Secrecy Syndrome

One week after the Persian Gulf war ended on Feb. 27, 1991, U.S. Army engineers blew up an ammunition storage depot at Kamisiyah, in southern Iraq. Not long after that, U.N. inspectors informed American officials that the facility had included quantities of chemical weapons. The U.N. report was immediately classified.

The Pentagon did not alert the troops who had destroyed the arms cache that they might have been exposed to toxic substances. Only last June 21, as this newspaper reported at the time, did it acknowledge that some U.S. soldiers may have been exposed to mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin when the depot was blown up. For years before that, the Pentagon had denied that it knew of any links between the many health problems cited by veterans of the war, symptoms that have come to be known collectively as Gulf War syndrome, and possible exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons.

This week the Defense Department, while denying it had deliberately kept silent about the report on Kamisiyah, conceded that its full relevance “was not recognized at the time.” Left unexplained is why that relevance was not subsequently perceived and acted on.

The report was distributed to selected high military and civilian officials by late 1991. At that time the extent of medical complaints by Gulf War veterans had not become obvious. In the years that followed, however, thousands who had served in the combat zone reported a variety of health problems. The Pentagon continued to maintain that it could find no link between their ailments and exposure to chemical agents.

What’s most puzzling is how no one inside or outside the Pentagon who had seen the 1991 report thought to connect its alarming findings with the many cases of illnesses that came to be described by Gulf War veterans. There may have been no intentional suppression of the findings on Kamisiyah, as the Pentagon says. But there clearly seems to have been a collective lapse of official memory about a possibly crucial clue to Gulf War syndrome, and that cries out for explanation.