THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 22, 1996 TAG: 9608220417
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 38 lines
The Pentagon has acknowledged in a new report that chemical weapons were detected as many as seven times in the first week of the 1991 Persian Gulf War near staging areas in northern Saudi Arabia, where tens of thousands of American troops were housed.
While insisting that it still had no conclusive evidence that American soldiers were ever exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons, the Defense Department said in the report that it was ``further exploring the plausibility'' that small amounts of chemical agents passed over American troops after American bombers destroyed Iraqi arms depots and factories north of staging areas near the Saudi city of Hafr al-Batin.
In the past, the Pentagon had said it knew of only two ``credible'' detections of chemical weapons in the gulf war, both made with Czech military equipment. The new report, which was dated Aug. 5, recounted those two detections and said five others reported in the first week of the war ``cannot be discounted.''
The report, which pulls together information from intelligence reports and other government studies, some of them made public earlier by the Defense Department, will doubtless be seen by ailing veterans of the gulf war as more evidence that they were made ill by chemical agents released in the war.
And the report is also likely to draw new attacks on the credibility of the Pentagon, which until recently had insisted that it had no evidence that Americans troops were exposed to chemical weapons. It was not clear why Defense Department officials had not compiled the information before in a public report, given the intense interest of thousands of sickly gulf war veterans and the fact that the information has existed in Pentagon records for years.
KEYWORDS: PERSIAN GULF WAR CHEMICAL WEAPONS VETERAN by CNB