Agent Orange [3]:
Pandora's Box
pic credit: courtesy of William A. Buckingham
by Robert Allen
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Phan Thi Phi Phi is one of the plaintiffs in the Agent
Orange civil case before Judge Jack Weinstein of the US
Federal Court in New York city.
A Vietnamese doctor in south Vietnam during the US war she
suffered four miscarriages that she believes are the result
of her exposure to Agent Orange, a biological weapon used
by the US Air Force to reduce Vietnam's food supply and
destroy jungle cover.
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At the opening of the on-going pre-trial discussion,
Weinstein said that the action was about war crimes.
"This
case involves human rights issues of great significance,
and it has got to be decided promptly," he said.
It hasn't. Since the case was filed in January this year
Weinstein has allowed it to drag on by giving the chemical
companies more time to prepare their defence. They want the
Vietnamese case to be dismissed because they argue that
they were ordered by the US government to manufacture
2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, the dioxin-laced herbicides that made up
Agent Orange.
This is the government contractor defense, which was used
to prevent attorney Gerson Smoger's US veterans, like crew
chief Joe Isaacson who were not represented in an earlier
judgement in 1984, seeking compensation from the chemical
companies for injuries they claim were caused by Agent
Orange. Smoger is seeking to have Weinstein's ruling on
this overturned and it now seems likely that his case on
behalf of the veterans will go to appeal.
Susan Hammond, of the Fund for Reconciliation and
Development Vietnam programme in New York, is trying to
raise the profile of the Vietnamese action but she is not
hopeful for US veterans.
"Weinstein has made it very clear
that he has had enough of the US veterans cases, and that
the issue for veterans was solved in 1984 [when Weinstein
settled a $180 million class action against the AO
manufacturers] and that he feels they now have alternative
channels for compensation via the Veterans Association and
should not tie up the courts any longer," she says.
Weinstein, Hammond believes, is ready to take a different
position with the Vietnamese.
"He felt that they had not
had a chance to be heard in court and he wants them to have
their shot. The fact that he spoke so long about all of the
issues with the case shows that he wants the lawyers for
the Vietnamese to be prepared when they come back to court
with responses to all of the issues the chemical companies
will bring up in their motions.
"At this point it looks like the case will not have another
hearing before Weinstein until early December," says
Hammond, who believes it will be next year before they
"even look at issues of causality and the scientific
research on dioxin exposure".
"Weinstein," she says,
"also seemed to think that in the
case of Vietnam the defense contractor excuse will not fly,
but even here this is open to interpretation as in theory
the South Vietnamese government approved the spraying. He
also brought up the issue of whether or not the northerners
were trespassing on the south and therefore any damage to
them could not be compensated".
Constantine Kokkoris, one of the attorneys representing the
Vietnamese, is confident their case will go to trial and
that the chemical companies argument that they do not have
legal standing to bring the action in the USA will fail in
Weinstein's court.
"The chemical companies will move to dismiss our case in
October," says Kokkoris.
"We will respond in November, and
probably sometime in December we will have oral argument in
court, and at that point the judge will decide whether our
case will survive and proceed to the issue of causation".
If Kokkoris is confident, Hammond is cautious.
"For the
Vietnamese lawsuit to succeed I think there needs to be a
better understanding in the US about what the Vietnamese
have had to deal with regarding Agent Orange and that there
are still vast areas of the country defoliated and areas
where dioxin is still poisoning the food supply," she says.
"The veterans lawsuit [in 1984] succeeded because of huge
public pressure to do something to help the vets. The
Vietnamese will need the same kind of pressure. In order to
put pressure for a settlement of the lawsuit we are working
with other groups to try to build awareness about the
lawsuit and Agent Orange in general and work together to
put pressure on the chemical companies to settle the case
in favour of the Vietnamese".
Such an outcome would resolve an issue that the US
government does not want to deal with and which the
Vietnamese goverment is treading warily with. This civil
action suits the Vietnamese government because it means
they are not in direct confrontation with the US
administration. But there is a long way to go and the signs
are that the US government will not take kindly to a
verdict in favour of the Vietnamese.
A strong indication of the US position was provided when a
February 16, 2003 memo from the US Embassy in Hanoi to
Washington was leaked to Susan Hammond, who cannot
understand why the memo had a "sensitive but unclassified"
tag when everything else from Hanoi is classified. But if
the aim was to put the memo into the public domain to spark
a media response it failed. The world's media, including
media in the USA, appear to believe Vietnamese propaganda.
Hammond claims she knows the identity of the author of the
memo, which seeks an authoritarian position on Vietnamese
attitudes to the joint research involving the US and
Vietnam on the environmental and social impacts of Agent
Orange in Vietnam - now in its eleventh year.
"The author of the memo I believe is the former [Centre for
Disease Control] officer at the embassy, Mike Linnan,"
Hammond alleges.
"He was a strong opponent to anything to
do with AO. He actually told a group of NGOs who were part
of the American Chamber of Commerce that 'he drank Agent
Orange and he is fine'. He spent most of his time there
interfering with any progress on AO research or talks with
the Vietnamese.
"He even got his wife who worked for UNICEF in Vietnam to
not allow any UNICEF funds to go towards a program that
would educate mothers and children who live in dioxin hot
spots not to eat the fish or ducks. It took a lot of
pressure [from] the other embassies in Hanoi to lift the
restriction on including dioxin education in their program.
He single handedly set back progress on the AO issue in
Vietnam by years in just the short time he was there".
Linnan's argument was a simple one, that found favour among
many of his colleagues in the Hanoi Embassy. The Vietnamese
are winning the propaganda war by duping domestic and
foreign media over the damage Agent Orange has done to
Vietnam and its people. The government of Vietnam has been
able to do this, Linnan concluded, because it controls
dioxin research in Vietnam. In the memo Linnan wrote:
"We
believe that the GVN will attempt to control, disrupt or
block any research project that could potentially produce
scientific evidence that refutes the GVN's allegations of
broad, catastrophic damage to the health of Vietnamese
citizens.
"We believe the GVN will never permit research that in any
way might discredit the main theme of its two-decade long
propaganda campaign, ie AO/dioxin is to blame for a huge
range of serious health problems - especially birth defects
and mental retardation - of residents of central and
southern areas and/or northern soldiers who served there.
"Engagement in a scientific research endeavor is a
secondary, supporting effort of the primary strategy to
force the USG to bow to international pressure and in the
words of the international interlocutors of the GVN's
position - 'address the chemical holocaust that has been
visited on Vietnam - to fully remunerate and premeditate
the devastation caused and denied since the 1960s'".
The US had to act, Linnan demanded.
"We need to counter the
disinformation with valid, scientifically documented
information. We should challenge bogus, slanted journalism
with factual, objective responses that expose the fallacies
of the GVN propaganda and describe other potential factors
that contribute to the health problems that the Vietnamese
attribute solely to AO/dioxin. Silence of bland
non-specific responses will only tend to 'confirm' the
disinformation in the eyes of the audience".
Hammond, while sceptical of Linnan's position, understands
the complexities in Vietnam.
"The Vietnamese will need to
change their message a bit," she says,
"to talk less of the
unknown associations with dioxin exposure and point to the
diseases already proven to be associated ... that already
receive compensation from the VA if they were in the US.
They are doing this with the lawsuit by being careful to
include those that are on the VA list of AO affiliated
diseases".
In a world of fairness and justice the Vietnamese civil
action would result in compensation. Dr Phi Phi has said
she is not participating in the legal action for herself
but for others who have suffered more than her. Agent
Orange was a killer. The US military knew from the
beginning how toxic Agent Orange was, and the Vietnamese
now know what the US knew back in 1962 when spraying began,
but this is not about truth, it is about money and about
power.
"This is a very political issue," says Hammond.
"The US
cannot take responsibility because it would open up a
Pandora's box. It would destroy the US economy if the
government took responsibility for the affects of AO or of
any weapon of war. It [would] also limit their ability to
produce the weapons they want to produce. The Bush
administration is doing whatever it can to get rid of the
environmental restrictions on the military, if they admit
responsibility [with] AO it will have a huge domino affect
in other areas of military activities in the US and
abroad".
The Agent Orange story, 40 years after it began, is not over.
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–
Robert Allen
The Agent Orange story, 40 years after it began, is not over.
This series on Agent Orange, its deadly toxicity and the legal battle to bring compensation to its victims also appears in The Morning Star, London.
Robert Allen is the author of The Dioxin War: Truth and Lies about a Perfect Poison, Pluto Press [see below], and a forthcoming book, Orange, on the story of Agent Orange and its victims.
Robert Allen is the author of Dioxin War: Truth & Lies About A Perfect Poison, Pluto Press, London/Ann Arbor/Dublin and University of Michigan, US, published in July 2004. Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com.
Book Description
This is a book about Dioxin, one of the most poisonous chemicals known to humanity. It was the toxic component of Agent Orange, used by the US military to defoliate huge tracts of Vietnam during the war in the 60s and 70s.
It can be found in pesticides, plastics, solvents, detergents and cosmetics. Dioxin has been revealed as a human carcinogen, and has been associated with heart disease, liver damage, hormonal disruption, reproductive disorders, developmental destruction and neurological impairment.
The Dioxin War is the story of the people who fought to reveal the truth about dioxin. Huge multinationals Dow and Monsanto both manufactured Agent Orange. Robert Allen reveals the attempts by the chemical industry, in collusion with regulatory and health authorities, to cover up the true impact of dioxin on human health. He tells the remarkable story of how a small, dedicated group of people managed to bring the truth about dioxin into the public domain and into the courts - and win.
Robert Allen is the author of No Global: The People of Ireland versus the Multinationals, Pluto Press, London/Ann Arbor/Dublin, published in April 2004. Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com.
Book Description
Ireland's economy has seen phenomenal growth since the 1990s, as a result of an earlier decision by the state to chase foreign investment, largely from US corporates. As a result, manufacturers of raw chemicals, pharmaceuticals and highly dangerous substances came to Ireland, where they could make toxic products free from the strict controls imposed by other nations.
Robert Allen's book reveals the consequences to human health and the environment of the Irish state's love affair with the multinational chemical industry. The cost to Irish society was a series of ecological and social outrages, starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 2000s.
No Global is a lesson for countries who seek to encourage multinationals at the expense of the health their population and the delicate nature of their ecosystems. It is also a heart-warming record of the successful campaigns fought by local people to protect themselves and their environment from polluting industry
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