It's hard for me to imagine that some people in the CIA who had firsthand knowledge would be unable to recognize that this would be helpful information for a soldier's death.
I'd like people to listen to our soldiers. They were there. They heard the alarms go off. They tasted the substance in the air. They spit up blood. They had rashes on their bodies. They got sick.
I think that some of our soldiers die in the battlefield and some come home to bad health and die prematurely, just by the nature of the kind of business they're in.
First off, we've had sworn testimony from soldiers and testimony before our staff that wasn't sworn, that said these alarms rarely went off, that they went off after the war in most cases and went off a lot.
The bottom line is that the CIA knew before the war, during and war, and after the war where most of these chemicals were and most of these biological agents.
There's another issue here - and I have some limits as to what I can say - but there's some real question as to the viability of the chemical masks, the protective gear used by our soldiers.
What we know from World War I is that some of our troops had acute symptoms of exposure to chemicals, had bad health and died because of chemical exposure in World War I.
Yes, there is a story about Agent Orange, and we knew that it harmed our troops and we knew how long it was to get the medical community to accept that, the military to accept it, the VA to accept it.
