David Koresh implementing his ideas about suicide, I think yes, it did.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. Does anybody else want to comment? I do not want to belabor it.

Mr. JAMAR. Yes, sir, I just wanted to follow the negotiator there. The analysis we did was how serious was the suicide pact in there from March 1 on. We did not hear anything specific until Victorine Hollingsworth came out on March 21. Her statement was corroborated by Marjorie Thomas, who was one of the survivors of the fire, and by Kathy Schroeder who came out or expelled by Koresh.

That was in our minds, but our analysis that if we do this, are we just going to have a mass suicide. Our thinking was that if there is a plan for mass suicide, that we do not think there was at the time, and it starts, how are we going to stop it. The only way we can stop it is to insert CS gas. But we were hopeful that when we did this, that it would drive the people out and make the place uninhabitable. We were extremely hopeful there was no suicide plan. Were we certain of it? Absolutely not. I think with the analysis and the recommendations, there was not, based on all of these conversations for all these weeks.

I think that in the reading of something, if you really believe something, you are going to read it into it anyway. I think what I will do is I will reread what you just described to me and I will give that as open mind as I can give, and I will reread those.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. The tapes, you mean, the transcription of the tapes?

Mr. JAMAR. The tapes, with that in mind. Again, I did not way it was bogus. I did not reject that plan. All I said was give us something this weekend that will show that you are serious, but all they gave us was the stall language, I have not seen the first tape, I have not seen the first page, I am going to edit it, you are not going to get it until I edit it, and I have not seen the first page. We get that on Sunday. That is what we were getting.

I was not getting any of this hopeful description of we have a new light and everything is wonderful in here. I never got that at all. But I will reread both the overhears and the negotiation transcripts. I will reread them in mind with nothing else in mind, I will read that.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. You will be back with us and I appreciate if you would do it. It would be very helpful to us.

I want to thank this panel for spending much of the day with us today. It has been a very extraordinary day and a very important day. We will resume with two or three of you in the future, but that is all for now.

The second panel will commence after you have had a chance to get up and the other folks can come in.

Thank you.

We are not really in recess. We need to have as much expedition as we can here. We have got several people who are coming in as witnesses.

I would like to start introducing them, if we can, if we can get the first panel cleared out. I know that is not quickly and easily done sometimes. As we know, we are running long hours in this subcommittee.

I will begin introducting our second panel today. There are name plates up here for your position I will swear you in and we will talk about the procedure for this panel.

Dr. Alan Stone has been a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard University since 1983. Dr. Stone has been board certified in psychiatry for almost 30 years. He is a past president of the American Psychiatric Society. As a professor at Harvard, he holds appointments on both the faculties of the law school and the medical school.

Dr. William Marcus, our second witness on this panel, is Senior Science Advisor at the Office of Science and Technology of the Environmental Protection Agency. He is board certified in toxicology by the American Boards of Toxicologists. He is also the associate editor of the Journal of Environmental Pathology, Toxicology and Oncology.

Dr. Paul Rice, our third panelist today, is a medical doctor and pathologist. Since 1987, he has served as head of pathology and general toxicology for the Chemical Defence Establishment in Salisbury, England.

Our next panelist is Dr. David Upshall, who holds a Ph.D. in toxicology and is a registered toxicologist in England. As a manager of a section of the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment in Salisbury, England, he is involved in research on inhalation and cellular toxicology research.

Our next panelist is Dr. George Uhlig. He is professor of chemistry and mathematics at the College of Eastern Utah. He also is vice president for research and development at Thermic Laboratories in New York City. Dr. Uhlig is a 23-year veteran of the Air Force, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

And our last member on this panel today is Mr. Hays Parks, a special assistant to the Judge Advocate General of the Army. He is an expert in international law relating to military operations and has served as a member of the U.S. delegations for law of war negotiations on many occasions. He has taught at the Army, Air Force, and Naval War Colleges, and is an adjunct professor at George Washington University. Mr. Parks served in Vietnam as an infantry company commander and later as a judge advocate. He retired from the U.S. Marine Corps with the rank of colonel.

I would ask all of you to please rise and I will swear you in. Will you raise your right hand: Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you are about to give today shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Dr. STONE. I do.

Dr. MARCUS. I do.
Dr. RICE. I do.

Dr. UPSHALL. I do.

Dr. UHLIG. I do.

Mr. PARKS. I do.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. Please be seated. Let the record reflect that all of the witnesses answered in the affirmative.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. MCCOLLUM. Today's second panel will be a little different in that four of the witnesses by preagreement will give 10-minute testimony each. I am going to introduce you in a certain order for this,

so you can prepare yourselves for that as I describe the rest of the procedure.

Dr. Uhlig will be first, Dr. Upshall will be second, Dr. Marcus will be third, and Dr. Rice will be fourth, to try to just give us a flavor and balance. That is our best estimate of how this should be proceeding. Dr. Uhlig, Dr. Upshall, Dr. Marcus, and then Dr. Rice, in that order.

Now, the way this is going to work, since you have got 10 minutes, I am going to turn the timer on when each of you begins. The timer is scheduled to run for 5 minutes, not 10, so you will see a yellow light go off and you will then have another 5 minutes and it will run down to a second yellow light. We really do have to keep with this, just as we do up here with our questioners, or we will not get through this.

This will take us a while to do, the better part probably of the next 45 minutes or so. But we need to try to keep on this as much as possible. But I think it is important for the CS gas questions that you are going to be discussing, for us to give you a chance to explain this to us, since there is a lot of technical stuff here, rather than just starting out with a question session.

With that in mind, if we could begin with you, Dr. Uhlig, I will turn the timer on, if you are ready to proceed. You are recognized for 10 minutes.

Dr. Uhlig.

STATEMENT OF GEORGE F. UHLIG, PH.D., PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY, COLLEGE OF EASTERN UTAH

Dr. UHLIG. Mr. Chairman, thank you so much for the opportunity to come here.

Let me start out with the very positive side. I have heard a lot of negative today. It has been about 15 years since I have had a good helping of collard greens, and you serve some real good ones downstairs in the restaurant.

Let us go ahead and press on on CS. I am a chemist. I am not an expert in CS. The first time that I experienced the effects of CS was when my research assistant Anita Dingman and I made a videotape that I have got here of the combustion of CS methylene chloride on cardboard. It worked very well, I should say, and that video is there.

I am not going to try and bamboozle you with a lot of fancy equations. We are going to make reference to amounts of CS agent. Being an educator, I like to use little tiny saccharin tablets so that you get a feeling for the size and weight of CS based on quarters. We all know about what the heft of a quarter is.

Now, CS is an abbreviation that many of us would use for brevity's sake. As a chemist, it stands for orthochlorobonzylidene malononitrile. That is a mouthful and a half, especially at this time in this hearing. It really takes its name from the two scientists that discovered it, Corson and Stoughton. They prepared it in 1928. It has been the standard riot control agent of the Army since about 1959.

I was horrified to find it in the possession of my female students in my classes as a self-protection device, 10 percent CS and methylene chloride, and they carry these little tubes in their purses.

The physical state of CS is a powder, usually a cream-colored powder, not a gas. You disburse it as an aerosol cloud of finely divided particles. You can blow it by blowers, bursting grenades, ferret rounds, or burning a mixture of the powder in a fuel. The effects of CS are described in Army publications that I was able to get my hands on as "impressive." You need about 20 milligrams per cubic meter to effect incapacitation. This little tiny saccharine tablet that you barely can see is 20 milligrams, actually about that. Some of them weigh 18 milligrams, and some of them 20. So that is about the size in a cubic meter.

Now, a cubic meter is about the volume of your standard 26-inch diagonal TV set. That contains about 35 cubic feet of air. If I stuck my head in there with 1 of these little tiny tablets for 1 minute, I would breathe about 1/64th of this tablet, if the Army calculations are correct and they seem to be to me-and that would incapacitate me.

What does it mean to be incapacitated by CS? Now, understand this is for the usual dosage. The affected persons experience severe burning sensations in the eyes with copious tears. My research assistant Anita Dingman experienced this in making this video. The eyes close involuntarily. The nose runs and moist skin stings.

Amnesty International produced a report toward the end of the 1980's. They were concerned about the excessive use of CS by the Israeli Defense Forces, or the IDF, in the occupied territories. Their findings are about what it meant to be incapacitated by excessive amounts of CS-intense tearing of the eyes, shortness of breath, irritation of the respiratory tract similar to an acute asthma attack, chemical burns, intense nausea, retching, abdominal cramps, and, particularly in children, severe and protracted diarrhea. That is a quote from their report.

I tried to get some feeling for the amount of CS used at Waco. It is very difficult to get your hands on accurate data. Nonetheless, it appears that about 400 of these ferret rounds were used or in excess of them. There are some sources that indicate a flight right round was used. Some folks would go as high as 500 pounds of CS used. I have a tendency to discount that. I think it was more on the order of around 4.5 to 7.5 pounds.

If you are an animal, we understand very well what the toxicology of CS is. If you are a pig, for instance, about 5,600 milligrams, which is the weight of about 22 dollars' worth of these quarters, and this is injected in a space of a cubic meter over 1 minute. If you are a guinea pig, it is about the weight of $1.50 worth of quarters. Now, do not go quoting me that a guinea pig is only worth $1.50. It is the weight of the quarters.

I ran across an article in the British test of halon fire extinguishers on humans, and they found that the toxicity levels were considerably lower than that for rats, and I am going to quote from them. The British have a marvelous way of expressing themselves. This may be because of the greater mental complexity of the human organism and the different body chemistry, or it may be simply that rats were feeling rather odd, but nobody knew.

Now, the best I have been able to do in making a calculation of what it would take to completely kill people in Koresh's size facil

ity, it would be in excess of 1,000 pounds of agent applied in that facility. I think that is just totally inconceivable in my mind.

I tried to get a better estimate of the amount of CS that could have been injected based on the fireball seen by survivors and assuming that the dust would carry that fireball through the hallways. I was fortunate in finding a publication from the Fire Institute at Lester, England, that gave me a range of dust particles. So if I were to take about a quarter of a sack of this Equal right here and dispense it into a cubic foot, then I would have sufficient material-by the way, Equal does burn very nicely, and so does sodium bicarbonate, at about those ranges. So does cement powder at about those ranges. So it could have happened.

But when you do that and you cut things down and you look at an order of magnitude less than that, you reach the conclusion about 75 pounds to 750 pounds, which I still think is excessive. I looked at the logistics of bringing that amount of material in. A 55gallon drum, according to manufacturer literature, contains about 200 pounds of CS. If I am looking at an agent called CS-1, which is a much more persistent agent, this comes ten 8-pound bags packed in a 55-gallon drum, so the logistics of the situation to bring 1,000 pounds onsite would be 5 55-gallon drums, 13 55-gallon drums of the CS-1 material. Methylene chloride, by the way, in and of itself is a toxic material.

The amount injected at Waco that day, probably the lowest estimate would be sufficient to incapacitate people in about a 200,000square-foot K-Mart store, just to give you a feeling for it. It was probably 2 to 4 times the amount that you would need to incapacitate the people in David Koresh's complex, just to give you a feeling for that particular number.

I think Attorney General Reno and this is my opinion-may have gotten her wish regarding the children. Gasmasks do not fit children very well. They probably, taking a look at some of the data, the bodies and number of children that were found in the vault area. These people were probably asphyxiated early on in the game either by the carbon dioxide injected or by the methylene chloride vapor. All the methylene chloride would have been a vapor. Calculations using the ideal gas law indicate this. You can take me to task because I did not do all my sums, but there is not that much hard data available.

In my opinion, the attempt to bring the siege at the Branch Davidian complex to a conclusion was really botched. I think it was Congressman Conyers-my time is up, according to my watch— Congressman Conyers made the statement that a lot of money was being spent to look at this. In my opinion, perhaps the law enforcement agencies should have gone ahead and admitted to making some boneheads and just pressed on and told this committee what they were doing to take care of it.

It is a lot like a cat that we have at home that we call Snoozer. We play hide and seek with Snoozer. When it is Snoozer's turn to be found, she has got just her head either under the curtains or under the couch. She gets terribly annoyed when we find her. You know, if a quarter of her is under the couch and three-quarters are hanging out, similar to this type of investigation.

My time is up, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.