely be discovered with the right research, according to the Institute of Medicine," Binns stated in his letter to Gibson, Nabors, Miller, the Senate VA Committee chairman, Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and others.
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