A component of Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T was produced by Philips-Duphar (A chemical subsdiary of the industry giant) in the Netherlands. At the end of the Vietnam war the remaining stock was dumped in a polder just North of Amsterdam. When the scandal broke it was too late and the chemicals had reacted to form various dioxins which had leached in a gigantic plume into the ground water around the town of Broek In Waterland.
To this day the area where this all happened is off-limits, even though the soil has been excavated to many meters depth. This will likely be a permanent feature in what used to be one of the Netherlands nicest areas to recreate.
Bloody hell, thanks so much for this, I had no idea. What would be the word for this, "collateral war crime"?
FWIW, even though far larger quantities were sprayed over Vietnam, the spraying made the contamination less permanent than in the Netherlands. Hopefully most of what was sprayed in the war has been run off into the ocean, with no pluming and relatively little groundwater contamination.
Although "relatively" is rather less comforting when the contamination involves dioxins.
This is just absolutely disgusting. I wasn't quite sure what Agent Orange was, so I looked it up in Wikipedia... as a Y gen, I knew that the Vietnam War was bad, but not this bad... It is absolutely disgusting and atrocious what humans can do each other.
2. Military was told to destroy crops used to feed guerrillas.
3. Later discovered nearly all of the food they destroyed were being used to support the local civilian population.
4. In Quang Ngai province, 85% of the crop lands were scheduled to be destroyed in 1970 alone, leaving many to die from the famine.
I remember reading a book, Crimes Against Humanity, which said how Nazi leaders, especially those participated in the Holocaust were tried for their crimes. I cannot see how US Military leaders should not be tried for their actions in an international court.
And that's the thing. It annoys how easily the Americans are willing to criticize everyone else, and yet shift the blame away from themselves. If they weren't such a superpower, they wouldn't even be able to get away with all this.
> I cannot see how US Military leaders should not be tried for their actions in an international court.
War crimes are a final insult of the victor over the vanquished. While the US was not victorious in Vietnam, neither were they defeated by the Vietnamese/USSR.
Don't think that war crime trials are about any sort of justice.
> While the US was not victorious in Vietnam, neither were they defeated by the Vietnamese/USSR.
Wait, what? At the very end US Troops were evacuated from Saigon, and the city was taken over by the Viet Cong. That was the end of the Vietnam war. South Vietnam was reunified with North Vietnam. It's still a communist country.
I'm very sorry, but exactly how is that not complete and total defeat, except under ridiculous exceptions like, "it wasn't really a war because: Congress"? What a disservice to everyone that fought.
The war escalated to the point where LBJ could neither stop, nor continue without basically destroying his legacy (as well as humanitarian and social goals), so he just kept fighting.
You completely missed his point, which is that nobody was in a position to try the U.S. for war crimes after Vietnam. There are many kinds of defeat. To be charged with war crimes requires utter defeat, not merely an unfavorable end to the conflict.
> To be charged with war crimes requires utter defeat
Officials from all factions in (for one example) the Bosnian civil war have been tried by the ICTY. So unless all sides suffered "utter defeat", that is demonstrably untrue.
One could argue that prior to the establishment of modern tribunals starting with the ICTY (but also including the ICTR and ICC), that was the case. And there might be other reasons that the US, in particular, is difficult to hold accountable. But its pretty clear that it is no longer the case that "to be charged with war crimes requires utter defeat", or even mere defeat.
You should read "utter defeat" to mean "subject to the decisions of others." Nothing more, really. You can charge anybody with anything. I'm talking about enforcement.
> exactly how is that not complete and total defeat
The US just left. They left with egg on their face and not looking so superpowery but neither Vietnam or the USSR were in a position to do anything to the US. The US lost, but the US was not vanquished. Actually they basically went home and life just continued on.
The Nuremburg Trials were possible because the Allies were in direct control of the territory of Nazi Germany and had removed it's government. Below someone brought up the various Yugoslav conflicts, but even then, they stopped and then started rounding up the former leaders because NATO basically made it happen. NATO did forceably end those wars.
Exactly. Another obvious example were the bombings done by the allies during WW2.
Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dresden (less known because they didn't use nukes, but with no less destruction: [1][2]) would have been classified as war crimes for certain had the allies lost.
Did Germany get prosecuted for their V2 campaign? I think there are things you kind of agree on are allowable in war and others not -like mustard gas, etc., targeting of civilians with no military value.
And yes, I'm sure had we lost wwii we'd have been in for war crimes, such is the world.
In a "total war" there are no "civilians with no military value".
The UK Bomber Command in WW2 had a strategy of "area bombing" - which was basically to hit the centre of German cities because they were easy to find and to hit at night. There were lots of euphemisms used e.g. "dehousing" - but everyone knew that it was a policy of targeting civilians.
Of course, the UK was on the winning side, so no war crimes trials.
I can recommend "Bomber Command" my Max Hastings for a very even handed account of the UK air campaign against Germany - my father was in the RAF in WW2 (not in bombers) and it's pretty difficult for me to combine the individual heroism of the aircrews with the awfulness of what it was they were actually doing - especially as the the impact on the course of the war was apparently so small.
My father was a navigator and bomb aimer on Wellingtons and later Halifaxs during WWII. He very rarely mentioned it, brushing off questions from my younger self saying he never really saw much action. It wasn't until I was a lot older that I realised that this wasn't the truth and he had been in the air force since 1942.
I can only assume (my father died several years ago) that he felt somewhat ashamed of his time in the war. I didn't appreciate the negativity surrounding the bombing campaigns until more recently when they opened the memorial in Hyde Park corner in London (http://www.rafbf.org/1794/bomber-command-memorial.html). It's difficult to appreciate this when you grow up watching films like the Dambusters and 633 Squadron and seeing these guys as heroes. Dads are always heroes.
I can imagine why he didn't want to talk about it - the rate at which bombers were lost (3% to 5% was typical) and the need to complete 30 missions must have been incredibly stressful.
> War crimes are a final insult of the victor over the vanquished.
The nature of war and sovereignty and the absence of international institutions has certainly led to that being a non-implausible perception of war crimes enforcement in the past, but I'm not sure that can be squared with the more recent situation demonstrated by ad hoc tribunals like ICTY and ICTR as well as the standing tribunals like the ICC.
> While the US was not victorious in Vietnam, neither were they defeated by the Vietnamese/USSR.
On the other hand, if you are posting from some alternate universe where that is true, the current experience in war crimes prosecutions might also be different there, too.
> 2. Military was told to destroy crops used to feed guerrillas.
> 3. Later discovered nearly all of the food they destroyed were being used to support the local civilian population.
To be fair, there is no distinction between the food guerillas eat and the food everyone else eats. Destroying the crops that feed the guerillas means destroying all the crops, period.
I'd further add that destroying food supplies is a pretty old strategy in war. Theoretically, it would result in less death, because most opponents would surrender before letting their people starve.
Except that it is classified as a war crime under Article 54 of Protocol I of the Geneva Convention:
It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to
move away, or for any other motive.
From what I purpose of Agent Orange was to deny the Viet Cong supplies in South Vietnam. "Friendly" South Vietnamese were to be relocated to strategic hamlets and provided food if needed.
This was not an attempt to starve the civilian population.
You are being down voted but yours is the only correct attitude when it comes to war. There are no rules, justice, good guys, bad guys, innocents or the guilty. These are luxuries we afford ourselves when talking about war diatanced from us by a certain measure of time. The only truth that exists when war is ongoing is the human capacity for evil expressed through some supposed agenda and dead bodies.
Agent Orange was in widespread use in South Vietnam - the same people that the US claimed it was there to protect in the first place. The US was destroying it's allied civilian's food...
> I remember reading a book, Crimes Against Humanity, which said how Nazi leaders, especially those participated in the Holocaust were tried for their crimes. I cannot see how US Military leaders should not be tried for their actions in an international court.
With the benefit of 40+ years of hindsight, the use of Agent Orange was regrettable, no doubt.
However, I don't think it is responsible to compare the decision to use Agent Orange with the Holocaust.
The questions you should be asking are: What was the intent? What was known about AO at that time?
While using a somehow poisonous defoliant against crops and forests is certainly less atrocious than using a certainly lethal Zyklon-B directly against humans, destoying 85% of the crops is also somehow irresponsible.
All wars are bad things, purportedly waged to avoid even worse things. But the Vietnam War had something especially bad about it, probably that same feature that made the US fight for 10 years, ruin the country it tried to protect, and effectively lose the case. One thing I remember from a historical book about that war is a general saying (approximately) "Do you think we will change the entire way our military functions just to win a frigging war?".
This kind of mindset definitely leads to both atrocities and losing. NB: applies to project management in general.
What's the word for nazis causing intentional famines that wiped out at least 8 million russians and ukrainians? Also 'regrettable'? Not 'criminal'? And what's the difference then? Why was one side tried in Nuremberg and second one celebrated?
Read this. Part of Hitler's plan was to create famines at the east to decimate the local people and provide food for Germans. At least 8 milion of people died in nazi-induced hunger, which makes it as huge tragedy as holocaust - but very few people know about this.
So, I ask again, how is killing 85 % of all crops different?
So you're saying the Nazi Holocaust and the U.S. invasion of Vietnam are equally onerous, because both involved destruction of crops?
That is comparing fundamentally different things based on a single non-essential concrete.
The most important point: Nazism was an evil fascist ideology that willfully killed millions. The United States has never been that way.
Secondarily, to give a concrete difference: The civillian death toll from Nazism was massively greater than the civillian death toll in Vietnam, even if you are extremely generous in figuring the latter (estimates range from 245,000 to 2 million, per Wikipedia).
Far from all Americans who fought in Vietnam were honourable. Look to the Kerry quote posted by shoo. The scene in Full Metal Jacket with the helicopter gunner randomly shooting down farmers? An actual even witnessed by a journalist. It may not be the industrialised conveyor-belt-like method of the Holocaust, but there was the same callousness involved.
No, Vietnam did not have the same callousness involved as an entire nation's effort to wipe out an entire race of people.
Vietnam soldiers were a bunch of misguided young American cannon-fodder that didn't want to be there. Some of them were callous. It was not Nazi Germany.
Most German soldiers in WWII were unaware of the death camps, and were the same kind of mix of volunteers and conscripted youth with nationalistic and idealistic components. If you think it was the "entire nation" that was working towards the Holocaust, you need to read more books and watch fewer action movies.
Keep in mind also that men like Ernest Medina had a one-hour trial and was acquitted across the board, and William Calley was actually given a life sentence... very briefly, until the POTUS himself stepped in and changed it to house arrest, and shortly thereafter gave a full pardon. Meanwhile heroic men like Hugh Thompson were given senatorial censure and publicly hounded. Trying to paint the US portion of the horrors of the Vietnam war as merely the result of 'a few misguided conscripts' is, frankly, obscene. Hell, the journalists covering the war used to call the daily afternoon briefings from the military "The Five O'Clock Follies", due to the sheer amount of CYA bullshit in them.
Edit: Perhaps a question - who do you think is more callous: a soldier who rounds up 'undesirables' and puts them on a train to what they think will end up at a work camp somewhere; or a soldier who shoots unarmed, unthreatening civilians for either entertainment (door gunner) or some sense of revenge (My Lai massacre)? This is what I mean when I say similar callousness was involved.
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say
that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at
which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly
decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in
Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on
a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all
levels of command....
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut
off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones
to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs,
blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages
in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs
for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the
countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage
of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is
done by the applied bombing power of this country.
Was this considered 'war crime', or was it a too modern way of conducting war so that it was not covered by the international laws at the time?
If against international law or not, has it ever been a case in an international court for the tactics used in Vietnam during this war? If not, is there a documented reason as to why not?
It wasn't foliage, but hair lice and other pests... the jews were shaven their heads and told to shower. Only when the doors locked, they realized what was going on.
I know even senior officials claim they did not know the official policy in Germany was to exterminate the Jews but is there any reliable data on how many Germans knew the objective?
I don't believe there is, as it's not exactly easy to prove someone knew a specific fact. But it can be assumed everyone working at (or living near) the KZ and Vernichtungslager knew about their purpose, as well as the Reichsbahn employees involved in the transports.
> I don't think the effects were expected, at least not officially.
I'm not sure about that, and if they weren't this was gross misconduct either way as issues related to dioxin contamination were either known or strongly hinted at before the operation started.
> This was an herbicide, not a chemical weapon.
The herbicide itself (actually a combination of two herbicides, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T) is relatively innocuous, but during manufacturing 2,4,5-T can be contaminated with 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin — the colloquial "dioxin" (by accidental overheating which is a significant risk of high-temperature 2,4,5-T production).
This contamination was revealed in 1952 (by Monsanto) and the toxicity of TCDD was published/revealed as early as 1957 (and Boehringer who manufactured 2,4,5-T using a low-temperature process warned other producers of the high-temperature process's risk and provided mitigation suggestions).
Very, very sad facts. But what can you expect of arrogant superpower which, in good old nazi-style stages an incident in Tonkin bay to start whole war, did regularly carpet bombardement of major cities (which automatically means blowing thousands of kids, women, elderly etc. to pieces along with some factories) and so on.
Yes, I'm pissed off on US, how they do what they want around the world in name of money and more power, and even try to lie to the face of the rest of the world about its motives. I don't see much change with present... methods changed, results not so much (ie Iraq poisoning with depleted uranium from those cool A-10 shells and thousands of kids with borne deffects). It's very hard to have much sympathy with events like 9/11 where +-3000 people died, when here we are talking about millions.
They only way I'll show my resent is try to NOT buy/use any US product, be it hardware spehere, or software. Of course, only when it actually makes sense and where proper non-US competition exists. In face of Snowden story, it should probably be agenda of many non-US companies nevertheless.
I have some bad news for you: the US is not at all exceptional in engaging in these behaviors. It's SOP for every country on the planet. The only ones who don't are those who can't. If you want to boycott governments/countries that engage in these behaviors, you're going to have to live an ascetic lifestyle. And naturally, the biggest manufacturers/producers are generally those with the most horrific crimes in the recent past: the UK, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, etc. These are also the same countries with the most powerful global electronic surveillance operations - yeah, the US isn't the only one doing that, either.
America gets most of the flak because it has the most power and influence. But out of all the hegemonies and empires in human history, I suspect the American one is among the most benevolent, if not the most benevolent.
That isn't to excuse its behavior if you find it abhorrent. But it is what it is. We are very lucky to live in the times we live in. The world was not nearly so kind only a few years ago. World powers now talk soft and pass all kinds of laws and treaties and human rights conventions and pay lip service and quite a bit more to principles that would have been laughed at for most of our history. To take this particular example, almost all historical generals would have laughed in your face and called you an idiot if you told them depriving citizenry of food was evil and they shouldn't do it.
What I wonder is how long this situation can last. We are a great aberration and I do not think it can last forever. We're already seeing some of the consequences: guerrilla warfare is effectively unstoppable as long as we have moral compunctions regarding civilians.
Very fair point, its intended use was indeed not as a chemical weapon.
It would however seem reasonable that, even if not expected at the time, people in charge could be held accountable after the fact as well. However this is perhaps way beyond what can be expected of international law.
A strong message about the unfortunate nature of international law:
"The ICJ ruled in favor of Nicaragua and against the United States and awarded reparations to Nicaragua. The ICJ held that the U.S. had violated international law by supporting the Contras in their rebellion against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua's harbors. The United States refused to participate in the proceedings after the Court rejected its argument that the ICJ lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. The U.S. later blocked enforcement of the judgment by the United Nations Security Council and thereby prevented Nicaragua from obtaining any actual compensation."
From wikipedia: "Agent Orange was manufactured for the U.S. Department of Defense primarily by Monsanto Corporation and Dow Chemical. It was given its name from the color of the orange-striped barrels in which it was shipped, and was by far the most widely used of the so-called "Rainbow Herbicides".[4] The 2,4,5-T used to produce Agent Orange was contaminated with 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD), an extremely toxic dioxin compound. In some areas, TCDD concentrations in soil and water were hundreds of times greater than the levels considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."
When someone asks me why I don't want Monsanto to grow my food I think I need no other answer.
First of all, weren't Monsanto a) just manufacturing this stuff on the request of DoD and b) the ones who discovered it's contaminated and warned the Government about it? It's like the very next occurrence of the word "Monsanto" in the Wiki article.
Secondly, and I apologize for Godwining the thread, you probably know that IBM built and sold machines to Nazi Germany, having full knowledge that they will be used for oppression and murder. They even found a way to avoid the business ban during wartime. Hell, ever seen the serial numbers tattooed on the arms of concentration camps' prisoners? You can thank IBM punch-card systems for that.
And yet I'm willing to bet that you don't avoid IBM computers, servers and software for that reason. Because what they did during WWII has little to do with the quality of hardware they manufacture now. And so is with Monsanto. The fact that they did work on herbicides-turned-chemical-weapons for USGOV doesn't mean anything about their ability to put healthy food on your table.
If you want someone to blame for Agent Orange, blame the DoD.
> The fact that they did work on herbicides-turned-chemical-weapons for USGOV doesn't mean anything about their ability to put healthy food on your table.
Monsanto & healthy food is an oxymoron. Try drinking some Roundup. I hear it's "safe" ;-)
If you're referring to that interview then keep in mind that it was just a crappy "journalist" trying to make a show out of what was supposed to be an interview on a topic completely not related to Monsanto.
Apparently he succeeded. I guess it's a lesson in designing propaganda - be an asshole, people will believe you.
Also, I'm not particularly convinced that the insane amount of stuff farmers dump on their crops is really better than replacing all of it with just one pesticide.
> If you're referring to that interview then keep in mind that it was just a crappy "journalist" trying to make a show out of what was supposed to be an interview on a topic completely not related to Monsanto.
Well, it's supposed to be "safe". Why didn't he drink it?
And the interview was originally about Golden Rice.
> Also, I'm not particularly convinced that the insane amount of stuff farmers dump on their crops is really better than replacing all of it with just one pesticide.
Actually, in a functioning ecosystem, no pesticides are needed. Insects & other microorganisms are natural parts of the food web.
> Well, it's supposed to be "safe". Why didn't he drink it?
Urine is also safe. Would you drink your own in front of a camera if I asked you to during an interview on water purification systems?
Most people react negatively to such weird requests, especially if they're out of the blue, in front of a camera, and asked by person who evidently tries to prove some point at your expense.
> And the interview was originally about Golden Rice.
Yes, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Roundup. Golden rice is a cool piece of biotech created to save more than half a million lives of children annually (and save many more from blindness) and is given away for free to grow (and replant) by people that need it. Bringing up Monsanto's pesticide in that interview was disingenuous, not to mention off-topic.
> Actually, in a functioning ecosystem, no pesticides are needed. Insects & other microorganisms are natural parts of the food web.
First of all, not really. That is, sure if you don't mind half your crops being rotten. I've never seen the evidence that you can successfully run a high-yield zero-pesticide farm. But I'm not that into farming and I'll be more than happy to learn I'm wrong.
But more importantly, even if possible, apparently almost no one does that. Especially not organic farmers, who dump even more chemicals on food than usual, with only difference is that those chemicals have "organic-certified" label. So between "a lot of pesticides", "even more pesticides applied by industry that tries to cheat you into thinking they're not using pesticides" the "one pesticide" solution suddenly doesn't sound that bad.
IMO, this whole notion that we accept poisons on our food is ridiculous. But ymmv. Many people are content getting fat & diabetic eating McDonalds.
> That is, sure if you don't mind half your crops being rotten.
Sorry, but that's a load of BS. Local farms don't really have this issue. Also note there is a huge problem of waste with conventional farming & animal meat production.
Re: "pests". Pests have predators. If you encourage the predators to thrive, you don't have a pest problem. Conventional monoculture chemical agricultural practices are prone to disease & pests because the natural food web & community is disrupted. It's an unsound architecture that requires expensive & destructive inputs to maintain. It's the industrial model fighting nature.
Why not work with nature instead?
> I've never seen the evidence that you can successfully run a high-yield zero-pesticide farm.
See the links I posted above. Both high-yield farms use zero-pesticides.
> But I'm not that into farming and I'll be more than happy to learn I'm wrong.
Maybe you should look more into it before stating such a strong opinion...It sounds like you are heavily influenced by propaganda from large chemical & petrol companies. I don't blame you, they have huge marketing budgets & are owned by the same interests that run the major media outlets. Too bad nature doesn't have a marketing department, huh?
> But more importantly, even if possible, apparently almost no one does that.
That's untrue. Natural methods are still dominant in most of the world. America is an outlier.
America subsidizes petrol chemical centralized agriculture. We don't subsidize natural methods. Lobbying & corporate interests drive this behavior.
> Especially not organic farmers, who dump even more chemicals on food than usual, with only difference is that those chemicals have "organic-certified" label.
The USDA Organic label is pretty asinine. Many think it's a way of sabotaging natural chemical free methods.
Note that natural food webs don't need chemicals. It has been done successfully but does not receive much attention on a large scale because it does not suit large scale corporate interests. If you take an interest in chemical free gardening, you can try it out yourself.
Natural methods emphasizes small, autonomous farms. It's also better for the environment since natural ecosystems are built (serving a variety of functions), instead of the monoculture pesticide drenched, petrol subsidized, environmentally destructive system that we have today.
The point is, the company profited grandly from the effort and used that profit to propel itself into its current grandeur position of gatekeeper to a significant portion of humanitys' food supply, and considers the literal mass manipulation of food supply key to its continued survival as an entity.
An entity which has no moral issue from profiting, immensely, from the production of poison.
There's plenty of reasons to dislike Monsanto for even today, they do have some shitty ways of doing business. But I see no reason to single out Monsanto in the story of Agent Orange, especially that they were the ones to warn everyone about the contamination issues.
I'm not a fan of Monsato, but I'm a fan of putting the blame in a precise way, on those responsible and only for the things they're actually responsible for.
Monsanto wouldn't be where it is today if it wasn't for its production of previous poisons which continue to plague the world with death and mayhem. The point is to remember this fact, in considering "The Monsanto of Today", because - just like in the 60's, the Scientists in the Company Producing Foods and Poisons, telling you 'everything is okay' here and now today, was wrong.
It's a mistake to treat corporations like people (no matter what the SCOTUS has to say on the matter). Corporations are just the people who work there. And none of the people involved with Agent Orange are working on GMOs today. They have nothing to do with one another.
Besides, Monsanto long ago spun off their chemical division as Solutia. We're not even talking about the same company.
In the end, you're confusing the name of something with the actual something.
An alternate interpretation is that the OP doesn't want Monsanto to grow their food because of their involvement in the military-industrial complex and poisoning of the environment, not because their defoliant was contaminated.
Bayer has got to have the worst history of any company still around. They used concentration camp slave labor and performed medical experiments on them as well. Then someone who went to prison for 7 years for war crimes was appointed the head of the board when he got out of jail. Of course they also invented heroin as a "non-addictive substitute for morphine."
All of these companies should have been shut down for immoral practices. If somebody acts shady in the past, it doesn't exactly reassure me to trust them in the present.
It's a view I used to hold, but now I'm not that sure of it. First, a company today is not run by the same people as it was 40 or 80 years ago. So the question is, how much of that immoral past is in the "company DNA", and how much of it was just the old management? Secondly, shutting down such company would work if and only if you went and jailed people responsible for atrocities. Otherwise, they'll just join other companies or start new ones and continue to do evil. And since what you really need is bad people in jail, you may as well just leave their company be.
Opposition on moral ground would be fair, but in case of Agent Orange there's enough blame to go around that one should probably put more blame on the US government, and to be consistent, avoid food advertised by them.
When I heard a vet recount how he was ordered to load AO straight instead of diluted, I realized it was as much a program of chemical warfare as defoliation.
Disgusting. When I visited HCMC a couple of years ago a photo exhibition was held showing the damage of Agent Orange. If you ever visit, check if it's still on.
Has any epidemiological studies been published on Agent Orange in Vietnam?
Birth defects happen even when no one is exposed to Agent Orange. Without a study, you wouldn't be able to determine how many more birth defects happened.
Interesting! Of course, the VA would have followed up. A quick perusal of the papers seems to indicate that the connection between AO and cancer are "non-significant" at least in the studies done so far.
Little difference in risk, however, was noted according to dates of service, type of unit, military region, or any other characteristics that may have been associated with the use of Agent Orange.
When trying to read this on iOS, the video traps me in the page. Once it starts playing and goes fullscreen, if you try to stop/pause/rewind/exit it, it just starts playing again and goes fullscreen again.
These mickey-mouse rules of what is and is not considered "safe" for work is one of the many, many reasons I don't work in an office anymore. The corporatist hivemind treats the individual worker like a child, incapable of discerning for themselves the difference between nudity and sexual imagery.
I'm including such coworkers, who can't discern the difference between offensive material and journalism--and clamor for rules to be applied to the rest of us--in the "corporate hivemind".
> I'm including such coworkers, who can't discern the difference between offensive material and journalism
What about people who just don't want to spend the mental energy on it? You can think that this is an important story, one that every American has an obligation to see, etc. and still want to save that for a time when you don't need to focus on your job.
I'd also remind you that not everyone is completely detached from these things. I've worked with Vietnamese immigrants, American veterans, and many people have family members who have birth defects which are similar to some of those pictures even if they weren't caused by Agent Orange. I certainly would hesitate to show any of them something like this without advanced warning.
I fail to see what any of this has to do with my usage, or why rules should be made out of it. The most rule you need is "get your work done or you're fired."
The point of "not safe for work" is for what other people will see on your screen.
And it's not their failing if such important depressing things distract them from getting their work done. It doesn't have to be offensive to be a bad idea to share with people that are trying to be productive.
Oh, I think I see your point better now, and I agree with that. But I was focusing on the horrifying deformities as something that can legitimately be a problem in a workplace, not incidental nudity.
but you are assuming that everyone has the same sensibility.
It's like swearing. By culture, I'm inclined to swear when something goes bad (i.e. hard to find bug), but I know some people don't like it, so I try not to do it around them, or around people whom I don't know well enough.
It's common courtesy, even if there is noone clamoring for it.
Germany paid big contributions to war sacrifices. I guess 'murica haven't paid any reasonable amount of compensations. I think it would be good for the country to pay compensations to 'murican war crimes sacrifices around the globe, hopefully it will prevent 'murican taxpayers from supporting new crimes(happening every day, in fact, e.g. innocent people killing in Pakistan with drones, http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/04/10/fewer-than-2-percent-of-... )
Maybe Pakistan should pay something for harboring one of the world's worst war criminals? [1]
I don't agree with many of things the U.S. has done in its past relating to war, but there was a Geneva convention for a reason, and it seems like the U.S. is the only one that is trying to abide to it as of late.
To this day the area where this all happened is off-limits, even though the soil has been excavated to many meters depth. This will likely be a permanent feature in what used to be one of the Netherlands nicest areas to recreate.
Photo of the site during the cleanup:
http://siebeswart.photoshelter.com/image/I0000jbBzIgQOwR4
This is the entrance to the site as it approximately looks today:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.42447,4.991151,3a,75y,103.82...
It's one of the most expensive toxic waste operations ever in Europe and the most expensive one to date in NL.
People were living within 100 meters of this dump!
And that dump is a small fraction of what was dropped over Vietnam.