From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
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Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They called me Bed, and we're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control Deck. And most importantly, you are you.
You are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
War? What is it good for? No, we're not gonna do the song? Well, there's absolutely nothing. But then it also makes me think of the quote from the Fallout Games, war never changes, you know all of that? Those are my two top War quotes. Is the song and the I also love a band that has a song like named after the name of their band, and that's such a really sick flex like Radiohead. Or no, that's not true.
There is a talking Head song called Radiohead. But anyway, yeah, not good for much except for you know, well, it's good for the population over all, great.
Medical innovation, scientific progress, technological breakthroughs.
And you make it sound awesome. It's a number.
It's a number one pick for unintended consequences as well. Uh, we've heard of agent Orange, and if you are a longtime listener of the show, you have heard about it as well, and the horrific effects that substance wrought upon civilians and military alike during the Vietnam War. In a previous conversation on Listener Mail, an anonymous conspiracy realist reached out to us to ask us about something called p B pills. It's a disturbing substance, little known outside of
the military or medical school. We had not heard of it before our listener reached out. However, according to firsthand sources, this may be the real explanation behind the notorious, still not fully understood collection of symptoms called Golf War syndrome. Here are the facts. We have to talk about the Golf War. It's something that happened in recent history, right in the nineteen nineties early nineteen nineties. It's sometimes called the Persian Gulf War, sometimes in a very dystopian way.
It's referred to as the First War because there was another one. But what happened for anybody who is unfamiliar with Saddam Hussein, well.
The United States led a coalition of forty two countries against Iraq, which at that point was under the control of the dictator Saddam Hussein. You might have heard of him kind of the first maybe not the first, but it was a really important moment for war coverage. So he almost attained this like celebrity status in a weird way, as this like big bad. He was elevated by the
press and the video of the television media. If you want to hear more about this guy, please do check out Robert Evans's excellent series on Behind the Bastard Bastards. Excuse me, he's one particular bastard.
Here, But in the end, at least my understanding is that it was between Iraq and Kuwait, right, There was conflict there. It had something to do with being in debt, right, so Iraq actually owed a ton of money to Kuwait and rather than you know, coming through with the payments, they came through with tanks and stuff.
Yeah.
So, right now, speculation about the logic behind Iraq's invasion of Kuwait it still thrives.
But you're correct.
I would say, Matt, that it does seem to go down to money, because in all I think it was August second of nineteen ninety, Husain's forces invaded Kuwait and they overran the country in like forty eight hours or less. It was very much one sided conflict there.
And you know how George W. Bush described the second like the second invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan as like, oh, it's just gonna be like forty eight hours that actually happened in this case.
Yes, yeah, Now, Hussein did not call it a crusade, give him that. He was also an inspiring romance novelist. Again behind the bastards check out the series It's Wild. The Iraqi forces declared ownership over Kuwait's northern territory and all of the rest of it came under the governance of a puppet state, you know, similar to Japan's actions on the Chinese mainland. And you know, here's why most
people agree. Money was the impetus for Hussein. Iraq had borrowed the equivalent of fourteen billion US dollars from Kuwait to finance another war against Iran, and Kuwait, like most creditors, wanted to be paid back. They wanted their bag. But at the same time, Kuwait and the United Arab Immirates were overshooting the quotas that OPEC sets for oil production, and there's a big deal to Iraq because they're an
oil export reliance country at the time. So the main way that they can pay back this debt is being aggressively devalued, and in the government's statements at this period of time, they're pretty blunt about it. The Iraqi government says Kuwait is doing this on purpose to make it difficult or impossible to pay back their debt. They wanted to put Iraq in a financial hole and keep it there.
Sorry, but like Iraq also massive oil production operations, right, yes, so why was Kuwait a to exceed those quotas. It seems like they were bending the rules a little bitter like, how how are they able to go about that in such a seemingly passive aggressive way.
Yet OPEC is a cartel, you know, and I know cartel has some sinister connotations, but OPEK essentially exists to slow the faucet of oil and.
Regulate prices the very least, yeah, even the mout.
Yeah right, right, so it's price fixing and it is focused on providing predictability and stability for oil exporting nations.
However, they it's a paper.
Basically, they sign a piece of paper saying we'll do this, we'll agree to this, and there's not a way to stop them from going back on their word.
Well, and there there are real world constraints on an oil producing country, right, and all of it's measured in barrels per day, which is the thing OPEC can can kind of control, right, how much money can you get for that single barrel of oil? And you know, if you can only make x number of barrels when that price fluctuates, you're in the The economics of your country can fluctuate wildly, right, which is what's happening here and
why it feels. It felt like, let's say to a rock that Kuwait had its boot on its neck.
And so it's a good example of putting all your economic eggs in one basket. Even if that basket or those eggs are incredibly valuable, it's still one thing, right, and that can hamstring you down the line if you don't have a diverse, more diverse economic outlook. Right.
Yeah, like Rizza said in the Chappelle Show, you got to diversify your portfolio.
And this diverse bonds I will with portfolio because it's not a little more economically minded.
The shout out to Chappelle's show, So did huseaning take a lesson from our pal, King Philip Street name heavy P because that he handles Kuwait the way that Philip handles the templar. He says, the best way to resolve this massive debt is to remove the creditor from the board. The US disagreed, as did most of the world. The United Nations and the Security Council specifically adopted to separate resolutions in the beginning, and they imposed economic sanctions against
the Rock. The United Kingdom and the US deployed forces into Saudi Arabia literal boots on the ground, and at the same time they urged other nations to follow their example. Eventually, as you said, Noel, they ended up with a coalition of forty two different nations involved in some way and the wallets were opened. Billions of dollars are powering this endeavor. Officially it was an estimated sixty billion dollars. However, we know war is messy and so a lot of that money.
The real toll financially is probably much higher and were never and a note, the full extent of expense here, but we do know the bombing begins in January of nineteen ninety one, and for any students of warfare, there are several notable aspects of this conflict. There are a lot of first time things here.
Yeah, do you guys have memories of watching the Iraq War, like the invasion and the green cameras, the night vision stuff. And I just have clear visions of CNN showing you know, all of this stuff and watching it with my parents just trying to understand what the heck's going on.
Well, and I sort of alluded to that earlier, just about this being you know, or Saddam being almost like elevated to this big, bad level by this kind of coverage, And I guess I didn't realize until I was looking at some of the research that Ben did here that this really was a first and that this kind of coverage prior even with like the Vietnam War, there were
no embedded journalists. It was all stuff sent to the news stations that was very much controlled by the military, and of course even the embedded journalists were very much controlled and handled by the media, but this was still different. It was very different, and yes, I do remember all of that.
Yeah, real time updates. The media forces and the government forces could attempt to sanitize what was depicted, but just like how live programs can have curse words slip through, you can't clean all of the footage. So for many, many citizens of the US and the world entire they were seeing the unedited reality of conflict and it's a very very ugly, strange, dangerous thing.
This is also.
I didn't know this, three of the largest tank battles in all of US history also took place at this time. This is also the first time people deployed depleted uranium in a large scale.
Yeah, hey, and head over to our YouTube channel and scroll all the way back to August twenty twenty three to watch our special on It's the Gulf War, syndrome, Agent orange and depleted uranium. There's three separate videos, so definitely check that out. But guys, this is also Nurse Narayah, right, yes, the testimony in nineteen ninety I guess it's right around the time of Iraq and invading Kuwait is when we got the Nurse Narayah testimony that we've talked about on
the show a couple of times. That turned out to be not true, dealing with what was it child babies being taken out of incubators.
Incubator Yep, yeah, we cover it in our book as well. I think it's chapter five, I want to say propaganda, or maybe it's oh, it might be chapter eight political corruption, bangor hit. Check out the art from our pal Nick Turbo Benson.
It's true.
It's something that people have been talking about for quite a long time. And this would also not be the last of these wars. In two thousand and three, the battle begins anew in the US. This was known as Operation Iraqi Freedom at this point. Still, even in twenty twenty four, in the grand scheme of things, the tragedies heartbreak of war are comparatively fresh. We as a civilization simply do not know the full consequences of these interventions.
We do know the threats were real. There were clear and present dangers. The West was very concerned with the Hussein administration's interest in biological and possibly nuclear warfare, and as previous lessons had proven time and time again, it is exceedingly rare, if not virtually impossible, for any government to walk back those ambitions once they get past a
certain threshold is super uncommon. So the US and its coalition, their ideas were going to cut this off of the butt or at least that's there, or cut this off of the route, nip it in the butts what I mean.
Yeah, Well, also, I mean people will certainly recall this obsession with disarming Iraq. You know, in this idea of weapons of mass destruction was sort of the mcguffin behind the whole Iraqi freedom operation, and it ended up like not being the case. That sort of comes back in a way in this story, this idea of this sinister secret thing that may or may not actually exist.
And the US sought to prepare its forces in advance for the possibilities of nasty things like nerve agents, biological weapons, et cetera. Like the Gulf War itself. We would not know the full consequences of these preparations for some time. In the decades after the First Gulf War, more and more veterans from all sides of the conflict began experiencing a collection of strange symptoms that they could not expel
lane fatigue, insomnia, rashes, diarrhea, intense cognitive issues. You know, we would call it brain fog today and muscle pain like all around. The kind of things where you would know that you were seriously sick, but you wouldn't have a name to put on the thing, right, you would know, you would be able to name all the stuff it was not. It was not the flu. You know, you would test negative for other things, but you are clearly sick. And this became known as Gulf War syndrome for sure.
And I mean, you know, well, there isn't a name exactly for this kind of thing. There's sort of a vague, foggy name for a thing that we don't know the name of. I mean, in this case, it was deemed or dubbed Golf War syndrome or Golf War illness. But according to a report released by the Institute of Medicine in twenty thirteen, about a third of Gulf War veterans suffer from what is referred to as a CMI or chronic multi symptom illness, which, like you said, is a
series of symptoms that cannot be medically explained. And if anyone has ever had to deal with anything like this, or even just an illness that won't go away, and the doctors don't believe you, or they keep treating it with the wrong thing. It can be so frustrating, you know, because Western medicine doesn't always get it right.
You know, Well, there's a thing where depending on how rare the illness you've got or the disease you've got, it's like if you imagine the graph, the more rare it is, the less likely you know, a general practitioner is going to say, oh, this is it right, because you're going to go through the checklist of all the other things that could cause all those different symptoms with
this Gulf War syndrome. It is so strange because it is so there's so many human beings that are experiencing similar symptoms right that are i don't know, broad spectrum right, dealing with exactly.
Yeah, And it's tough because this is not saying that the medical professionals were purposely bearing this, but a lot of times these guys are these guys feel like there is a conspiracy of foot to suppress what is actually happening to them. And unfortunately, there is a great deal of validity to that concern. We will see as we continue this evening that veteran advocacy groups had to fight tooth and nail to get this acknowledged to not be dismissed.
The public is still searching for an official explanation behind Gulf War syndrome. What could cause these otherwise inexplicable series of ailments? Is it possible people were asking that the US government, in a rush to protect their soldiers, accidentally poison them. This is the story of PB pills. We're going to pause for a word from our sponsor, and then we'll dive right in. Here's where it gets crazy. Paridistigmine bromide worked on that one for a seconds.
It's a it's a doozy, the bromide part alone. I mean anything anything I've heard bromide attached to usually isn't something that you necessarily want to jest. I don't know. Maybe I'm thinking of like potassium bromides.
Yes, that's the last one I remember, which is the Mountain Dew guy.
A good right, and was a brominated vegetable oil.
Orange. Yeah, we're here to ruin the things you enjoy. So right now, I could just picture how many people drink orange Fanta? Do you think while they listened to the show.
Oh, somebody had it in their mouth when you said that.
We are sorry to you. But but the potassium bromide was apparently used as a sedative in the nineteenth century, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but I believe it was discovered to not be great for you.
Yeah, it happens. It happens, And that might be the story with PB pills as well. This stuff dates back. It was clearly established well before the Gulf War. It was patented in nineteen forty five. It's been used in civilian medicine since nineteen fifty five, and primarily then as now, it is used to treat an extraordinarily rare autoimmune neuromuscular condition called myasthenia gravis.
Guys, is it weird to you at all? My asthenia gravis? So let's stay right there. But just as an aside, is it weird to you guys hearing that medicine is patented in nineteen forty five? Just considering I guess there's chemical warfare occurring in World War two, right, with all kinds of gases and things that people are going to be exposed to, it would make sense that this is around the time when it gets patented and deployed.
But it is just I don't know, it seems like yeah, oh for sure, but you know, you know, so many things they figure out down the line that's been around for asias. You can prescribe off label and it does other things. But I'm always suspicious when I hear off label thrown around. It's like, hey, just so happens that it kind of sort of does this other thing that we didn't really realize, and let's let's prescribe it for that, even though it's not for that.
I mean a lot of a lot of medicine. And indeed, great invention is trial and error and finding something that you didn't intend when you were trying to do another thing unsuccessfully. Shout out to alchemy, which created chemistry. Shout out to viagra, which was supposed to help with heart with heart problems.
Yeah, the microwave, right with something to do with the chocolate that melted in the guy's pocket, Like that was an accident, and then they realized they could harness.
That, and I guess, tech, I guess if we're waxing poetic, viagra can help with heart problems, I mean hard problems.
Of the hearts.
You know.
Yeah, but Okay, So here's here's the thing. Here's why PB pills matter. So this substance is what's known as a cholinesterase inhibitor. There is a protein in your body if you're human, called calinesta RaSE and it breaks down a chemical called aceta. Calling wildly mispronouncing this maybe, but the reason this chemical is important, this aceta colding, is because it helps your nerve cells and your muscles talk to each other. It's like a zoom call for them
or a telephone for them. And as a result, this PB substance helps that useful protein stay in your system longer. It helps your body activate the muscle. It lessens muscle weakness. So if you have a condition like my esthenia gravis, this is a godsend for you. It just keeps your body running the way it should. So it's preventative.
Right.
Since this stuff helps your nerves and your muscles communicate, then the theory is the logic is that if another substance interferes with that communication, these PB pills can sort of hold the line. They can lessen the impact of some very nasty stuff. It sounds good, Oh yeah, it sounds great. I think we're done for today.
Are there a lot of people in the military that have myasthenia gravis?
Uh not, actually not a time, not disproportionately.
Maybe with the rest of the population. The weird, it is a little weird, but like you know, of course I was, you know, sorry, this isn't we're not talking about patasium bromi. But I did look it up just to see what I was thinking about, and it was
taken off of the market. It's used in veterinary medicine, but it's taken off the market for human use because of a litany of side effects that just outweighed any positives, and it was used as a sedative, and other they call them hypnotics had come out that were far more effective. So it was fully pulled for human use, and now it's apparently only used to you know, sub do pooches and kiddies. But let's talk about the side effects of these this other bromide situation, these PB pills.
Oh, it's got them. Like every good drug, he's got side effects. And it's the scary stuff you gotta read in the ad.
It's the fine print that they say really really fast.
But in this case, there's no ad for this. You just get handed some you know as a person in the military. But let's talk about them. There's uncommon side effects as again or always read in the ads.
Well, let's currently welcome to the welcome to the good guys marine take these. Make sure you don't get a hit with nerve gas, but just in case you do, you're gonna want to take some PB pills. Oh, thank you sir. Currently these are uncommon side effects, but include stuff like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps and cramps, twitching, or weakness of the muscles.
Wait, how is it going to cause weakness of the muscles? It's supposed to do the opposite.
Wow, is your specialty questions? Get out of here, you know what I mean? Like that's and also there's a hell of a ven diagram right between again slowly nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, muscle cramps, twitching, and muscle weakness. That's pretty similar to Gulf War syndrome.
Is this an antidote situation?
Like?
Do you only supposed to take these if you're exposed to nerve gas? Now it's any it's a mephyl.
Yeah, oh button, it's preventative.
Oh okay, uh yeah, sorry, I have a very specific image of that word.
I think most people do.
But tech tech.
It is preventative, but it's not a vaccination. The idea is that if you are in a conflict situation, right, if you're in the armed services, you're out there in the Middle East, you might get exposed to nerve gas from Hussein's force, stuff like Sarah or Soman, and then this stuff will It won't cure you, but it will make it more likely that if you are exposed to a nerve agent, you have a higher chance of surviving with no long lasting ill effects.
Quick quick review, what are the effects of these agents or some maybe hit lists of some particularly gnarly effects. If you get hit with a nerve agent.
It's gonna mess with your body's ability to have your nerves connect to your bid. It's the communication that the pbpills are actually supposed to be helping out here, right, and the concept of taking them every day. The way that we were told by our anonymous listener is that
you never know when a chemical attack could occur. It could be in you know, the place where you're sleeping, and all of a sudden there's a nerve agent or something that you're going to be affected by, so you've got to make sure it's in your system, just continually cycling. So sorry, I didn't mean a derail, but let's get back here.
Why not at all? I think that's it's incredibly important important, But it's funny how some of the side effects of nerve agents are kind of similar to the side effects of these bills, right exactly.
And again, a lot of people who are taking these they are trusting the authorities. They are not themselves medical professionals. But like most people listening to tonight's show, they would like to not die. And so this is where it gets tricky. Right, Like many substances, this was always thought to be non harmful below a certain threshold, And that's where it gets tricky. How can we keep track of
how much an individual person ingested? And when the VA Veterans' Affairs has a lot of information on this, we pulled some quotes directly from them.
Yes we did, and here goes one. PB pills were supplied to service members as twenty one tablet blister packs with prescribed dosage as one thirty milligram tablet every eight hours. Veterans actual exposure is not known because pills were self administered, and there are few examples in individual or unit health
records from the Department of Defense. And we're all get to a real weird reason why that's the case, are we ben there are some very interesting instructions that were given when people were handed these pills.
Yeah, and there's a huge caveat in there that we have to spend some time on the VA then and now is saying that soldiers were left on their own when it came to the dosage. They were given recommendations like we outlined, but administering the PB pills was up to the individual themselves. And so if we asked scurselves how the dosing worked, like you said, one thirty milligram tablet every eight hours. So that is, for some quick math,
that's ninety milligrams every day. And the FDA recommends that people who have my esthenia gravis take up to six hundred milligrams of PBE pills or the PP substance every twenty four hours, depending on the needs of the patient.
And I saw this in a couple of places, but not everywhere. About this stuff. There was some indication from folks that they were asked to destroy records of who received these and whether or not they were taking them. Or again, if it's self administer, the would necessarily be a record of how many times or how often they were taken. But I did hear in a couple of talks and in some articles that there was this sense that they didn't want a record of like how these were distributed.
Right, similar to burn pits or documentary that.
Oh yeah, well, and just to go back to our anutomous listener again, this person said that they chose not to self administer the PB pills, or at least they began just a little bit and then stopped. But then this person witnessed a whole bunch of other people in the same platoon who are taking it religiously, like just won't like, oh it's eight hours, I'm taking my pill.
Well, there were apparently a lot of bullying tactics deployed by commanding officers as well, saying if you didn't take them, you're gonna get you know, have to scrub the or whatever you know, or not be court martialed. But just inconvenient, mean spirited kind of tasks.
Right, and from their perspective, by the way, these commanding officers are kind of doing like a tough love thing.
Yeah, take care medicine, you know, Yeah.
I'm saving your life, maggot.
All right.
It's like that's kind of the energy that they had. They weren't purposely trying to poison. And also, you know, another thing about the horrors of conflict is that it creates superstition, right, very quickly. So even if you are not going to be evolved with any kind of nerve agent, you can feel a sort of safety by taking the thing, you know what I mean, Like every so often I do this, and this is somehow a safety measure, even if I don't know how it works totally. Yeah, And look,
not everyone here's the thing. Not everyone who took these pills, these PB pills got sick. And not everyone who fought in the Gulf War returned with Gulf War syndrome. There is therefore a mystery afoot, and to those who believe the government may be covering up something, this leads to a series of increasingly disturbing allegations.
It does, indeed, first and foremost and probably the most plausible. Let's just start from where they where they stemmed from. These were from veterans and veteran advocate groups, which includes a lot of different individuals, whether it be family members trying to go to bat for their loved ones and speaking out publicly. I saw really really great TED talk from a woman named Jennifer Jackson Gorillas gay G K O U R I, L L A S who had a loved one and she does this talk as an
advocate for that individual. But then there's also you know, veterans affairs groups and less so maybe the veteran the VA, but there are advocates groups that sort of exist to improve the way the VA functions. Right, So the most plausible that comes out of these various sources is that Uncle Sam administered PB pills without proper oversight, methodology and research.
Because this was put out without FDA approval, they were given something called a waiver, which I believe is very similar to what happened with COVID nineteen vaccines.
Guys. I found that the waiver again, I have it on my refrigerator.
Now.
I think we've mentioned this several episodes back, but it's the waiver that you got in place of actual consent and information about a drug because of that Emergency Act. And it's just basically you're saying, look, I understand this is an experimental drug. There could be side effects that we don't know about yet, haven't gone through clinical trials, but we're taking it anyway, and I'm doing it on my own volition.
Yeah, isn't that counter to like the Nurmberg Treaty or whatever it was. I forget if it's a treaty, but there was some official document that makes it illegal to experiment on vulnerable populations. And you could very much class people in the heat of battle who are terrified for their lives and to your point, Ben, wanting that safety blanket, even if it's just a feeling, they'd be more compelled to take something like this if they're in that situation,
therefore making them vulnerable. Doesn't this go completely counter to that?
Well, they didn't. In their opinion, this was not an experiment. This was not human experimentation. Their opinion, this was a kind of like a band aid rollout of something, you know what I mean. Like you would say, hey, we understand the concept of parachutes. Therefore it is not human experimentation to have people jump from a plane with a parachute.
Well yeah, and theoretically this is almost a piece of technology that it is a piece of technology that can be deployed with your troops to lessen the effect your enemy's weapons have on them.
Right, yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's kind of a greater good argument, and that leads us to just to follow that first allegation. They didn't do their homework. That's the first allegation, right, The intentions were good, but there wasn't enough due diligence applied before this was rolled out to a ton of people. The second, more sinister allegation is that someone in the halls of power may have known full well that there was potential or ill side effects and they either buried it or ignored the research.
That's tough, that's the old fodder viewpoint, right, yes, yeah, Like we know that these guys are going to be down there with the enemy tanks, they might be in tanks themselves. There is a much higher chance that one or an entire group of these human beings gets killed in combat. Let's take this precaution, even though it's dangerous, because it is also likely that they will get killed anyway.
Right, Yeah.
If that's true, that means the US government ran a brutal cost benefit calculus, right or calculation, and they concluded, Look, the potential for harm is below a certain percentage, so it's an acceptable risk. And that might sound morally repugnant, because you know it is. Yeah, but we have to
admit there is a contextual logic to it. Would you rather risk injury to say, one out of three soldiers or do you want to roll the dice on Saddam Hussein in nerve gas knowing that if you don't try to prevent that deployment it will kill thousands of people very quickly.
Esh Man, I don't want to be the one making those kinds of decisions, Thank you very much.
Do we have evidence that that nerve gases were deployed, that definitely were deployed or is this all preventative for a thing that made like I was asking earlier, may or may not have actually been on the tablet at the time.
At the time, they were in a little bit of a black box, but they were pretty sure that saren cyclo, sarin and mustard gas were possessed by the husay In administration, and if they were possessed, then they would be used. That was the only logical conclusion they could make. And I'm not defending them, but I'm just saying from their perspective, we can see the steps that they walked through.
Right.
Oh, well there, I mean, there was an extensive chemical weapons program in Iraq, right, and we know that from history, like this was a thing in the eighties specifically, So it's I don't know there. If you listen to Immortal Technique, the you know, we knew they had chemical weapons because we helped them get them to them.
I'm sorry, I totally forgot about that detail in that previous conflict, right, I believe what they're on We had sold there are allies at that point, and we sold them these various agents, which is what led us to do the research to figure out how to use the PB pills in the first place.
Right now, you're right, all right, History, sometimes, you guys, is such a he said, She's a kind of thing. You know what I'm talking about.
History is written by the victors, which is a terrible editorial standpoint, but it's the standard operating procedure.
Right.
There's a third, unproven and more sinister allegation wartime profiteering. We know that pharmaceutical companies have an outsized lobbying influence, and just like defense companies, they make a lot of money from government contracts. Then, as now, so is it possible then that private pharmaceutical companies successfully lobbied to get their products sold consequences be damned.
Oh, I didn't even think about that. Just the contract, that government contract to buy all the pills.
And none of this is proven, right, I mean, we know that they did sell the pills to the government, but we can't ascribe motive. There's no smoking gun for it, and that leaves us with the first allegation as the most likely scenario. Because there may be some science to back up this idea. There were discoveries made about PB pill exposure far after it was given to America's fighting forces.
Suggests we take a pause for a word from our sponsors and then put on our house stuff works hats and dive into some disturbing science.
And we've returned, so let's just get into it, guys. Veterans Affairs officially says that these PB pills that we're describing in this entire episode are not connected to the thing that is recognized as Gulf War syndrome. Right, that's the official stance.
Yeah, yeah, that's the official conclusion, but the science appears to go back and forth. In twenty fifteen, or we found a study from twenty fifteen at Baylor University, a pretty small study, but it found something revolutionary. It linked the use of anti nerve agent pills PB pills to Gulf War syndrome and it also found a missing link,
a possible genetic factor that would result in sickness. There's an article from the Military Times that puts it this way, quote genetic factors may contribute to a veteran's risk for Golf War illness, which they were calling at the time. And this study links the PB pills and their adverse effects to the genetic makeup of individual soldiers.
So there's a.
Gene variant that, to put it very simply, because we're not geneticists, there's a gene variant that complicates your body's ability to metabolize chemicals in these PB pills. And if you have this variant, then you are going to be up to forty times more likely to have Gulf War syndrome symptoms. And people who don't have this variant, are gonna be fine. Wow, it's something, you know, It's something no one like the idea of searching for cyanide poisoning
or attempting to diagnose an illness. It's something people just didn't think to look for, is the argument.
Jeez, guys, I'm just thinking about for what forty times actually means. So I was just imagining someone telling me, hey, Matt, you have two times the chance of getting in a car wreck if you leave in if you leave your house in your car today. So I would be like, oh, I'm not not going to do that. But if somebody say, hey, Matt, you have a forty times larger chance of getting in a car wreck today, I'd be like, hmmm, car.
Yeah, yeah.
This it's it's weird too, because you know, it reminds me of the genetic factors and things like the taste of cilantro. You know, this genetic variant is likely something that most people will never know about themselves. It simply won't come up because genes are very complicated and you don't think about it most of the time.
Right.
No, And well, and this drug, these chemicals that are in this drug were meant to be administered only to people who were dealing with a pretty rare problem, right, So, like I'm just thinking about the number of the number of people that it would have gone to if it weren't being used for this purpose, we never would have known that there are any major issues and.
The original thing was rare, like right, Yeah.
Because if you think about a clinical trial with side effects, like any any drug that gets tested, there are a few people that develop cancer. There are a few people that develop things, and it may have nothing to do with the actual drug that's being administered. It may be what that individual was going through prior to getting the drug, but because it was involved in the trial, you have to list it, right.
Yes, And we're talking about people that had goal war illness or goal for syndrome, whatever that is. It's it's within a niche specific community obviously, and people I believe that even interacted with some of those folks, like family members, I believe even could have received some effect from this. But it's it's not a tiny number. It's a what we're talking like in the dozens of thousands, Like, like,
do do we have that? Yeah, it's a little hazy, and it's not certainly not really confirmed by the government per se.
No, yeah, yeah, government is uh. The government is still disagreeing with veterans and their advocates. And originally they were out of sight, out of mind about it, and they discredited a lot of things that they should have been looking at. That's just that's not political statement, no ideology applied objectively.
That is true.
And even now the US government officially considers what we call Gulf War syndrome to be a quote cluster of medically unexplained chronic systems end quote, meaning they acknowledge something exists, but they don't conclude much else about it. They don't even like using the term Gulf War syndrome. They say the symptoms vary far too widely.
That's the thing too, right, Like these are unrelated symptoms that don't usually get lumped in with the same malady. That's another thing that made it difficult for medical practitioners to kind of figure out based on the normal clues they would usually have. It's like a set of symptoms that equals something like a particular condition or adjacent conditions, but these were it was a real mystery.
Who what if PB pills are one part of a much larger equation.
Yeah, what if history is not super cut and dried. What if real life is kind of complicated, just like people's genetic code. This is something that the VA seems to tacitly acknowledge because they say the following quote, certain chronic, unexplained symptoms existing for six months or more are related
to golf war service without regard to cause. So if you are a veteran and you are in theater during that time, then you can apply for disability for compensation for assistance without specifically without the VA having to specifically say golf syndrome is real and you have it, they can just say unexplained things you happen to be in the Gulf War.
We know the government is all about plausible deniability, both internally and you know publicly, especially publicly, they have whole divisions that are designed to do damage control control about this kind of stuff. And we know that they're not gonna treat somebody or give them extra treatment because that would acknowledge the thing exists in the first place and that it was their fault.
Right.
A lot of the conspiracies that you see in the world of government are someone messed up and then someone tried to cover it up or cya. Right, and there are to your point, Matt, there are other possible causes, and they likely did affect people. We're talking about things like burn pits, oil well fires because this is a resource war, right, oil wells are set on fire and Kuwait by the Iraqi army as they're retreating. They're doing this scorched stirth thing.
Right.
If I can't have it, you can't either. And the smoke from those fires was inhaled by a lot of soldiers on both sides of the conflict, and a lot of those folks went on to have acute pulmonary consequences like you know asthma, bronchitis, et cetera.
Has to do with your lungs, right pullmaner, Oh yeah, other chronic evict Just throwing that out there in case anybody didn't catch it.
When did we talk about burn pits recently? It feels like a blur, but I swear it came up very recently about the kind of nasty stuff that they were burning, you know, near camps or in the midst of camps.
Yeah, but this wasn't this wasn't goal for war. We were talking about Iraqi freedom, we're.
Talking about talking about the thing. You know, they got a for sure. And I think I had mentioned earlier the idea of the peb pills there being some obfuscation going on in terms of the records. I think that was less. I think I was maybe misconstruing that more with what you were saying then that the locations uses and the proximity of these burn pits. They have a very hard time producing any records about that, as well as medical records for the folks that were around them.
So DOA did a pretty crappy job of tracking this stuff. Well.
Also, it's kind of it's not outright covered it up right, It's kind of a supply chain dilemma as well. You know, one of the most expensive parts of fighting a conflict abroad is you have to build the logistics out. You have to build the supply chain. So when you have a bunch of trash and things that you need to throw away, you don't have your you know, the city garbage truck to come by.
Halliburton doesn't send in a you know, a chinook and pick up all the garbage.
They're a little expensive, oh weird.
But guys what we received, I don't know. I would estimate a dozen personal accounts from different individuals who talk to us about burn pits at very specific camps, very specific bases that in it was the range of like a very large forward operating base to just a place where when you first arrive in a rack camp was on the side.
Yeah.
So I don't know that it seems like it was just it seems like they could figure out where there was burn pit, because if there were troops there, there was probably a burn pit.
And I'm sure that you guys saw this in your research as well. But I did find a full text, I guess versions very no bells and whistles of the second report by the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, which is indicated as a you know, investigation into Gulf War veterans illnesses. It says VA D O D continue to resist strong evidence linking toxic causes to chronic health effects. And if you do a search for the word records in this seventy six instances of that occur, and almost
every one of them tied to there are none. So just that's where I got that information. It's a real report from nineteen ninety seven from Congress.
And there are there's a lot of research on the part of legislative bodies regarding this, and it continues because you know these individuals for a long time. Or again we're being roundly ignored, and we're going to get to something here another possible cause that should bother you. But first, actually they should all bother you. But first let's talk
about depleted uranium. The Gulf Wars the first time this stuff is used on a large scale as a weapon, right, in military applications, du or depleted uranium is ideal for use in armor penetrators. As one marine Front of the Show put it, it shoots through stuff good.
Yeah, especially tanks, the armoring on tanks, right, which we know in the Gulf War that was an issue. There were big tanks that were coming at you. The US had larger tanks, more technologically advanced tanks and depleted uranium rounds.
And this is just a byproduct of nuclear energy creation or where is this stuff coming from? They US have all this depleted uranium laying around, is that right? It is kind of just like a trash that they're re using to blow up tags.
Yeah, depleted uranium is naturally occurring uranium, and it's been stripped of most of but not all, of the radioactive goodies. And it is a byproduct it comes from preparing uranium for nuclear application.
That makes perfect sense. And how lucky for them they were able to make lemons to lemonade or whatever.
Well, and it does stick around, right, it's uranium. It doesn't just naturally decay real quick. Now it's a radioactive substance.
Yeah, but it's great for shooting stuff, is the thing.
Real good.
It's really good at it. It's also really not good for humans. And if you ever are hanging out with some friends on the weekend and they're like, hey, do you want to play with depleted uranium, you should say no, I hope that's not a hot take.
Okay, good to know.
Well, just imagine though, if you're in that situation in there are du rounds going off all over the especially in a large battle in maybe a somewhat urban environment, right where you're now going through that same city that you just shot up like crazy. That stuff's in the air via like dust, that stuff's on the ground.
It's so there're SOPs for wearing gas masks or protection when circling back through these areas. I'm sure.
Yeah, there's always going to be a standard operating procedure or like an order of operations for stuff, but that can fall to the wayside very quickly in the chaos of a hot conflict. Multiple studies by the US government appear to show that, yes, depleted uranium is nasty stuff, but they conclude it does not itself cause what we call Gulf War syndrome double however, so that's two howevers
for US played along at home. Since twenty eleven, US combat veterans can still claim disability compensation for any health problems related to depleted uranium, and this is up to the VA. They decided on a case by case basis, which means, yet again you're at the mercy of bureaucracy, right. And this is not to disparage the people working at the VA. It's the system that's the problem.
Hip because it really does become bureaucratic. As you said, where were you deployed, when were you there? What you know, battalion and blah blah blah blah blah, all that stuff, and then you can basically the VA could say, well, there's an x percent chance that you were actually exposed to du right, which could be good or bad.
And it's like, do you have the right form from the right medical professional. Oh, do you need to see the medical professional. Okay, that'll be like a couple of years. I mean, hopefully it's not that extreme. But there are systemic problems here. This is another cause that we personally don't care for, and it was it was bandied about
a lot in the early days. Factions of the US government were going to veterans and saying, well, you think you have Golf War syndrome, Even before they had a name for it, they said, what you really have is PTSD post traumatic stress disorder. Now gaslighting, Yeah, before we continue, PTSD is very real. It can affect absolutely anyone civilian or military alike. Given the right circumstances, it happens. It
is a real thing. We're not dismissing that, but we are saying lumping all of those proven physiological symptoms of Gulf War syndrome into one umbrella and saying it's just PTSD. That can seem profoundly offensive to some people. It is like gaslighting. It feels like that it's dismissing a genuine health condition as being quote all in your heads.
And that is messed up. Yeah cool, and again we you know, I mean I should get but like you know, my kid has as aversion to certain types of antibiotics were particularly penicillin. It causes a severe psychological reaction. There was this time where they were given penicillin and all of a sudden, like we're acting like they were having an emotional, uh, you know, anxiety attack basically. But that's a really hard thing to convince doctors to believe in
because they don't. There's not a whole lot of exact precedent for it, but it happens every time. So this is like that, but with even more documented cases. And you've basically got people saying, sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. That's all in your head, buddy.
I would say, I've I have personally been diagnosed with PTSD one time by a neurologist, and it was not that huge collection of symptoms that are you know, those that are described as Gulf War syndrome. So if this for my money, guys, it makes sense that PTSD is a component of all that other stuff. Yes, oh, but it is not.
Yes, portfolio, as I believe he.
It's an ocean's eleven of terrible stuff. You know, it's a heist crew on your health. And the question is it aided? Has this heist grew been aided and embedded by the US government? Unfortunately at certain points in the narrative that appears to be the case, right, and the VA and other research organizations have concluded that evidence does not support an association a causual connection between PB pills and what they call chronic multisymptom illness and what the
rest of the world calls Gulf War syndrome. But the VA still again says, if you have chronic, unexplained symptoms existing for six months or more that are related to your time in the Gulf War, then you are deserving of assistance, compensation, and resources, regardless of what the cause is, what the official cause is. So really, what they're saying again is agree to disagree on the specifics of what's happening,
but we will help you in theory. And this like it seems like I don't know after looking into this, folks, we believe the most likely factor for PB related GWS Golf War syndrome, it has to hinge on that previously unknown genetic variant. And again there are people who never took PB pills who do have golf war syndrome because as we've as we've shown, there are other factors that can create this.
Yep, and I do gosh, I do wonder how many of those factors add up to create Wait, how many do you need?
Right?
Do you need the burn pits and the PB pills and then you're in golf war syndrome territory? Do you need PTSD in burn pig? You know? Like, just what is what are the things?
It reminds me of the stuff with AstroTurf giving people cancer where it was really difficult to show the correlation or maybe cause that I can't remember. I always get those confused. I know the difference, But there was something with that where it was very tricky to show that these people that got cancer definitely got it because they were rolling around an AstroTurf.
Right, because there were other factories yea, yeah, And this is all unfortunately true. We know that the idea of a genetic variant can explain why some people ingested these pills with no lasting effect, while others may have incurred lifelong medical consequences as a result, even when following official guidelines to the letter. And just like the VA decides stuff on a case by case basis, the causes of Golf War syndrome for a lot of individuals in the
Armed Services may vary case to case as well. To your point, Matt, and the most important thing here is that if you served in the Gulf War in Operation Desert Shield or Desert Storm anytime after August second, nineteen ninety, the VA wants you to know that you may be at risk of certain health conditions. So they are admitting that something is up, and that is, as strange as it sounds, that's actually progress from the nineteen nineties. Now they're admitting the house is haunted.
And like you said, Man, I mean, that's a big deal, because that just doesn't happen unless they've got no other route, you know, And at that point it's like damage.
Control really quickly. Guys. Imagine twenty three years after that August date in nineteen ninety, we made our video series, right and then what ten years later, a little yeah, less than ten years, less than ten years later, we're talking about it again, and it's still a problem. Just the span of time. And there are people out there who have been dealing with this since nineteen ninety or at least, you know, nineteen ninety one ninety two, after they were exposed to all this stuff.
Well, you know, we haven't really talked about personal experiences or personal accounts of people that actually suffer from this, but they are out there. And that Ted Talk I mentioned Ted x talk. If you want to hear someone describing how debilitating this is for a loved one, that's a good source. And just just search for you know, golf for syndrome testimonials. There they're out there, and this is stuff that literally is causing people's quality of life to just be just absolutely in the tank.
Yeah, and there are you can find just through a quick YouTube search. You can find some contemporaneous reporting. I'm thinking especially about an interview out of KMOVTV four in Missouri that was from like nineteen ninety six, and they interviewed veterans about this before the VA reached its current conclusions. So you can see the pendulum moving in the right direction. But for many veterans, leaving combat only led to another battle,
a battle for their conditions and injuries. To be acknowledged rather than buried under paperwork or swept under a bureaucratic rug. It is tragically a battle that many of our fellow listeners in the audience tonight continue to fight one day at a time. But the VA, as imperfect as it is,
it exists to help. So if you are a loved one or experiencing medical conditions physiological, psychological as a result of your time in the service, contact the VA at the following number eight seven seven two two two eight three eight seven. You might be on hold for a while, but that's why they're there to help you, not to put you on hold. Just to clarify, and with that, we want to hear your experiences to your point about
personal stories. Tell us about your your encounters with golf or syndrome as well as other potential conditions related to combat, and let us know whether you think there's a cover up a foot. We try to be easy to find online.
That's right. You can find us at the handle conspiracy Stuff, where we exist on Facebook, on YouTube, where we have video content galore rolling out every single week, and also on x FKA, Twitter, on Instagram and TikTok. We exist at the handle conspiracy stuff show.
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