FROM
CHAIRWOMAN,
DENISE NICHOLS [email protected]
_____________________________________________________________
WE need more editorials and letters to the editors of all newspapers
Veterans all especially Gulf War Veterans Please post this on websites
and forward to others that you know. We need a massive effort. The Agent
Orange Vets and Atomic vets went thru this and unfortunately we are
17 almost 18 years in to this battle against our own government. I believe
each veterans, their family members and spouses can have a huge impact
if we all respond now. I am asking for three simple actions that each
of you have the ability to do. If you think you cannt then think of
General Mich, Major Donnelly and his family they were severly ill and
in motorized chairs with respiratory support but they did not give up.
We may have gotten a bum deal so far but this is not about one of us
individually but all of us and for the survivors that have already lost
a loved one. This is about making a change now that will not be forgotten!
You can do these three things from where you live for very little cost!
But if we all do it in each state it must result in an impact!
For some reason each of us has some mission in our larger lives and
maybe this is it. For the current and future!
1. Tommorrow or tonight I am requesting each of the gulf war
veterans and their families to write a letter to the editor of your
local paper...you can find them all on line and can submit them on line.
The American people need to hear from you the injuried what it has been
like!!!! Tell them what your veterans day or Thanksgiving was really
like dont hold back let the emotions and truth flow!
2. Then I also am requesting that if you live in your capitol
of your state to hand deliver a copy of the downloaded RAC report to
your governor.
Write a short letter and ask them to address the issue in an editorial,
ask them to direct their legislatures to have one hearing with their
Senate and House VA committee at State level.....ask for a resolution
from your state house and signed by governor that 17 years is long enough
that the gulf war veterans should get compensated and rapidly. Ask them
to support the call for medical research funding thru the DOD CDMRP
program as is explained in the report.
3. Then ask them the Governor to have a meeting with the gulf war veterans
and the chancellor of your medical school in your state....Share the
RAC report with them....Ask for a meeting with the heads of their departments....neurology,
hematology, cardiology, immunology, bio chemistry, pharmacology.....Present
the findings to them and describe to them the symptoms and problems
you have had. WE need to actively find the best of the best to submit
research grants in the next cycle....we just had one....but that is
okay you want them discussing between departments and getting informed
and forming a interdisciplinary team to work together on their submissions.
Remember biomarkers, diagnosis, treatment trials(small at first to prove
the point and effectiveness)....
YOU CAN MAKE A SIGNIFICANT IMPACT AS ILL GULF WAR VETERANS THAT Dont
just want compensation but CARE and treatment and a way to get better
and have a quality of life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is how you
can really have a mission!
This battle is not done and each of you can play a significant important
role to help not only yourselves but other gulf war veterans.
Enjoy the article below and please get energized because to carry this
thru and get the job done is going to take all of us working and doing
a little each day....
YOU CAN AND MUST DO THIS...a
handful and a committeee RAC/Adv comm on GWV can not accomplish this
without you
Sincerely,
Denise
[email protected]
_______________________________________________________________
ROBERT C. KOEHLER
For release 11/27/08
THE GHOSTS OF DESERT STORM
By Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media Services
Seventeen years and three wars later, the ghosts of Operation Desert
Storm — the cancers, the chronic headaches and dizziness, the
fibromyalgia, the ALS and so much more that have stalked returning vets,
whose medical claims have been denied, ignored, relegated to the paper
shredder — have just gotten a reality upgrade.
“The extensive body of scientific research now available consistently
indicates that Gulf War illness is real, that it is the result of neurotoxic
exposures during Gulf War deployment, and that few veterans have recovered
or substantially improved with time.”
Thus concludes the 452-page report of the Research Advisory Committee
on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, presented last week to Veterans
Affairs Secretary James Peake. Suddenly the government has several hundred
thousand medical claims emanating from a few months in 1991 it has to
start taking seriously — and that’s the easy part.
The implications of the congressionally mandated advisory panel’s
report, chaired by James Binns, a former deputy assistant secretary
of defense and a Vietnam vet, may not be easy to contain. In the name
of sanity and the planet’s future, I hope this report blows the
hellish toxicity of modern warfare wide open and creates a legal wedge
by which the forces of moral outrage can hold governments accountable
for what they do . . . for what our own government is doing right now.
For 17 years, the VA maintained that the strange, debilitating, sometimes
fatal symptoms the vets of Gulf War I — that quick little romp
that routed Saddam’s army and left America feeling so good about
itself — began experiencing was, to the extent that it was anything
at all (or anything that had to do with the war), a mental thing, PTSD-induced.
Vets learned that fighting the war may have been nothing compared to
fighting the VA for treatment and compensation. It was a struggle that
thousands didn’t survive.
The Binns report estimates that more than a quarter of the GIs deployed
during Desert Storm, around 200,000 of them, are suffering in some way
from Gulf War Syndrome, and identifies two primary causes: pyridostigmine
bromide, an anti-nerve gas medication all troops in the Gulf were required
to take, and highly concentrated, DEET-like insect-repellents that were
extensively used.
But the neurotoxic hell that is modern war cannot be reduced to two
problematic substances. Many of the troops — and, of course, millions
of Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians — were exposed to a wide array
of toxic chemicals, which the report did not rule out as contributing
factors. These include: the smoke from burning oil-well fires; fumes
from poison gas dumps blown up by the Army; anthrax vaccines; and the
extremely fine radioactive dust of exploded depleted uranium munitions,
which may prove to be the deadliest of all the poisons modern war leaves
in its wake.
What the report also exposes is the cynicism and denial of the U.S.
war establishment, which, as we all know, disputed the toxicity of Agent
Orange for 20 years before giving in, and which, it now turns out, suppressed
evidence that substantiated Gulf War syndrome. Quoted in the report,
according to Cox News Service, is Lt. Gen. Dale Vesser, acting special
assistant to the secretary of defense for Gulf War illnesses, who said
in 2001 that, while Saddam Hussein didn’t poison U.S. troops,
“It never dawned on us . . . that we may have done it to ourselves.”
And M.J. Stephey of Time magazine wrote that the report “serves
as a grim reminder that sometimes a soldier’s greatest enemy is
the government he or she is fighting for.”
All of this is true, but the irresponsibility of the war establishment
and the enabling media goes, I believe, deeper than the betrayal of
our own troops. What are we doing to the world, not merely with our
satanic weapons systems but with the unregulated toxic waste of war?
Consider, for instance, a recent story in Military Times about the open-air
burn pits throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, where the military disposes
of hundreds of tons of war-zone waste every day, including “unexploded
ordnance; paints and solvents; and even . . . bloody bandages and amputated
limbs.” U.S. troops (and, of course, the locals) have almost no
protection against the toxic fumes the pits produce. GIs report such
symptoms as “stinging eyes, monster headaches, severe respiratory
infections and ‘plume crud’ — prolonged hacking that
produces blackened phlegm and sometimes blood.”
No matter that the smoke contains “arsenic, benzene, carbon monoxide,
sulfuric acid and dioxin, the cancer-causing main ingredient in the
defoliant Agent Orange,” the Pentagon insists that there’s
no long-term environmental impact. Yeah, right. Who here believes the
soldiers in the war on terror aren’t facing serious health problems
because of such exposures? How long will we continue to tolerate our
government’s pattern of pathological denial?
Perhaps the Defense Department understands that if it ever begins taking
responsibility — and conceding liability — for what it does,
a moral and financial hemorrhaging will ensue that makes war itself
impossible.
- - -
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist,
is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer.
You can respond to this column at [email protected] or visit his
Web site at commonwonders.com.
© 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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