Sarin

WASHINGTON -- CNN retracted yesterday its explosive and widely criticized report that a U.S. military mission during the Vietnam War had used deadly sarin gas to target U.S. defectors, saying an independent review of its story found "serious faults."Tom Johnson, president of the CNN News Group, apologized for the report, which was broadcast June 7 and appeared in Time magazine the next day. He said CNN bore full responsibility for its joint "NewsStand" report with Time."There is insufficient evidence that sarin or any other gas was used" on the mission, Johnson said in a statement.

March 20 1727: Physicist, mathematician and astronomer Sir Isaac Newton died in London. 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential novel about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was first published. 1976: Kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was convicted of armed robbery for her part in a San Francisco bank holdup. 1987: The Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of AZT, a drug shown to prolong the lives of some AIDS patients. 1995: In Tokyo, 12 people were killed, more than 5,500 others sickened when packages containing the poisonous gas sarin leaked on five separate subway trains.

WASHINGTON - You would have thought that the discovery of an actual weapon of mass destruction in Iraq would be big news, especially since it was aimed at American soldiers. But apparently not in the eyes of most U.S. newspaper editors and network television producers, who chose largely to ignore one of the major stories coming out of Iraq this week. On Monday, the Iraqi Survey Group, which is tasked with searching for Saddam Hussein's WMD, confirmed that an artillery round containing weaponized sarin nerve gas was detonated in an improvised explosive device (IED)

TOKYO -- Abundant information has emerged in the last week indicating that the Japanese media and the police had reason to be concerned about a poison gas attack, like the one that hit Tokyo subway riders last week.Particularly, they had reason to be concerned about the No. 1 suspect in the case, the Aum Shinri Kyo religious sect.As early as September, explicit warnings of gas attacks were delivered to Tokyo news organizations, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest paper. The warnings targeted the city's subway; its major baseball park, the Tokyo Dome; and its major concert hall, the Tokyo Budokan.

Nerve gas, mustard agent and Sarin are all words most of us would like to never hear pronounced. Along with biological agents and nuclear weapons, they are among the most sinister tools of modern warfare. So feared are they that they are banned under the Geneva Convention's rules of war and have rarely been used. On those occasions when they have been inflicted on populations, mostly by the Iraqi regime of more than a decade ago, the results have been horrifying, even compared to more conventional forms of warfare.

GULF WAR Gassed 15,000?" ran a banner headline atop the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. Ah, the old newspaper trick of using a question mark to get away with anything. How about: "Ross Perot: Space Alien?"Actually, that last one may be true. But we can say without a doubt that absolutely no allied troops were "gassed" in the gulf. Furthermore, reports that as many as 100,000 of our soldiers were "exposed" to Iraqi nerve gas are simply meaningless.Yet many consider this the smoking gun proving that the huge panoply of symptoms known as Gulf War Syndrome, of which I've counted over 80, is real.

WASHINGTON - With all the steps the Bush administration and Congress are taking to protect Americans, I have been waiting for the most important one: Civilian defense. Right now, those of us who are at ground zero in Washington are defenseless. I agree it is a great idea to stockpile iodine pills against radiation sickness and to build up a supply of vaccine against smallpox. It is also logical to develop new and better vaccines against anthrax. But let's face it. All of this won't mean much if there is no distribution system and if people are not prepared to use the antidotes and vaccines.

THE PENTAGON has confirmed that traces of the nerve agent sarin were detected in an Iraqi artillery shell that was found and detonated in Baghdad on May 15. To suggest that this discovery proves the Bush administration was right to go to war against Saddam Hussein is close to ludicrous. Yet it would be equally foolhardy simply to dismiss this find. Chemical weapons are serious business -- and where there was one shell, there may be more. Some background: No one disputes that Iraq produced nerve agents, and used them, during the 1980s.

Chemical warfare experts at Aberdeen Proving Ground have been swamped with calls from officials of U.S. cities seeking information about the nerve agent sarin, similar toxic chemicals and how to deal with them.As a result of the suspected nerve agent attack Monday in the Tokyo subway, said James M. Allingham, spokesman for the Army Chemical and Biological Defense Command at Aberdeen, officials from more than a dozen municipalities have asked how to respond to a similar event -- how to equip emergency personnel and what types and quantities of medical supplies to have.

WASHINGTON -- Federal authorities claimed yesterday that they foiled an apparent terrorist plan to unleash a Japanese-style gas attack on visitors to Disneyland during its crowded Easter weekend festivities.The plot was thwarted when authorities at Los Angeles International Airport apprehended two Japanese travelers a few days before Easter with information in their possession about how to make the highly toxic nerve gas sarin, The Sun has learned.The two were allegedly members of the Japanese cult that released the same type of poison gas into the Tokyo subway system last month, killing 12 people, the officials added.