La Sindrome del Golfo

«How did the idea of ​​making a documentary on the Gulf War Syndrome come about?

I was making other documentaries in America on some controversial cases like that of the Unabomber, the biggest terrorist in American history, wanted for 20 years without absolutely understanding who he could be, to then discover that he was a mathematics professor from Berkeley, he was not an Arab, he was not a militiaman, but a mathematical genius who became a terrorist because he hated the development of technology. Something must have exploded in his psyche to make him become a murderer, but the starting point of his thought was very deep, very interesting. The American public opinion was very upset to discover something like that. Studying cases like this I also began to investigate counter-information. I was doing a long research project thanks to the help of a friend who was the former head of the FBI in Los Angeles, who, after retiring, entered counter-information and began writing articles, making and collaborating on documentaries. Thanks to him I was able to get in touch with these sick soldiers that everyone was talking about but no one knew who they were or where they lived, the Pentagon didn't give any information.

When you say everyone was talking, do you mean at the media level or counter-information level?

It was talked about in the media, but in a very approximate way, as a controversy between the soldiers and the Pentagon. There were 50,000 sick soldiers, 10,000 had already died between 1991 and 1996. The Pentagon kept saying that they were making it all up, that there was no disease, that the range of diseases they were reporting was too vast to claim that it was due to the Gulf War. On the big American networks, there were news specials that were terrible. I remember one evening Dan Rader, a big American anchorman who even made fun of a sick soldier. It was a very serious thing in my opinion, someone like him will have between 12 and 20 million listeners. This was the general attitude, we never went into depth. At a certain point, some shocking photos came out in Time and more serious reports where they began to interview soldiers and showed photos of deformed children. The children born after 1991 to these sick soldiers had frightening deformations: missing organs like eyes and arms. This was the situation when I started looking for them. But I didn't find them, no one knew where they were. If it weren't for this friend, I wouldn't have been able to do anything, but he put me in touch with key people who were seriously investigating, with sick soldiers and also with a former member of the CIA, Jim Tuite, who was doing in-depth research.

Who was this CIA person commissioned to do this investigation?

It was a government association paid with research funds, a government group linked to the CIA, it may seem strange but it's true, and as you saw in the film, it makes strong accusations.

Which contrast with those of the Clinton commission.

Yes, because he had already gone further in the research. The Clinton Commission had the role of balancing the soldiers' accusations, the Pentagon's position and this research.

The video also highlights the contrast between the results of military doctors and civilian doctors. The case of the military doctor who is removed as soon as he begins to discover something is emblematic.

The case of Herbert Smith is interesting in this regard. He was rejected by the military hospital in Washington because he was accused of making cuts to infect his blood. A civilian doctor and her husband took him to a very expensive hospital in Memphis that he could never have afforded, where he was treated for free and they saw that what he was saying was absolutely true: he had a very serious form of lupus and is still paralyzed. Everything I am saying is confirmed in an article that appeared two months ago in Vanity Fair, an eight-page dossier that confirms exactly everything you see in the documentary from three years ago, they are the same people interviewed. This proves that the research we did was right. And there have been no major developments yet. The Pentagon finally admitted the existence of Gulf War Syndrome a year and a half ago, but it distinguishes between soldiers and children. They say that this percentage of deformities is normal for the United States, they do not notice any statistical increase, they say "How can you say that children were born deformed precisely because you took part in the Gulf War?"

Yet in the video the parents claim to have done research in their families from which no previous case of deformity has been found.

If there was contamination, and now the Pentagon has admitted it, the causes could have been different. For example, the toxic cloud caused by the American bombing of Saddam's chemical weapons depots, who in turn has always denied having used chemical weapons, claiming that if there was contamination it is because the Americans bombed the depots and then the wind blew the cloud onto them. This hypothesis, however, contrasts with the interview of the Pentagon general who says that our soldiers are protected from chemical and biological weapons. However, the fact that even those who did not go to war, but for some reason took the vaccine administered to soldiers who went to the Gulf, in some cases present the same problems related to Gulf War Syndrome, demonstrates that the most probable cause is the vaccine. The problem is that the composition of the vaccines is a military secret, so there has never been a verification that could finally tell what the truth is. Because now we have entered a regime of chemical and bacteriological warfare; the vaccine is part of the war, it is a military secret, what protects my soldiers I cannot publish, tell the press how it works, because the enemy would find out. So the vaccine is secret. 100,000 soldiers are sick, 10,000 are dead, in England 20,000 soldiers are sick and 300 dead. This is very strange: while in America 15% were contaminated, that is 100,000 out of 700,000 soldiers, in England it seems that 80% were contaminated. It also seems that, since many vaccines were needed quickly, the production was quickly outsourced to various industries, otherwise they would not have been able to send so many soldiers to war. Many of these industries and laboratories were not equipped for the composition of vaccines and it seems that there were many errors in its realization, which would be even more serious. We are truly talking about the war of the future and perhaps we have not realized it. I met some professors from the University of Florence who invited me to see the film and then think about what we could do to carry out the research together. There was a physicist, a chemist and a biologist. The biologist told me that he can easily make this type of virus that comes out in the video in his laboratory in Florence. We are reaching a point where we will no longer know who builds the weapons, we have arrived in a very dirty area where no one can do anything and no one understands anything. Especially because television continues to tell the story of the war with an incomprehensible language, full of errors, denials, I don't know if you followed Yugoslavia, what was the information, it was a continuous denial.

There is another thing in your documentary that is very impressive: the fact that the disease is infectious, that 70% of wives, relatives, have been infected.

This in my opinion goes to validate the vaccine hypothesis. I believe that this composition is toxic, that there is a percentage of people who cannot handle it. We also need to understand whether it was an error of judgment or whether the most serious accusation made by one of the soldiers against the Pentagon is true. That is, that every time there is a war, there is an experiment. They try to understand how to reduce the number of deaths by trying to understand what the perfect vaccine is. And one day we will all have to use that vaccine to defend ourselves from biological attacks, because in the face of a biological attack there are no soldiers to defend you, you have to go and get the vaccine. What is a problem for the military today, will be a problem for civilians around the world tomorrow.

This could also explain why RAI has never broadcast this documentary. In an interview with Il Manifesto you said that this was due to the fact that RAI does not have a culture of documentary, which is certainly true, but one could also think of another logic. From this documentary emerges an absolute unpreparedness, a lack of control of weapons and security by the armies. In the perspective of a more active Italian participation in the wars, as has recently happened, perhaps its projection would risk putting the consensus on tagging along with the American battalion into crisis a little more...

I absolutely believe that this is the reason that pushed RAI not to broadcast this documentary. It is clear that we are in an experimental phase of the war, it is clear that every soldier who is sent to the front must be vaccinated and cannot know what is being put in his blood. In this documentary you see that the most powerful army in the world has made a huge mistake and is somehow camouflaging it. It is something that hurts when people see it, that hurts the soldiers, but I think it also hurts ordinary people. I hope it goes on the air, I still hope to meet people at RAI who, thinking about the true meaning of this documentary, now that there has been all this fuss in the newspapers, now that the war in Yugoslavia is over, that we can finally broadcast it in its entirety and with a debate, as we have done around Italy. I'm preparing another one, I want to go back, follow the same stories more deeply, I want to make four stories of four soldiers, the same ones from the previous report, following the evolution of the disease, how the scientific investigation is going, the search for a cure, the relationship with the Pentagon and with the American government that must support them financially. I want to understand what is happening no longer with a reportage language but with a documentary language.

The operation you carried out with this documentary is very reminiscent of Radio Bikini, a film made in 1987 on the atomic tests of 1946. The official version of those events, built through media spectacularization and decades-long military censorship, was contradicted by giving voice to those who had never had one, one of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers exposed in those years deliberately and without their knowledge to radiation, who tells of his years of suffering, of the many dead soldiers and who will die himself a few months after the filming.

Yes, there are precedents, there is a history of secrets and scandals. I think the best thing is to follow a topic in depth, possibly in parallel with scientific research. The University of Florence has offered me a collaboration on the next documentary. With the report three years ago I raised the case, now I want to know the truth. I would like to make a documentary on this case every two years, because I hope, maybe in ten years, to be among those who have contributed to understanding what is happening with chemical and bacteriological weapons and I also hope to have been among those who will perhaps succeed in having their production banned. Because in the end that is where we need to get to, it is not by refusing the vaccine that you avoid the destruction of humanity, you avoid the destruction of humanity by blocking war forever, because however monstrous war may be it is never as monstrous as hurra bacteriological warfare, because that is truly the end of the world. Moving from the false objective of a safe vaccine to the abolition of biological weapons or wars, however, requires a political awareness, which in the documentary emerges explicitly only in one of the veterans. Well, he had already been in Vietnam, he saw more than one. In America there is a great sensitivity to these phenomena, people are very motivated and serious when they start to confront power and fight, but there is a very strong tendency towards individualism. This can be a good thing, but also a bad thing, because if you don't unite with others you can never fight politically. In fact, soldiers are unable to unite with each other and in three years not much has changed. These researchers, these doctors still seem to me to be loose cannons in the American system, they are doing important things, at the beginning they were considered crazy, doctors who were fueling subversive theories to gain publicity, now they are certainly more respected. A novelty is the identification of a substance called squalene in the blood of some sick soldiers, but the Pentagon forbids examining the two million newly vaccinated to see if they have squalene. Four months ago, before the war in Yugoslavia, 200 soldiers refused to take the anthrax vaccine and were demoted. In England, 70 soldiers refused a medal of military valor to denounce the lack of information on Gulf War Syndrome. There are some things that are going on, but it seems to me that the public still doesn't know anything». (from an interview with Alberto D'Onofrio conducted by Marco Farano in June 1999)