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End of the Road for Agent Orange Victims?
HANOI - Where can Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange get justice? Probably nowhere, after the United States Supreme Court refused to hear, this month, a final appeal by Vietnamese plaintiffs against chemical giants Dow and Monsanto.
U.S. Air Force planes spray the defoliant chemical Agent Orange over dense vegetation in South Vietnam in this 1966 photo. Air Force researchers found elevated risks of prostate and skin cancer and also diabetes in those who sprayed the chemical defoliant. (AP file) Soon after the Mar. 2 decision on the case, that began in 2004, was announced local newspapers declared that rights had been "trampled" upon, and foreign ministry spokesman Le Dung said the nation was disgusted.
Two weeks later, the issue remains in the news and in the minds of frustrated Vietnamese citizens.
The legal battle is likely over. Vietnamese plaintiffs cannot appeal again, despite promises of help from the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), a non-governmental organization (NGO) dealing with rights issues.
U.S. courts have ruled that no link has been established between Agent Orange's active ingredient, the highly toxic dioxin, and the birth defects claimed. Both victims and the Vietnamese government claim otherwise. Moreover, under U.S. law these companies cannot be sued as they were acting under government orders.
Hope may now come from avenues of 'softer' power: friendship societies, NGOs, and increased pressure on the Obama administration.
Agent Orange has been described as one of the last hurdles in the U.S.-Vietnam relationship that is now worth over 15 billion US dollars in two-way trade. In reality, it may be less than a hurdle, but the government knows that an angry response is better than none.
"The current leadership does not want to make this an impediment or hurdle in the bilateral relationship but it faces a domestic constituency that demands some compensation," said Carl Thayer of the Australian Defense Force Academy over e-mail. "[But] the condemnation by the state-controlled media and by government officials is an expression of genuine frustration."
The outlook is not entirely grim. The U.S. government in 2007 earmarked three million dollars as part of a cleanup effort in particularly affected hotspots, such as where the chemical was stored.
Targeted was the former U.S. airbase at Danang city and now an airport serving the coastal tourist area. Hatfield Consultants, Canada, which conducted soil tests in 2007, turned up results that showed levels of toxic matter 400 times higher than acceptable levels.
"I see a potential unspoken linkage between the U.S. addressing the legacy of Agent Orange and gradually improved security-defense ties. The Agent Orange issue gives the U.S. a possible avenue of influence on the Vietnamese political system and society at large," continued Thayer.
Some hold out hopes that the Obama administration will pursue the matter. Len Aldis, secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society, has written two open letters to President Barack Obama, the second one protesting the Mar. 2 ruling.
Aldis wrote: "Despite the court ruling you have the authority to make a policy that will give financial compensation to the victims of Agent Orange and to their families. It is your moral obligation. Sooner or later, it has to be done."
Agent Orange is a chemical defoliant. Over 80 million lt were dropped on south and central Vietnam to deny communist forces cover, and give clear sight to army bases fearing attacks.
Agent Orange contains dioxin, the most deadly substance known. In lab experiments scientists have found even a few parts per trillion dangerous.
Though granting compensation worth 180 million dollars to veterans in 1984 in an out-of-court settlement, the U.S. government denies that dioxin causes birth defects. The Vietnamese government says otherwise and estimates that four million citizens are Agent Orange-affected.
Despite its inevitability this loss is disheartening for many.
‘Doc' Bernie Duff, a U.S. veteran who walked the length of the country last year to raise awareness about Agent Orange and will do so again in less than a month, told IPS via e-mail, "I was hoping that this blot could at last be removed... as a U.S. veteran I have watched many of my compatriots suffer and often die as a result of the use of that chemical compound."
People in Vietnam do feel strongly about Agent Orange, though they aver they no longer care about the war that spawned its usage. That is history. The children born with deformities and the remaining cancer-stricken veterans are not.
The government believes that Agent Orange has affected the third generation, with sick and deformed children born to people sprayed during the conflict. They feel an innocent second, or third, generation should not suffer needlessly.
"There's never enough help. These families have no bright future. There are economic costs and it also affects their spirit and their mind," Vu Hai Thai, a 23-year-old banking student, told IPS. "The court judgment wasn't fair. But it [Agent Orange] is a past story now."
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Show All"U.S. courts have ruled that no link has been established between Agent Orange's active ingredient, the highly toxic dioxin, and the birth defects claimed."
Actually the link between Agent Orange and genetic damage was proven, among other places, at the Institute of Molecular BioScience at Massey University in New Zealand. The full report is published at the website the Agent Orange Association of Canada at http://www.agentorangecanada.com
Also, the Veterans’ Benefits Act of 1997 granted benefits for children of Vietnam veterans who were suffering from spina bifida, a birth defect. (38 U.S.C. §1805).
These are some of the other diseases which VA acknowledges resulted from exposure to Agent Orange.
Hodgkin's disease.
Multiple myeloma.
Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma
Acute and subacute peripheral neuropathy.
Porphyria cutanea tarda.
Prostate cancer.
Respiratory cancers (cancer of the lung, bronchus, larynx, or trachea).
Soft-tissue sarcoma (other than osteosarcoma, chondrosarcoma, Kaposi's sarcoma, or mesothelioma).
But of course the rationale here is that it is the fault of the government of Vietnam for allowing its people to walk around in a country that was doused in the chemical.
The Nuremberg War Criminal Tribunal convicted 24 IG Farben company board members and executives on the basis of mass murder, and other crimes against humanity for manufacturing Zyklon-B gas, the chemical used in the Nazi gas chambers. The fact that they were acting under government orders, and that Zyklon B had other "legitimate" uses, didn't work for those criminals under the Nuremburg trials, but it has worked just fine for Dow and Monsanto in US courts.
America, with perfect hindsight, and unrestrained arrogance, has chosen a path more dangerous and less forgiving than the one chosen by Nazi Germany.
As the newcasters reminded us each day during the Gulf War, the US considers non-military "casualties" to be collateral damage and collateral damage does not count.
Mahalo; excellent post!
It's rulings like this that made me leave my country for twenty years. I returned in 2000 and this sh_t is still happening! Hope all you CDers can watch "The World according to Monsanto." It's a well-made shocumentary that's on the web now and then.
As a Veet nam vet I always thought the dropping of agent orange was the most cowardly thing we did in that war. You can't run and you can't hide from it.
Monsanto and Diamond made billions and were NEVER touched.
SCOTUS......=......Supreme Corruption of the United States,
It is foolish to expect the US Government to allow this...... Open this can of worms and it can never be closed. The responsibility for long term damage caused by the weapons of war would put governments and industry entirely out of the war business. They could not conduct wars if they had to look ahead to this kind of settlement. Agent Orange (245T) was not understood to have these effects at the time it was used. I held a quart jar of it in my hands just two years ago...... having found it in a cabinet of yard chemicals dating from the 60's. A common over the counter chemical in those days .... as was DDT, and Heptachlor.... which I also found there.
In an ideal world, the men responsible for these things would be brought to justice.... Bush and Cheney would be sitting in the dock for their crimes, Johnson, and Nixon would have lived out their golden years behind bars, and Reagan would have died in prison for his crimes. The reality is somewhat different.
Howard
Idealism VS Reality........and the victor will always(?) be____________.
Sioux Rose
Here again is an instance where it is useful to remember the law of karma. We are living in a time where the very basis for accountability seems to be fast becoming a bygone notion. Fortunately, that is not how the Universe regards action. Just as wealthy persons living in the Middle Ages believed they could buy access to a seat in heaven by paying the church a bribe known as "an indulgence," today's wealthy corporatists OWN the lawmakers of our times and are getting their own apparent free passes.
What bothers me the most about Monsanto is that it's proven itself a company with no moral compass, a company absolutely ready to kill in order to make its own claim to wealth. With this type of spiritually bankrupt track record, it is beyond the pale that it positions itself as a leader in biogenetic engineering. Thus to hear Monsanto tout that its products are perfectly safe when the whole "science" of genetic mutations is relative new, and there doesn't yet exist a body of evidence for its long-term effects is true to its operating principle: morally bankrupt.
Monsanto profited handsomely from war products like Agent Orange and has graduated to a new generation of similar sinister products, such as those used in the "war on drugs" in South America. Once again farmers are being exposed to dangerous toxic products, many of these lend lasting effects in the form of creating physical liabilities for 2nd and 3rd generations.
Mother Nature knew what she was doing when over eons of trial and error she put particular genetic combinations together. Now we have the equivalent of organized crime raiding the genetic treasury and stealing the codes stored there from the sacred banks of time. And look who has made this claim to so dangerous a heist? It's not unlike those who have access to the fiduciary treasury who similarly are acting lawlessly, but believe they own impunity.
When the thieves and murderers rule the temples, then you'd better hope there is a higher justice than that being everywhere thwarted or maligned, a force such souls will have to answer to. That's the key thing, the tough one is that the scales do not always end up balanced in ONE lifespan.
Yesterday's Agent orange is today's DU. Thousands of cancers and birth defects, but it is all in our minds. Our government, which is concerned for our welfare and never lies, has told us so.
DU now shows up in filters around the world along with tests in the bodies of those who were directly exposed. Look at the photos of the birth defects becoming all too common in areas where we use the damned stuff.
----------------------------------------------------
Depleted Uranium
Depleted Uranium, the new panacea
The Arms Maker’s choice with a half-life of only 4.5 billion years.
Workers in DU must wear exposure suits and respirators
Just a creative use of atomic leftovers.
Dense, hard, it punches through armor like tissue,
Vaporizes and fragments into dust and tiny chunks.
Dust to be breathed and chunks to be embedded
As shrapnel or become buried in earth.
Battle tested in Desert Storm and Kosovo,
Now everyone is making them, and selling them,
To armies around the globe, eager for the latest thing.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi desert and Kosovo are laden with tons.
Pay no attention to the sick and the dying.
The Government says it is anything but DU.
Agent Orange was all in the mind, too.
Birth defects and cancer are coincidence in Govspeak.
A hundred or a thousand years from now,
When Hussein and Imperial America are long forgotten,
Or are but spooky tales told around the campfire,
As a new civilization tries to grow.
Peasants, trying to coax food from the ground will stir up clouds of dust.
They, their children and their animals will slowly sicken and die,
And they will know not why.
Just collateral damage from a weapon long ago.
Steve Osborn
19 February 2003
----------------------------------------------------
And so we continue towards our own destruction, like the frog in the frying pan of slowly heating water, never realizing the danger until it is too late.
Excellent post;
Yesterday, Agent Orange- whose effects lingers on for decades.
Today, DU- whose effects will still linger decades from now.
Chemical warfare is a war crime.
There are excellent posts here. It warms my old heart to know people actually are still alert to this government's insistences...
"U.S. courts have ruled that no link has been established between Agent Orange's active ingredient, the highly toxic dioxin, and the birth defects claimed."
The same genetic material that told a generation to 'Duck and Cover,' that nuclear radiation and fallout is harmless ('just take a pill'). DU is not a 'new' phenomenon or generational negative icon for a dead paradigm.
It is the icon of a dying culture, choking on its somnambulate karma, hoping its existence has mutated to a more vespertine vine or succulent while the planet rockets through a violent universe, itself ungodly, irreverent and thoroughly uncaring...
Has there ever been a time when the US was not destroying the earth
and human beings? Hardly ever!
The right-wing corporate "Supremes" have again said 'No!' to conscience
and the world, once again to Vietnam and its citizen's lives we so
easily destroyed -- and to our own soldiers and their families!
War by Monsanto -- Food by Monsanto!!
Time for a name change???
or "According to all myth, the female - not the male -- gives life"
One really cannot expect justice from the US Legal System EVER.
The U.S. have been involved in the murder of Vietnamese people since 1945 when it decided to back the French in their attempted (but failed) reconquest of Indochina. When the U.S. war ended in 1975 3-4 million Indochinese had been murdered. The death toll from this murderous operation continues to mount as the people of Indochina die from the effects of agents orange and agent blue (which you don't hear much about -- it too is deadly and was used throughout the war). Amerika is the most murderous terrorist state on earth.
The United States government uses WMD's on other nations and is not held accountable. It likes to talk about terrorists in other countries, while it is the biggest terrorist nation on Earth -- responsible for the deaths of millions world-wide. Just read news of democratic left leaning government being elected in Salvador, despite recent U.S. covert operations there in an effort with right-wing supporters to disrupt elections of a soverign nation. When will the U.S. government live up to its false rhetoric of freedom and democracy in other countries? PROBABLY NEVER UNLESS CONFRONTED IN AN INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT!! -- and maybe not even then, sadly.
Let us not forget the Bhopal disaster while we are at it. We don't even need a war to justify murder by US corporations!!!
How about a petition to establish term limits for the Supremes, retroactive?
Zyclone B was also made to government orders. . .Ditto Bhopal
and what was in Rumsfeld's gas that Saddam dropped on the Kurds?
the nwo control of the masses relies on the court system as its ultimate backstop
that is the court system that says companies like monsanto and others have the right to come into your country - assassinate or generally corrupt your leaders, ruin your economy, indebt your nation in perpetuity, kill your peasants, pollute your ecosystem and then get of the hook in terms of legal liability
having the supreme court in your back pocket - priceless
and it is a crowded back pocket what with the president and the congress all bouncing around in there
just ask bush who was awarded the presidency by declaration - thank you supreme court
if its any cold consolation to the vietnamese - the american soldiers who had their healths ruined by agent orange and other chemicals can't get a dime out of monsanto either
rather like the vets from desert storm, operation enduring freedom our wounded soldiers are on their own once they are used up
same with the first responders on 9/11
piss off the lot of you
The USA still owes the Vietnamese government 3.2 billion dollars with interest as reparations.
It would be nice if the corporate shill Mr. Obama would just write them a check, and be done with it.
But, the government, like its corporate leaders, will never admit malfeasance or wrong.