Thursday, December 20, 2012

One more Clinton scandal

Does exposure to nerve gas cause long term illness?

The Pentagon has acknowledged that the postwar demolition of a chemical weapons depot at Kamisiya, in southern Iraq, may have exposed 100,000 troops to nerve gas. But the military has said it was unlikely that nerve gas caused long-term illnesses in troops, a position it reiterated on Thursday.

Nearly half of the 700,000 service members who were deployed in 1990 and 1991 for the gulf war have filed disability claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and more than 85 percent of those have been granted benefits, the department has reported...

There was a dirty little secret about the first Gulf war, and it was that many of those who served developed a debilitating neurological disease. True, some of those claiming disability were what we would now call "post traumatic stress syndrome", but the years of the Clinton administration trying to claim all the cases were psychological is a major and rarely mentioned scandal of those days.

Hat tip to Boinky, who cites a New York Times article: http://fkclinic.blogspot.com/2012/12/gulf-war-syndrome-forgotten-veterans.html

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