Where are all the people who "Support the Troops" during slogan shouting, and political PR speaking? Or, that was "Support the use of troops".
Whoever supports the troops should care about them as human beings, and consider their life worth something (other than how useful/expendable in achieving political/military objectives). So since the government ordered them to poison themselves, the government should also be responsible to them. First in honesty, then in restitution. That means listening to the Congress requests as in second paragraph here quoted. It's important for the restoring of the damaged lives, and the saving of future lives. Again, if the pesticides and other toxic substance were used by the US government in schools, corporations (say, Wall Street and investment banks), senior homes, hospitals, city streets, public transportation, etc., and 1 out of every 4 became physically damaged, there would be no attempt at dissimulating information. Somehow, despite the recruiting ads, etc., the Pentagon and certain part of the government think that merely because military-people follow orders and sometimes have a higher mortality rate because of war, that their lives are worth so much less, and have no more human rights or value than expendable furniture or supplies.
This is especially unfair because the soldiers were ordered to get exposed to toxins in the middle of a war. And they were carrying out orders at the government's bidding. They were not given choice to be exposed or not be exposed to the toxins. Whoever exerts the power to order people should also take responsibility for the consequence of those orders.
http://news.mywebpal.com/partners/680/public/news936004.html
WASHINGTON - At least one in four U.S. veterans of the 1991 Gulf War suffers from a multi-symptom illness caused by exposure to toxic chemicals during the conflict, a congressionally mandated report being released Monday found.
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It recommends that the Department of Veterans Affairs order a re-do of past Gulf War and Health reports, calling them “skewed” because they did not include evaluations of toxic exposure studies in lab animals, as Congress had requested.
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The report also faults the Pentagon, saying it clearly recognized scientific evidence substantiating Gulf War illness in 2001 but did not acknowledge it publicly.
It said that Acting Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Gulf War illnesses Lt. Gen. Dale Vesser remarked that year that although Saddam Hussein didn’t use nuclear, biological, or chemical agents against coalition forces during the war -- an assertion still debated -- “It never dawned on us ././. that we may have done it to ourselves.”
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About half of Gulf War personnel are believed to have taken PB tablets during deployment, with the greatest use among ground troops and those in forward positions.
Many veterans say they were forced to take the pills, which had not been approved by the FDA, and some said they immediately became sickened.
“Many of us got sick from the pills,” said retired Staff Sgt. Anthony Hardie, a Wisconsin native who was with a multinational unit that crossed from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait and then Iraq.
He said he was required to take them for several weeks and soon suffered from watery eyes and vision problems, diarrhea, muscle twitching and a runny nose. A fellow Special Forces officer, he said, lost about 20 pounds in short order. “All of us had concerns at the time.”
To ward off swarms of sand flies in Kuwait City and the eastern Saudi province of Dhahran, Hardie said trucks would come through at 3 a.m. and spray “clouds” of pesticides.
Fly strips that smelled toxic hung “everywhere,” especially near food. “The pesticide use was far and away (more) than what you’d see in daily life,” he said.
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Several soldiers interviewed said they were ordered to dunk their uniforms in the pesticide DEET and to spray pesticide routinely on exposed skin and in their boots to ward off scorpions.
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The federal panel added that it also could not rule out an association between Gulf War illness and the prolonged exposure to oil fires, as well as low-level exposures to nerve agents, injections of many vaccines and combinations of neurotoxic exposures
...100,000 U.S. troops who were potentially exposed to low-levels of Sarin gas, a nerve agent, as a result of large-scale U.S. demolitions of Iraqi munitions near Khamisiyah, Iraq, in 1991.
Troops who were downwind from the demolitions have died from brain cancer at twice the rate of other Gulf War veterans, the report stated.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
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