Chem suits

[Guest guest]

The time is at hand for the Pentagon to come clean about the number of

refusers and especially the number of adverse reactions to the anthrax

vaccine! Let's also throw in the number of individuals that have

departed the military because this misguided and unproven program!

> June 26, 2000

> Pg. 1

>

> Officials Turned Deaf Ear To Chemical-Suit Alarms, IG

> Says

>

> By M. Donnelly

>

> The number of potentially flawed chemical-protective suits in the U.S.

military has been four

> times what the Pentagon previously conceded, military officials now say. The

Defense Logistics

> Agency’s Philadelphia office bought the suspect suits, meant to protect

soldiers from doomsday

> agents, from a fraudulent firm called Isratex, Inc., starting in 1989. The

agency says it never

> knew that all 778,924 suits were potentially flawed, only that 173,000, or a

quarter of them,

> might be bad. And it only learned that much last fall, the agency says.

>

> However, the Defense Logistic Agency, or DLA, had ample warning for at least

seven years that

> any of the suits made by Isratex could be defective and all should be tested,

Defense Week has

> learned. And DLA officials repeatedly declined criminal investigator’s urgent

requests to test

> samples representing 605,854 of the suspect suits, citing the costs in money

and military

> readiness. Instead, the DLA ignored warnings, sending them to unsuspecting

Army and Air

> Force units, according to congressional testimony, interviews and

correspondence.

>

> Finally, in May, DLA and the Army Natick Soldier Center in Massachusetts

quietly confirmed

> what the investigators have long maintained: not a single one of the Isratex

suits should be used

> in battle because of " critical " defects. After the flawed-suits story broke

this past February, the

> suits were pulled from the shelves and now can only be used for training. And

their number

> never represented more than a small fraction of the 4 million protective

garments in the U.S.

> military inventory.

>

> But the flaws in question could have imperilled the lives and combat

effectiveness of hundreds

> if not thousands of soldiers and airmen.

>

> " How in God’s name was it possible for military personnel to give that

equipment to other

> military personnel? " asked Rep. Shays (R-Conn.), chairman of the

House

> Government Reform national security panel, at a Wednesday hearing on problems

with

> protective equipment. The glimpse of just how slowly the Pentagon responded to

this critical

> problem reflects last week’s revelation that the armed forces are just now

coming to grips with

> widespread defects in military gas masks, a problem that officials have

likewise known about

> for about as many years.

>

> Of the over 600,000 suits whose potentially unsafe status is only now

admitted, DLA said last

> week that 93,000 were made available for use in the 1991 Gulf War, though it

is unclear how

> many of the suits actually not there. Troops serving in Desert Storm might

have been exposed to

> chemical agents. There is no evidence that officials knew at the time of

Desert Storm that there

> were problems, though quality-assurance reports for the first of these suits,

which were

> delivered in 1990 just before the war, were reportedly not favorable. After

the war, alarm bells

> rang louder.

>

> All 778,924 of the suspect Isratex pants-and-jacket sets, called " battle dress

overgarments, "

> were at some point in the last decade available to troops to wear in places

such as the Middle

> East and Korea, where adversaries may possess chemical and biological weapons.

>

> Isratex officials were convicted last fall and in April were sentenced to jail

terms of up to

> several months for doing a bait and switch gambit on numerous contracts for

years. They would

> fool inspectors with a handful of quality garments and then deliver many more

shoddy ones. The

> company was first investigated in 1993.

>

> The 778,924 suits were made under two contracts that together cost $48

million. The larger

> batch of 605,854 was made under a 1989 contract. The smaller batch of 173,000

was made

> under a 1992 deal. Lt. Gen. Tom Glisson, DLA’s commanding general, told

reporters in

> February that the larger 1989 deal’s suits were " never in question, " and " they

never had a single

> quality control problem identified on the 1989 lot. "

>

> " If we had any indication, any indication, that we had suits out there that

would have been

> potentially dangerous to anyone in the Department of Defense, we would have "

removed the

> suits from the inventory, he added.

>

> Similarly, just last Wednesday, Brig. Gen. Mongeon, commander of DLA’s

Defense

> Supply Center Philadelphia, told the House Government Reform panel that there

wasn’t any

> indication until last month that the larger batch of suits was defective.

>

> " I’m just curious what ‘any indication’ means, " said Rep. Janice Schakowsky

(D-Ill.), who

> probed Mongeon on this subject at the hearing.

>

> Contrary to the generals’ statements, however, starting in 1991 and cresting

in 1995, the safety

> of not just the smaller batch of suits but also of the larger number were both

very much in

> question. Specifically, DLA’s then Defense Personnel Support Center in

Philadelphia

> repeatedly resisted calls from the Pentagon inspector general’s Defense

Criminal Investigative

> Service (DCIS) to test samples of suits from both the 1989 and 1992 contracts.

>

> Repeated requests to test

>

> It was January 1995 when DCIS, in a conversation, first asked that both the

1989 and 1992 suits

> be tested by the Philadelphia center, said Carol Levy, DCIS deputy director,

at Wednesday’s

> hearing. But in April 1995, Panzera, chief of the equipment branch in

Philadelphia,

> wrote to the Columbus depot where the suits were stored complaining about the

" the significant

> costs " of segregating the suits— pegged at $245,500. Panzera denied the

request from DCIS,

> ordering that " normal procedures be followed in regard to the issue of all

chemical protective

> suits in storage at your location. "

>

> Finally, a compromise was drawn up in late 1995 when, after 10 months of

wrangling, the

> investigators and logisticians agreed to test just the smaller set of

1992-contract suits. But DCIS

> agent ph Mulhern, in a October 1995 letter to Philadelphia, made clear

that the problem

> was with Isratex, not with any particular contract, and therefore all the

suits were suspect. Still,

> he was ready to " initially " start testing with just the 1992 suits in order to

accommodate

> Philadelphia’s concerns.

>

> " Although we have obtained evidence that questions the integrity of the entire

production of

> chemsuits by Isratex, " Mulhern wrote, suits made during 1993 and 1994, which

presumably but

> not necessarily included just the 1992 contract suits, were " the most

serious. "

>

> Prosecutors versus logisticians

>

> Today, DLA says they read that memo to mean DCIS agreed the problems were with

only the

> 1992 suits. DLA’s tests on the 1992 suits turned up no critical defects. Only

later did tougher

> tests show the suits were flawed. Since no problems warranted stopping

issuance of the suits,

> they sent them to the services, and DCIS did not ask for further tests again

until 1999.

>

> " If we had found that the ’92 suits which we examined in 1996 were other than

serviceable, we

> would have proceeded to examine the ’89 suits, " DLA’s Mongeon told Defense

Week in a

> statement.

>

> Said Dan McGinty, a spokesman for DLA: " Because most investigations do not

result in

> prosecutions or civil recovery actions, we do not routinely curtail or stop

logistics operations

> should they become the subject of a DCIS investigation. "

>

> But the separate treatment of the 1992 and 1989 contracts still miffs

investigators. Although the

> 1989 and 1992 contracts were signed three years apart, the suits were coming

off the Isratex

> production line at the same West Virginia facility, even simultaneously at

times, Levy said.

> Secondly, low-ranking Isratex laborers had told investigators not about

defects in one 1989 lot

> or in a 1992 lot—they just told about defects in overgarments generally.

Third, Isratex

> executives had been under investigation since 1993 for running the same shell

game with

> inspectors at a Puerto Rico plant where Isratex produced cold-weather parkas

for the military.

>

> Most importantly, by January 1995, when investigators first asked to test all

the suits, Isratex

> had been under investigation for fraud on four different lines of clothing—

men’s coveralls,

> combat coats, the parkas and battle dress overgarments.

>

> " To take the position that (Isratex) is probably sending (DLA) defective stuff

on four clothing

> lines, but not on a fifth, is something I don’t understand, " said a Defense

Department official

> who requested anonymity. Another compared it to buying several used cars, some

of which

> lacked engines, and not checking under the hood of the others.

>

> Belated tests

>

> A February 1996 DLA summary of the tests done at the time on the 1992 suits

alone shows they

> did turn up some " major " defects, including " open seams, ... and cuts or holes

in the fabric, " that

> " may or may not render the unit unusable. " But the tests, like all those the

Philadelphia center

> conducted on Isratex suits, did not turn up " critical " problems that would

have condemned the

> whole batch. So 120,000 of the suits were released for use in Bosnia,

officials have said.

>

> In 1999, though, tests on the very same sample of 1992 suits—but not the

larger 1989

> batch—found critical defects, meaning problems serious enough to require

condemnation of the

> entire lot. These tests, like the tests just last month that were finally done

on the 1989 batch,

> were conducted by the Army’s Natick facility using more stringent

specifications than DLA had

> used.

>

> But until last month, no one had yet tested a large sample of the 1989

contract’s 605,854 suits,

> except for annual checks for fungus and rot, which never turned up the

defects. The May test was

> halted a quarter of the way through the 500-suit sample, because testers found

critical defects

> " similar to those found " in the 1992 batch, Kinney, a Natick official,

told the House

> panel last week.

>

> Last month’s test was completed seven years after Isratex was first

investigated and weeks after

> Isratex officials were finally sentenced.