Q: I just wanted to ask you if you had any reaction to the follow-up report by CNN this past Sunday night about the Operation TAILWIND. Specifically, there were additional soldiers interviewed who said it was their belief that sarin nerve gas was used in the operations. Do you have any reaction to that report?
A: Well, it was a -- it reminded me of the old adage, "Give me a one-handed economist, because he can't say `On the one hand, on the other hand.'"
But the Secretary has asked the Navy -- I'm sorry -- has asked the Army and the Air Force and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to review these allegations made by CNN 10 days ago, and that review has been underway for about a week. I'm going to a meeting on it this afternoon. It has about three weeks to go in order to meet the 30-day deadline, and I think I would just like to withhold comment until that review is complete.
But I have not seen, and I'm not sure anybody in the building has seen, any information that would change our view that we have no evidence that either sarin was used in Laos or that Operation TAILWIND was designed to track down and kill U.S. defectors.
Having said all that, the review has been launched precisely to go back and talk to people, to look at documents, and to do as thorough an analysis as possible on this question, and we hope to have a clear answer in the next few weeks or so.
Q: Maybe you can just correct something for me. With sarin, isn't it also absorbed by the skin?
A: Yes.
Q: And what would be -- I know it's a very theoretical question -- what would be the time, like, before let's say a drop of sarin would dissipate, under normal, not particularly windy conditions?
A: I don't know. I'm not an expert on nerve gas. I can tell you that experts have told me that sarin does not perform very well in very hot, humid, jungle-like conditions, the type of conditions that exist in Laos and certainly existed in Laos in September of 1970.
Sarin kills relatively quickly, in a matter of minutes, actually, if the drop lands on the skin or if it's inhaled. That doesn't seem to be the case of what happened here, because we do have contemporaneous accounts of people surviving without their masks or with defective gas masks, and people talking about walking through a cloud of gas as they were beginning to feel the effects, either tearing or vomiting or the other effects that they felt from the gas.
Those effects all sound very much like either tear gas CS, or vomit gas, CN.
But this is exactly the type of thing the reviewers are going to be looking at. They're going to find -- they will go back and look at the manifests of what was -- what weaponry was used at the time. They will talk to pilots. They will talk to commanders. They will talk to people who participated in the missions, as well as looking at all of the statistical and documentary evidence that we have from 1970.
Q: Do you know if any attempt will be made to locate the actual personnel who would have loaded the weapons on airplanes?
A: Well, I don't know the full scope of the investigation at this time. I think what we will do is as much as we need to to satisfy ourselves that the conclusion we've reached is the accurate and proper conclusion.
How much work that is going to involve remains to be seen. Whether it can be done in the next three weeks remains to be seen, but we're hopeful that we will be able to complete this relatively quickly.
We don't think it serves anybody's interest to have this question open and unresolved.
Okay. Thanks. Why don't we come back at 2:15 p.m.? Is that okay -- with General Habiger? Thanks.