From 1961 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed Vietnam with Agent Orange, which contained large quantities of Dioxin, in order to defoliate the trees for military objectives. Dioxin is one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man. It has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen (causes cancer) and by the American Academy of Medicine as a teratogen (causes birth defects).
Between 2.5 and 4.8 million people were exposed to Agent Orange. 1.4 billion hectares of land and forest – approximately 12 percent of the land area of Vietnam – were sprayed.
The Vietnamese who were exposed to the chemical have suffered from cancer, liver damage, pulmonary and heart diseases, defects to reproductive capacity, and skin and nervous disorders. Children and grandchildren of those exposed have severe physical deformities, mental and physical disabilities, diseases, and shortened life spans. The forests and jungles in large parts of southern Vietnam have been devastated and denuded. They may never grow back and if they do, it will take 50 to 200 years to regenerate. Animals that inhabited the forests and jungles have become extinct, disrupting the communities that depended on them. The rivers and underground water in some areas have also been contaminated. Erosion and desertification will change the environment, contributing to the warming of the planet and dislocation of crop and animal life.
The U.S. government and the chemical companies knew that Agent Orange, when produced rapidly at high temperatures, would contain large quantities of Dioxin. Nevertheless, the chemical companies continued to produce it in this manner. The U.S. government and the chemical companies also knew that the Bionetics Study, commissioned by the government in 1963, showed that even low levels of Dioxin produced significant deformities in unborn offspring of laboratory animals. But they suppressed that study and continued to spray Vietnam with Agent Orange. It wasn’t until the study was leaked in 1969 that the spraying of Agent Orange was discontinued.
U.S. soldiers who served in Vietnam have experienced similar illnesses. After they sued the chemical companies, including Dow and Monsanto, that manufactured and sold Agent Orange to the government, the case settled out of court for $180 million which gave few plaintiffs more than a few thousand dollars each. Later the U.S. veterans won a legislative victory for compensation for exposure to Agent Orange. They receive $1.52 billion per year in benefits.
But when the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange sued the chemical companies in federal court, U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein dismissed the lawsuit, concluding that Agent Orange did not constitute a poison weapon prohibited by the Hague Convention of 1907. Weinstein had reportedly told the chemical companies when they settled the U.S. veterans’ suit that their liability was over and he was making good on his promise. His dismissal was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. The chemical companies admitted in their filing in the Supreme Court that the harm alleged by the victims was foreseeable although not intended. How can something that is foreseeable be unintended?
On May 15 and 16 of this year, the International Peoples’ Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange convened in Paris and heard testimony from 27 victims, witnesses and scientific experts. Seven people from three continents served as judges of the Tribunal, which was sponsored by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL).
Testimony given by the witnesses showed the following:
Mai Giang Vu, a member of the Army of South Vietnam, carried barrels of the chemicals on his back. His two sons could not walk or function normally, their limbs gradually “curled up” and they could only crawl. They died at the ages of 23 and 25.
Pham The Minh, whose parents also served in the South Vietnamese Army, showed the Tribunal his severely deformed, crooked, skinny legs; he has great difficulty walking, as well as digestive and pulmonary diseases.
To Nga Tran is a French Vietnamese who worked as a journalist during the spraying. Her daughter weighed 6.6 pounds at the age of three months. Her skin began shredding and she could not bear to have skin contact or simple demonstrations of love. She died at 17 months, weighing 6.6 pounds. Ms. To described a woman who gave birth to a “ball” with no human form. Many children are born without brains; others make inhuman sounds.
Rosemarie Hohn Mizo is the widow of George Mizo, who served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam in 1967. He slept on contaminated ground and consumed food and drink that were also contaminated. George refused to serve after he was wounded for the third time; he was court-martialed and sentenced to 2-1/2 years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. George helped found the Friendship Village where Vietnamese victims live in a supportive environment. He died from conditions related to his exposure to Agent Orange.
Georges Doussin, co-founder of the Friendship Village, visited a dormitory where he saw 50 highly deformed “monsters,” who produced inhuman sounds. One man whose parent had been exposed to Agent Orange had four toes on each foot. Doussin said Agent Orange creates “total anarchy in evolution.”
Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, from Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), sees many children born without arms and/or legs, without heads or faces, and without a brain chamber. According to the World Health Organization, only 1 – 4 parts per trillion (PPT) of Dioxin in breast milk can cause severe deformities in fetuses and even death. But up to 1450 PPT are found in maternal milk in Vietnam.
Dr. Jeanne Stellman, who wrote the seminal article about Agent Orange in the magazine Nature, testified that “this is the largest unstudied environmental disaster in the world (except for natural disasters).”
Dr. Jean Grassman, from Brooklyn College at City University of New York, testified that Dioxin is a potent cellular disregulator which alters a variety of pathways to disrupt many systems. Children, she said, are very sensitive to Dioxin; the intrauterine or post natal exposure to Dioxin may result in altered immune, neurobehavioral, and hormonal functioning. Women pass their exposure to their children both in utero and through the excretion of Dioxin in breast milk.
Many ecosystems have been destroyed and Dioxin continues to poison Vietnam, especially in the several “hot spots.”
Chemist Dr. Pierre Vermeulin testified that it was estimated that $1 billion would be required to restore one hectare of land in Vietnam. The cost of caring for the victims, many of whom need 24-hour care, is enormous.
In 1973, President Richard Nixon promised $3.25 billion in reconstruction aid to Vietnam “without any preconditions.” That aid was never granted.
There are only 11 Friendship Villages in Vietnam; 1000 are needed to care for the child victims of Agent Orange.
Last week, the Bureau of the IADL, meeting in Hanoi, presented President Nguyen Minh Triet of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam with the final decision of the Tribunal. The judges found the U.S. government and the chemical companies guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ecocide during the illegal U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam. We recommended that the Agent Orange Commission be established in Vietnam to assess the damages suffered by the people and destruction of the environment, and that the U.S. government and the chemical companies provide compensation for the damage and destruction.
I told the President that it always struck me that even as U.S. bombs were dropping on the people of Vietnam, they always distinguished between the American government and the American people. The President responded, “We fought the forces of aggression but we always reserved our love for the people of America . . . because we knew they always supported us.”
An estimated 3 million Vietnamese people were killed in the war, which also claimed 58,000 American lives. For many other Vietnamese and U.S. veterans and their families, the war continues to take its toll.
Several treaties the United States has ratified require an effective remedy for violations of human rights. It is time to make good on Nixon’s promise and remedy the terrible wrong the U.S. government perpetrated on the people of Vietnam. Congress must pass legislation to compensate the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange as it did for the U.S. Vietnam veteran victims.
Our government must know that it cannot continue to use weapons that target and harm civilians. Indeed, the U.S. military is using depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will poison those countries for incalculable decades.
attacks. However, those officials refuse to stipulate further just who they have included under that rubric, according to Fick, and have not offered any figure on civilian deaths. 
Ghor’s deputy governor Ikrammudin Rezazada says villagers are reporting 
Peace and Justice Post 
Obama whitewashes foreign policy
June 19, 2009By Teo Ballve | The Advoacte, June 19, 2009
President Obama is trying to whitewash the history of U.S. foreign policy.
In two major speeches in the last month, he has spun a fairy tale.
At the National Archives on May 21, Obama claimed, “From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.” And in Cairo, Egypt, just two weeks later, Obama said, “America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. … America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election.”
These assertions ring entirely hollow in Latin America, where the reverse is true: Washington propped up tyrannical leaders and bankrolled murderous armies. Under the iron fist of these U.S.-backed regimes, the region’s torture chambers rang with the cries of innocent victims.
As Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza ruthlessly ruled his country like a colonial coffee plantation, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly said of his ally: “Somoza may be a son of a b—-, but he’s our son of a b—-.”
Intervention sometimes came at the behest of influential U.S. companies, as in Guatemala. In 1950, President Jacobo Arbenz won a landslide election and moved ahead with a land reform program aimed at breaking up large landholdings.
The reforms sat uneasily with executives from the United Fruit Co. (today, Chiquita), which owned vast, feudal-like fruit plantations throughout the country. The company collaborated with the CIA and the State Department to orchestrate Arbenz’s overthrow in 1954. What followed were a succession of military governments and a crescendo of violent conflict that ultimately claimed more than 200,000 Guatemalan lives.
After the socialist Salvador Allende won the presidency of Chile in 1970, national security adviser Henry Kissinger declared, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Three years later, Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende with the support of the U.S. government. Pinochet then helped band together his fellow South American dictators. They formed a coordinated campaign of state terrorism, called “Operation Condor,” against leftist sympathizers. The U.S. ambassador to Paraguay at the time suggested the campaign was receiving key intelligence support from the Pentagon.
A common tactic practiced by the military in these dirty wars was to throw drugged, yet alive and conscious, prisoners out of aircraft over the ocean. Not even pregnant women were spared from electric shocks to genitalia and waterboarding.
As Congress became concerned over the intensifying repression carried out by U.S. allies, Kissinger assured his nervous Argentine counterparts: “Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported.” Those “friends” killed 30,000 innocent people in Argentina alone.
In Central America, where civil wars broke out, the destruction was even greater. The CIA and the Pentagon worked with death squads in the name of U.S. national security. In El Salvador, where Washington spent $6 billion trying to defeat rebels, 75,000 lost their lives.
Today, Washington still disregards human rights abuses in its military alliances. Colombia’s army is drenched in scandal over its execution of 1,600 innocent civilians, who were later claimed as rebels killed in combat. The United Nations has called political murder at the hands of the army “widespread and systematic.” Nevertheless, Obama’s first foreign appropriations budget has slated $270 million in military aid to Colombia.
At the National Archives, Obama made a veiled criticism of the Bush administration’s policies.
“We went off course,” Obama said.
As U.S. involvement in Latin America shows, the truth is that the ship went off course a long time ago. Acknowledging this would be the first step toward steering it straight again.
Teo Ballve is a writer for Progressive Media Project, affiliated with The Progressive magazine.
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Tags:Colombia, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Latin America, President Obama, Salvador Allende, U.S. foreign policy, United States
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