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: THE PENTAGON'S TOXIC e Fair Article Page 2 of 10 ae * "| skipped periads of time," he explains. "I was in a car driving towards Baltimore on I-70, and the next thing J know, I'm outside of Washington, D.C., on 1-95, and I've got no clue how I got there.” ry One night, his worst, Smith became completely disoriented. "I had blacked out for an hour, hour and a half. I had to call my wife on the phone to find my way home. I was probably 25 miles away. I was an emotional mess because by then I had to admit to myself that something was wrong with me." By this time Smith was seeing Dr. Michael Roy, an internist at Waiter Reed. Roy diagnosed Smith's condition as "somatization disorder," a psychosomatic illness in which a patient becomes so obsessed with an imaginary disease that he begins to exhibit its symptoms. Smith was not the only Gulf War veteran experiencing mysterious symptoms. In late 1991 and early 1992, some from a reserve unit at Indiana's Fort Benjamin Harrison reported sick with a constellation of symptoms that have since been associated with Gulf War syndrome: joint pain, headaches, fatigue, memory loss, and rashes. Reservists in Georgia and Alabama made similar complaints. Military doctors mostly dismissed the symptoms as psychosomatic or stress-related. As the number of people affected began to grow, several government studies were commissioned, including those of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Milnesses, the Institute of Medicine, and the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. By 1996 all of them had concluded that there was no single disease that could account for all the different symptoms associated with Gulf War syndrome. The Department of Defense has examined at least 20 possible health hazards, including pyridostigmine bromide (PB.) pills taken by the Gulf War troops to help protect against chemical warfare, the insect repellent DEET and various pesticides used by the soldiers, and Kuwaiti oil-fire smoke. A frequently repeated theory, still unproven, blames the syndrome on low-dose exposures to chemical- weapons fallout. . About 40,000 veterans have registered with the Department of Defense's Comprehensive Clinical Evaluation Program. (C.C.EP.) for Gulf War illnesses; another 70,000 or so are tallied by the VA. A C.C.E.P. spokesperson says the numbers do not overlap; i.e., the total number of 110,000 to 115,000 is accurate. Of these, 18,000 are undiagnosed, and are merely being treated for their symptoms. To date, the federal government has sponsored 140 or so related research programs, exploring everything from microwaves to biological weapons, which have been funded at a cost to the taxpayer of more than $130 million. Colonel Smith is one of the highest-ranking officers on full disability for Gulf War syndrome. He believes he might have never known the nature of his illness had it not been for the efforts of Dr. Pamela Asa, a Ph.D. molecular biologist who for the past five years has waged a one-woman battle with the Pentagon over the diagnosis of Gulf War syndrome and its cause. She has conducted her own research without a penny from the government or any other benefactor. Because of Asa's work, Colonel Smith has become more than a poster boy for a public-health disaster. Asa believes that in Smith's blood there is evidence that may hold the answer to why so many veterans of the Gulf War are sick. Vanity Fair has uncovered military documents that show the Department of Defense made plans to run a clandestine trial of experimental vaccines and medical products during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Military physicians called this effort "the Manhattan Project.” While many of these vaccines were never used, Vanity Fair has found evidence suggesting that the Pentagon may have developed a modified version of its ED-A.-licensed anthrax vaccine during an operation called “Project Badger." If Pam Asa is right, an experimental substance that causes incurable diseases ill lab animals was mixed into an unknown number of doses-in essence creating a new, untested anthrax vaccine. The actual administration of such a vaccine would have violated the 10-point Nuremberg Code, which in 1947 established the conditions for experiments on human beings - the cardinal point being informed consent. Speaking for the Pentagon, Dr. Ronald R. Blanck, a three-star general in the army's medical command, denies that any of this took place. "Absolutely not,' he says. "I will tell you Bat out it wasn't done." There are echoes of the antebellum South in Pam Ass's accent, in the way she can stretch three syllables out of a word like "hey." Her speech is a genteel drawl, evoking images of hoopskirts, silk fans, and magnolia blossoms. Asa, 46 years old and the mother of four, lives in Memphis, Tennessee. "American by birth, southern by the grace of God," she likes to say, especially in the presence of Yankees. During the Civil War, Union cavalrymen arrested her great-great-grandfather the Reverend John Murray Robertson for refusing to pray for Abraham Lincoln, and then turned his church, Huntsville, Alabama's Episcopal Church of the Nativity, into a horse stable. But though Asa is fond of making jokes about "the War of Northern Aggression," she is no regional chauvinist. Members of her family have fought in just about every American conflict, from the Revolutionary War up through Vietnam. Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to the national anthem, is http://www. idir.net/~krogers/vantyfair-html 11/8/2005