McClatchy Washington Bureau
The U.S. government was concerned about contaminants in the air that service members breathed in at a former Soviet base in Uzbekistan as early as 2002, newly released documents obtained exclusively by McClatchy show.
Military health investigators traveled to the base, Karshi-Khanabad, multiple times between 2001 and 2004 to assess the contamination there. McClatchy has previously reported on the chemical and radiological contaminants found on the ground at K2, as the base was commonly known.
But documents produced by the Department of Defense for a congressional oversight committee, obtained by McClatchy, show there were also concerns about harmful contaminants in the air.
Hundreds of veterans who were assigned to K2 between 2001 and 2005 have reported cancer diagnoses.
The House Oversight and Reform subcommittee on national security is investigating toxic exposure faced by U.S. forces at that base and the long-term illnesses they now have, in an effort to get their illnesses recognized by the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs as connected to their time at the base.
What military investigators found during those 2001 to 2004 investigations was that most of the personnel based there would be exposed to potentially harmful substances, including tetrachloroethylene, which has been linked to a variety of cancers.
“It is estimated that between 50% and 75% of personnel at Stronghold Freedom [K2] will be exposed to elevated levels of compounds in air,” the investigators wrote in 2002.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked tetrachloroethylene to higher risks of bladder cancer, multiple myeloma or non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, among other cancers.
“The hazard probability was classified as likely,” the health investigators reported.
On Wednesday, subcommittee chairman Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., discussed some of the documents, which were recently declassified by the Defense Department as part of the panel’s investigation.
A September 2004 report found that “the potential for daily contact with radiation exists for up to 100 percent of the assigned units,” Lynch said to reporters, reading from the document.