10/22/12 – Kelley Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Website is scotthorton.org.
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Okay, our first guest on the show today is Kelly Vlahos from the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com.
In regards to this one at the American Conservative, that's theamericanconservative.com.
It's called the New Agent Orange.
Welcome back to the show.
Kelly, how are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
You've got some Gulf War illness for us, do you?
Yeah, more Gulf War illness.
We're in the second stage of the Gulf War illness.
I mean, for folks that are probably around our age, remember the slow emergence of the sicknesses and illnesses and symptoms that soldiers were suffering from from the first very brief Gulf War in the early 90s and how long it took them to get recognition for these mysterious illnesses.
And I don't know if you remember reading, I mean, there was this drip, drip, drip, like today, in the news from the Pentagon about what these soldiers in the first Gulf War had been exposed to.
One big one would be that, was it the Qaeda ammunition dump?
They bombed it, right?
It was basically what happened was there was this giant underground depot the size of a couple of Walmarts or something down there, full of all kinds of munitions, including chemical weapons.
And there's video of that, I think people can probably find it on YouTube.
And then they just detonated it with plain old TNT.
And they could have used some kind of fancy implosion incineration bomb or something, I guess.
I don't know exactly what they could have done.
But they just set it off with dynamite.
And apparently it was the biggest non-nuclear man-made explosion ever.
And all they did was just spread a bunch of chemical weapons to the wind, to everybody downwind, which is a lot of soldiers got exposed to this stuff.
Yeah, and I remember, because I remember following this, you know, as a reporter.
And at first the Pentagon said it was a very small number of troops were exposed.
And then, you know, within a year or two later it was tens of thousands of troops that had been exposed.
And then it came out about the pesticides they were using, the anthrax tablets they were taking.
And so we have a lot of soldiers out there in their 40s and 50s who are suffering from unexplained illnesses, everything from chronic, you know, joint pain to cancers.
And then we have another war in which, you know, we have unexplained illnesses, soldiers coming home with a range of symptoms, but mostly, you know, targeting the, you know, lung function and pulmonary function, the heart.
We have soldiers who, you know, leave to go overseas, perfect health, able-bodied, you know, I mean, athletes.
And they come back and they're huffing and puffing like old men and women have all sorts of strange, you know, heart complications, breathing, sleep apnea, and in some cases worse, cancers, skin lesions.
And so they're looking around like what's going on because once they start talking to each other and they realize there's more of them around than many had thought, then people start talking about where were you stationed, where were you stationed.
And, you know, a few years ago, we start hearing about the burn pits.
Lo and behold, a lot of the tens of thousands of our troops had moved in and out of these forward operating bases like Bagram, you know, where you had these huge burn pits that were, you know, the size of a football field, just burning garbage and human waste, body parts, you know, tires, batteries, anything that they needed to get rid of went into these open air incinerators, which was like basically you're just breathing in toxic smoke day in and day out.
And people would talk about the sheen of black dust over everything and this, you know, this feeling, this coughing feeling and they didn't want to go outside to do their physical training because they just knew, you know, inherently that the air was bad.
And I can go on and on about the stories that were told about, you know, people who did have skin lesions and they called it sort of like a black lung that people would get from working in the mines for years where it was coughing up all sorts of stuff.
Actually, I do want you to go on and on about that, but I just wanted to throw in here, I don't know how expensive the technology is and I'm no expert on the science, but I remember years ago they were getting rid of old chemical weapons munitions in Alabama, American chemical weapons, and they had this incinerator that was made to burn extremely hot and it was a contained kind of a thing where, at least in theory, by the time the exhaust came out the top, it was pretty much clean.
It had been burnt all the way to a crisp at extremely high temperature or whatever.
And so, you know, who knows, it probably wasn't all that safe.
But the point I'm getting at is they didn't have these kind of incineration machines at these forward operating bases where they're burning everything that they throw in there at the highest temperature they possibly can and combusting every last molecule they possibly can combine with oxygen at high temperature before the smoke comes out the stack.
They're just throwing crap in a pit that's burning at whatever temperature.
And whatever kind of poison you could possibly imagine is coming out in that smoke.
Right.
And, you know, you talk to the military and they'll tell you, well, you know, this is how it was done.
For instance, the history of war, you can't just create, you know, you can't move it off base.
For example, if you've got waste, you can't just move it off base and bring it to a garbage dump.
So the expedient way was to burn all their waste and trash.
Now we have so much, I mean, everything is synthetic now.
So what you're burning is more highly toxic than anything they had burning, say, 100 years ago, even 50 years ago.
That aside, yeah, it is the 21st century and we have things called these incinerators.
Now this leads to what is becoming a pretty broad class action lawsuit by six soldiers who are blaming, you guessed it, KBR, subsidiary of Halliburton, which had a contract with the military to take care of waste removal, which incorporated putting incinerators onto these forward operating bases so you could do just what you described, burn up all the waste in a clean, you know, environmentally friendly, safe way.
And that didn't happen right away.
Now eventually these incinerators, you know, came into existence over time.
Just as recently as like two years ago, I think they put the last one in and the burn pits were shut down, mostly because Congress got involved.
KBR says, well, we, you know, they have a host of explanations, blaming the government, blaming the military, why they couldn't get these incinerators in there faster.
But what the lawsuit contends is, listen, you were given X amount of dollars, millions of dollars to put these incinerators and you basically set up a system that was fiscally expedient for you and your bottom line, which meant putting up these burn pits and then lollygagging on getting the expensive incinerators on there.
And then not only that, you put these burn pits into like right next to where people are sleeping and eating.
So even where the burn pits were located and how they were handled, you know, were disgusting.
So, I mean, I hate to ruin, this is a whole other vein that you and I have talked about, the whole, you know, private contracting strain of the war story.
But again, we have an example of private contractor, you know, that allegedly had basically kept these burn pits in place because it was helping their bottom line.
Now, I might be oversimplifying, but that's what the lawsuit contends.
I'm already giving them a preponderance of the evidence, so don't put me on the jury.
So here's the thing now, what about denials?
Because when we go back to the Gulf War illness, remember it was called the Gulf War Syndrome.
And the media put out all these stories at the government's behest saying, oh, this is a bunch of hysteria.
This is a bunch of, you know, people convincing each other that they're sick and a bunch of hypochondria.
And or, well, you know, just look at our skewed numbers, which say that, yeah, of course, there are a lot of sick veterans of the first Gulf War, but there's a lot of sick, all kinds of people from that same era.
And they're not any more sick than anyone else who lived through the year 1991.
And so law of averages says, you know, it's all just a bunch of hype.
And it took forever.
And, of course, part of the reason why they got away with the denials is because, as you said, it was all different things, right?
Some guys got exposed to sarin.
Some guys got exposed to anti-sarin pills that had damaged their brains in ways even worse than sarin might have done in small doses.
Other guys were given untested anthrax vaccines as an experiment.
Other guys were downwind from Camasea and on and on like that.
So they had all the and, of course, depleted uranium, perhaps radioactive poisoning, definitely heavy metal poisoning was a big cost.
So they there were all these different accusations.
And so it was easy for the military and Bill Clinton's entire administration to say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're all just sick from 100 different things.
And this is all just a bunch of hype.
And, you know, one of these it's which burnings isn't the right kind of hysteria to cite as an example.
But they would cite, you know, hysteria is in the past where people believe that there's this terrible thing happening when it's not even really true.
So I wonder now they finally did admit a lot of the truth of what was going on.
Those veterans of the first Gulf War.
But I wonder, you know, just how hard of a time are they giving the veterans of this war now and the Afghan war for that matter?
Well, this is where the story gets a little more complicated, because I know that there are a lot of studies going on.
And it's and I and I'm the first to admit that the studies, a lot of them are government driven.
And I believe there's a lot of good people who are earnestly trying to find out what is going on, why these soldiers are sick, you know, and they're testing the air quality, you know, around these burn pits.
Now, what they found out, what we know so far in terms of what's been made public is that the air quality around these burn pits like Bagram is unbelievably high and dangerous.
They will admit that because that's what the that's what their own testing is telling them.
But what they will not admit at this point is that it's because of the burn pit.
Now, people will throw up their hands and say, well, I mean, come on, we're spelling all this toxic.
You know, you know, all these particles into the air.
There's a big black plume coming up into the sky and it's creating a dust everywhere.
I mean, give us a break.
It's not the burn pits, but they have not.
And this is typical that government, just like with Agent Orange, you know, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, they're going to drag.
I don't want to say drag their feet, but they're going to wait until that.
It basically knocks them over the head until they'll admit that these burn pits have caused all of these symptoms.
Now, there's another school of thought I've also written about is that the dust in Iraq right now, this is taking Afghanistan off the plate.
But the dust in Iraq is already polluted.
And that soldiers not even near the burn pits have been breathing in this dust in the air that's filled with these particles of heavy metal, for example, that are getting into the lungs.
And that could be a host of things.
That could be the depleted uranium.
That could be naturally occurring things that were in the earth that got erupted when we've been, you know, continuously bombing the hell out of the land there.
Not even just us, but during the Iranian and Iraqi war, plus the burn pits, plus all these other things, just general pollution.
And that could be causing all these sicknesses.
So the government's like, well, there's all sorts of things going on.
We can't possibly say this until we know for sure.
And that's where it stands right now in terms of what they're going to admit to.
So I could safely say they will admit that the air quality is really bad around these burn pits, but they won't say that the burn pits are the cause.
And we're not, you know, we're talking about thousands of soldiers who have already, or veterans that have already come forward and have logged in on various registries that are online, like Burn Pits 360, for example.
And I think the DAB had their own registry going, and I think that the Army Times had something going where they're inviting people to come in.
So we're talking a lot of people, now is that scientific?
No, because you never know.
There could be somebody who's writing in and making up stories.
I don't know.
So it's not exactly a perfect survey.
But there's an indication out there that there's people that are, and I've talked to many of them.
There's no reason that somebody like 38 years old or younger should be coming home and all of a sudden have the lungs of an old man or the heart of an old man.
Well, that's the thing, too.
And he's got an oxygen tank around him all the time.
Right, well, and to compare them to the general population in the broad numbers is a damn lie, too, because, of course, these are the high school football team is who goes and joins up the Army.
These are the kids who are in the best shape.
Right, and exactly.
And the USA did a study, I don't know, or got a hold of some DOD numbers a couple years ago, and I don't have them in front of me right now.
But they had, basically the Army admitted among their active duty soldiers, they had increased levels like 16%, 17%, 20% of cases of respiratory problems and pulmonary problems and neurological problems among their own rank, active duty, like year over year or something like that.
I don't have the numbers in front of me.
So they even admit that there's increased cases of these issues.
That's not even counting the vets who have gone out of the military since the war.
So there's something going on.
It's just they've been slow to admit it.
Now, what I was writing about for the American Conservative is that the veterans groups are now pushing for this registry through the VA so that the veterans can officially log on and say, this is where I was stationed.
I was at this burn pit or at this air base with a burn pit.
These are the symptoms I'm feeling now and I'm suffering from, yada, yada, and have that on the record.
So the VA knows who they are, where they were, and they could use that.
It might not be, again, it might not be purely scientific, but it would give them sort of a snapshot of these veterans and it would also give veterans a chance to be on a list.
So when something does happen or they can get information, they can get examined, whatever.
They did the same thing with the Gulf War guys and the Agent Orange guys.
They figured, hey, it's time to do this now because this has become so prevalent.
I mean, it's becoming more of an issue than I think that the VA was willing to admit.
Well, you know, Jacob Warburger has pointed out, I guess he pointed out to me years and years ago, government is the only institution that complains about having too many customers.
So, right, any other doctor's office in the world, you give them money, they will find out what the hell is wrong with you and treat you.
And if they can't, they'll give you a referral to somebody that they think is the right guy who can do it and they'll take care of you.
They want to take care of you.
To the government, oh, crap, here come a bunch of sick soldiers.
Come on, everybody, let's invent a bunch of ways to deny them the care that we swore to them we'd give them if they would only go and kill for us.
Right, right, exactly.
Now, there is a doctor, Dr. Robert Miller is out there at Vanderbilt University, and he's been doing these lung biopsies on soldiers and finding that they have this bronchiolitis that can only be found with the lung biopsy.
And basically, they find, he's finding their tissues, their lung tissues are riddled with these tiny holes.
And it doesn't, it can't be treated.
I mean, I guess it can be treated so that the symptoms, you know, to take away the severity of it, but the lungs aren't going to get any better.
They don't reform themselves, apparently.
I mean, I'm not a doctor, but from what I'm reading, this is really severe.
And he started doing these biopsies because these guys are complaining of all this pulmonary trouble, and they were going through stress tests, like your typical test for heart.
And everything was coming out okay, but these guys couldn't breathe.
So he's like, there's got to be something deeper going on.
And so he started doing this.
Now, he's become sort of like the go-to guy for veterans who are suffering.
They want to find out what's wrong with them.
They're going online.
They're finding that this doctor's been doing all these studies.
He's talking about burn pits because he himself has not said definitively that the burn pits are causing this condition, but he said that they are definitely suffering from pollution from their service overseas, which is as close as you're going to get at this point from somebody, you know, in this medical, in the medical community.
And guess what?
Now I'm hearing from veterans that the Army's not letting them go to Dr. Miller anymore.
If they're active duty and they want to get a second opinion, they're not letting them go to Dr. Miller anymore.
Now, I don't know if that's true.
As a reporter, I need to get on the phone and say, is this true, you know, to the Army, which I plan on doing.
But I've heard this from more than one veteran now that Dr. Miller is sort of like not on their Christmas card list anymore.
All right.
Well, Kelly, don't take this personal.
I do not mean to insult you by asking you such a stupid question, but what about Congress?
Well, you know, I have some faith in Congress.
I mean, I can't believe I'm saying that.
But when I started working on these stories, I had gotten a call from Ron Paul's office, and he had called me in.
And there was already a bill.
There was already a bill on the Democratic side to get the burn pit shut down.
That was Tim Bishop's office.
And he got a bunch of Democrats.
And Ron Paul got wind of this.
He didn't know anything about it because, you know, this whole polarization in Congress.
Well, oh, if the Democrats are fighting for veterans on this issue, then the Republicans must not, you know, pay attention to it.
So he didn't know anything about it.
And I told him, and he had some colleagues in his office, and I was like, oh, geez.
And I told him all about it.
And the next day he put his name on the bill.
And I said, well, to myself, I said, this is how we hope that Congress works.
We elect a representative.
They go to Washington.
You know, they listen to the issues, and they try to push legislation that is going to help their constituencies.
That's how, you know, unfortunately, I'm sure that was very much the exception.
But, you know, to answer your question, there are bills out there.
There's the bills that bipartisan efforts to get this registry going and to get more attention on the issue.
So there are members of Congress working on it.
And I think without them working on it, we'd never get anywhere because those burn pits were shut down because of Congress.
Yeah.
You know, always whenever we talk about this stuff, Kelly, and, again, everybody, in case you tuned in late, it's Kelly Vallejos from the AmericanConservative.com.
And we're talking about this article, The New Agent Orange.
And I always think back to when I was young and dumb enough to where I might have considered joining the Army, something like that.
And I guess I was lucky because I really knew better by the time I was 16 or 17 that there was no way I would do such a thing.
I know basically I still remember, you know, being in the position where I believe most of the hype the way that they give it, that, you know, this is how a boy becomes a man in American society.
Go and join the Army.
And then it gives you a right to have an opinion a lot better than other people.
You could say, well, I was in the Army, and I say blah, blah, blah before everything you say.
And whatever, whatever, all the mythology of serving your country and this and that and whatever.
And so I feel so bad for the kids who didn't have an opportunity to learn about, you know, CIA drug sales or whatever when they were 16.
And maybe still, you know, basically believe in the mythology of America when they're of age to join the military.
They basically are just going along with what their dad and their coach agree about, which is this has got to be done.
It's the right thing to do.
And the entire implicit thing there is that the rest of us, the adults in this society, we won't have them used for any missions out there in the world unless it's absolutely necessary.
And we will, and they'll have to risk their lives sometimes.
That's part of being a soldier, is you'll have to risk your life.
You'll have to risk your limbs and your health in order to protect America.
But then we send them over there not to protect America at all.
We send them over there to imperialize everybody.
We send them there.
We got kids invading Iraq thinking that they're getting revenge for September 11th, for crying out loud.
You know, we got, anyway, you know the rap.
So these kids are betrayed.
And then all of the stories about, and we'll take care of you.
You'll have health care for life, and so will your wife and your kids and everything, and we'll pay for your college.
And this is how, you know, a blue-collar kid can become a white-collar adult in this world and get ahead and whatever.
And we're going to take such good care of you.
And then they just stab them in the back.
They poison them, and then they lie about it.
It's terrible.
I admit it.
And I think that the easiest way to encapsulate this is to say men go off to war and, you know, just better pray to God nothing happens to you.
Because if it does and you come back and you need, whether you need medical attention, you need psychiatric attention, you will find out firsthand, you know, the level of assistance that the post-war army is going to give you or military in general.
And I think that there are thousands of men from Vietnam who understand what I'm saying right now.
They came back when they had multiple injuries, you know, head and body, and they have to go and wrestle with this bureaucracy, which is, you know, you talk to veterans and they have these piles and piles and piles of paperwork.
They're filed.
They're records.
And they're constantly having to refer to them.
They're constantly having to fax them.
They're constantly having to bring them to the VA.
It is like a full-time job to get what's owed to you if you come home with any needs.
You know, if you come home and you're just fit as a fiddle and everything went well, you're one of the guys that are part of the propaganda machine.
So then when the next war comes, you go, ready men, line up.
We're out there to defend freedom.
Because their whole experience was fine.
And the guys who have struggled with the VA, who continue today, are the ones that don't have the voice in the propaganda machine.
And they end up lining up too because they want to feel like what they went through was worth something.
They were in a conundrum.
We would love to have all the guys who have suffered stand up and say, you know what, kid, this might happen to you if you go to war.
But for some reason, that isn't given voice, unfortunately.
What's given voice, you know, you went through this too, I'm sure.
The frustrating, you know, scene where after 9-11, everybody's lining up and going to the recruiting offices.
And it was like Vietnam was just wiped off the memory board, you know.
Nobody remembered.
As though we didn't already have a military full of men.
And as though Al-Qaeda was more than a couple of hundred Egyptians and Saudis hiding in Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Like, boy, we better all join up so that Uncle Sam will have enough guys to use in this thing.
Yeah.
And we sent them all off to war.
Now they're all coming back, again, sick, crippled, and with PTSD, suicidal, you know, brain damage.
And everybody's looking around like, whoa, we didn't know this was going to happen.
Yeah.
You don't even need that long of a memory.
You don't even need that long of a memory.
And it's just very sad because I hear the same stories I heard from the Vietnam veterans when I was covering their stories.
I hear the same thing.
I have the piles and piles of paperwork.
I'm calling the VA every day.
I'm calling this lawyer.
I'm doing this.
I've got to have this in order to get this prescription.
You know, the vet that I featured in my last story, you know, his wife, I talked to her directly.
And, I mean, it's so sad because she's saying how she's crying herself to sleep at night because he lost his job as a state trooper because when he came back he had the heart of an old man, couldn't do his job.
They finally let him go.
You know, they only had a limited amount of insurance with the reserves because he was a reservist.
You know, so they had to spend all their savings to get all this medical care.
The next thing you know, you know, they're scrimping and they don't have money to pay for this or that and a mortgage.
And I'm thinking, wow, and he's only 39 years old.
You know, it's just like, and this is like one after the other after the other.
Yep.
That's what it's really like.
That's what the consequences really are.
Not like they say on TV, but the real life, you've got to read the American Conservative magazine for that.
Right, and I bet we won't be talking about that tonight during this debate.
Right, yeah, exactly.
Nobody will be asking this tonight, that's for sure.
Everybody, that's Kelly Blahos.
She writes at the American Conservative magazine, theamericanconservative.com, and of course at antiwar.com as well.
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