The 411
Ignoring War Crimes
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
SeeingBlack.com Columnist
Jan 31, 2007, 21:55
Mumia Abu-Jamal
In the last few years, we've all seen nothing but mass violations of virtually every international human rights treaty.
Torture, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, violence against civilians, orders to ignore the Geneva Conventions .... The list goes on and on.
How has the American government dealt with this state of affairs? It has virtually ignored it.
There have been a handful of military prosecutions against relatively low level people, but there is a steel ceiling, above which the prosecutors dare not go.
That's because the violations of international law go to the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Writer Lila Rajiva argues, in her remarkable The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005), that the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad shows something deep and ugly in the American state:
"The Prometheans of today acknowledge no limits except of their own imagining, and at least for now the world that they find themselves in allows them the self-indulgence of that imagining. With such absolute power comes absolute corruption, only not the corruption that the law easily unmasks, the simple corruption of bribery and chicanery. The occupation of Iraq displays ample evidence of that as well, but the deeper corruption that rote the institutions of America today is one legitimated by law, whose presence is revealed not in the courthouse but in the solitary recesses of prison cells hidden from the light. Torture is the insignia of this corrupt power. Torture is the deadly proof of the metastasizing cancer of American empire."
Rajiva tells us many of the stories from Iraq that have been largely whitewashed from the safe coverage that the corporate media airs. She tells us the many cases where Iraqi women were raped by Americans, and subjected to public humiliations.
Perhaps if more Americans read, saw or heard such accounts, they would not be mystified by the steady growing of the insurgency in Iraq, which is surely fueled, in part, by how Americans treated Iraqi men and women
in prisons there.
The corporate US media has done more to misinform its public than to inform them. They keep Americans in the dark, while people all around the world know more about America than Americans.
In this context, we can continue the illusion that the US is 'doing good' in this new kind of colonialism of aAmw lands. It is this mass disinformation campaign that allows political figures to float the mad idea of more troops in Iraq.
The somewhat tame Iraq Study Group report has come and gone, with supporters of the military-industrial-complex working their media assets to insure that their defense contractors keep getting paid.
Discussions over Geneva Conventions might as well be about treaties with space aliens, as arcane as they are to most of us. But the Geneva Conventions aren't rocket science. There are 4 of them. The first governs wounded and sick soldiers; the second relates to the treatment of war prisoners captured at sea; the third deals with treatment of prisoners of war; and the fourth governs how citizens should be treated in times of war. Under the articles of these conventions, people had express rights to fair, humane treatment, family visitation, and the right to be processed by "competent tribunal". As the flicks from Abu Ghraib showed, in living color, folks were treated like dogs. Geneva, though, to be 'quaint', didn't apply.
When it comes to the Empire, there is no higher law.
The Emperor has spoken: that is all that is needed to launch wars, torture, terrorize, bomb, imprison, kill, obliterate.
That kind of logic can only lead to more disaster.
Copyright 2006 Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Mr. Jamal's recent book features a chapter on the
remarkable women who helped build and defend
the Black Panther Party: *WE WANT FREEDOM:
A Life in the Black Panther Party*, from South
End Press (http://www.southendpress.org (http://www.southendpress.org)); Ph.
#1-800-533-8478.
© Copyright by YourSITE.com
Some of amerikkka's war crimes against it's own citizens
Spectre orange
Nearly 30 years after the Vietnam war, a chemical weapon used by US troops is still exacting a hideous toll on each new generation.
Cathy Scott-Clark
and
Adrian Levy report
Saturday March 29, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/united snakes/story/0,12271,923831,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/united%20snakes/story/0,12271,923831,00.html)
Hong Hanh is falling to pieces. She has been poisoned by the most toxic molecule known to science; it was sprayed during a prolonged military campaign. The contamination persists. No redress has been offered, no compensation. The superpower that spread the toxin has done nothing to combat the medical and environmental catastrophe that is overwhelming her country. This is not northern Iraq, where Saddam Hussein gassed 5,000 Kurds in 1988. Nor the trenches of first world war France. Hong Hanh's story, and that of many more like her, is quietly unfolding in Vietnam today. Her declining half-life is spent unseen, in her home, an unremarkable concrete box in Ho Chi Minh City, filled with photographs, family plaques and yellow enamel stars, a place where the best is made of the worst.
Hong Hanh is both surprising and terrifying. Here is a 19-year-old who lives in a 10-year-old's body. She clatters around with disjointed spidery strides which leave her soaked in sweat. When she cannot stop crying, soothing creams and iodine are rubbed into her back, which is a lunar collage of septic blisters and scabs. "My daughter is dying," her mother says. "My youngest daughter is 11 and she has the same symptoms. What should we do? Their fingers and toes stick together before they drop off. Their hands wear down to stumps. Every day they lose a little more skin. And this is not leprosy. The doctors say it is connected to American chemical weapons we were exposed to during the Vietnam war."
There are an estimated 650,000 like Hong Hanh in Vietnam, suffering from an array of baffling chronic conditions. Another 500,000 have already died. The thread that weaves through all their case histories is defoliants deployed by the US military during the war. Some of the victims are veterans who were doused in these chemicals during the war, others are farmers who lived off land that was sprayed. The second generation are the sons and daughters of war veterans, or children born to parents who lived on contaminated land. Now there is a third generation, the grandchildren of the war and its victims.
This is a chain of events bitterly denied by the US government. Millions of litres of defoliants such as Agent Orange were dropped on Vietnam, but US government scientists claimed that these chemicals were harmless to humans and short-lived in the environment. US strategists argue that Agent Orange was a prototype smart weapon, a benign tactical herbicide that saved many hundreds of thounited snakesnds of American lives by denying the North Vietnamese army the jungle cover that allowed it ruthlessly to strike and feint. New scientific research, however, confirms what the Vietnamese have been claiming for years. It also portrays the US government as one that has illicitly used weapons of mass destruction, stymied all independent efforts to assess the impact of their deployment, failed to acknowledge cold, hard evidence of maiming and slaughter, and pursued a policy of evasion and deception.
Teams of international scientists working in Vietnam have now discovered that Agent Orange contains one of the most virulent poisons known to man, a strain of dioxin called TCCD which, 28 years after the fighting ended, remains in the soil, continuing to destroy the lives of those exposed to it. Evidence has also emerged that the US government not only knew that Agent Orange was contaminated, but was fully aware of the killing power of its contaminant dioxin, and yet still continued to use the herbicide in Vietnam for 10years of the war and in concentrations that exceeded its own guidelines by 25 times. As well as spraying the North Vietnamese, the US doused its own troops stationed in the jungle, rather than lose tactical advantage by having them withdraw.
On February 5, addressing the UN Security Council, secretary of state Colin Powell, now famously, clutched between his fingers a tiny phial representing concentrated anthrax spores, enough to kill thounited snakesnds, and only a tiny fraction of the amount he said Saddam Hussein had at his disposal.
The Vietnamese government has its own symbolic phial that it, too, flourishes, in scientific conferences that get little publicity. It contains 80g of TCCD, just enough of the super-toxin contained in Agent Orange to fill a child-size talcum powder container.
If dropped into the water supply of a city the size of New York, it would kill the entire population.
Ground-breaking research by Dr Arthur H Westing, former director of the UN Environment Programme, a leading authority on Agent Orange, reveals that the US
sprayed 170kg of it over Vietnam. John F Kennedy's presidential victory in 1961 was propelled by an image of the New Frontier. He called on Americans to "bear the burden of a long twilight struggle ... against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself." But one of the most problematic new frontiers, that dividing
North and South Vietnam, flared up immediately after he had taken office, forcing him to bolster the US-backed regime in Saigon. Kennedy examined "tricks and gadgets" that might give the South an edge in the jungle, and in November 1961 sanctioned the use of defoliants in a covert operation code-named Ranch Hand, every mission flown signed off by the president himself and managed in Saigon by the secret Committee
202 - the call sign for defoliating forests being "20" and for spraying fields "2".
Ngo Luc, 67, was serving with a North Vietnamese guerrilla unit in the Central Highlands when he saw planes circling overhead. "We expected bombs, but a fine yellow mist descended, covering absolutely everything," he says. "We were soaked in it, but it didn't worry us, as it smelled good. We continued to crawl through the jungle. The next day the leaves wilted and within a week the jungle was bald. We felt just fine at the time." Today, the former captain is the sole survivor from his unit and lives with his two granddaughters, both born partially paralysed, near the central Vietnamese city of Hue.
When US troops became directly embroiled in Vietnam in 1964, the Pentagon signed contracts worth $57m (£36m) with eight US chemical companies to produce defoliants, including Agent Orange, named after the coloured band painted around the barrels in which it was shipped. The US would target the Ho Chi Minh trail - Viet Cong supply lines made invisible by the jungle canopy along the border with Laos - as well as the heavily wooded Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that separated the North from the South, and also the Mekong Delta, a maze of overgrown swamps and inlets that was a haven for communist insurgents.
A reporter for the St Louis Dispatch witnessed a secret spraying mission and wrote that the US was dropping "poison". Congressman Robert Kastenmeier demanded that the president abandon "chemical warfare" because it tainted America's reputation. Instead,
William Bundy, a presidential adviser, flatly denied that the herbicide used by America was a chemical weapon, and blamed communist propagandists for a distortion of the facts about the Ranch Hand operation. Only when the Federation of American
Scientists warned that year that Vietnam was being used as a laboratory experiment did the rumours become irrefutable. More than 5,000 American scientists, including 17 Nobel laureates and 129 members of the Academy of Sciences, signed a petition against "chemical and biological weapons used in Vietnam".
Eight years after the military launched Operation Ranch Hand, scientists from the National Institute of Health warned that laboratory mice exposed to Agent Orange were giving birth to stillborn or deformed litters, a conclusion reinforced by research conducted by the US department of agriculture. These findings coincided with newspaper reports in Hanoi that blamed Agent Orange for a range of crippling conditions among troops and their families. Dr Le Ke Son, a young conscript in Hanoi during the war and now director of Vietnam's Agent Orange Victims Fund, recalls, "The
government proposed that a line of runners carry blood and tissue samples from the front to Hanoi. But it was more than 500 miles and took two months, by which time
the samples were spoiled. How could we make the research work? There was no way to prove what we could see with our own eyes."
In December 1969, President Nixon made a radical and controversial pledge that America would never use chemical weapons in a first strike. He made no mention
of Vietnam or Agent Orange, and the US government continued dispatching supplies of herbicides to the South Vietnamese regime until 1974.
That year, Kiem was born in a one-room hut in Kim Doi, a village just outside Hue. For her mother, Nguyen, she should have been a consolation because her husband, a Viet Cong soldier, had been killed several months earlier. "The last time he came home, he told me about the spray, how his unit had been doused in a sweet-smelling mist and all the leaves had fallen from the trees," Nguyen says. It soon became obvious that Kiem was severely mentally and physically disabled.
"She can eat, she can smile, she sits on the bed. That's it. I have barely left my home since my daughter was born."
By the time the war finally ended in 1975, more than 10% of Vietnam had been intensively sprayed with 72 million litres of chemicals, of which 66% was Agent Orange, laced with its super-strain of toxic TCCD. But even these figures, contained in recently declassified US military records, vastly underestimate the true scale of the spraying. In confidential statements made to US scientists, former Ranch Hand pilots allege that, in addition to the recorded missions, there were 26,000 aborted operations during which 260,000 gallons of herbicide were dumped. US military regulations required all spray planes or helicopters to return to base empty and one pilot, formerly stationed at Bien
Hoa air base between 1968 and 1969, claims that he regularly jettisoned his chemical load into the Long Binh reservoir. "These herbicides should never have been used in the way that they were used," says the pilot, who has asked not to be identified.
Almost immediately after the war finished, US veterans began reporting chronic conditions, skin disorders, asthma, cancers, gastrointestinal diseases. Their babies were born limbless or with Down's syndrome and spina bifida. But it would be three years before the US department of veterans' affairs reluctantly agreed to back a medical investigation, examining 300,000 former servicemen - only a fraction of those who had complained of being sick - with the government warning all participants that it was indemnified from lawsuits brought by them. When rumours began circulating that
President Reagan had told scientists not to make "any link" between Agent Orange and the deteriorating health of veterans, the victims lost patience with their government and sued the defoliant manufacturers in an action that was finally settled out of court in
1984 for $180m (£115m).
It would take the intervention of the former commander
of the US Navy in Vietnam, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, for
the government finally to admit that it had been aware
of the potential dangers of the chemicals used in
Vietnam from the start of Ranch Hand. The admiral's
involvement stemmed from a deathbed pledge to his son,
a patrol boat captain who contracted two forms of
cancer that he believed had been caused by his
exposure to Agent Orange. Every day during the war,
Captain Elmo Zumwalt Jr had swum in a river from which
he had also eaten fish, in an area that was regularly
sprayed with the herbicide. Two years after his son's
death in 1988, Zumwalt used his leverage within the
military establishment to compile a classified report,
which he presented to the secretary of the department
of veterans' affairs and which contained data linking
Agent Orange to 28 life-threatening conditions,
including bone cancer, skin cancer, brain cancer - in
fact, almost every cancer known to man - in addition
to chronic skin disorders, birth defects,
gastrointestinal diseases and neurological defects.
Zumwalt also uncovered irrefutable evidence that the
US military had dispensed "Agent Orange in
concentrations six to 25 times the suggested rate" and
that "4.2m US soldiers could have made transient or
significant contact with the herbicides because of
Operation Ranch Hand". This speculative figure is
twice the official estimate of US veterans who may
have been contaminated with TCCD.
Most damning and politically sensitive of all is a
letter, obtained by Zumwalt, from Dr James Clary, a
military scientist who designed the spray tanks for
Ranch Hand. Writing in 1988 to a member of Congress
investigating Agent Orange, Clary admitted: "When we
initiated the herbicide programme in the 1960s, we
were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin
contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware
that the military formulation had a higher dioxin
concentration than the civilian version, due to the
lower cost and speed of manufacture. However, because
the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us
were overly concerned."
The Office of Genetic Counselling and Disabled
Children (OGCDC) operates out of a room little bigger
than a broom cupboard. Dr Viet Nhan and his 21
volunteers share their cramped quarters at Hue Medical
College with cerebral spinal fluid shunt kits donated
from Norfolk, Virginia; children's clothes given by
the Rotary Club of Osaka, Japan; second-hand computers
scavenged from banks in Singapore.
Vietnam's chaotic and underfunded national health
service cannot cope with the demands made upon it. The
Vietnamese Red Cross has registered an estimated one
million people disabled by Agent Orange, but has
sufficient funds to help only one fifth of them,
paying out an average of $5 (£3) a month. Dr Nhan
established the free OGCDC, having studied the impact
of Agent Orange as a student, to match Vietnamese
families to foreign private financial donors. "It was
only when I went out to the villages looking for case
studies that I realised how many families were
affected and how few could afford help," he says. "I
abandoned my research. Children need to run before
they die."
The walls of his room are plastered with bewildering
photographs of those he has helped: operations for
hernias and cleft palates, open-heart surgery and
kidney transplants. All of the patients come from
isolated districts in central Vietnam, villages whose
names will be unfamiliar, unlike the locations that
surround them: Khe Sanh, Hamburger Hill, Camp Carroll
and the Rock Pile. "I am not interested in
apportioning blame," Nhan says. "I don't want to talk
to you about science or politics. What I care about is
that I have 60 sick children needing financial
backers. They cannot wait for the US to change its
policy, take its head out of the sand and clear up the
mess."
He takes us into an intensive care ward to meet
nine-year-old Nguyen Van Tan, who two weeks before had
open-heart surgery to correct a birth defect thought
to be connected to dioxin poisoning. There is no hard
proof of this, but his father, who sits beside the
bed, talks of being sprayed with defoliants when he
fought with the Viet Cong. The area they live in was
repeatedly doused during the war. Almost all of his
former battlefield comrades have disabled children, he
says. Nhan ushers us away. "I don't want to tell the
family yet, but their boy will never fully recover. He
is already suffering from total paralysis. The most we
can do now is send them home with a little money."
Back in his tiny office, the doctor gestures to
photocopies of US Air Force maps, sent by a veterans'
organisation because the US government refuses to
supply them. These dizzying charts depict the number
of herbicide missions carried out over Quang Tri, a
province adjacent to the DMZ, from where almost all
Nhan's patients come. Its topography is obliterated by
spray lines, 741,143 gallons of chemicals dropped
here, more than 600,000 of them being Agent Orange.
"I'm just scratching the surface," he says.
The Vietnamese government is reluctant to let us
travel to Quang Tri province. It does not want us "to
poke and prod" already dismal villagers, treating them
as if they are medical exhibits. We attempt to recruit
some high-powered support and arrange a meeting in
Hanoi with Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, who until last year
was the vice-president of Vietnam. She receives us at
the presidential palace in a teak-panelled hall
beneath an enormous photograph of Ho Chi Minh in a
gold frame writhing with dragons. "Thank you, my young
friends, for your interest in Vietnam," Madame Binh
says, straightening her grey silk ao dai, a
traditional flowing trouser suit.
She looks genteel, but old photographs of her in olive
fatigues suggest she is a seasoned campaigner. As
minister of foreign affairs for the Provisional
Revolutionary South Vietnamese government, she
negotiated at the Paris peace talks in 1973. "I must
warn you, I will not answer questions about George W
Bush," she says, casting a steely gaze, perhaps
conscious of the fact that, since the lifting of the
US economic embargo in 1994, trade with America has
grown to £650m a year. Madame Binh does, however, want
to talk about chemical warfare, recalling how, when
she returned after the war to her home province of
Quang Nam, a lush region south-west of Hue which was
drenched in defoliants, she found "no sign of life,
just rubble and grass". She says: "All of our
returning veterans had a burning desire for children
to repopulate our devastated country. When the first
child was born with a birth defect, they tried again
and again. So many families now have four or five
disabled children, raising them without any hope."
What should the US do? Madame Binh laughs. "It's very
late to do anything. We put this issue directly on the
table with the US. So far they have not dealt with the
problem. If our relationship is ever to be normal, the
US has to accept responsibility. Go and see the
situation for yourself."
She sends us back to Hue. Over chilled water and
tangerines, we talk to a suspicious party secretary
who asks us why we have bothered to come after all
these years. "There is no point," he says. "Nothing
will come of it." But he opens his file all the same
and reads aloud: "In Hue city there are 6,633
households affected by Agent Orange and in them 3,708
sick children under the age of 16." He eventually
agrees to take us north-west, over the Perfume river,
beyond the ancient royal tombs that circle this former
imperial city, towards the DMZ. We arrive at a distant
commune where a handyman is sprucing up a bust of Ho
Chi Minh with white gloss paint. Eventually, the
chairman of the People's Committee of Dang Ha joins
us, and our political chaAmwanc stuffed with seven
officials sets out across the green and gold
countryside, along crisscrossing lanes. The chairman
tells us proudly how he was born on January 31 1968,
the night of the Tet offensive, the turning point of
the war, when the Viet Cong launched its assault on US
positions. By the time we stop, we are all the best of
friends and, holding hands, he pulls us into the home
of the Pham family, where a wall of neighbours and an
assembly of local dignitaries dressed in shiny,
double-breasted jackets stare grimly at a moaning
child. He lies on a mat on the floor, his matchstick
limbs folded uselessly before him, his parents taking
it in turns to mop his mouth, as if without them he
would drown in his own saliva.
Hoi, the boy's mother, tells us how she met her
husband when they were assigned to the same Viet Cong
unit in which they fought together for 10 years. But
she alone was ordered to the battle of Troung Hon
mountain. "I saw this powder falling from the sky,"
she says. "I felt sick, had a headache. I was sent to
a field hospital. I was close to the gates of hell. By
the time I was discharged, I had lost the strength in
my legs and they have never fully recovered. Then Ky
was born, our son, with yellow skin. Every year his
problems get worse." Her husband, Hung, interrupts:
"Sometimes, we have been so desperate for money that
we have begged in the local market. I do not think you
can imagine the humiliation of that."
And this family is not alone. All the adults here,
cycling past us or strolling along the dykes, are
suffering from skin lesions and goitres that cling to
necks like sagging balloons. The women spontaneously
abort or give birth to genderless squabs that horrify
even the most experienced midwives. In a yard, Nguyen,
a neighbour's child, stares into space. He has a
hydrocephalic head as large as a melon. Two houses
down, Tan has distended eyes that bubble from his
face. By the river, Ngoc is sleeping, so wan he
resembles a pressed flower. "They told me the boy is
depressed," his exhausted father tells us. "Of course
he's depressed. He lives with disease and death."
This is not a specially constructed ghetto used to
wage a propaganda war against imperialism. The
Socialist Republic of Vietnam has long embraced the
free market. This is an ordinary hamlet where, in
these new liberal times, villagers like to argue about
the English Premiership football results over a glass
of home-brewed rice beer. Here live three generations
affected by Agent Orange: veterans who were sprayed
during the war and their successors who inherited the
contamination or who still farm on land that was
sprayed. Vietnam's impoverished scientific community
is now trying to determine if there will be a fourth
generation. "How long will this go on?" asks Dr Tran
Manh Hung, the ministry of health's leading
researcher.
Dr Hung is now working with a team of Canadian
environmental scientists, Hatfield Consultants, and
they have made an alarming discovery. In the Aluoi
Valley, adjacent to the Ho Chi Minh trail, once home
to three US Special Forces bases, a region where Agent
Orange was both stored and sprayed, the scientists'
analysis has shown that, rather than naturally
disperse, the dioxin has remained in the ground in
concentrations 100 times above the safety levels for
agricultural land in Canada. It has spread into
Aluoi's ponds, rivers and irrigation supplies, from
where it has passed into the food chain, through fish
and freshwater shellfish, chicken and ducks that store
TCCD in fatty tissue. Samples of human blood and
breast milk reveal that villagers have ingested the
invisible toxin and that pregnant women pass it
through the placenta to the foetus and then through
their breast milk, doubly infecting newborn babies. Is
it, then, a coincidence that in this minuscule region
of Vietnam, more than 15,000 children and adults have
already been registered as suffering from the usual
array of chronic conditions?
"We theorise that the Aluoi Valley is a microcosm of
the country, where numerous reservoirs of TCCD still
exist in the soil of former US military
installations," says Dr Wayne Dwernychuk,
vice-president of Hatfield Consultants. There may be
as many as 50 of these "hot spots", including one at
the former US military base of Bien Hoa, where,
according to declassified defence department
documents, US forces spilled 7,500 gallons of Agent
Orange on March 1 1970. Dr Arnold Schecter, a leading
expert in dioxin contamination in the US, sampled the
soil there and found it to contain TCCD levels that
were 180 million times above the safe level set by the
US environmental protection agency.
It is extremely difficult to decontaminate humans or
the soil. A World Health Organisation briefing paper
warns: "Once TCCD has entered the body it is there to
stay due to its uncanny ability to dissolve in fats
and to its rock solid chemical stability." At Aluoi,
the researchers recommended the immediate evacuation
of the worst affected villages, but to be certain of
containing this hot spot, the WHO also recommends
searing the land with temperatures of more than
1,000C, or encasing it in concrete before treating it
chemically.
At home, the US takes heed. When a dump at the Robins
Air Force Base in Georgia was found to have stored
Agent Orange, it was placed on a National Priority
List, immediately capped in five feet of clay and
sand, and has since been the subject of seven
investigations. Dioxin is now also a major domestic
concern, scientists having discovered that it is a
by-product of many ordinary industrial processes,
including smelting, the bleaching of paper pulp and
solid waste incineration. The US environmental
protection agency, pressed into a 12-year inquiry,
recently concluded that it is a "class-1 human
carcinogen".
The evidence is categoric. Last April, a conference at
Yale University attended by the world's leading
environmental scientists, who reviewed the latest
research, concluded that in Vietnam the US had
conducted the "largest chemical warfare campaign in
history". And yet no money is forthcoming, no aid in
kind. For the US, there has only ever been one
contemporary incident of note involving weapons of
mass destruction - Colin Powell told the UN Security
Council in February that, "in the history of chemical
warfare, no country has had more battlefield
experience with chemical weapons since world war one
than Saddam Hussein's Iraq".
The US government has yet to respond to the Hatfield
Consultants' report, which finally explains why the
Vietnamese are still dying so many years after the war
is over, but, last March, it did make its first
contribution to the debate in Vietnam. It signed an
agreement with a reluctant Vietnamese government for
an $850,000 (£543,000) programme to "fill identified
data gaps" in the study of Agent Orange. The
conference in Hanoi that announced the decision,
according to Vietnamese Red Cross representatives who
attended, ate up a large slice of this funding. One of
the signatories is the same US environmental
protection agency that has already concluded that
dioxin causes cancer.
"Studies can be proposed until hell freezes over,"
says Dr Dwernychuk of Hatfield Consultants, "but they
are not going to assist the Vietnamese in a
humanitarian sense one iota. We state emphatically
that no additional research on human health is
required to facilitate intervention or to protect the
local citizens."
There is cash to be lavished in Vietnam when the US
government sees it as politically expedient. Over the
past 10 years, more than $350m (£223m) has been spent
on chasing ghosts. In 1992, the US launched the Joint
Task Force-Full Accounting to locate 2,267 servicemen
thought to be missing in action in Vietnam, Cambodia
and Laos. Jerry O'Hara, spokesman for JTF-FA, which is
still searching for the remains of 1,889 of them, told
us, "We don't place a monetary value on what we do and
we'll be here until we have brought all of the boys
back home."
So it is that America continues to spend considerably
more on the dead than it does on the millions of
living and long-suffering - be they back home or in
Vietnam.
The science of chemical warfare fills a silent,
white-tiled room at Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh
City. Here, shelves are overburdened with research
materials. Behind the locked door is an iridescent
wall of the mutated and misshapen, hundreds of bell
jars and vacuum-sealed bottles in which human foetuses
float in formaldehyde. Some appear to be sleeping,
fingers curling their hair, thumbs pressing at their
lips, while others with multiple heads and mangled
limbs are listless and slumped. Thankfully, none of
these dioxin babies ever woke up.
One floor below, it is never quiet. Here are those who
have survived the misery of their births, ravaged
infants whom no one has the ability to understand,
babies so traumatised by their own disabilities,
luckless children so enraged and depressed at their
miserable fate, that they are tied to their beds just
to keep them safe from harm