Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Covering up American War Crimes in Viet Nam

Extract from an article
"Covering up American War Crimes, From Baghdad to New York"
by Charles Glass

March 25, 2010 "
Taki's"

".....There are precedents for government resistance to admitting responsibility (for war crimes).

American Vietnam veterans crippled by the dioxin they dropped all over Vietnam waited many years for the government to acknowledge their plight.


At first, the government resisted the connection between dioxin and the veterans’ cancer, Parkinson’s, and other fatal illnesses.

By the time the government paid anything, the vets were observing that their children were being born with severe birth defects from dioxin in Agent Orange and other herbicides unleashed on the South Vietnamese countryside.

Their children’s congenital deformities included spina bifida and other horrors that may go for generations to come. The Department of Veterans Affairs didn’t send them any money until 2003—thirty years after the last barrel of poison was dropped on Vietnam. Even that was restricted to 7,520 of the 99,226 veterans who claimed to have been affected.

While dioxin disabled thousands of American service personnel who merely handled it, as many as 4.8 million Vietnamese endured twenty-eight million gallons of toxic rain that drenched their skins, soaked their soil, and polluted their rivers and groundwater for ten years.

As with the American war vets, then-unborn children were also affected.

Vietnam has one of the world’s highest levels of birth defects, concentrated in the south where the American forces deployed most of the chemicals.


Five children out of one hundred are born with serious abnormalities, including missing limbs, spina bifida, twisted or missing internal organs and grotesque malformations that have made their survival impossible.

While reluctantly accepting a link between dioxin and birth defects in American service personnel’s children, the US denies any connection when it comes to Vietnamese...."


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