All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Kelly B.
Vlahos.
She is a Washington DC based freelance writer, longtime political reporter for foxnews.com and contributing editor at the American conservative magazine.
That's amconmag.com.
She's a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine and writes a regular column at antiwar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com/Vlahos, which is spelled just like it sounds.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
Good.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Who is captain Mark Lyles?
Uh, captain Mark Lyles is a, a Naval research, uh, uh, doctor or medical research analyst, um, who works at the Naval war college, who has been doing his own, uh, investigation on the dust in Iraq for the last, it's almost 10 years now, um, he's doing this on his own, um, not on behalf of the war college or, or the government, but he found out some pretty, uh, uh, devastating things about the dust that's being breathed in by our soldiers by anybody over, over in Iraq.
And, and he's found a lot of resistance within the military ranks to, uh, being open up to, uh, his, his findings.
And, um, you know, he, he finally busted out with, uh, his, his, his research and a big, uh, USA today piece, uh, last month and, um, is getting some traction finally on it.
And it's, it's caused quite a, a stir among, um, the, the Pentagon establishment who does not clearly does not want, uh, this debate to happen, um, about the dust and why the, the DOD has done more to protect soldiers, uh, from what could be catastrophic, you know, health effects from what they're breathing in over there.
Now, Gulf war illness used to be called Gulf war syndrome.
That was what the government called it.
Yeah.
Uh, and the implication there, and this was in the diagnosis, I think more than half the time was it's all in your head.
You have some kind of psychosomatic thing.
You want to be sick.
Uh, I know you're a battle hardened Marine, but, um, our official diagnosis is you're a sissy and, and that's where your physical symptoms are coming from and this kind of thing.
Um, uh, and they were made fun of basically it was a conspiracy theory to believe that there was any kind of Gulf war illness.
And then it came out that the, uh, the pills that they were given that were supposed to protect them from any exposure to Sarin were, uh, had deteriorating effects on the brainstem.
And, uh, it came out, of course, that they detonated the Kamecia chemical weapons depot with conventional explosives instead of napalm or something and, or some fancy implosion, uh, type of device.
And so all that, uh, was all the soldiers downwind from that, uh, had been exposed.
And then of course the depleted uranium, uh, there are questions about heavy metal poisoning and radiation poisoning, of course, uh, when it comes to the dust from the anti-armor, uh, shells, depleted uranium shells, uh, that are used.
And even then though they go, well, look at all these different so-called reasons, it still sounds like, uh, you don't have a room full of scientists with a consensus about what's going on here or who it's happening to, or whatever, just even if there are more reasons than that, now you're telling me just the dirt in Iraq is toxic.
Right.
And, you know, I, I've, I've, I've been talking to, to, to Captain Lyles about this for, geez, I think it's a couple of years now.
And, you know, he hadn't been ready to, to go public with his findings and he was still trying to use the, to go through the, the official channels.
That's right.
I think I remember you mentioning this to me on the show before.
Yeah.
And I alluded to it in stories and stuff.
Um, you know, what he's found is by sampling the dust.
Now, this guy does not have a dog in the hunt.
He's not anti-war.
He's not anti, you know, counterinsurgency.
He's not anti-empire for that matter.
Um, but he is a scientist and what he was led, he was led to studying this dust because of the, the film, I guess, that was, um, you know, on top, you know, it was sort of accumulating on top of medical equipment in the field.
And what he wanted to do was test the dust, test how they could figure out how to keep the equipment clean out.
And, you know, in these, in these medevac units.
So he went out there with a team of people and they studied it.
And what they found was that, that it was this, um, highly concentrated particulate matter, which is like very, very, very fine.
Yeah.
That, that, that one could breathe in through their lungs that will had concentrations of, um, metals, heavy metals, and bacteria that were way off the charts in terms of, of the health effects.
And he told me that he, you know, he's worked with teams all over the country, retested, tested, got different analysis, different opinions on this.
And, um, and the conclusion was the same that from what, you know, this is what he's telling me that the conclusion was pretty uniform, that this stuff was dangerous, um, that this was, this is beyond acceptable in terms of levels that we would find in this country acceptable for air to breathe in.
I mean, way off the charts.
You've said before on the show, and this is in the piece too, that a lot of this is just, this is the environment in Iraq, but a lot of this, uh, you know, especially the heavy metals and stuff, this was all buried deep in the soil, but 30 years of war will do a lot to just pound on that ground and force all that stuff up.
Correct.
And like, and I, and I guess I'm, I'm kind of getting ahead of myself that, you know, for your listeners is, is what you're saying is correct.
You know, Captain Lyles does not believe this is truly a manmade situation.
So he's not willing to leap to the conclusion that, that this was created by war, but he does say that this is, this is, um, unique to the soil in Iraq.
You know, he traces it back from what he believes to a prehistoric lake that had eventually evaporated and brought all of these, all of these characteristics underground with it and the silts in the soil and, you know, over the thousands of millions of years, you know, rock formations had brought this back up.
Well, how does it, how does it get into the air?
How is it blowing around?
Well, a lot of that has to do with a, is naturally occurring, but B the pounding of the earth.
I mean, you can't, you know, and I brought this up in a story.
I mean, Iraq has been going through some sort of war since the Iran and Iraq war.
And that means pounding and pounding artillery tanks, you know, pummeling missiles, you know, so this has been going on and it's shaking up the earth.
And then you have the massive dust storms that you have there, you know, and that is just blowing around.
Now, people have asked me, well, what about the Iraqis?
You know, they, they, they should be, you know, equally, if not more impacted by this, but, you know, as we know, and, you know, even, you know, non-medical.
Persons like ourselves know that, you know, bodies become, you know, acclimated to their uncertain and particular environment, you know, and so.
I, you know, from what I'm gathering is that people who, you know, foreigners are going to have more of a proclivity to getting sick and this is what we're seeing, we're seeing soldiers come home.
Well, and who says the Iraqis are healthy?
Right.
I mean, as far as we know, you look at, you know, for example the studies that have been done about depleted uranium and Fallujah, although I think, you know, they're not complete necessarily.
There's seems to be some horrible health effects going on up there in terms of.
Yeah, I'm not saying that there, there, there aren't any, but you, you know, it is such a, it is such a morass, you know, that we're looking at here and of a conflicting and complicated, you know, scenarios here that we've talked about this many times on the show and you've just alluded to it of all of these potential causes for health effects affecting both soldiers, you know, foreign soldiers and the people that live there.
And I, you know, I guess the most, the take home here, the most frustrating aspect of this is that, you know, time and time again, the government is just in the, seems to be in the business of denying that there are any cause and effects here so that, that we can't push forward as, you know, as a, as a country, you know, to figure out what exactly it is because the big gorilla in the room, the Pentagon is always putting the brakes on and advancing the ball.
We'll have to leave it right there for, for now.
We'll be right back after this break with Kelly B.
Vallejos from the American conservative and antiwar.com.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I'm talking with Kelly B.
Vallejos from the American conservative magazine and antiwar.com.
We're talking about her article on the Gulf war illness.
A DOD dodges deadly dust data by Kelly B.
Vallejos.
That's original.antiwar.com/Vallejos.
And now Kelly, before we were interrupted by the break, you were talking about the bottom line here is that the DOD won't do an honest job of just looking into this.
And it seems like that's kind of where I was going with the kamecia here and the sarin pills there, anthrax vaccines, of course, depleted uranium is that when the government can say, see, there are all these competing theories and none of the people accusing us of ignoring what's going on here even have a consistent, a simple case to make.
And so because it's complicated, it makes them, and because there could be, you know, a wide number of different things affecting even just one soldier, it makes it complicated enough for them to pretend that that makes it kind of not real and makes it easier for them to just deny and then ignore the effects of these illnesses and conditions on the soldiers formerly deployed over there.
Right.
And I mean, we're looking, if you just look purely at the numbers, you know, they've had since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001, they've had a 251 percent increase in the rate of neurological disorders among active duty service members, a 47 percent increase in respiratory issues and 34 percent increase in cardiovascular disease.
A separate report that was done by a VA medical doctor recently, the biggest report so far in terms of the number of veterans, 7000 veterans, 14 percent of them had had some sort of respiratory illness when they came home.
So the numbers are there and they're getting worse because now more studies are actually being done and the VA has pledged to study this and they have yet to come out with their numbers.
But the numbers are there.
So the causes, so we're looking at causes now and we've talked about the burn pits.
You know, there's the issue of sulfur fires that, you know, one unit had been battling and all those guys have severe bronchial disorder now.
You have, you know, the depleted uranium argument.
You have, now you have this dust issue.
And in time and time again, the DOD has said we do not see a link between your burn pit, you know, theory or your dust theory and what's going on with these soldiers.
But these guys are coming back, healthy guys and gals coming back who had been running marathons before they left are coming back hobbling like old men and women who can't walk up the stairs without falling down because they can't breathe.
Yeah, well, their blood's full of benzene.
They've been poisoned.
So here, so here's a here's a Navy guy who is super conservative.
He would not agree with anything you and I would have to say about the war because I've argued with him many times personally.
So he's not coming at it with an ax to grind against the military and saying there is something in this dust, there is something wrong and it's hurting our troops.
And he recommended years ago that they get those little flimsy masks, something when they're operating, the guys that are going out on patrol, the guys that are constantly out in the field to have something so they're not breathing.
He says it's like breathing in peanut butter.
I mean, we just it's beyond anything of our imagination.
And then finding these metals in there and bacteria, bacteria which cause things like meningitis.
Well, and, you know, I want to go back to that point about the, you know, the kind of little not even a surgical type mass, the kind of thing you'd have for like mowing a lawn on a dusty day or something.
One of those things.
Here's a guy who, as I say, he's got no ax to grind.
He's not trying to convict anybody or expose any cover up or any kind of thing.
He's just saying, hey, look, you know, I think there's a lot, you know, Iraq happens to be some really toxic dirt and there's a lot of environmental hazards here.
Why not equip the troops with some very simple paper breath masks?
It would do a lot of good.
It wouldn't be a cure all, but it would do a lot of good.
And because they don't want to acknowledge his research at all, they won't take a simple preventive measure that could be protecting guys over there right now.
Of course, there's still 50,000 soldiers and 100,000 contractors.
I don't know how many of those exactly are mercenaries or not.
But anyway, yeah, there's still plenty of Americans deployed over in Iraq to be concerned about today.
Right, exactly.
And, you know, I was listening to an interview with Cy Hirsch the other day, and, you know, he said something really, you know, interesting and somewhat heartening.
And he said, you know, and he's talking about he's alluding to his own sources within the government.
And he was saying, you know, there are a lot of guys, a lot of people in the military right now who are not they're not towing the line.
And they're and they believe that when they took on that role, that they they they really were there to uphold the Constitution.
And they and they are striving to do that every day.
So I found that I found that heartening because too often we see everybody in the military as as evil or are following a political agenda coming out of Washington.
And there are good people who have become disillusioned, you know, with this war in their own way.
And this is one of those cases where he was doing his job and he found out things that were really that harmful.
And then when he went to the proper channels, they didn't want to hear what he was saying.
And after my story came out and Kelly Kennedy's story came out, the DOD came out blasting with letters to the editor.
There was a letter to the editor on our site, which tells you something that if the DOD felt a fit to respond to an antiwar dot com piece with a lengthy, you know, sort of not I wouldn't call it a rant, but just basically a counterpoint to Captain Lyles saying that his research doesn't hold up.
You know, it was it was kind of pissy against him, it wasn't you know, it didn't really take issue with what I wrote, but more saying that, you know, this guy is didn't come out and say he was a flim flam, but they said that, you know, it wasn't peer reviewed and stuff like that.
So they're obviously a little nervous about what he's doing.
But here's the guy who's just doing his job, not a rogue.
Right, well, you know, as far as, you know, the rank and file bureaucrats in the national security state, a lot of them being patriots and that kind of thing, I think probably a lot of that is blowback from the Iraq war.
I mean, the whole run up to the Iraq war, they said, look, the CIA are supermen from beyond the moon who know all and are never wrong.
And they say there are weapons of mass destruction.
And then when there weren't, they said it's all the CIA's fault.
And of course, for those of us who are reading Seymour Hersh, we know that it was, you know, selective intelligence over there at the Pentagon.
They call themselves the Cabal, he wrote.
These were the guys who lied us into war.
The CIA helped kind of, sort of, but it was mostly the neocons at the Pentagon who did it.
And the CIA took the rap.
And a lot of them said never again.
That's why they've been saying the right thing about, well, you know, the truth about Iran for the last few years, for example.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And that's exactly what Seymour Hersh was getting at.
And you look back, actually, why was Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel and those guys, why was their reporting so accurate about the weapons of mass destruction back in the late summer, in the fall of 2002?
It's because they were talking to the rank and file.
If they were Washington Post guys, they would have been talking to the political leadership and reprinting a bunch of lies.
But they were talking to the rank and file analysts at the CIA who were going, hey, man, there were no Martians that came and brought a bunch of weapons of mass destruction to Iraq.
And we already knew that they didn't have any anymore.
So what I don't know what Dick Cheney's talking about, but it's not any information we gave him.
I mean, that was all published then because the rank and file patriotic types were against the Iraq war in the first place.
A lot of them.
Yeah, well, that's so frustrating when they when David Petraeus, you know, when they you know, just when he was appointed or he was nominated for to head the CIA, you know, some of the commentary in Washington was, well, you know, he'll teach them a thing or two, you know, he'll reform that, you know, insinuating that the CIA is a broken place full of idiots, you know, who have their head, you know, where and you need this soldier to come in.
This guy who's been part of this political agenda for the last 10 years to come in and shape them up.
I mean, it just makes your head spin.
Well, and actually, I kind of like it because I think it's just too obvious that they're giving him the job as head of the CIA so you can write up a report about what a great job he did in Afghanistan because if anybody else was in charge of writing it, it wouldn't say that.
Yeah, it's just the city is crazy.
Your latest piece is about the Democrats version of PNAC, the Center for a New American Security.
That's basically the foreign policy department of whoever the next Democratic president is created in waiting during the last years of the Bush administration.
And then these are the guys who, as you've written so well about at antiwar dot com and in the American conservative, these are the the brains behind the counterinsurgency will give them a government in a box doctrine of General David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal.
Correct.
And I know this all probably sounds really trite and in the weeds for for your listeners, because, you know, outside the beltway, you know who the heck cares about the Center for American Security?
But I think it speaks to a larger issue and it speaks to the sort of mechanics of how things are done in Washington, particularly with the defense, the military, industrial complex.
And, you know, it's very important.
You think about I remember during Bush versus Gore and all that people would say, well, you know, George Bush, OK, he's the legacy spot, you know, but he's got a bunch of really great people with him that, you know, are really grown up and adult and trustworthy and whatever.
And that meant Richard Perle in them.
And so it really does matter who's the deputy assistant secretary of defense for blowing things up, you know?
Yeah.
And it really does matter who the go to think tank or the civilian, the civilian groups and organizations that are basically either creating policy or or promoting the policies that are created, you know, by others.
But in this case, I follow these guys and, you know, I know I read about them a lot.
It's because, you know, back in 2008 when I was covering the, you know, the I think it was a Democratic primary and, you know, looking at who was advising Hillary Clinton and Obama and there was, you know, Obama had this spiel about bringing change to Washington and rethinking foreign policy.
But the people, you know, these people in Washington that make up the Center for New American Security, you know, we're we're insinuating themselves in his campaign and Hillary's campaign, hedging their bets, creating this sort of policy portfolio of counterinsurgency, which was basically humanitarian intervention, liberal interventionism that Peter Beinart had had written about, you know, the muscular democratic foreign policy.
And this this was so intriguing and this was so, I would say, you know, tantalizing to the Democratic establishment because here they could look tough again while just ever so slightly shifting the current foreign policy, the Bush administration's policy, which was very popular with the military.
And so when when Obama came into office, you know, these people were right there at the ready for him to tap into.
He needed a foreign policy.
He needed a stable of people who had the connections within the military.
You know, that CNAS had also, you know, correctly, like any other think tank defense wise, had populated its ranks with former military members.
So it's just like a lobbying house.
You know, when when members of Congress leave, they get gobbled up by lobbying firms because they are the connection.
They're the interlocular.
So what these think tanks do is that they get former members of the military and make them senior fellows.
So they have this instant connection with the military.
Right.
And then think of it like a meeting of Lockheed vice presidents.
They need somebody, some egghead to sit down and come up with an ideology to justify in the 90s, expanding NATO to Russia's door in the early 2000s, invading Iraq, spreading democracy around the Wolfowitz doctrine and all this stuff.
And so now the Democrats need a doctrine and they'll call it the new counter insurgency where we give them all a government in a box and all this stuff.
And it doesn't matter that none of it ever comes true, that none of it ever works out.
All that matters is Lockheed got some planes sold.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's you know, if you go into the bios of the people that are that sit and they think tanks, particularly CNAS, because we're talking about them right now, you know, there's this constant revolving door between think tanks, academia, you know, the private defense contracting community and the military.
And there's no this isn't, you know, something that, you know, you have to you have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure all this out.
It's right there in black and white.
And in Washington, they're so bloated and full of themselves that this is just natural.
This is this is something that this is this shows your your influence and power in Washington.
If you can put all this different stuff on your resume, but which is what it really means is you have this insular community, this incestuous community.
It is just self-serving and self-sustaining has nothing to do with the greater good of the country or the Constitution.
It is all about keeping business flowing and pumping and every hand helps the other.
So when I go to this event every year, I'm looking for what are the dynamics?
Well, in 2009, the dynamics was counter insurgency.
You know, they had the policy.
They were making it happen.
They had David Petraeus speaking in front of thousands of these dark suited guys, you know, from all over the defense community and the military.
They had soldiers there, you know, and they were like, we are going to turn around in Afghanistan.
You know, these guys that we just kicked out of office or we helped to, they didn't know what they were doing.
You know, David Petraeus really knew what he was doing.
And we're going to do this in Afghanistan.
And then last year, they barely talked about it because it was going down the toilet.
And then this year, they didn't talk about it at all.
And they're on to Pakistan.
And not only that, it's just they don't really talk about much at all of any substance because there's too many people and too many interests that they can offend.
They go to this thing and it's just basically a vanity exercise.
Look at us.
You know, we have a couple of things there on the abandonment of of coin.
I mean, I want to get to Pakistan's most important point, obviously, but on the abandonment of the coin doctrine, you quote a former assistant secretary of defense as basically just mocking the counterinsurgency doctrine and that the whole place basically just shrugged and nobody even got mad.
Right.
Yeah.
Bing West, who has just written a pretty powerful book called The Wrong War, has basically been in Afghanistan for years, you know, embedded and has come back and has said that that coin has been a great disservice to the American military.
And he's not anti-war.
He is basically anti-coin.
And he he was invited there, obviously, as the one counterpoint person.
This is what they do every year.
They have one person who doesn't agree with the hive in the room to basically make it look more legitimate.
And the first year was Andrew Bacevich.
And there was actually debate and everything.
The second year, you know, I forgot who I.
Oh, yeah.
Paul Pilar, whose articles have been on anti-war dot com, thinks counterinsurgency is a bust.
They didn't, you know, if they let him talk, they let him criticize.
That's funny.
Wasn't Pilar the guy who was the the chair of the National Intelligence Council and they wrote up the phony 2002 Iraq and IE?
Oh, yeah, exactly.
We're talking about like basically blaming the Pentagon.
Oh, well, the Pentagon and Paul Pilar were the ones who lost in the war.
And anyway.
Yeah.
But yeah.
So so Bing West gets up there and he says, coin is not, you know, we've been giving all this stuff to the Afghans and they are blowing it and they're and they're laughing all the way to the bank.
And we've lost all this blood and treasure and it's wasted time.
We need to get out of there.
You know, and nobody said anything.
They just it was like, oh, that's just being.
You know, we all read his book because they do read his book.
God, they read his book and they talk about it and they think it's the greatest thing.
I'm sorry, we're almost out of time.
Are these guys serious about, well, the next big thing we must somehow get into a worse war with Pakistan than we're already in?
Well, I don't think that they had the you know, they had the, quote, anatomy to be that bold about it.
But I think that by diverting attention to Pakistan, they're basically saying we basically want to stay in the region.
Right.
Well, it makes it not their fault that everything went bad in Afghanistan.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry, we're all out of time, but I really appreciate your time on the show today, Kelly.
Oh, thanks.
Everybody, that's Kelly B.
Vallejos.
She writes for the American Conservative magazine and antiwar dot com.
That's original dot antiwar.com/Vallejos.
The latest one is seen as conference becomes a thumbsucker.
It's good.
Very good.
Read it.
