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Veterans of first Gulf
War sue, allege contamination
NEW YORK (AP) — Blaming corporations for fueling
former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons program, victims of
the first Gulf War filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking compensation for
illnesses affecting more than 100,000 soldiers.
"Anyone with eyes and ears knew Saddam was killing people with poison gas in the 1980s," lawyer Gary B. Pitts said outside federal court. "These companies have to be held accountable or they'll do this same thing in the future with some other tyrant." The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for more than 100,000 soldiers who it says suffered severe injuries and staggering economic losses after they were exposed to chemicals when coalition forces blew up Iraqi ammunition dumps. Lawyers said they hoped to force chemical corporations from France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States to reject future requests for business from tyrants around the globe. Some of the illnesses described include memory loss, deterioration of the central nervous system and brain functions, chronic fatigue, confusion, impairment of sensory acuity and coordination. According to the filing, the Department of Veterans Affairs has determined that more than 100,000 veterans of the first Gulf War have at least a 10% impairment from chemical exposure, about 3,500 veterans have 70% impairment and 1,200 veterans are 100% disabled. Pitts said he brought the lawsuit in Brooklyn because the court there has experience with complex lawsuits and because litigation pertaining to Agent Orange had been filed there. The herbicide Agent Orange was used in the 1960s and 1970s in Vietnam to clear dense jungle foliage that provided cover for enemy forces. Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
They allege liability for ailments linked to service in 1991
From Phil Hirschkorn and Deborah Feyerick
CNN New York Bureau
Wednesday, August 20, 2003 Posted: 8:10 AM
EDT (1210 GMT)
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Former U.S. Marine Capt.
Daniel Hammond’s physical ailments forced him to quit business school and
left him unable to hold a job.
Story Tools
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NEW YORK (CNN) -- Veterans of the first U.S.-led war with Iraq filed a lawsuit in federal court in Brooklyn on Tuesday alleging that companies that exported chemicals to Iraq in the 1980s, and the banks that financed those deals, are liable for illnesses the U.S. veterans sustained from exposure to chemical weapons stockpiles that were blown up during the 1991 war.
The veterans are among the more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers who have symptoms including extreme fatigue, memory loss, and bone and joint pain, which are often referred to as Gulf War syndrome or Gulf War illness.
The defendants are 11 companies that the suit accuses of supplying Iraq with precursors for chemical weapons, and 33 banks that provided letters of credit for Iraq's purchases according to Iraq's declarations to U.N. weapons inspectors.
Plaintiffs attorneys acquired the never-made-public documents last year from Iraq and showed them to CNN.
They list banks that provided letters of credit for Iraq and more than 50 suppliers of chemical precursors that could have been used to manufacture mustard gas, sarin and VX.
"Those documents reveal which companies were involved, what they sold -- and the veterans have unfinished business with these companies," attorney Gary Pitts said.
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They have to pay for what they've done or
they'll do the same thing in the future with some other tyrant
who has money.
"They knew or should have known that the chemicals that were being sold were being used a part of the weapons of mass destruction program of the Iraqi regime," attorney Kenneth McCallion said.
All the companies and banks sued are based outside the United States.
Although the companies have been previously sued in state court in Texas, the banks are new to the class-action litigation.
The banks sued are mainly based in Germany, Italy, France, Japan, England, the Netherlands, Kuwait, and Pakistan, and include such well-known firms as Deutsche Bank, Banca Nazionale Del Lavoro, Barclays Bank, Credit Lyonnais, and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.
None of the banks reached by CNN would comment on the suit.
A number of the companies previously denied any connections to Iraq weapons programs.
'Defining moment in my life'
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Daniel Hammond was in peak
physical condition when he served with the Marines. |
Former U.S. Marine Capt. Daniel Hammond, 37, from Chicago, Illinois, is among the plaintiffs.
He was deployed to the gulf in late December 1990 and returned home the following March.
"Three months out of my life -- it was almost a footnote, but it's become the defining moment in my life," Hammond said.
Hammond, a high school gymnast and a college diver, was among the first troops to cross into Kuwait in February 1991, expelling the Iraqi forces that had invaded the country.
"We had vehicles with us that could detect the chemical weapons, and those alarms went off five or six times," Hammond said.
His physical ailments forced him to quit business school a few years ago and left him unable to hold a job. He's been unemployed for eight months.
"In the last five years, I've worked 10 different jobs, trying to find something that I can do," he said.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages and medical monitoring.
All of the defendants or their subsidiaries conduct business in New York, which is also home to a number of plaintiffs.
Raymond Bordonaro, 65, a former New York police officer from Long Island, called up as an Army reservist, was 52 years old when he was sent to the gulf.
The chief warrant officer was deployed to Kuwait to remove enemy artillery.
Since returning home, he has suffered memory loss and other ailments.
For him, the suit is about "vindication more than anything."
Both he and Hammond are among the 161,000 Gulf War veterans receiving disability payments from the Veterans Administration.
"I'm looking for these companies to pay for their dirty deeds," Bordonaro said.
The veterans' first suit on the matter is pending in Texas state court.
Attorneys filed the new suit with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in part because the court has handled similar cases in the past, such as settlements for Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange, and for Holocaust survivors who sought to reclaim inheritances left in Swiss banks.
Pitts said the U.S. justice system can also hold Saddam Hussein's former suppliers and financiers accountable.
"They have to pay for what they've done or they'll do the same thing in the future with some other tyrant who has money," he said.
UK banks named in Gulf War Syndrome court case
The accusations are part of a class action lawsuit filed this week in New York by 16 former US servicemen who have all developed symptoms of so-called Gulf War syndrome.
Lloyds TSB, Barclays and Natwest, part of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, are accused of helping Saddam to secure finance to buy ingredients and equipment used in the production of chemical weapons in the late 1980s.
Weir Group, a Scottish engineering firm, is also named in the suit along with a small chemical distribution company from Poole, Dorset, called BDH, now owned by Merck, the German chemical group.
Oxoid, another British laboratory chemicals group, is also named in the lawsuit.
The 16 veterans are all disabled and some have fathered severely handicapped children since they were exposed to nerve and mustard gases during the first Gulf War. The lawsuit claims that the companies and banks are directly responsible for their illnesses because Iraq would not have been able to manufacture the deadly weapons without their help.
The UK companies are among 44 businesses named in the class action, which was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York on Tuesday.
Gary Pitts, the Texas lawyer representing the 16 men, believes that as many as 100,000 servicemen and civilians have developed Gulf War syndrome and have had their symptoms recognised by the US Veterans Administration. It is expected that all 100,000 will eventually join the class action.
Mr Pitts was able to single out the companies using confidential documents provided by the Iraq Government to United Nations weapons inspectors. The documents were part of the 12,000-page dossier given by Iraq to the Unmovic weapons inspectors earlier this year.
Weir Group is described in the Iraqi dossier as a supplier of pumps in 1987. UN sources said that Weir’s name had figured many times in its research on supplying Saddam’s military-industrial complex.
Weir said that it had never engaged in any illegal activity or provided equipment that had been used to make chemical or biological weapons.
“The pumps that were provided in 1987 were for bona fide purposes as far as we are concerned,” Alan Mitchellson, a lawyer at Weir Group, said. “We will vigorously defend this lawsuit. We have done nothing wrong.”
Merck, which now owns BDH, said that it had not yet been served with legal papers concerning the case and could not comment.
The UN dossier obtained by The Times alleges that BDH, along with a number of other companies, provided chemicals to Iraq that were used to make the deadly VX nerve gas.
The UK banks are each accused of being a so-called “correspondent bank” on letters of credit obtained by Saddam’s Government in connection with the purchase of goods or services used to acquire or produce chemical weapons of mass destruction.
A spokesman for Unmovic said that many of the companies named in the 12,000-page dossier, and similar dossiers provided by the Iraqi regime since the end of the first Gulf War, had been contacted and asked to co-operate with weapons inspectors.
He added that many companies that did business with Saddam’s regime in the run-up to the first Gulf War might not have been aware that they were participating in a weapons programme. Mr Pitts said that such a defence was invalid.
The suit does not specify a compensation figure but, if successful, Mr Pitts believes it could stretch to billions of dollars.
| Gulf War vets suing big banks
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"Anyone with eyes and ears knew Saddam was killing people with poison gas in the 1980s," said Gary Pitts, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, who filed the suit yesterday in Brooklyn Federal Court. "These companies have to be held accountable, or they'll do the same thing in the future." Pitts said the corporations and banks linked to the former dictator's weapons program were identified in documents the Iraqi government turned over to United Nations inspectors last year. Among the defendants named in the suit are Deutsche Bank of Germany, Credit Lyonnais of France and Lloyds Bank in England, as well as Bloomfield, N.J.-based ABB Lummus Global Inc. More than 100,000 veterans of the 1991 war were poisoned when hundreds of Iraqi ammunition dumps were destroyed by U.S. forces, creating toxic clouds, the suit said. Ray Bordonaro, 65, a retired NYPD cop and former Army National Guardsman, said he has suffered fatigue and memory loss since serving in Kuwait. "I love my country," Bordonaro said. "These companies just wanted to make a buck, and they feel like they're above everything." ABB Lummus Global Inc. is accused of illegally supplying laboratory equipment, which was used to manufacture chemical weapons, to Iraq during the 1980s. "Until we are served with the papers, we can't comment," said Ronald Kurtz, an ABB spokesman in Connecticut. The veterans are seeking unspecified monetary damages and medical
treatment for their illnesses. |
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August 20, 2003
By THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, Courant Staff Writer
Sixteen veterans from the Persian Gulf War filed suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., against 11 chemical companies and 33 banks from throughout the world that allegedly helped Iraq construct and support its extensive chemical warfare program.
The suit alleges that evidence shows the companies "built Saddam Hussein's nerve gas and mustard gas factories, supplied him with chemical weapons production equipment, and sold him the bulk chemical precursors used to make his chemical weapons." It asks to become a class action on behalf of all veterans of the 1991 gulf war who can prove they became sick from chemical weapons' fallout.
These companies and banks, the suit claims, are identified in the official written Iraqi disclosures given to the U.N. weapons inspectors after the war. They essentially expose Hussein's procurement network for building his large chemical weapons arsenal, the complaint alleges. The foreign companies and banks all do business in New York.
The banks named in the suit include Deutsche Bank AG of Germany, Lloyds Bank of the United Kingdom, Credit Lyonnais of France, State Bank of India, Banca Roma of Italy, National Bank of Pakistan, Arab Bank of Jordan, Bank of Tokyo and Kuwait Commercial bank. The companies that the suit claims have sold chemicals or materials to Iraq are headquartered in France, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain and the United States - ABB Lummus Global Inc. in Delaware.
The banks helped facilitate the sales of the chemicals by arranging finances and letters of credit between the companies and the Central Bank of Iraq, the fiscal facilitator for the Iraqi chemical producers, the suit alleges.
Thirty-six percent of the 581,000 retired veterans who served at the height of the gulf war have filed health government claims, while 22 percent of those filing claims either still have those health claims pending or have been denied benefits. More than 11,000 of the veterans, whose average age was 36 during the war, have died. The federal health figures were updated this year but date to last November.
The veterans' exposures came from the chemical fallout blown over troops from allied bombings of Hussein's chemical weapons production and storage facilities during the air war, the suit claims. In addition, the suit says, the veterans became sick from "the explosion of hundreds of captured and uninventoried Iraqi ammunition dumps in southeast Iraq during the brief time that coalition troops were in that area upon the liberation of Kuwait."
During the ground war and after, U.S. and allied forces destroyed large stores of chemical weapons. And as the battles progressed, thousands of military chemical alarms went off, causing soldiers to don chemical protective equipment. Since then, the U.S. General Accounting Office and veterans' advocates have criticized the lack of quality of the masks and chemical protective suits worn by U.S. troops.
Two of the most controversial after-war explosions were at Khamisiyah, Iraq, on March 4 and 10, 1991. The Defense Department first estimated that 5,000 troops were exposed, and then increased the estimates repeatedly until the number rose to 100,000. Another GAO report said the number is much higher than that but gave no specific figure.
The Defense Department claimed the troops' exposure to chemical warfare agents was too weak to have seriously harmed their health. And last year, the department disputed high death-rate figures for those troops cited by the Veterans Benefit Association.
After U.S. forces bombed the Iraqi bunkers, the CIA admitted it had advance knowledge that the bunkers contained chemical warfare agents, but the information never filtered down to troops in the area. Most were not wearing gas masks and chemical suits.
The lawsuit, drafted by attorneys Gary Pitts, an Army National Guard veteran, and Kenneth McCallion, claims the companies named in the complaint "made large profits by helping Saddam Hussein make the nerve gas and mustard gas" to which the veterans were exposed.
A government study released more than a year ago said a sample of 10,423 veterans showed they had "a cluster of symptoms consistent with neurological impairment," consistent with exposure to nerve gas.
Symptoms reported by the veterans include blurred vision, loss of balance or dizziness, tremors or shaking, and speech difficulty. The study was conducted by the Veterans Health Administration in the federal Department of Veterans Affairs and the George Washington University School of Public Health.
Medical research, the suit says, has likewise shown that mustard gas exposure causes birth defects and cancer.
The suit seeks compensation for the "poisoned veterans and their birth-defected children."
Plaintiffs call Saddam Hussein
08/24/03
When Iraq, hoping to head off war, filed its "Full Final and Complete" weapons dossier late last year, eight groups had the unexpurgated version, with its handy how-to guides on acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Five were nuclear weapons powers - the permanent Security Council members. The sixth was Iraq. The United Nations also got an unedited version.
But who was the eighth?
A group of 1991 Gulf War veterans who believe Iraqi chemical weapons caused their many infirmities and the birth defects of some of their children.
Texas lawyer Gary Pitts says the group has used the secret part of the dossier listing suppliers to claim damages from scores of firms they allege helped Saddam Hussein build chemical weapons in the 1980s.
The group's most recent lawsuit, filed last week in a federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y., as a class-action on behalf of all Gulf War vets, claims damages from 11 major chemical and equipment companies and 33 banks. The businesses allegedly sold precursor chemicals, glass-lined tanks and other goods or provided the letters of credit to complete the transactions.
Most supplier companies are European, although one U.S. firm, ABB Lummus Global Inc., is named for allegedly providing lab equipment in the 1980s. A spokesman for the New Jersey firm was ill Friday and unavailable for comment.
A smorgasbord of European, Asian and Middle Eastern financial institutions allegedly facilitated the deals.
U.S. troops and survey groups prowling Iraq have discovered the effectiveness of international efforts after the 1991 war to deny Saddam the means and opportunity to rebuild his arsenal. A couple of well-scrubbed trailers with vats and hookups that may have been biowar labs have been found, along with parts of a gas centrifuge and nuclear-related documents buried in a scientist's backyard for the last 12 years.
But pre-1991 was another story.
That was when Saddam was favored by Western governments who didn't want Iran to win the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. That was when Ronald Reagan's personal envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, visited Baghdad on the very day scientists on a U.N. team announced they'd retrieved evidence showing chemical weapons were being used against Iranians with horrific results.
In the 1980s, the U.S. government approved the sale to Iraq of scores of samples of anthrax, botulinum toxins, salmonella and hundreds of other potentially lethal viruses, bacteria, fungi and protozoa. U.S.-funded labs trained Saddam's microbiologists and handed over samples of nasty pathogens. U.S. firms were part of a host of Western companies selling "dual-use" equipment that could be used as easily for weapons as for regu- lar factories.
After the war brought the grisly results to light, this craven effort was the subject of a quickly forgot ten Senate Banking Committee investigation.
Since then, the U.S. government has tried hard to keep secret the data on who fed Saddam's weapons projects in the 1980s, and why.
It's just the opposite of the eager effort last fall and winter to exaggerate Saddam's 1990s accomplishments.
Iraq, however, didn't play along.
Seven months before Saddam's government fell to the U.S.-led onslaught, Pitts says, the Iraqi government gave his group a full, uncensored version of the weapons declaration, complete with lists of suppliers big and small. His Web site, www.gulfwarvetlawsuit.com, says the document was handed over in September 2002 to the group's hired emissary, former weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
Interviewed by phone Friday at his Houston office, Pitts said it was this copy of the "Full Final and Com plete Declaration" that backed up last week's lawsuit and an earlier one in Texas that names additional firms.
Why would Iraq burn bridges by re vealing the web of suppliers that might have helped it resume the weapons trade once U.N. sanctions were lifted?
"They sort of had this charm offensive' they were trying to do to stave off war," said Pitts. "This was part of it."
What's ironic and sad is that Iraq gave the veterans some thing their own government would not. Pitts says his group tried for three years to obtain the documents but was denied them after a Defense Intelli gence Agency review classified all as secret.
No one is quite sure what has caused so many Gulf War veter ans to suffer debilitat ing seizures, rashes, memory loss and other damage loosely classed as Gulf War syndrome. Did chemical weapons do it? It's unclear and probably unprovable.
Yet quite apart from the merits, though, is the fact that U.S. secrecy and indifference forced these vets to go to the "enemy" to get the goods on who might have contributed to their post-war ailments and suffering. That is simply not acceptable.
Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages.
Contact Elizabeth Sullivan at:
bsullivan@plaind.com , 1-216-999-6153
© 2003 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.
More than 100,000 veterans of the first Gulf War are suing more than two dozen corporations and banks. The lawsuit, filed in Brooklyn Federal Court Tuesday, claims the companies' actions helped Iraq's development of its chemical warfare program.
NY1’s Jeanine Ramirez filed the following story:
Daniel Hammond said the skin lesions on his body are the least of his problems. The former U.S. Marine Corps captain who said he was healthy when he was deployed to the Gulf War in 1991, is now on 100 percent disability with the Veterans Adminstration.
“Primarily, it's extreme fatigue,” Hammond said. “It's joint and muscle pain, it’s severe memory problems, short term memory problems. These are all documented through the V.A.”
Hammond is just one of more than 100,000 Gulf War veterans who said they're suffering from illnesses they got after being exposed to chemical weapons in Iraq. Now, they want those who helped build Saddam Hussein's arsenal to be held accountable.
“These chemicals were supplied to Iraq by a number of companies,” said attorney Kenneth McCallion. “France, German companies, Swiss companies, and yes, unfortunately a few American companies as well.”
A class action lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Brooklyn Federal Court against 11 supply companies as well as 33 banks. Lawyers said they've recently obtained Hussein's records of business with the institutions.
“Our argument is anyone with eyes and ears knew that Saddam Hussein was killing people with poison gas against international law in the 1980s,” said attorney Gary Pitts. “So they had a duty to act reasonably, which would be not to act in this trade.”
Lawyers said getting all of their proof together has taken years, but now the medical research is also showing that many veterans with Gulf War syndrome are having babies with birth defects.
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