Iraq '91 Nerve Gas Exposure Probed

Tuesday, June 3, 2003
The Associated Press

U.S. troops destroyed ammunitions caches in Khamisiyah, Iraq, on March 4 and March 10, 1991. Some of those weapons contained sarin and cyclosarin, two nerve gases. The Pentagon has said more than 100,000 soldiers were exposed to low levels of nerve gas when the weapons were destroyed in Khamisiyah.

WASHINGTON -- AP
The government miscalculated the number of U.S. troops who may have been exposed to nerve gases when Iraqi weapons were destroyed during the first Gulf War, congressional investigators say.

The General Accounting Office is expected to testify in a House hearing Monday that the Pentagon and CIA used a flawed computer model to estimate the fallout from the weapons. The models were created with inaccurate data, and the height of the plume resulting from the 1991 weapons explosions was underestimated, according to a memo sent to members of a House Government Reform subcommittee. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the memo Friday.

The data indicate that initial reports that about 100,000 troops were exposed were wrong. The memo doesn't say whether more or fewer troops were likely to have been affected.

"We shouldn't be making policy by relying on that modeling," said Larry Halloran, a spokesman for the National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations subcommittee.

The GAO finding is sure to reverberate among Gulf War veterans and their advocates, who have said the exposure to the weapons' gases was one cause of mysterious illnesses among many veterans. Advocates also will use the testimony to argue for health care and compensation for veterans within a certain radius of the weapons explosions.
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2003 © The Associated Press.

Dan