Thursday, June 24, 2010

Presidential Executive Orders Defense Production Act

The Position of Dow Chemical Company today remains that Agent Orange was never a health hazard and never posed a health risk. As a safe guard against any liable action. Dow notes that its chemical operation related to Agent Orange had been commandeered by the US federal government during Vietnam by Presidential executive order under the emergency powers of the Defense Production Act and that if anyone should be sued it would be the Federal Government, including the Pentagon, Department of the Army, and Department of the Air Force. As a nation at war, the U.S. government compelled a number of companies to produce Agent Orange under the Defense Production Act. The government specified how it would be produced and controlled its use.


Innovest group has advised both Dow Chemical of the investor risk related to Agent Orange use outside Vietnam, The Dow Chemical has never rebutted that notion other than claim Agent Orange was not a health risk during Vietnam. This documentation alone should suffice to give Veterans and effected residents outside Vietnam the benefit of a doubt, since the Department of Defense can neither confirm of deny Agent Orange was manufactured at Paritutu New Plymouth New Zealand or stored on Guam during the Vietnam War.

Even if there is not sufficient proof that Agent Orange was manufactured at Paritutu and shipped on to Guam during the Vietnam War, the chemical companies who produced it under orders from the DoD appear to believe it was. This should be good enough for the VA to add Paritutu and Guam to the list of presumed locations of Agent Orange use, storage, or trans shipment.

The scientific investigation on Agent Orange has gone on since the Vietnam War and continues today. There have been extensive epidemiological studies of those veterans most exposed to Agent Orange. Today, the scientific consensus is that when the collective human evidence is reviewed, it doesn’t show that Agent Orange caused veteran’s illnesses.”

The same position paper in which Dow Chemical today claims that “the scientific consensus is that when the collective human evidence is reviewed, it doesn’t show that Agent Orange caused veteran’s illnesses” also has Dow Chemical coming across as if the chemical companies “federalized” by the U.S. government during Vietnam were also victims of the Agent Orange they claim that the US government produced.


In fact, in arguing its latest lawsuit filed by Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange use in Vietnam the chemical companies successfully argued right up to the Supreme Court that the governments involved in the Vietnam War must resolve the issues surrounding exposure to Agent Orange, for the chemical companies had no choice but to produce what DoD and the White House wanted under the Defense Production Act.

This view is reinforced by the position taken by Monsanto, “There have been other lawsuits since that time [the Agent Orange settlement]. In March of 2009, a key legal question was settled in the United States when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand unanimous lower court rulings disallowing recovery from lawsuits on the Agent Orange issue. The Supreme Court agreed that the companies were not responsible for the implications of military use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, because the manufacturers were government contractors, carrying out the instructions of government.”

Agent Orange use outside Vietnam

With one face the two faced Dow Chemical and Monsanto deny the health risk to Veterans of Agent Orange poisoning but are quick with their other face to be cautioned about the Corporate Investment Risk of future claims or lawsuits due to Agent Orange use on Guam and elsewhere outside Vietnam.

Their strategy tends to be placing the blame on the federal government. America’s Veterans need to ask this hard question could the chemical companies be right? History of the Agent Orange lawsuits tends to support their position. If not, how come Vets and lawyers were so willing to settle out of court, and how come the compensation and research aspects surrounding Agent Orange have been within the realm of the US government NOT the chemical companies. This includes US allied countries Governments outside the US involved in the Vietnam War.

The US Presidential Executive Order of the US Defense Production Act also applied to its US owned overseas chemical production plants, one being Ivon Watkins Dow Chemical Plant at Paritutu New Plymouth New Zealand in full cooperation and agreement with its Vietnam War allie the New Zealand Government.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Price Tag on Legacy.. $300 Million.

HANOI, Vietnam—Thirty-five years after the Vietnam War, a $300 million price tag has been placed on the most contentious legacy still tainting U.S.-Vietnam relations: Agent Orange.

An action plan released Wednesday called for the first time on the U.S. government and other donors to provide an estimated $30 million annually over 10 years to clean up sites still contaminated by dioxin, a toxic chemical used in the defoliant.

The funding would also be used to treat Vietnamese suffering from disabilities, including those believed linked to Agent Orange exposure.

Washington has been slow to address the issue, quibbling for years with its former foe over the need for more scientific research to show that the herbicide sprayed by U.S. aircraft during the war caused health problems and birth defects among Vietnamese.

"We are talking about something that is a major legacy of the Vietnam War, a major irritant in this important relationship," said Walter Isaacson, co-chair of the joint U.S.-Vietnam working group that released the report. "The cleanup of our mess from the Vietnam War will be far less costly than the Gulf oil spill that BP will have to clean up."

The report was released by the U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin, a panel of policymakers, scientists and citizens formed in 2007 to look for ways to address the lingering issue.

It called for the cleanup of dioxin-contaminated sites, expansion of care and treatment for Vietnamese with disabilities believed caused by the defoliant, and the restoration of damaged ecosystems.

The U.S. military dumped some 20 million gallons (75 million liters) of Agent Orange and other herbicides on about a quarter of former South Vietnam between 1962 and 1971 to destroy crops and jungle cover shielding guerrilla fighters.

The defoliant decimated about 5 million acres (2 million hectares) of forest -- roughly the size of Massachusetts -- and another 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) of crops, the report said.

Dioxin has been linked to cancers, birth defects and other ailments. A study released last year by the Canadian environmental firm Hatfield Consultants showed that dioxin levels in some blood and breast milk samples taken from people who lived in affected areas were 100 times above safe levels.

Dioxin levels in soil, sediment and fish in the same area were 300 to 400 times above international limits. That report estimated up to 100,000 people living near the site still face a potential health risk from exposure.

Dioxin is slow to degrade. It works its way from the soil into the sediment of rivers, lakes and ponds via rainwater then attaches to the fat of fish and ducks, which can be eaten by humans and passed on to future generations.

The Vietnam Red Cross estimates up to 3 million Vietnamese children and adults have suffered health problems related to Agent Orange exposure. But the U.S. says the number is much lower, with many Vietnamese birth defects instead likely resulting from other health and environmental reasons, including malnutrition.

"We said, 'Let's leave aside exactly who's to blame for which illness that might have occurred,'" Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit group that promotes international dialogue, said by phone from Washington. "It's a mess we made ... and we'll get private money and a little bit of government money and we'll clean it up."

The Vietnam War ended April 30, 1975 when the former U.S.-backed regime in Saigon, the former capital of South Vietnam, fell to northern communist forces, reunifying the country.

Agent Orange has remained a thorny topic between the former enemies despite strong recent partnerships in areas ranging from economic to military. Next month, the U.S. and Vietnam will celebrate 15 years of normalized diplomatic relations.

The U.S. government has provided $9 million since 2007 to assist with Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Isaacson said he was hopeful the U.S. government will provide at least half the $300 million needed by 2020, with corporations, foundations and other donors supplying the rest.

"We will continue to find constructive ways to work together to ensure the protection of Vietnam's environment and the well-being of Vietnamese people living with disabilities, including by looking for additional funding for dioxin-related projects," Andrew Shapiro, U.S. assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, told reporters during a visit to Hanoi earlier this month.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Qantas Media Award

Taranaki Daily News reporter Kirsty Johnston won a Qantas Media Awards for her coverage of the discovery of toxic chemicals in drums buried beneath a public park in New Plymouth.

The story on drums containing dioxin were uncovered under a childrens playground at Marfell Park New Plymouth by stormwater workers, sparking concern from nearby residents.

Dioxin was a by-product of chemicals manufactured by the Ivon Watkins-Dow company from the early 1960s until 1987.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

1st, 2nd, and now 3rd Generation effected by Agent Orange.

Each year for the last five years the U.S. has welcomed a delegation of Vietnamese affected by spraying chemicals in Vietnam three decades ago. The Fifth Agent Orange Justice Tour ended recently. It focused national attention on grass roots and legislative efforts to achieve comprehensive assistance to victims in Vietnam, to the children and grandchildren of U.S. veterans, and to Vietnamese-Americans.

It is not news that American troops fighting for the U.S. military in Vietnam were told by their commanders that the defoliants and herbicides sprayed by the U.S. Air Force were “perfectly safe…[they] just kill plants.”
The statistics, while heartbreaking, are, likewise, not news for anyone who pays attention to recent history. From 1961 to 1970 more than 20,000 missions that composed Operations “Trail Dust” and “Ranch Hand” dispersed about 13 million gallons of chemicals over five million acres of Vietnam’s forests and agricultural lands; southern Laos and Cambodia were sprayed too.

To the military mind, defoliating was a practical solution that disallowed cover to the enemy. To the corporate mind – Dow, Monsanto, Hercules, Uniroyal, Diamond Shamrock, Syntex Agribusiness, and more than two dozen others – manufacturing chemicals provided good ROI: one gallon of liquid cost $7 back then. Moreover, corporations sped up the 2,4,5T manufacturing process so they could produce more, faster. They ignored the partially catalyzed molecule, dioxin, that was a byproduct of the faster process; it remained in Agent Orange (AO).

Vietnam’s dense southern uplands’ forests were sprayed with a range of chemicals signified by color-coded barrels: Agents Blue, Orange, White, Pink, Purple and so on. Areas that the C-123 “Provider” airplanes didn’t reach – equal to the size of Rhode Island — were bulldozed with Rome Plows.

Paul Cox was a US Marine fighting along the DMZ for months. Today, he is a civil engineer, a Veteran for Peace member, and a board member of Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign (VAORRC). In a recent presentation in San Francisco, he described the area he fought in at the time as “almost totally denuded from high explosives and multiple spraying sorties; aside from some invasive grass, hardly anything lived, no animals, no bugs, no nothin’. We could operate in the area for days in a row and see no living trees.”

Since 1994, the Canadian company Hatfield Consultants has conducted contamination and mitigation work in Vietnam in close collaboration with Vietnamese Government agencies. More than nine projects in twenty provinces have determined levels of Agent Orange/dioxin in soils, food items, human blood, and breast milk. Hatfield also studies the effects of loss of timber that leads to reduced sustainability of ecosystems, decreases in the biodiversity of plants and animals, poorer soil quality, increased water contamination, heavier flooding and erosion, increased leaching of nutrients and reductions in their availability, invasions of less desirable plant species (primarily woody and herbaceous grasses), and possible alterations of Vietnam’s macro- and micro-climates.

In short, there is no let up to the devastation wreaked by war’s practicality and profit three decades ago.

Consistent determination

Despite VAVA delegates representing three million people when they travel to the U.S., to date U.S. courts have not acknowledged the chemicals’ effects on Vietnam or the Vietnamese.

Yet, under U.S. law, veterans who served in Vietnam between 1962 and 1975 (including those who visited Vietnam even briefly), and who have a disease that the Veterans Administration (VA) recognizes as being associated with Agent Orange, are presumed to have been exposed to Agent Orange and are eligible for service-connected compensation based on their service.
The VA’s list of “Diseases associated with exposure to certain herbicide agents” are Acute and Subacute Peripheral Neuropathy,AL Amyloidosis, Chloracne (or Similar Acneform Disease), Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (now expanded to B Cell Leukemias), Diabetes Mellitus (Type 2), Hodgkin’s Disease, Ischemic Heart Disease, Multiple Myeloma, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Parkinson’s Disease, Porphyria Cutanea Tarda, Prostate Cancer, Respiratory Cancers (of the lung, larynx, trachea, and bronchus), and Soft Tissue Sarcoma.

Veterans’ children born with Spina bifida “may be eligible for compensation, vocational training and rehabilitation and health care benefits.” For the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded in its 1996 update to its report on Veterans and Agent Orange – Health Effects of Herbicides Used in Vietnam that there is “limited/suggestive evidence of an association between exposure to herbicides used in Vietnam and spina bifida in children of Vietnam veterans.”

A time line, briefly

September 10, 2004: an amended class action complaint was submitted to the U.S. District Court, Eastern District; Constantine P. Kokkoris, represented the victims.

March 10, 2005: in Brooklyn, Judge Weinstein dismissed victims’ claims.

September 30, 2005: a Brief was submitted to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York against 36 U.S. chemical companies. The summary by Jonathan Moore states:

The lawsuit…seeks to hold accountable the chemical companies who manufactured and supplied Agent Orange to the government. Contrary to government specifications, the product supplied to the government contained an excessive and avoidable amount of poison…[D]ioxin…was present in the herbicides supplied to the government only because these chemical companies deliberately and consciously chose to ignore then existing industry standards and produce a herbicide that contained excessive and avoidable amounts of dioxin. The presence of the poison dioxin had no military necessity…chemical companies…knew that the more herbicide they produced the more money they would make and the faster they produced it the more they could sell to the government….[T]hey ignored industry standards….

That lawsuit was unsuccessful.

Another try

This year VAVA, Veterans for Peace, and the Vietnamese will begin to apply pressure on Congress to pay the bills for damage done in that country. These groups are drafting legislation that they expect will become a bill that, eventually, addresses this legacy. It consist of four parts:

1) clean up the environment and do no further harm.

2) address the problems of millions ill …that now extends to three generations.

3) create regional medical centers specifically for victims’ children and grandchildren born with the physical deformities and mental illness associated with dioxin.

4) conduct a public health study on the Vietnamese American population in the U.S. to learn if, and if so, how they have been affected by AO sprayed in their homeland. (The assumption is that this population could have a similar exposure to deployed American military personnel).

Personal stories: new every time

If the news about dioxin – and the political and economic wrangling that accompanies it – is depressingly familiar, what is always fresh are the hopeful voices and enthusiastic faces of the VAVA delegates. All suffer grievous disease or deformities yet their spirits and generosity are astonishingly strong.

This year, 33-year old Pham The Minh accompanied the small group. He is the son of a Vietnamese fighter contaminated by Agent Orange in Quang Tri Province where the spraying was most intensive. Minh and and his sister were born after the war with birth defects that signal dioxin contamination.
His is no story of victimization. The man’s voice is vibrantly honest and alive as he says, “I grew up with pain in my spirit and in my body…I graduated from university and I am happy to teach English to victims of Agent Orange.”

In Minh’s city of Hai Phong alone there are more than 17,000 victims with birth defects, most of whom live difficult lives and require constant support from hard-pressed families.

Last year, the delegation was headed by Dang Hong Nhut who suffers from cancer and has experienced multiple miscarriages. Twenty-one year old Tran Thi Hoan accompanied Nhut. Tran was born with one hand and no legs due to her mother’s exposure. Despite Tran and her mother both being diagnosed with life threatening and disabling conditions that create severe and life-long hardship, the young woman attends college and is determined to work for a just solution for other Vietnamese families.

The 2007 delegates shared compelling stories too.

Vo Thanh Hai was 19 years old in 1978 when he was employed replanting trees around Nam Dong that had been defoliated by the U.S. Army’s spraying operations.

In 1986, Mr. Hai’s wife miscarried. In 1987, their son, Vo Thanh Tuan Anh was born. In 2001, he began episodes of fatigue and dizziness that was diagnosed as osteosarcoma for which he was treated with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Their doctor also advised Mr. Hai to have a lump on his own neck examined. Tests disclosed Hodgkins Disease.

Both father and son have difficulty performing routine activities. Mrs. Hoa provides their daily care…which means the family has little regular income.

Nguyen Van Quy served in the Vietnam People’s Army from 1972 through 1975. He ate manioc, wild herbs and plants and drank water from streams in areas that had been spayed with Agent Orange. He experienced periodic headaches and exhaustion and itchy skin and rashes.

In 2003, Mr. Quy was diagnosed with stomach cancer, liver damage and with fluid in his lung. His son, Nguyen Quang Trung, was born with spinal, limb and developmental disabilities, enlarged and deformed feet, and a congenital spine defect; he cannot stand, walk, or use his hands.

Mr. Quy’s daughter, Nguyen Thi Thuy Nga, was born deaf and dumb and developmentally disabled. Neither child can attend school or work and neither is self-sufficient.

In her presentation in San Francisco, shortly before leaving the U.S. to return home, another 2007 delegate, Mrs. Hong, said how happy she was to have had a chance to visit this country and talk to people she found “very welcoming.”
Mrs. Hong had served in the Eastern Combat Zone of South Vietnam as a clerk tailor and medical care worker. In 1964, she was sprayed with Agent Orange while washing rice in a stream. She tried to dive into the water to wash away the chemicals that stuck to her body. Moreover, she consumed contaminated food, wild grasses, and water every day after that.

In 1975 she was diagnosed with cirrhosis and required long term hospital treatment. In 1999 she was found to have an enlarged spleen and hemopoesis disorder. Several tests later uncovered cancer of the left breast as well as shortness of breath, high blood pressure, cerebral edema, breast cancer with bone metastasis, stomach aches, cirrhosis, gall-stones and bladder-stones, varicose limbs, limb-skin ulcer, weak legs and limited range of movement.

Both Mr.Quy and Mrs Hong died shortly after they returned to Vietnam.

Tragedy of such magnitude easily can overwhelm those unprepared to hear it. Yet listening deeply to these personal stories presented in the even-handed, non-blaming manner of the VAVA delegates creates an opening that may allow We, the People to apply pressure on Congress to co-create legislation to alleviate our nation’s moral stigma from our actions in Vietnam.

Perhaps the courage of the women in Lan Teh Nidah’s poem, Night Harvest can give hope to Americans of peace and reconciliation. These courageous Vietnamese women harvested rice at night to avoid detection by American forces.



The golds of rice and cluster bombs blend together.
even delayed fuse bombs bring no fear:
Our spirits have known many years of war.
Come, sisters, let us gather the harvest.



We are the harvesters of my village,



We are not frightened by bombs and bullets in the air –

Only by dew, wetting our lime-scented hair.

One day, perhaps, we in the United States will acknowledge our responsibilities in Vietnam. For we, too, have known many years of war. Those of us who struggle for peace are harvesters too. Let us accept our history, sew the seeds of peace, and highlight the futile lose/lose proposition that is war.

By Susan Galleymore