Donald Riegle: “Mr. President, I am here today with some very important information with respect to what may be affecting the health of…”

“Mr. President, I am here today with some very important information with respect to what may be affecting the health of our gulf war veterans, many of whom have come home with terribly disabling medical problems. I have been meeting with them, both here in Washington, and back in my home State of Michigan. It is hard to describe fully the magnitude of this problem without addressing individual cases and actually having them give first-person accounts as to both what happened to them when they were over in the war zone and also what has happened to them since they have returned. Back on September 9, here on the Senate floor, I released a lengthy report which suggested that the illnesses which have come to be called gulf war syndrome--a collection of illnesses, serious illnesses, that our veterans are experiencing--could have resulted from exposure to chemical and biological warfare agents in the war zone, either through direct exposure from some kind of weapon, or shellfire; or from the downwind exposure as we bombed these biological and chemical weapons facilities--throwing hazardous debris up into the air which was then carried down over our troops. There is also a question as to whether some of the medicines that we gave our troops to protect them against exposures of this kind may also have had the result of making some of them sick.”