Summary of Case
SUMMARY
In the 1980s, it was widely publicized and well-known that Saddam Hussein was violating international law (the Geneva Convention of 1925) by killing people, including his own citizens, with chemical weapons. This litigation will show that the Defendant companies, nonetheless, 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.
In the 1991 Gulf War, international Coalition forces destroyed as much of Saddam’s chemical weapons as they could find. During this necessary destruction, widespread low-level exposures of our troops occurred. The Defendant companies made large profits by helping Saddam Hussein make the nerve gas and mustard gas to which our clients were exposed. The exposures came from the chemical fallout, with prevailing winds, from bombing Saddam’s chemical weapons production and storage facilities during the air war, and 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. The U.S. government has calculated that over 100,000 of our troops were exposed to sarin nerve gas fallout from the detonation of just one Iraqi ammunition dump alone, the one at Khamisiyah. It was foreseeable to the Defendants that people would be hurt when they supplied Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction, at the same time that he was known to be an international outlaw concerning weapons of mass destruction.
Medical research has shown that Gulf War Illness is a multi-symptom neurological disorder caused by exposure to nerve gas, which is enhanced by genetic susceptibility in some to low-level exposure to nerve gas. Medical research has likewise shown that mustard gas exposure causes birth defects and cancer.
The purpose of this litigation is to not only recover compensation for Gulf War veterans and their birth-defected children, but to deter these Defendants and others like them from ever enabling those like Saddam Hussein, with weapons of mass destruction in the future.
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