Guest op-ed, by Russ Wellen: The year’s end brings real disarmament that you can touch and feel

Don't get this wrong, this fight isn't over. But under the leadership of Greg Mello, the Los Alamos Study Group has made significant headway in slowing down and eventually stopping this wrong-headed project. There are two lawsuits well under way to do so. As Russ Wellen points out here, this is disarmament you can taste -- this is more real than much of the well intended but often ill informed rhetoric of many liberal peace groups. Case in point: the START 2 treaty. I remember well how we (the Los Alamos Study Group) were criticized for not automatically signing on to this fake Obama-Medvedev "disarmament treaty" while testifying at the NPT hearings at the UN in New York City. Sad thing is that the signing of this treaty enabled a lot of funding to go towards what amounts to the START of a renewed nuclear arms race --the last thing our world needs. This could have been all together prevented if there would have been less eagerness by the mostly democratic 'peace' community to hand Obama a 'win' in what will probably the only remotely 'disarmament oriented initiative' he will sign during his term (despite being a Nobel prize winner).  It is time for foundations to take a deep look at the work that has gone into this, and support the Los Alamos Study Group in its efforts to halt the CMRR-Nuclear Facility. How ? By making sure that some of the 'liberal' foundation money streams reach the Los Alamos Study Group (lasg.org). Please donate generously, in this time of darkness and the return of light. You can make a real difference happen....

Willem Malten

“In crisis lies opportunity” is more than just a cliché (and we’re not just talking about Naomi Klein’sShock Doctrine.)  For instance, what could be a better time than the recess-depression in which we’re mired to rethink the whole concept of a growth economy, which has become unsustainable in the face of climate change and dwindling resources? At the very least, it’s a chance to trim our defense budget. In fact, it might not be foremost in the minds of most Americans, or even of much consolation, but cuts to our nuclear-weapons program constitute a silver lining to our economic crisis.

If you’ll recall, earlier this year, the New START treaty was held hostage by Senate Republicans under the direction of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). By way of ransoming it, the Obama administration forked over a proposal to spend $88 billion during the next decade on nuclear-weapon modernization. (As if to show the futility of that approach, while it was ultimately passed, Kyl still didn’t vote in favor of New START.) That figure represents a 20 percent increase above funding levels proposed during the Bush administration.

Equally as sad, as Hans Kristensen wrote at the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Blog:

… the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead and actually permits the United States and Russia to deploy almost the same number of strategic warheads that were permitted by the 2002 Moscow Treaty [thanks, in part, to a] new counting rule that attributes one weapon to each bomber rather than the actual number of weapons assigned to them. [Even stranger, this] “fake” counting rule frees up a large pool of warhead spaces under the treaty limit that enable each country to deploy many more warheads than would otherwise be the case.

Indeed, the New START Treaty is not so much a nuclear reductions treaty as it is averification and confidence building treaty.

Confidence building is nice and all. But it’s been 62 years since both the United States and the former Soviet Union (and then Russia) have possessed nuclear weapons,  25 years since the pivotal Reykjavík nuclear summit, and 20 years since the end of the Cold War. We’re still just trying to build confidence?

Meanwhile, what does disarmament look like when it’s not just pecking at the inside of its egg struggling to emerge? Regular readers of Focal Points know that we track the progress of the Los Alamos Study Group, a disarmament organization that monitors the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory (the heart of the Manhattan Project during World War II) and is today managed by a Bechtel-led consortium for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

In recent years, the mission of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) has been to halt the progress of a Soviet-era-sounding project called the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility (CMRR), intended, in the words of the Los Alamos National Laboratory itself, to perform “analytical chemistry, materials characterization, and metallurgy research and development,” for the production of nuclear pits.

Upon first hearing the phrase, a nuclear pit might sound like a dump for nuclear waste and old warheads. But, as in the pit of a fruit, it’s an origin of life — where the chain reaction occurs in a nuclear warhead. You can be forgiven if you’re surprised that, in light of President Obama’s renowned Prague disarmament speech and New START, however watered down, we’re still creating these obscure objects of destruction. Especially considering that 14,000 pits have been recovered from warheads that have been retired.

Physicist and nuclear policy authority Frank von Hippel recently testified in a lawsuit that the LASG filed against the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

The need for large-scale pit production has vanished. In 2003, the [NNSA] was arguing that the [United States] needed the capability to produce 125 to 450 pits per year by 2020 to replace the pits in the US weapon stockpile that would be 30 to 40 years old by then. . . .But, in 2006, we learned that US pits were so well made that, according to a Congressionally-mandated review of … pit aging, “Most primary types have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years.”

Of course, that’s as much bad news — these infernal engines will be around for another century unless they’re dismantled — as good news. Meanwhile, the CMRR project is now expected to cost between $4 and $6 billion. In order to halt or at least stall it, the LASG filed a case against the NNSA seeking a new Environmental Impact Statement (as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act) to address, among other things, seismic concerns about the project. While that case was dismissed, the LASG is not only appealing it, but filing a second lawsuit toward the same end. In the latest LASG newsletter, Executive Director Greg Mello writes (emphasis added):

On December 15, House and Senate conferees issued their “megabus” appropriations bill for fiscal year (FY) 2012. [Passed in the Senate and House, though 86 Republicans defied Republican leadership and voted against it. -- RW] … the bill appropriates only 63% of the requested funds for the [CMRR], slashing $100 million (M) from the $270 M proposed spending level in the project. … CMRR and [a project in proximity to it] were the only NNSA Weapons Activities construction projects cut. … The proposed CMRR cut is 90% of the total proposed cut in new NNSA construction. NNSA’s other proposed massive project, the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF), slated to be built at the Y-12 Nuclear Security Site in Tennessee, was not cut at all.

We have no wish to slight the forces arrayed against the Oak Ridge, Tennessee project. But we can’t help but conclude that, along with current economic climate, the Los Alamos Study Group made the difference in slowing progress of the CMRR.

As Mello writes, the funding cut “can be fairly described as one of the few concrete policy accomplishments of the entire arms control and disarmament community in the United States over the past couple of years.” Never mind your garden-party treaties that are guaranteed not to offend — when the construction of a facility designated for the manufacture of nuclear-weapons components is blocked, that’s disarmament you can taste and feel.

Guest op-ed, by Russ Wellen: The year’s end brings real disarmament that you can touch and feel

Don't get this wrong, this fight isn't over. But under the leadership of Greg Mello, the Los Alamos Study Group has made significant headway in slowing down and eventually stopping this wrong-headed project. There are two lawsuits well under way to do so. As Russ Wellen points out here, this is disarmament you can taste -- this is more real than much of the well intended but often ill informed rhetoric of many liberal peace groups. Case in point: the START 2 treaty. I remember well how we (the Los Alamos Study Group) were criticized for not automatically signing on to this fake Obama-Medvedev "disarmament treaty" while testifying at the NPT hearings at the UN in New York City. Sad thing is that the signing of this treaty enabled a lot of funding to go towards what amounts to the START of a renewed nuclear arms race --the last thing our world needs. This could have been all together prevented if there would have been less eagerness by the mostly democratic 'peace' community to hand Obama a 'win' in what will probably the only remotely 'disarmament oriented initiative' he will sign during his term (despite being a Nobel prize winner).  It is time for foundations to take a deep look at the work that has gone into this, and support the Los Alamos Study Group in its efforts to halt the CMRR-Nuclear Facility. How ? By making sure that some of the 'liberal' foundation money streams reach the Los Alamos Study Group (lasg.org). Please donate generously, in this time of darkness and the return of light. You can make a real difference happen....

Willem Malten

“In crisis lies opportunity” is more than just a cliché (and we’re not just talking about Naomi Klein’sShock Doctrine.)  For instance, what could be a better time than the recess-depression in which we’re mired to rethink the whole concept of a growth economy, which has become unsustainable in the face of climate change and dwindling resources? At the very least, it’s a chance to trim our defense budget. In fact, it might not be foremost in the minds of most Americans, or even of much consolation, but cuts to our nuclear-weapons program constitute a silver lining to our economic crisis.

If you’ll recall, earlier this year, the New START treaty was held hostage by Senate Republicans under the direction of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). By way of ransoming it, the Obama administration forked over a proposal to spend $88 billion during the next decade on nuclear-weapon modernization. (As if to show the futility of that approach, while it was ultimately passed, Kyl still didn’t vote in favor of New START.) That figure represents a 20 percent increase above funding levels proposed during the Bush administration.

Equally as sad, as Hans Kristensen wrote at the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Blog:

… the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead and actually permits the United States and Russia to deploy almost the same number of strategic warheads that were permitted by the 2002 Moscow Treaty [thanks, in part, to a] new counting rule that attributes one weapon to each bomber rather than the actual number of weapons assigned to them. [Even stranger, this] “fake” counting rule frees up a large pool of warhead spaces under the treaty limit that enable each country to deploy many more warheads than would otherwise be the case.

Indeed, the New START Treaty is not so much a nuclear reductions treaty as it is averification and confidence building treaty.

Confidence building is nice and all. But it’s been 62 years since both the United States and the former Soviet Union (and then Russia) have possessed nuclear weapons,  25 years since the pivotal Reykjavík nuclear summit, and 20 years since the end of the Cold War. We’re still just trying to build confidence?

Meanwhile, what does disarmament look like when it’s not just pecking at the inside of its egg struggling to emerge? Regular readers of Focal Points know that we track the progress of the Los Alamos Study Group, a disarmament organization that monitors the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory (the heart of the Manhattan Project during World War II) and is today managed by a Bechtel-led consortium for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

In recent years, the mission of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) has been to halt the progress of a Soviet-era-sounding project called the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility (CMRR), intended, in the words of the Los Alamos National Laboratory itself, to perform “analytical chemistry, materials characterization, and metallurgy research and development,” for the production of nuclear pits.

Upon first hearing the phrase, a nuclear pit might sound like a dump for nuclear waste and old warheads. But, as in the pit of a fruit, it’s an origin of life — where the chain reaction occurs in a nuclear warhead. You can be forgiven if you’re surprised that, in light of President Obama’s renowned Prague disarmament speech and New START, however watered down, we’re still creating these obscure objects of destruction. Especially considering that 14,000 pits have been recovered from warheads that have been retired.

Physicist and nuclear policy authority Frank von Hippel recently testified in a lawsuit that the LASG filed against the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

The need for large-scale pit production has vanished. In 2003, the [NNSA] was arguing that the [United States] needed the capability to produce 125 to 450 pits per year by 2020 to replace the pits in the US weapon stockpile that would be 30 to 40 years old by then. . . .But, in 2006, we learned that US pits were so well made that, according to a Congressionally-mandated review of … pit aging, “Most primary types have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years.”

Of course, that’s as much bad news — these infernal engines will be around for another century unless they’re dismantled — as good news. Meanwhile, the CMRR project is now expected to cost between $4 and $6 billion. In order to halt or at least stall it, the LASG filed a case against the NNSA seeking a new Environmental Impact Statement (as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act) to address, among other things, seismic concerns about the project. While that case was dismissed, the LASG is not only appealing it, but filing a second lawsuit toward the same end. In the latest LASG newsletter, Executive Director Greg Mello writes (emphasis added):

On December 15, House and Senate conferees issued their “megabus” appropriations bill for fiscal year (FY) 2012. [Passed in the Senate and House, though 86 Republicans defied Republican leadership and voted against it. -- RW] … the bill appropriates only 63% of the requested funds for the [CMRR], slashing $100 million (M) from the $270 M proposed spending level in the project. … CMRR and [a project in proximity to it] were the only NNSA Weapons Activities construction projects cut. … The proposed CMRR cut is 90% of the total proposed cut in new NNSA construction. NNSA’s other proposed massive project, the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF), slated to be built at the Y-12 Nuclear Security Site in Tennessee, was not cut at all.

We have no wish to slight the forces arrayed against the Oak Ridge, Tennessee project. But we can’t help but conclude that, along with current economic climate, the Los Alamos Study Group made the difference in slowing progress of the CMRR.

As Mello writes, the funding cut “can be fairly described as one of the few concrete policy accomplishments of the entire arms control and disarmament community in the United States over the past couple of years.” Never mind your garden-party treaties that are guaranteed not to offend — when the construction of a facility designated for the manufacture of nuclear-weapons components is blocked, that’s disarmament you can taste and feel.

Mello speaks to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), on the CMRR Nuclear Facility, Santa Fe, Nov 17, 2011

Not many people know that to maintain the CMRR-Nuclear facility once it is built, will cost about 150 million per year. Imagine that. It is not just the 6 billion dollar price-tag, it is the recurring costs if it ever gets built: an additional artificial indebtedness of the 99% to a monstrosity that only serves the interests of the 1 %. Debt is the money of slaves. Let's not be slaves any more to bankers who hold safes of worthless derivative papers, that prove we owe them.... or masquerading scientists in Los Alamos who want to hold a hoard of plutonium in their private bunkers to play with.....yes, on the backs of the tax payers. How long can this farce last in a time of economic crisis and ecological holocaust ?


Here Greg Mello, head of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) here puts the proposed DMRR-Nuclear Facility in the context of larger societal developments, in particular an environmental crisis and a financial crisis.

  

Open letter to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB)

Dear Sirs,

First, let me thank you for coming to Santa Fe and taking the time to listen to Santa Fe and NM citizens and questioning publicly to the existing NNSA and LANS employees about the subject of safety at Los Alamos, in particular PF-4 and the newly proposed CMRR-Nuclear Facility.

In my own, kind of rambling presentation (my apologies), I wanted to mainly draw your attention to the ‘wet finger’ historical safety record of LANL. Here I want to re-iterate my points more succinctly:

-Fire: Los Alamos is an area of tremendous natural beauty, but also fraught with danger. Fire Hazards (Cerro Grande and Las Conchas) seem to plague the region with almost predictable regularity once every 10 years or so. The fires have become more intense and devastating in acreage and also ‘heat’, because of the increased drying conditions throughout the South West, due to global warming. 

Las Conchas fire snake initially marching straight towards Los Alamos

Ultimately controlled burns and the fire suppression ability of the Los Alamos emergency teams are no match for the havoc that fire can create in a place like Los Alamos. As someone mentioned during the meeting, Los Alamos and its laboratory is a very complex place to practice fire suppression. The lay of the land, with many arroyos and disjointed mesas, make fire suppression difficult, particularly in a compounded emergency scenario (fire and earthquake). The historical contamination, and current activities include a vast array of chemical, radiological and to a lesser extend biological contaminants that threaten to become volatile during a fire. Mercury, PCB’s, high explosives, etc. have all been used and disposed of, in high quantities.  

During the Cerro Grande fire in 2000 there was one large historical underground storage bunker and waste facility (in TA-16), that caught fire and emergency teams were unable to suppress it, while the exact nature of the available contaminants were no longer traceable since records had either been lost or destroyed. This underground bunker burned even 6 weeks after the rest of the Cerro Grande fire was long extinguished. By conservative estimates there are an estimated 800 smaller and larger historical contaminated waste sites all over the Los Alamos grounds, though a precise number of these is unknown.

 Other buildings and structures (including for instance power transformers, full of PCB’s) were also destroyed during the Cerro Grande fire. What was in the thick smoke and its precipitation residues and particles was never fully investigated, yet covered some of the finest agricultural productive land in Northern New Mexico (Velarde, Taos, Penasco, and to a lesser extend Espanola and Nambe) and if there were any credible studies done, the results have been unavailable to the public. When asked the NMDA (NM dept of Ag) officials respond that the reason these results were not made public was that it would hurt farmers in Northern New Mexico, and the public would get unduly alarmed.

normally this daikon is one straight root...pray tell me about this abnormality

Now 11 years later I personally have seen some abnormal plant growth in the region in particular deformed radishes (large white daikon), that instead of being a long root (like a carrot) are shaped like a bunch of disheveled limbs. Whether or not this has anything to do with Los Alamos is an open question.    

-Seismic: As your board has already noticed there is a lot of new seismic information that requires study, and construction adjustments. I was really surprised by the quantity and increasing magnitude of seismic activity, when I attended one of the recent LANL meetings on the subject. Hereby I will share two of the slides that caught my attention in particular. 

222 local earthquakes around Los Alamos 1973-2007

Between 1973 and 2007 there were 222 earthquakes registered of which 91 were located within 20 miles from LANL. Though the exact number of earthquakes since 2007  has not been published, it is becoming clear that there have been more earth quakes still, with increasing intensity. Earlier this year we saw two larger earthquakes: a 5.3 magnitude quake in the Raton Trinidad area (a little bit farther away from Los Alamos on the border with Colorado), and a 3.8 magnitude quake in Nambe, only 18 miles away from the proposed CMRR-NF site.

Hereby I would also like to once more draw your attention to the fault lines located under the LANL. Somehow, in the map provided by LANL itself,(see map) incredulously the fault lines stop at the Labs boundary lines (RCF, RCF), and then seem to continue just beyond the borders of the Labs on the south side. 

The most generous thing that can be said here, is that it is apparently difficult,
even for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to establish the exact location of fault lines

But if one were to connect the south side fault-lines with the north-side --one would realize that there are fault lines right underneath the proposed CMRR-NF building site. Engineering may be pretty good these days, but even so, it doesn’t seem prudent to store 13000 pound of plutonium or more, on top of these fault lines, on the side of one of the largest calderas in the world.

-Water: After the Las Conchas fire there have apparently many problems with water testing. Every time there has been a big rain, the testing water intakes have been shut down, since there was too much ash and slurry to not clog up the testing instrumentation. Predictably, no radiation to speak of has been measured so far. I don’t want to be an alarmist about water, or hysterical about the Buckman wells supplying water to Santa Fe: I belief that in many ways the Rio Grande does provide an effective barrier between the Los Alamos and Santa Fe side and that drinking water in Santa Fe is relatively safe. However I would be interested to see what contaminants from Los Alamos are released over time (not just after a fire with hit and miss testing) and how these contaminants are taken up and concentrating in different biological cycles. After all, downstream, a lot of species, humans included, are dependent on the Rio Grande Bioregion water, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. What I am suggesting here is to take a look at Cochiti lake, an artificial lake that was created as a de- facto containment of last resort for the laboratory. Most water run off from the laboratory collects there. It would behoove us to test that water and muck and see what contaminants there are and in what quantities. Also there are fish and other aquatic life living in Cochiti lake that would have absorbed and concentrated contaminants -- this too may be of interest.

Staff of the DNFSB clearly frustrated by the inadequate answers of the NNSA and LANS officials

Thanks again for coming to Santa Fe. It was a breath of fresh air to see your authority make the officials from the NNSA and LANS squirm, something we commoners have never been able to do. It is a question of power, and we live in a colonized state.    

Sincerely,

Willem Malten 

guest op-ed by Greg Mello: A Nuclear Facility We Don’t Need

Hot of the press: finally.....our case reaches the New York Times. Now that the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) has thus found legitimacy in the "liberal press", by printing this op-ed by Greg Mello, will you help us make sure that we win our case ? Not one more penny to the new Nuclear Weapon Facility in Los Alamos, NM (CMRR-NF). Visit http://lasg.org/, and please don't forget to push the "donate Now" button. Through activism and litigation together we can win this one: it will be your (X-mas) present to humanity...Willem Malten 

It has been over 20 years since the end of the cold war, and yet the United States continues to spend enormous sums on its nuclear arsenal and related programs. In fact, rather than looking for ways to save money in this budget-conscious time, the National Nuclear Security Administration is asking for even more money to build one of its most unnecessary projects yet: a second big plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The facility, which the administration says it needs to produce more nuclear warhead cores, called pits, would cost between $4 billion and $6 billion to build, and roughly a quarter billion a year to operate. Strikingly, despite the decade (and about $450 million) spent developing the proposal, the administration still doesn’t have a firm cost estimate or a final design. That hasn’t kept it from asking for money, though: this year it is requesting an additional $270 million to continue planning, part of a proposed $621 million increase for warhead management.

A better cost estimate may be available in early 2013, when the final design nears completion, though the administration hopes to begin construction long before that, in January 2012, if Congress allows it. Even after that, experience strongly suggests that further cost increases are likely between now and 2023, when the project is expected to finally come online. By then it will be needed even less than it is now; by the time it is completed the entire nuclear arsenal, except for cruise missile warheads, will have been successfully upgraded without this investment.

The laboratory needs fewer grand ambitions, not more space. Its existing plutonium facility, which has about twice the space inside as the proposed one, already has a high-capacity manufacturing line that takes up just a third of the building. Why does the nuclear administration need to produce more pits, let alone at a faster rate? Scientists agree that the existing stock of pits will last a century or so without replacement. There are also large reserves of extra warheads and pits for each delivery system, more than enough to replace every warhead and bomb deployed.

The nuclear administration says it needs more capacity to facilitate large-scale production of pits for “replacement,” i.e., to produce new types of warheads. It optimistically claims that such new designs can be certified in the absence of nuclear testing. The new building would be built to handle the large steel tanks needed for the explosive “subcritical tests” and “scaled experiments” that are considered helpful in certifying these otherwise untested replacement warheads.

The new building would also house a large new vault containing “the plutonium stores of the nation,” as Don Cook, the administration’s deputy director, has said. Yet the administration already has nuclear storage facilities in South Carolina and Nevada, which are more than sufficient. Meanwhile, it is spending additional billions on other questionable plutonium facilities to dispose of excess plutonium around the country and is even emptying a large modern plutonium facility in Livermore, Calif.

One reason the facility’s estimated costs continue to rise is a new appreciation of how the region’s seismic profile affects the design of the facility. The proposed facility would sit above a thick layer of loose volcanic ash, which amplifies seismic accelerations and provides little resistance to sliding. The entire Los Alamos laboratory complex sits on a fault system capable of shallow magnitude 7.3 earthquakes that give rise to sharp high accelerations.

To top it off, the administration is still not even sure how to design the building: whether to anchor the bunkerlike structure deep in the mesa or let it “float” up near the surface, its upper part protected by earthen berms.

There are alternatives — simpler, faster, cheaper and safer ones — but the nuclear administration refuses to examine them. For example, it could make better use of existing facilities, which were very costly to acquire and are very expensive to maintain and make safe, but which are not being used efficiently. But the nuclear administration and its predecessor agency within the Department of Energy have been continuously on the Government Accountability Office’s watch list of agencies most prone to waste and poor management since the list began 20 years ago.

Even setting these criticisms aside, the case for building more nuclear weapons, at a time when the United States’ arsenal is already by far the most sophisticated and most expensive in the world is growing harder to make. The Congressional supercommittee, which will soon wrap up its plans for cutting federal spending, might or might not want to touch the politics of maintaining our nuclear arsenal — but cutting resources for this dangerous and unnecessary project should be something every member of Congress can get behind.

Greg Mello is the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear disarmament advocacy organization.

Resurrection of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

“...... I was participating in a truly significant historic event.... a consensus had been reached as to the supreme value of the human person, a value that did not originate in the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the fact of existing—which gave rise to the inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and to fully develop one’s personality …there was an atmosphere of genuine solidarity and brotherhood among men and women from all latitudes, the like of which I have not seen again in any international setting....”
                                   Hernan Santa Cruz, Chilean member of the drafting committee, 1948

There was real hope after the second world war that the human atrocities perpetuated during the second world war (1940-1945) would never occur again.....by law. The unanimous adoption (with some abstentions) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also heralded a new era of optimism and a kind of enlightened attitude (inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt), in which the United Nations would settle disputes and the USA was the new world leader, liberal, freedom loving and different from any empire that bit he dust before.

a wave of optimism

Today the actual force of content of this declaration has all been falling by the wayside. Though the words 'human rights' are frequently used in news papers of stature, thanks to Bush and his cronies Cheney and Rumsfeld, torture --perhaps the most comprehensive transgression of human rights-- has become a way of war and a career for many. Extra judicial killings perpetuated by the presidency of Obama, and facilitated by drone warfare are now a commonplace, almost daily occurrence. Hardly anyone raises an eyebrow that once more we are ruled by blood thirsty murderers parading in civilian clothes, who know most certainly that the attorney general of the USA will not prosecute. However, let there be no doubt: crimes against humanity do exist and violations of human rights are crimes. One day, heinous acts will once more be recognized as heinous crimes. With 7 billion of us justice can no longer just be a matter of brute power, if humanity wants to have a future at all. Treaty law actually surpasses national law --it is the supreme law of the land. It is up to us to give it teeth.

What I am suggesting here is to once more give meaning to this document: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yes, this is a legal document and presumably dry --however it is not: it is amazingly accessible. One can see how much the drafters tried to make human rights easy to grasp: in 30 small paragraphs, laws that represent the highest human aspirations are laid out for the masses. But just in case these paragraphs are not simple and clear enough, the panel took the trouble to distill these principles once again. Here I will give you the whole summary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why? Because I believe this is a profound testament to our own humanity: this is what we all agreed upon as a human family. Hopefully in this manner this document will come alive for you and becomes a useful tool in challenging the injustices we are facing globally now,  including assaults on your own liberty and ability to express yourself. What are your rights brother ? Only if you know, you can move from warfare to "lawfare". We will see this move in many areas that are increasingly intertwined with human rights such as issues of global warming, nuclear proliferation, mining, poverty, health,  economic development, education, employment, inequality, etc. This new framing of the issues in the light of human rights, gives impetus also for action.

 Let's examine article 1, arguably the foundation of all other principles.

article 1: All humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood

Here I will stick to the abbreviated versions of the 30 different articles. But if you 'd like to see the whole version, click here.

1. Right to Equality
2. Freedom from discrimination
3. Right to life, liberty and personal security
4. Freedom from slavery
5. Freedom from torture and degrading treatment
6. Right to recognition as a person before the law
7. Right to equality before the law
8. Right to remedy by competent tribunal
9. Freedom from arbitrary arrest and exile
10. Right to fair public hearing
11. Right to be considered innocent until proven guilty
12. Freedom from interference with privacy, family, home and correspondence
13. Right to free movement in and out of the country
14. Right to asylum in other countries from persecution
15. Right to a nationality and freedom to change nationality
16. Right to mariage and family
17. Right to own property
18. Freedom of belief and religion
19. Freedom of opinion and information
20. Right to peaceful assembly and association
21. Right to participate in government and in free elections
22. Right to social security
23. Right to desirable work and to join trade unions
24. Right to rest and leisure
25. Right to adequate living standard
26. Right to education
27. Right to participate in the cultural life of community
28. Right to a social order that articulates this document
29. Community duties essential to free and full development
30. Freedom from state or personal interference in the above rights

Well....here they are. When people talk about human rights, this is what they are really talking about. Obviously this is not the world we live in ...but it should be, since these are the basic principles we agreed upon with all nations. Laws that insure our ability to  flourish fully as human beings. These laws will only gain force in the shifting narrative of history, if we, the 99%, become much more aware of their content and insist that these laws have meaning in our daily lives. They are the Law.

Occupy Wall Street and the meaning of Bread

First day in New York City . A little challenged by having a cold, probably attracted in Santa Fe and of course exacerbated by the second hand air in the airplane. However today I made it to Occupy Wall Street and I was impressed with OWS: its chaotic ramshackle tents, its attempt to find organization in the midst of an overwhelming amount of interrelated but at the same time disjointed issues, its ability to recognize intelligence in methods of communication that will eventually tie one another into a real community of intent and purpose -- something historic is taking shape here. Inevitably they (OWS movement) are under tremendous commercial pressures and also political pressures from people that one way or another want to co-opt the movement --even unconsciously. Some celebrities don't just want to be part of OWS --they want to carry the flag and be recognized for it, because they are conditioned to do so. The large spontaneous public discussion was on the meaning of the cult of celebrity, and what role it has in the 'movement'. I think the larger question should be: what role does celebrity have in a system that fosters inequality and marginalizes most people ? We never quite got there, but people spoke up eloquently one after another. When a celebrity did show up (Johnny Simons ?), and expected to speak before everyone else, he was told to wait his turn and so (predictably) he left. Habits run deep on all sides. I spoke too: "there is no revolution without bread --there is no solution without breaking bread". Then magically I pulled one of the Cloud Cliff Nativo Breads out of my bag and we broke and ate it together as strangers no more. Made me think about the symbolism of bread. In the past 6000 years or so bread was recognized as the staff of life, because it fed plebs and nobility alike. It was the common denominator. Our bodies then, were recognizably made of bread (perhaps more so than now). So bread as a symbol is the great equalizer. That is why bread is so revolutionary: it focusses us humans on our commonality. "We all have red blood" the native American elder Corbin Harney used to proclaim. Forget celebrity, let's get to know ourselves, let's enjoy each other --as is......

Children of Agent Orange - People & Power -

This is a very profound documentary and so beautifully made -- in many ways hard to watch without crying aloud. But we have to open our eyes and see: this is a problem of humanity and we all have to engage and be part of the solution. We have to understand that a huge crime was committed here, in the order of Hiroshima or worse. Mutagenic weapons, that is weapons that affect future generations, like nuclear weapons and biological weapons such as Agent Orange are an assault on evolution itself and are and should be illegal. Producers and users of these types of mutagenic weapons need to be questioned in court. We need to stand with our brothers and sisters in Vietnam and the US alike who have become victims of Agent Orange. The least we can do is make sure that this will never be repeated.

Children of Agent Orange

english.aljazeera.net

How a group of US veterans in Vietnam are trying to atone for the mistakes of the past.

Children of Agent Orange - People & Power - Al Jazeera English

                               my gratitude to you for picking this issue up

Occupy Wallstreet, Decolonize Washington, Liberate All

Brothers and Sisters, first we have to clearly focus on understanding our enemy.

The enemy is a militarized state, which has become top heavy by endless wars, and which is financed by Wallstreet's sleight of hand banksters, aided and abetted by a corrupt body of politicians and media. These wars only benefit corporate wealth and provide 'raison d'etre' for the security state: a direct transfer of your taxes into a corporate war-prison-torture-machine (ultimately stacked against you).  Through the media this violence, poverty and inequality are accepted as 'normal events'  --even infecting our own minds.

"Occupy Wallstreet" has to be about decolonizing Washington-- money out of politics--. Decolonizing Washington means throwing off this yoke of oppression that comes from unregulated capitalism and the deepening monopolization of resources in the hands of the very few ultra rich, who own their politician lackeys, who own the military, and who are forming a spiderweb of extraction of resources around the globe. They are the 'supranational' elite who back themselves up with the terror of nuclear weapons. Don't kid yourself. 


In its current manifestation, money only represents endless debt. Money should be more like water: by circulation, water fertilizes everything it touches and stimulates the diversity and abundance of nature (and culture I may add). In its essence money is like the water of the economy -- it has be real, like silver or gold --not just debt hanging like a noose around the neck of us all. Like with water or blood, if money gets stuck in a few hands and no longer circulates the corpus becomes sick: there is desertification everywhere, people go hungry, people are no longer educated, resources are raped, and the earth goes barren. That is the situation we are in.

This system of mindless extraction for profit is what occupies of all our public space and discourse and IT is our 'enemy'. The way to fight this enemy is to make sure that its bloodsucking ability is de-fanged by:
    banning hi-frequency trading,
breaking "too big to fail" apart,
decentralizing energy,
dismantling the corporate prison state of fear and intimidation,
capping personal wealth at one hundred million $$,
imprisoning banksters and
stop killing people
Ending the resource and drone wars that only serve the corporate 'personhoods'.

This movement is about throwing off the yoke of oppression and poverty. Rejecting the violence. Liberation of people and resources.
This is about every-one's birth right of walking on this earth free from fear and free of hunger.

Report on the Second International Conference on Agent Orange/ Dioxin (Hanoi, 8-9 August 2011), guest op-ed by Bob Rigg

I wish I could have been there.....but my friend Bob Rigg was there and has written this moving and also funny account here --well worth reading. 

We need to find ways to support our Vietnamese brothers and sisters, by breaking the silence that is surrounding this issue and challenging the official American denial that Agent Orange was used as a weapon in the Vietnamese conflict. I call on all veterans and their deformed children, to start speaking out loudly, once again, about the reality of their suffering and that of their Vietnamese colleagues. Somehow there should be a lot more peoples' exchanges between the US and Vietnam that expose the extend of the ongoing genetic damage done. 

Mutagenic weapons such as Agent Orange tie generations of former enemies together into a branch of evolution which serves to witness the aberration and horror of modern warfare. We need to accept that the damage is done, but should never be repeated, and the victims should not have to struggle for survival without the genetic make up do so. We have to hold the corporations that created Agent Orange, and the American governments which used it accountable......We need to insist on compensation to the victims, who are  innocent by default: at the time of the crime they were not yet born.

Willem Malten

This was my first trip to Vietnam, except in my imagination as an anti war protester in the early sixties. I arrived at my military hotel in Hanoi at about 11 pm in the night before the beginning of the second international conference on agent orange/ dioxin. A very likeable Indian from New Delhi was, like me, as hungry as a hunter, so we hired a taxi into the middle of Hanoi. As all restaurants were closing the only option open to us were the numerous street eateries where food is prepared on the street, often in what may to us appear to be squalid conditions. I had been advised that, provided all food eaten at these places is grilled under your eyes, the risk of any serious infection is minimised.  And this is how most Hanoians eat. My Indian friend, whose entire life has been spent in Asia, is, it turned out, from a well-heeled family. He has never in his life eaten at one of these eateries, and was afraid of the possible consequences. He succumbed and very nervously took a few bites and then decided that he quite enjoyed the meat and vegies that we were grilling over a mini barbecue. The next morning at breakfast he and his delightful wife fell all over me and reported that diarrhea had spared him a visitation.  

When the conference opened at 8:15 am I was still shell-shocked from jet lag and tiredness, and was stunned when the distinguished Vietnamese former Deputy Minister of Defence who was chairing the meeting called out my name and invited me to sit next to him on the
podium, to help guide the proceedings of the conference. We were joined by a German woman whose husband had died of agent orange. Before he died they had begun to establish a village in Vietnam aiming to provide high quality care for children who are victims of agent orange. [I did  not know this at the time] The other person called up to the stage was a US woman who looks a bit like everyone's favourite grandma, in whose mouth everything turns to butter. It turns out that she is the chair of an international association of lawyers dedicated to justice, has worked with Ralph Nader, has dedicated herself unrelentingly to the anti-war movement, and has been a quiet and persistent pain in the ass of the US establishment ever since. Each woman is very different; both are compelling and quietly powerful figures.

As I sat next to the Vietnamese chair, I could observe him at close range. Although he appeared not to speak English, when the conference concluded he popped over to me and said that he was looking forward to seeing me in Vietnam next year. There will need to be continuous follow up on such an important conference, and they want my participation, I am pleased to say.

The conference was attended by about 200 people, many of them Vietnamese. Iran, Venezuela, and Iraq were represented by ambassadors. Fascinating, from a political point of view, was the surprise arrival of the ambassador of China later in the day. Because I was next to the chair I could see that this was unexpected. China and Vietnam have been at loggerheads ever since the Vietnam war, with parts of the northern provinces of Vietnam having been overrun by Chinese troops, including Sapa, which I was later to visit.  And there are ongoing tensions, amongst other things in relation to oil and gas reserves off the coast of Vietnam. And the US, influenced by its undeclared China containment policy, is seeking to improve relations with Vietnam, which shares a border with China. I interrupted the plenary session which I was chairing, welcomed His Excellency  and called upon the chair to formally greet him. He announced that the staff of his embassy (not the govt of China, note) had donated US$500 to help victims of agent orange. Intriguing.

These were the diplomatic frills. The day was taken up by a succession of papers, about 35% of which were presented by individuals who were either victims of agent orange or individuals from all over Vietnam who are overseeing the enormous effort of trying to care for the approx 3.5 million Vietnamese requiring intensive care and treatment (3/4 of the human population of NZ). Resources are lacking. The US and the US chemical companies which made a mint out of producing prodigious quantities of dioxin continue to deny liability, or even to provide humanitarian assistance without admitting liability. Many US veterans, some of whom were exposed to agent orange, have also had to discover that, although their own government has established a fund to assist vets suffering from agent orange, at the end of the day there are always very good bureaucratic reasons why they should either be
denied assistance, or granted so little that it is hardly worth jumping through numerous flaming hoops to get it.

I called on one US vet who I did not know at that stage, to come forward to speak. There was a delay of a couple of minutes, and I began to wonder whether he had left the room. Suddenly this gigantic black man rose from his seat (I would guess that he is not too far off seven feet tall) and walked very slowly, with the body language of someone carrying the world on his shoulders, to the podium, where he spoke in a slow sepulchral voice. He had tipped large quantities of agent orange out of helicopters onto Vietnam. He had vaguely known that this stuff was pretty deadly, but wasn't worried about it then. After the war, however, he began to reflect on what he had done, possibly helped by the growing availability of information about its terrible consequences. He fell apart, lost his job, and went onto dope, especially heroin. His marriage disintegrated, and he found himself at the top of the great US scrap heap. Decades later he is off the dope, has found a lovely German wife, and teaches meditation. He can still not forgive himself for what he has done. The conference did not make it easy for him either, as he had to sit through never ending horrific accounts of the appalling misery dioxin, now into its fourth generation of victims,
continues to inflict.

A 34 year old US woman victim delivered a moving speech. Her dad came home from the war. She was born with webbed hands and feet, and with part of one leg missing. Her dad
was dying of dioxin poisoning, then not recognised at all by the US administration. Her dad lost his job and died aged 50, leaving behind an impoverished wife and family, with a severely disabled daughter. He never forgave himself for what, as he saw it, he had done to his daughter, and worried that she would never marry, and would be condemned to a half life. She is now married with kids, and is an agent orange activist.

Several Vietnamese got up and told heart-rending stories. It is important to realise that many of the disabilities are internal, often of the most terribly painful and disabling variety. Check it out on the net if you are interested. The list of internal complications that can afflict a single individual can occupy half a page or more. The Vietnamese government is doing everything in its power to deal with agent orange and to support its victims. But Vietnam is a developing country lacking the resources to deal effectively with this gargantuan problem, which is now getting worse. Many of the absolutely incapacitated victims are being cared for at home by mums, dads, and extended families. But this kind of care, esp for people living in poverty who have to work very hard to survive, is more than slightly demanding. Many of the victims require 24 hour seven day a week non stop care. Many care-givers are now dying out, either
from stress and exhaustion or from old age, or both. Who is now to care for those who they have loved for 30-40years?

By and large the West has turned a blind eye to all of this misery, and gives little or nothing. When I say West I mean here Western governments. But Western non governmental groups and organisations are all too frequently blind in this eye as well. Not a single Western media organisation was present at the conference, although many were invited. Because the focus is on the victims, the predominant emotion was grief. The fact that this was done by the US government is understood by all. As is the fact that neither the US government nor the US chemical industry has ever come to the party. But the Vietnamese waste no breath on outbursts of politically charged rhetoric. What animates them is the terrible suffering which they alone must try to mitigate. Just inside the main door of the conference room was a fourth generation victim - a boy, maybe ten years old, with the face of a saint and the fresh, innocent smile of an angel - both arms are missing at the shoulder, and are tiny little shirt-sleeved stumps. I have several photos of him. Some second and third generation victims just managed to make their way up to the stage. They were often university educated. One spoke nearly perfect English. I had to step down from the stage to help them up onto the stage, and then back down again. They spoke about their situations with searing detachment, as though they were scholars reporting on case studies. They all came from poor families economically ruined by this disaster, but they all understand the reality of the political situation their government is in, and value and appreciate its attempts to come to their assistance. They also understand the role of the US in all of this, but are neither bitter nor angry. What would be the point? It wouldn't change a thing.  

They focus all their energy on living with their manifold sufferings and making the most of what they can achieve and can enjoy, with the love and support of others. Indirect victims were also present. The aunt of the little armless boy, who cares for him full time.  The German woman next to me on the stage, who lost her husband. The Vietnamese father of five second generation children, all of whom are massively disabled and unable to care for themselves in any way. He was poor before he and his wife were hit by this disaster. Now they are poorer, but they face up to their situation unflinchingly. As an outsider I weep, and I also feel a smouldering anger which, if they feel it, they do not show.

I have never been to a conference like this. I will certainly attend conferences like this in the future. I want to devote as much as possible of my time and energy to helping mobilise an effective international campaign on behalf of the victims. In the conference I was able to do one thing which has changed the life of one person in the conference room - the hulking US veteran who I wrote about above. It struck me during the conference that there were all kinds of group photos, but none of the victims. Although some victims were speaking, most were silent and invisible. I consulted with the key Vietnamese players, who liked my idea, but said Bob, you are chairing this session of the conference. We have confidence in you. Do your thing. I did something which, it turned out, has never happened in years of meetings of agent orange victims. I announced that I wanted them all to find their way to the front of the room for a group photo. I emphasised that indirect victims such as the German woman sitting next to me on the stage were very much included in this invitation. After a bit of milling around - we had excellent Vietnamese interpreters who were vainly trying to keep up with my rapid fire Kiwi-English - everyone, wheelchairs, crutches and the works, came up front and stood together embracing each other and feeling good together for the first time.  The entire remaining audience then spontaneously stood up and applauded loudly for several minutes. Then I took a small risk (there was no opportunity to consult with the victims) and announced that I was going to take advantage of the power vested in me as chairman to invite anyone in the audience who had dropped agent orange over Vietnam and who had repented, to join the victims. After another very long - for me - pause the hulking American veteran stood up and walked beaming to join the victims. He embraced them and they welcomed him. He was still beaming, with a huge Colgate smile, when I last saw him. We later swam together in the hotel pool and became underwater blood brothers.

I was about to sign off when I realised that I simply had to include a paragraph on an official event on the third and last day of the conference. It took place in the top Hanoi venue, a grand old opera house along French lines. That day marked the 50th anniversary of the first day on which the US dropped agent orange over Vietnam. The event was attended by every senior political figure in Vietnam. No one who mattered was missing. There were Vietnamese opera and song renditions, all relating to the theme. There were a few speeches from Vietnamese dignitaries, and one from the distinguished US woman lawyer mentioned above. As the dancing etc proceeded, never-ending gut-wrenching images of victims of agent orange were flashed across the back of the stage. No one could accuse the Vietnamese of falsely sentimentalising things. As far as I could tell, there was absolutely no anti US rhetoric. It was not necessary. Everyone knows quite well who dropped this stuff. So why rant on about it? The Americans don't want to know about it. But that is another story.  An army band provided live music from high up in the gods. When we left we were all absolutely wrung out.

Yet the Vietnamese were so restrained, almost gracious. And the leadership, seemingly without any bodyguards, mingled warmly and informally with sweet little girls carrying burning candles, dancers and others.

I had intended to paint a picture of my wonderful personal travels, as a privileged foreigner with money and perks. Somehow it does not fit after what I have just written. Also, this draft has taken about three hours to hammer out with my primitive hunt ‘n peck typing skills.
Just back from a walk around Hanoi in the middle of a very hot and humid day. Bought one of those peasant straw hats and was admired by many Western tourists. Met a very interesting French banker in an Australian bar called the Kangaroo. He has recommended a French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant called the Green Tangerine. Will let you know how it turns out.

Agent Orange: Agent of Death.....guest op-ed by N.D. JAYAPRAKASH

This is a very important and comprehensive article that recounts the atrocious history of Agent Orange. Since Agent Orange affects the makeup of genetic codes in nature and humans alike, it needs to be recognized as a "mutagenic weapon". Mutagenic weapons in effect target future generations and thus are not just immoral -- they are a violation against all of creation --they are and must be illegal.. The only way to treat crime, or torture, or war on civilians is to demand accountability of the different actors: whether they are whole nations,  corporations, politicians, soldiers, or presidents for that matter (on this blog, see also The Case against Agent Orange and all Mutagenic Weapons). 
We need to support our Vietnamese brothers and sisters in their demand for compensation and responsibility. And we have yet to come to grips with the devastation Agent Orange has perpetuated on our veterans and their families in our midst. 
If there was any conscience at all in the Obama administration, minimally it would have send an envoy to attend the proceedings of this Second International Conference of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin. Or perhaps a cameo appearance of Hillary Clinton. But no, no-one showed up.....Obama is a disappointment on so many humanitarian issues as well. He did not even speak out as police chemically sprayed totally non-violent protesters in UC Davis, etc. Chemical warfare, not only perpetuated in Vietnam, but also, for instance in the drugwar in South and Middle America, now also is directed against the US's own citizens. Against the same people that made it possible for Obama to become president. This man, Barack Obama, really knows how to put shame on the Nobel Price for Peace.....
Willem Malten

On the 50th anniversary of the use of the deadly Agent Orange in Vietnam, an international conference seeks justice for its victims.

HOANG DINH NAM/AFP 

A March 2000 picture showing two sisters, both victims of Agent Orange, at the doorway of their home in Dong Ha, in the central Vietnamese province of Quang Tri.

THE shocking images of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York are well etched in the minds of almost everyone who had access to a television set at that time. Similarly, all those who were adults or were in their teens in the late 1960s and early 1970s and had access to radio or newspapers must have heard or read about the Vietnam War. Some of them may be familiar with the term “Agent Orange” and may even have come across some fleeting references to the same. However, the devastating effect of the chemical warfare that the United States military unleashed on Vietnam from 1961 to 1971 is hardly ever in the news, despite being hundreds of times deadlier than the 9/11 attack in terms of the scale of death and devastation and long-term impact. This report is an attempt to shed light on some aspects of this critical issue that has gone largely unnoticed and unaddressed to date.

THE Second International Conference of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin was held in Hanoi from August 7 to 10 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first use of herbicides in Vietnam by the U.S. military during the civil war between the Ho Chi Minh-led communist regime of North Vietnam and the U.S.-propped regime of South Vietnam. (The First International Conference was held in 2006.) The U.S. began ruthlessly using chemical weapons on Vietnam (notably in areas theoretically under the “protection” of the U.S.-backed regime) exactly 16 years after President Harry Truman had shocked the world with his decision to test nuclear weapons by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The thoughtless use of these chemical weapons, especially the one in the form of a herbicide called Agent Orange, which contained trace amounts of a by-product called TCDD (dioxin – one of the most toxic chemicals known to humans), had devastating effects. (See “The Effects of Herbicides in South Vietnam”; Report of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., 1974; and Jeanne Stellman, et al; Nature, April 17, 2003.) No less than 80 million litres of herbicides was sprayed over Vietnam between 1961 and 1971, which effectively destroyed over three million hectares of forests, mangroves and cultivable land and devastated the lives of more than three million people in Vietnam alone.

More than 200 delegates, half of whom were from 24 other countries, attended the conference. They included Agent Orange victims from not only Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia but also the U.S., South Korea, Australia, Canada and Thailand. Victims of chemical warfare* from Sardasht (Iran), Marivan (Iran) and Halabja (Iraq) and victims of chemical disasters from Seveso (1976) and Bhopal (1984) also attended the conference.

Sanjay Verma, who lost his parents and six siblings in the Union Carbide pesticide factory disaster and in its aftermath, along with this writer represented the Bhopal gas victims at the event.

The fact that U.S. and allied soldiers also became victims of Agent Orange testifies to the recklessness with which the U.S. military sprayed the herbicide. The most striking example of this is the case of the Zumwalt family. Admiral Zumwalt, as commander of the U.S. Naval Forces in Vietnam between 1968 and 1970 and as the one who commanded the flotilla of Swift Boats that patrolled its coasts, harbours and rivers, was instrumental in increasing the area and intensity of Agent Orange spraying. His son, Lieutenant Zumwalt, who was the commander of one of the Swift Boats that patrolled the areas that were worst hit by Agent Orange, died of cancer in 1988 at the age of 42. His grandson, Russell Zumwalt (born in 1977), is mentally retarded. Their unenviable plight is recounted in a moving account titled My Father, My Son (Macmillan, 1986). Lt. Zumwalt believed that it was Agent Orange that had caused his cancer and his son's severe learning disabilities.

Heather Bowser, a second-generation American victim (whose father, Bill Morris, had served as a soldier in Vietnam in 1968 and died of an Agent Orange-related disease in 1998) was born without her right leg below the knee, the big toe on her left foot and several fingers. Heather, 38, the first second-generation U.S. victim to interact with her counterparts in Vietnam, was there to seek justice for Agent Orange victims. Lawyers, scientists and social activists and the Ambassadors of China, Greece, Iran, South Africa and Venezuela were among others who attended the conference.

KHAM/REUTERS 

HEATHER BOWSER (LEFT), a second-generation Agent Orange victim whose father, Bill Morris, was a U.S. soldier in Vietnam's southern Bien Hoa city during the war, is photographing inmates of Friendship Village, a hospice for Agent Orange victims outside Hanoi, on August 9.

Rosemarie Höhn-Mizo of Germany and Masako Sakata of Japan, who are now in their early 60s, had nothing to do with the war in Vietnam. It was their misfortune that they married U.S. war veterans who had served in Vietnam in areas that were sprayed with Agent Orange. Their husbands, George Mizo and Greg Davis, who realised that they were suffering from the effects of Agent Orange and went back to Vietnam to seek justice for the victims of Agent Orange, subsequently died of cancer in 2002 and 2003 respectively. Rosemarie, as president of the International Committee of the Vietnam Friendship Village Project which supports Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, and Masako, as a documentary film-maker, are carrying on the struggle to seek justice for all Agent Orange victims. They attended the conference.

It is not known whether President John F. Kennedy, who first sanctioned the use of herbicides, was aware of the presence of dioxin in them and about the nature of their toxicity. Official reports have tried to argue that at the time these herbicides were permitted to be used in Vietnam, they were in fact sold commercially in the U.S. ( The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam – 1971-1973; Willard J. Webb and Walter S. Poole; page 378.) In other words, these herbicides were legally produced and used in the U.S. However, there was one crucial difference: there was a wide variation in the amount of dioxin present in the batch of Agent Orange that was sold domestically and in the consignment that was exported to Vietnam. It appears that “in domestic preparations it is present in much lower concentrations, 0.05 ppm (parts per million), as opposed to peaks of 50 ppm in stock shipped to Vietnam. Therefore, dioxin contamination of Agent Orange was up to 1,000 times higher than in domestic herbicides” ( The Ecologist; Hugh Warwick; Sept-Oct 1998; page 264.)

While 0.05 ppm is considered the “safe” level for domestic sale of Agent Orange in the U.S., the manufacturers (Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and five other companies) and the U.S. administration consciously manufactured and exported Agent Orange to Vietnam with unacceptable levels of toxicity. They knew very well that using herbicides with high levels of dioxin would cause irreparable harm to the Vietnamese people who happened to be in the vicinity of the spraying area and would result in widespread destruction of the exposed environment. Thus, the U.S. and the manufacturers of the herbicide knowingly committed an abhorrent war crime – a crime against humanity – for which they have to be held accountable and punished. However, Dow has conveniently placed the entire blame on the U.S. administration by propounding the specious plea that: “As a nation at war, the U.S. government compelled a number of companies to produce Agent Orange under the Defence Production Act. The government specified how it would be produced and controlled its use” (http://www.dow.com).

Monsanto has taken the following position: “We believe that the adverse consequences alleged to have arisen out of the Vietnam War, including the use of Agent Orange, should be resolved by the governments that were involved” (http://www.monsanto.com/).

The U.S. cannot claim that it had the right to use chemical weapons because it was not a party to the Geneva Protocol of 1925 until 1975. If the signing of international protocols is the yardstick for determining culpability, no action should have been contemplated against terrorists such as Osama bin Laden for the 9/11 attack because he was not a party to any international treaty governing conduct of war.

The U.S. is guilty of wilfully poisoning the people of Vietnam (as well as its own soldiers and those of its allies) and of destroying the environment; it can in no way claim ignorance about the grievous consequences of its action. Thus, there is a strong case for the Government of Vietnam to seek suitable remedy before the International Court of Justice and to highlight the matter before the Non-Aligned Movement, the United Nations General Assembly, and every available international forum for eliciting appropriate support for its just cause.

KHAM/REUTERS 

VICTIMS AT A hospice in Da Nang in central Vietnam.

In view of the consistent protest from North Vietnam and the mounting evidence about the high toxicity of dioxin, concerned people and organisations across the U.S., including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), expressed their firm opposition to the use of dioxin-based herbicides. As a result, “On 15 April, 1970, the Secretaries of Health, Education, Welfare, Interior and Agriculture announced the suspension of uncontrolled domestic use of herbicides containing 2, 4, 5–T. That same day, the Deputy Secretary of Defence suspended temporarily all use of Orange in military operations pending a more thorough evaluation of the situation.” (Webb and Poole; op cit.; page 380). This decision practically ended yet another diabolical and sordid act of the U.S. in the 20th century because the decision was never rescinded.

Considering the enormous level of destruction and devastation that the U.S. had unleashed on Vietnam, at the time of signing the Paris Peace Accord on January 27, 1973, the U.S. made a solemn commitment to undertake necessary action to heal the wounds of war. Under Article 21 of the Accord, it pledged that: “In pursuance of its traditional policy, the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to post-war reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and throughout Indochina” (Webb and Poole; op cit.; page 407). This promise was followed by a letter dated February 1, 1973, in which President Richard Nixon promised that the U.S. would contribute “in the range of $3.25 billion” in post-war reconstruction assistance to Vietnam over a five-year period (Congressional Research Service Report for Congress; Michael F. Marti; Washington, D.C., March 2009; page 4). The U.S. has failed to comply with this commitment despite the National Academy of Sciences' report affirming in 1974 that: “It is the committee's firm belief that rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts should …be undertaken as rapidly as conditions permit… since any delay will make its accomplishment more difficult” (Report of the National Academy of Sciences; op cit.; page 41 [s-16]).

Considering the enormity of the task of detoxifying three million hectares of affected land area and of medically, economically and socially rehabilitating three million dioxin victims, the proposed plan of the “U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin” to tackle the problem over the next 10 years (2010-2019) with a total budget of just $300 million is rather a far-fetched one (http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/agent-orange). It amounts to an average expenditure of just $5 per dioxin victim for meeting all their needs every year and another $5 per hectare for detoxifying the affected land annually. Effectively, the Dialogue Group's proposed plan belittles the enormity and gravity of the problem while making a pretence that effective steps are being taken to remedy the same.

U.S. representatives on the Dialogue Group, who include senior members of the Ford Foundation and the Aspen Institute, did not attend the Second International Congress despite claiming that the Dialogue Group was set up to support the cause of Agent Orange victims.

It is, indeed, ironical that the U.S. which had no qualms about spending an estimated $658 billion (at 2008 prices) for waging the Vietnam war and in spending an almost equal amount for waging the Iraq war is so financially hard-pressed when it comes to the question of raising requisite funds for healing the wounds of war (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/25/national/main4296368.shtml, July 16, 2009). Retribution in the case of the 9/11 attack has been dealt with on an entirely different level. This was despite the fact that the impact of the chemical warfare on Vietnam was hundreds of times greater than the impact of the 9/11 attack in terms of human loss and environmental damage.

The U.S. has either arrested or killed most of the alleged perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. Over $38 billion has been paid as compensation to the 9/11 victims, including $8.7 billion for 2,880 cases of death (at an average of $3.1 million each) and $23.3 billion as compensation for property damage. Injury cases, numbering about 2,680, were also paid over $1 billion as compensation, which works out to an average of over $373,000 each (http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/defenseandsecurity/a/randon911.htm and http://www.justice.gov/final_report.pdf). Whereas, in the case of the Agent Orange attack no one has been arrested or prosecuted in the past 50 years.

Of the 105,000 U.S. war veterans who served in Vietnam and reportedly suffered from the effects of Agent Orange, 52,000 have been awarded a total compensation of just $197 million at an average of about $3,800 each (http://www.vba.va.gov/bln/21/benefits/herbicide/AOno2.htm). The double standards in the award of compensation even to its own citizens are evident on the face of it. Vietnam has been promised a total of just $300 million in the next 10 years for remediation of the affected land and as medical assistance. Under the circumstances, despite President Kennedy's questionable role in ordering the use of herbicides on Vietnam, it has to be noted that he was the one who actually tried for a rapprochement with that country as early as 1962 ( The Boston Globe; June 6, 2005). Not only was Kennedy against the escalation of the war in Vietnam but he initiated the process of rapprochement with the Soviet Union through what became known as the McCloy-Zorin Accord on General and Complete Disarmament, which was signed on September 20, 1961 (http://www.nuclearfiles.org/). On December 20, 1961, the McCloy-Zorin Accord was adopted unanimously by the U.N. General Assembly (http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/resguide/r16.htm [A/RES/1722(XVI)]) and serious negotiations began under the aegis of the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC) for implementing it. However, after the assassination of Kennedy, the entire process was reversed at the instance of the military industrial complex, which felt threatened by the prospect of world peace if the disarmament process progressed. Kennedy's assassination, thus, cleared the way for U.S. combat troops to land in Vietnam and for the escalation of the war.

AP 

A U.S. B-52 Stratofortress drops a load of 750-pound bombs over a coastal area in Vietnam on November 5, 1965.

The Second International Conference, in its appeal (www.vava.org.vn), called upon the U.S. administration and U.S. companies such as Dow and Monsanto to assume responsibility for the horrendous crime they committed against the people of Vietnam and against the U.S.' own soldiers and those of its allies. The appeal noted that the U.S. and the said companies had an abiding duty to take appropriate remedial measures to detoxify the affected environment and to provide medical, economic and social rehabilitation for all the victims.

Unfortunately, the appeal is silent on the role of the Government of Vietnam and other governments and peoples concerned in pressuring the U.S. administration to fulfil its duties and responsibilities towards the victims of Agent Orange and in taking the U.S to task for the war crimes it committed against the people of Vietnam and against humanity in general.

N.D. Jayaprakash is Co-Convener, Bhopal Gas Peedith Sangharsh Sahayog Samiti (BGPSSS) and Joint Secretary, Delhi Science Forum.?

* Saddam Hussein, as an ally of the U.S., had used a variety of chemical weapons (including phosgene, sarin and mustard gas) primarily on the Kurdish people during the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-1988.