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Alright you guys, introducing Marjorie Cohn.
She is Professor Emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego.
She's the former president of the National Lawyers Guild and her most recent book is called Drones and Targeted Killing Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues and it's coming out in a brand new edition.
Welcome back to the show, how are you doing?
Fine Scott, thanks for having me.
And I'm sorry, when is the new edition coming out?
It's coming out next month.
Next month, okay great.
And the website is Marjorie Cohn.
That's C-O-H-N, MarjorieCohn.com for all her great writings.
And boy, you know, I'm not surprised.
Well, I'm not shocked.
I guess I'm a little surprised, I just didn't know.
But boy, do you have a thorough and wonderful treatment of the story of America's chemical war in Vietnam.
And we've been doing a little bit of Vietnam revisionism on the show here to coincide, of course, with everybody paying attention to this issue because of the Ken Burns documentary, The Vietnam War, that's playing on PBS here.
And well, I can tell you've been very interested in and involved in this issue for a very long time.
You know all about it, and it's a hugely important story.
So I'm really happy to have the chance to have you on the show to talk about this.
So I'm very happy to have you here.
Tell us everything you know about America's use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and the consequences for whoever you feel like talking about.
Everything I know is going to take more than 15 minutes, but I'll do my best.
No, that'll be fine.
I'll be here.
I'll do my best.
Well, I first want to say that there are many criticisms out there of the Burns-Novick series, but one of the most tragic legacies of the war is that people are still suffering, both Vietnamese and Americans, from the spraying of Agent Orange, and that is given very short shrift in the documentary.
The victims are not portrayed other than one very brief sighting, and the ongoing harm created by the chemical warfare program is never mentioned.
Agent Orange dioxin was a herbicidal chemical that was manufactured by Dow and Monsanto and other U.S. chemical companies, and the U.S. military sprayed it from 1961 to 1971.
Now, dioxin is one of the most toxic chemicals known to humankind, and the U.S. government was aware that the use of poison as a weapon of war was forbidden by international law well before it was used in Vietnam.
In fact, the U.S. government suppressed a 1965 report called the Bionetics Study that showed that dioxin caused many birth defects in experimental animals, and once that report was leaked, that's when the spraying of Agent Orange dioxin was stopped.
But people who were exposed to Agent Orange dioxin often have children and grandchildren born with horrific birth defects and serious illnesses and disabilities, and there is a virtual unanimity of opinion within the international scientific community that exposure to Agent Orange dioxin caused some forms of cancers, reproductive abnormalities, immune and endocrine deficiencies, and nervous system damage.
And people are still being born, grandchildren of people who were exposed, both Vietnamese and Americans whose ancestors, whose U.S. soldiers were exposed to it, continue to be born with birth defects.
I was a judge, one of seven judges from three continents, in a tribunal in Paris in 2009.
It was called the International People's Tribunal of Conscience in support of the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, and 27 witnesses testified, and that included victims, both Vietnamese and American victims, scientists, journalists.
It was really quite overwhelming, and I just want to give you a couple of examples of what these witnesses said.
Mai Giang Vu was exposed to Agent Orange.
He served in the Army of South Vietnam.
He carried barrels of the chemicals on his back, and his sons were unable to walk or function normally.
Their limbs gradually curled up.
They could only crawl, and by 18, they were bedridden.
One died at age 23, the other 25.
Nhat Tran was a French-Vietnamese woman who worked in Vietnam as a war correspondent, and she was there when the U.S. began spraying the chemical defoliants, and that's what they were.
They were defoliants.
They were sprayed around U.S. Army bases to clear out the foliage.
So while the spraying was going on, a big cloud of this chemical enveloped her, and shortly after her child was born, her daughter was born, and the child's skin began to shed.
She couldn't bear to have physical contact with anyone.
She never grew.
She remained 6.6 pounds, which was her birth weight, until she died at the age of 17 months.
And Tran's second daughter suffers from alpha thalassemia, which is a genetic blood disorder rarely seen in Asia.
Tran herself, who was a journalist, saw a woman who gave birth to a ball with no human form.
Many children are born without brains.
Others make inhuman sounds.
There are victims who have never stood up.
They creep, and they barely lift their heads.
Now, in terms of the U.S. veterans, Rosemarie Hoan Myso was another witness at the tribunal, and she is the widow of George Myso, who fought for the U.S. Army in Vietnam.
He refused to serve a third tour, so he was court-martialed and spent two-and-a-half years in prison, finally received a dishonorable discharge.
Before he died from Agent Orange-related illnesses, he helped found the Friendship Village, where Vietnamese victims live in a supportive environment.
And there are some of these.
I think there are about 11 Friendship Villages around Vietnam, which is not even half of what are needed to take care of these victims.
Another two scientists, Dr. Jean Stellman and Dr. Jean Grassman, also testified.
Dr. Stellman wrote the seminal Agent Orange article in the magazine Nature, and she said, this is the largest unstudied unnatural environmental disaster in the world.
Dr. Jean Grassman, who teaches at Brooklyn College at CUNY in New York, said that dioxin is a potent cellular dysregulator that alters several pathways and disrupts many bodily systems.
She said children are very sensitive to dioxin.
They're exposed to it through mother's milk.
Women pass their exposure to their children through mother's milk.
And intrauterine and post-nasal exposure to dioxin, she said, can result in altered immune, neurobehavioral, and hormonal functioning.
So these were some of the witnesses who testified.
An interesting thing, Scott, is that at the time, well, after we came up with our very comprehensive report, we presented it.
We went to Vietnam, some of us, and presented it to the president of Vietnam.
And there was an opportunity for question and answer after we presented the report.
And I asked a question, and I said to the president of Vietnam, as U.S. bombs were falling on Vietnam, and I'm a veteran of the anti-war movement, I should say, but as the bombs were falling on Vietnam, the Vietnamese people never hated the American people.
They separated the American people from the American government, and particularly when they saw hundreds of thousands of people in the streets in the U.S. and, of course, all over the world protesting the war.
And in a very moving response, the president of Vietnam said to me, we always knew the American people were our friends.
So I thought that was quite amazing.
And if you watch the Burns Novick documentary, you see the devastation wreaked on that land.
And you don't even see the half of it, really, but you see bombs dropping and villages burned to the ground and people living in underground caves because they were being bombed on a daily basis.
Well, in 1973, in the Paris Peace Accords, the Nixon administration promised to contribute $3 billion for compensation and post-war reconstruction of Vietnam, and that promise remains unfulfilled.
Now, the U.S. government has funded the cleanup of dioxin at the Da Nang Airport, but that's only one of the 28 so-called hot spots in Vietnam that are still contaminated by dioxin.
And they need to be cleaned up or remediated as well.
The people who live there are eating the crops and the animals and the fish from the surrounding area and continue to be poisoned by this dioxin.
Now, in 2004, both U.S. veteran and Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange sued the chemical companies, I think 22 chemical companies, including Dow and Monsanto, who knowingly manufactured Agent Orange and other herbicides, which they knew contained an unnecessary but lethal amount of dioxin.
They were prevented from suing the U.S. government because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity, and so there was a settlement.
And despite agreeing to compensate U.S. veterans in an earlier lawsuit for some of the illnesses caused by their exposure to Agent Orange and other herbicides, the U.S. government and the chemical companies maintained in court and to this day that there was no evidence to support a connection between exposure and disease, and the scientists have just proven that flat-out wrong.
Efforts by veterans groups and others to take care of our vets have resulted in a compensation scheme administered by the VA, by the Veterans Administration, and it annually pays out billions of dollars to veterans who can demonstrate that they were in a part of Vietnam that was contaminated and they have an illness that is associated with exposure to Agent Orange.
But unfortunately, the Vietnamese, the intended victims of Agent Orange who were exposed to it on a scale unheard of in modern warfare, have been left out in the cold, and it's unconscionable that this Burns-Novick series leaves this out.
I mean, they spend, I don't know, what, an hour or half an hour, an hour on prisoners of war, and of course that's an important thing to cover.
They could have spent 10 minutes on Agent Orange, which continues.
I mean, it's one of the most serious legacies of the Vietnam War.
There was a mention of Agent Orange in the last episode, but the narrator mentions the spraying campaign against a verdant backdrop of green fields and abundant crops, and so that's even misleading.
Now, so people will say, well, what can we do about this?
There is something to be done about it.
Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California, I'm proud to say, has introduced H.R. 334.
That's H.R. 334, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2017.
It already has 23 co-sponsors, and this bill would lead to the cleanup of dioxin and arsenic contamination that's still present in Vietnam.
It would provide assistance to the public health system in Vietnam directed at the 3 million Vietnamese people affected by Agent Orange, and it would also extend assistance to the affected children of male U.S. veterans who suffer the same set of birth defects which are already covered for the children of female veterans, so it would equalize that coverage.
The bill, H.R. 334, would also enable research on the extent of Agent Orange-related diseases in the Vietnamese-American community and provide them with assistance, and it would support laboratory and epidemiological research on the effects of Agent Orange.
So if people want to know what they can do, contact your representative and ask him or her to sign on as a co-sponsor of H.R. 334 because effective compensation for Agent Orange dioxin victims is a moral imperative.
And I should say that I am a co-coordinator of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign, so if you want to know more about that, you can go.
It's VAORRC, V-A-O-R-R-C.
Those are the initials, and that will take you to our website.
V-A-O-R-R-C.
Yeah, Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign.
Great.
And then again, it's H.R. 334.
And you know what?
Yeah, it's just like the Yemen Resolution going on right now.
It's the kind of thing that most of the time we would just— well, most of the time it's true that nothing like this is happening.
There's no bill to get behind.
But hey, here's a couple of really important resolutions where a few phone calls could really make a difference in getting just the right cosponsor to get a couple more cosponsors and even get some momentum behind something like this.
And after all, it's the troops, right?
That's right.
Exactly.
Support the troops.
I mean, they're dying.
And when I talk about this, invariably someone will say, my brother-in-law fought in Vietnam and died of cancer from his exposure to Agent Orange.
My uncle, my friend, my friend's friend.
It's astounding.
And these are people in our midst, and we don't even know about this.
And of course, in Vietnam, there are 3 million people who were exposed to it and people still being born, children with horrible birth defects.
When I was in Vietnam, I saw some of these people, and it was just heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking.
And this is, you know, it's very important that the series was made, Burns and Novick, but this is something that is ongoing.
It's not history.
And in fact, Jonathan Moore, who is a New York attorney who was one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit to get compensation for Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, he and I wrote an op-ed, and it's on many of the blogs, including Huffington Post and lots of them.
And it's called The Vietnam War is Not History for Victims of Agent Orange.
It's not just in the history books.
It's happening right now.
The side effects, I guess you would say, of our war against Vietnam.
And in Vietnam, they call it the American War.
They don't call it the Vietnam War.
They call it the American War, and they had the French War before that.
But this is something that's ongoing, and yet it only warranted one or two brief mentions in this 18-hour series, the Vietnam War, and people need to be talking about it and taking responsibility for what was not just a moral outrage, although certainly it was, but illegal chemical warfare.
You know, we love to talk about chemical warfare and weapons of mass destruction, and here the U.S. government actually engaged in chemical warfare using weapons of mass destruction in Vietnam, and yet we're not talking about it.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Well, you know, that's the thing about Agent Orange, too, is it's almost like prison rape.
Everybody knows that that's the way it is.
Everybody's heard of Agent Orange.
There's actually a great punk rock band named after Agent Orange and even a horrible but very popular R.E.M. song about it, and it's part of popular culture.
Everybody knows about Agent Orange, and yet we still don't do anything about it anyway kind of thing.
It's one of those, and, you know, I actually knew a guy in the 1990s who I'm sure is dead by now who he had a prescription for medical pot back before the whole new era of medical pot started in California.
He would get a little round tin full of joints once a month from the U.S. government where they grew.
The U.S. government had their own farm where they grew pot to send to Agent Orange veterans, including this guy.
Really?
That's interesting.
I never knew that.
That's really, I mean, good.
Yeah, but they were the only ones in America who could smoke pot legally, basically, at the time.
Wow.
And then also I like mentioning this.
It's important because it kind of brings home, you know, the real kind of consequences for the rest of us, too, and in this case it's the death of David Hackworth, Colonel David Hackworth, who was, I don't know, everything about him, but I know he was the most decorated combat veteran officer from the Vietnam War, and after that he dedicated his life to, in a manner of speaking, class war inside the military.
In other words, he was the self-appointed defender of the enlisted man against the evil government officer corps who would exploit them, poison them, get them shot for nothing, use their power unwisely, etc., and he died of bladder cancer from Agent Blue, and I guess there was Agent Orange and Red and Blue in different concoctions.
Right.
I'm not sure what all the differences were.
Right.
But he was a great anti-war hero, and from the right wing, right, a decorated combat veteran, Colonel Hackworth, he could arm wrestle the hell out of anybody in North America, and he was hardcore against the Iraq War, and we lost that level of, that major bit of power, right?
He was, like, on a Scott Ritter level of anti-war ability, and we lost him to cancer because of this.
Right, right.
You know, I do also want to put a pitch in for Veterans for Peace, and I'm on the advisory board.
It's a very, very important organization, and many, it's made up of a lot of Vietnam veterans, and, you know, many of whom have post-traumatic stress disorder, some of whom have Agent Orange-related illnesses, and they do really important anti-war work.
And I also want to alert people to a book that I co-authored with Kathleen Gilbert called Rules of Disengagement, the Politics and Honor of Military Dissent, and what we do in this book, Rules of Disengagement, is to draw parallels between what we did in Vietnam, what our government did in Vietnam, and what it did in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of war crimes, the racism, the sexual harassment in the military, et cetera.
So it might be of interest to people, especially because many people have watched all or part of this Burns Novick documentary.
Yeah, very important.
And, of course, yeah, there's all kinds of new problems with the burn pits and, of course, with depleted uranium all over the Balkans, Afghanistan, Mesopotamia, and I guess now in the Levant as well.
So, yeah, ongoing thing there.
Now, so let me ask you this.
I just wanted to clarify this point.
You said they used Agent Orange, I don't know exactly how steadily, from 1961 through 71, but right around in the middle there in 65, they knew how bad it was, but they buried that and continued to use it on American soldiers even.
And as they said it at the time, it was sort of like they said about DDT, which I guess was correct about human exposure to DDT.
Don't worry, it won't harm you, it'll only harm the mosquitoes kind of thing.
And that was what they said here.
Oh, it'll kill plants, but don't worry, it's okay to spray it on Johnny, he could bathe in this stuff, it's fine, right?
But no, it wasn't fine.
In 1965, the Bionetics study came out.
It showed that dioxin caused many birth defects in experimental animals, and the government suppressed that study.
They lied about it.
And it wasn't until someone leaked it in 1971 that the spraying of dioxin of Agent Orange stopped.
That's another outrage, piled on top of other outrages.
Well, and then, of course, as you say, the fact that this gets passed down, apparently they don't just suffer the damage and metabolize it out of their system.
It stays in their system permanently.
Grandchildren are sick with this.
And not just from environmental exposure, if I hear you right, but they're getting it passed down through their parents.
Right, exactly, through being in utero and also from breast milk.
So it's just, it's the, I don't want to say the gift that keeps on giving, it's the horror that keeps on giving, and it's continuing.
This is not ancient history.
This is happening right now.
I'm going to have to go, but I just want to remind people once again to encourage your representative to sign on as a co-sponsor to HR334, HR334, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act.
Can I ask you one more thing real quick?
Yeah.
I just wonder, how do they clean it up, especially when we're talking about a jungle and stuff like that?
You mentioned cleanups, but I just, I'm trying to picture how that works.
They call it remediation.
They've done it.
It's very, very expensive.
They've done it at the Da Nang Airport, but it's a complicated process.
I can't even begin to understand it, but it's, you know, they have to wear this incredible protective gear, and it's a very expensive, complicated process.
I can't really give you more details about it because I don't understand it myself.
Sure, no, that's fine.
All right, well, listen, Marjorie, I really appreciate you always and making time and coming on the show and talking about this stuff.
Thanks so much for having me, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's the great Marjorie Cohn.
Her website is marjoriecohn.com.
That's C-O-H-N, marjoriecohn.com.
We ran this one on antiwar.com the other day, and as she said, it's reprinted all over the Internet.
The Vietnam War is not history for victims of Agent Orange, and then again, it's HR334 if you want to support Barbara Lee's bill, and V-A-O-R-R-C is their organization.
You can just put that in your favorite brand search engine, and you'll find it V-A-O-R-R-C for their veteran support group for the victims of Agent Orange there.
And again, her latest book is Drones and Targeted Killing, and her website is marjoriecohn.com.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks, everybody, very much for listening.
You can find the full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
Find my institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
And the book, my new book, it's Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
It's at foolserrand.us.
