US finally start the clean-up of Agent Orange in Vietnam

A US$49 million US government effort begins this week to cleanse deadly Agent Orange herbicide from a former air base in Danang, central Vietnam, where Americans stored, loaded and washed chemical weapons while using the toxic defoliant during the Vietnam War. The project will be launched on Thursday and is headed by Vietnam’s Defense Ministry and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

"It's a ground-breaking effort between the governments of the US and Vietnam for a project which will clean up all the dioxin at the [Danang] airport remaining from the use of Agent Orange," said Charles Bailey, director of the Washington-based Aspen Institute's Agent Orange in Vietnam Program, in an interview on July 31 during a Bangkok stopover. He referred to the trip as a "historic opportunity". "At Danang, there are some 70,000 cubic meters [2.5 million cubic feet] of contaminated soil that, over the next three years, will be cleaned up," Bailey said. "This is the first of several major hot-spots."

Call me cynical, but I wonder if the US would be doing this if it didn't need an alliance with Vietnam to counter China's growing influence in the region.

Americans, Vietnamese and others are believed to have suffered deformities, diseases or death from dioxin and other herbicides, which the Pentagon used to clear jungles so Vietnamese communist soldiers could more easily be spotted, bombed, or deprived of crops and territory. [1] Danang, America's biggest air base during the Vietnam War, is one of the worst cases. Agent Orange was stored there in steel barrels, loaded onto warplanes, and washed out of the returning planes' spray tanks.

In 2009, the US Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the Vietnamese to hold Dow Chemical and Monsanto liable for birth defects allegedly linked to Agent Orange. The US Veterans Administration, however, paid billions of dollars to Americans involved in the Vietnam War who later suffered illnesses suspected of being caused by dioxin.

In 1994, retired US Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr said in an interview he ordered millions of gallons of Agent Orange to be sprayed in Vietnam and would do so again, even though he later believed the dioxin caused his son to die from cancer. Zumwalt's son was a patrol boat commander in the Mekong River delta near Saigon when Agent Orange was being sprayed in the area. "At the time we didn't know it was carcinogenic. The chemical companies that made it knew. But they told the Pentagon it was not," Zumwalt said. "Even knowing it was carcinogenic, I would use it again. We took 58,000 dead. My hunch is it would have been double that if we did not" spray, Zumwalt said, referring to the war's toll on Americans.

I find his comments particularly disturbing.


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reply to post by deessell


NM

Its always disturbing to see human's regard our fellow man's lives as lesser, simply because of a different geographic location of birth. I wonder if they are also going to replace all the dead children who were burnt alive with napalm, or help all the family's with genetic malformations seek medical help? Maybe they can figure out a method of giving all the rape victims back their innocence? Or maybe, just maybe, they can hold Monsanto accountable for its clear criminal negligence in this incident? A company which continues to this day to push poison on third world country's, using children, and women as test subjects in its cruel money making scheme's. I doubt it, since Rumsfeld made sure to make a cushy seat in the U.S. political circles for his old company G. D. Searle & Company, after he sold it to Monsanto.