08/14/12 – Marjorie Cohn – The Scott Horton Show

All right, so welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthorton.org is my website.
And I know that we like to pretend all the time that the chemical war against Vietnam loss in Cambodia never happened, but for the next 10 minutes, we're going to acknowledge that it did.
How do you like that, huh?
Our guest is Marjorie Cohn, professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild.
She's the co-author of this piece at common dreams.org 51 years after the chemical war began in Vietnam, be silent, then take action.
Welcome back to the show.
Marjorie, how are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us here today.
Now, my pleasure.
So here's my thing.
I'm trying to remember back before I was really interested in politics stuff when I was really young, I guess.
And what I knew about Agent Orange, because I think that's pretty much what everybody knows about it, which is that some vets got sick and the government pretended there was no such thing as Agent Orange sickness for a while, but they finally acknowledged it.
And maybe some people even know the government gave medical pot to Agent Orange victims, GIs who were sick with it.
But nobody ever really talks about, at least I never heard for a long, long time, I've never heard a thing about what happened to the Vietnamese and their long-term effects from Agent Orange.
And so I'm glad to have the opportunity to bring a little bit of attention to it because of course the effects, as you write in your article, continue to linger in a horrible way.
First of all, can you tell us what is Agent Orange anyway?
Well, Agent Orange, the active chemical in Agent Orange is dioxin.
And dioxin is one of the most deadly chemicals known to man.
It has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen, which means it causes cancer, and by the American Academy of Medicine as a teratogen, which causes birth defects.
And it was sprayed all over Vietnam from about 1961 or 62 through 1971, for about 10 years.
20 million gallons was sprayed all over Vietnam, and it exposed about 5 million people, mostly civilians, to deadly consequences.
Five million people?
Yes, and what's happened is that second and third generations of children who were born to parents who were exposed during the war and in areas of these hotspots, which is where there was heavy spraying, have been born with unspeakable birth defects.
I mean, there are children born without limbs, without brain cavities, and they have cancer, liver damage, defects to their reproductive capacity, pulmonary and heart disease, shortened lifespans.
It's really just outrageous, and certainly just as outrageous that our Vietnam vets, our U.S. Vietnam vets, have suffered some of the same kinds of diseases.
Now the hotspots, many of them are located around U.S. Army bases.
They were trying to clear out the foliage.
It's a defoliant, Agent Orange.
And so that's why a lot of our vets were unintended victims of the spraying of this dioxin, Agent Orange.
But the intended victims, the Vietnamese, have not received compensation for what we – this is really a war crime.
There's no doubt about it.
And yet, when a class action lawsuit was filed by friends of mine against the chemical companies including Dow and Monsanto in the U.S. court on behalf of the millions of Vietnamese, it was dismissed on the ground that spraying this Agent Orange did not amount to a war crime and the Vietnamese had not established a clear causal connection between exposure to Agent Orange and their health problems.
And, you know, I was a judge on a tribunal in 2009.
It was called the International People's Tribunal of Conscience in support of the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.
There were seven judges from three continents.
We heard testimony from 27 witnesses, which included Vietnamese and American victims and journalists and scientists.
And there was incredible testimony about what happened to people who were in the area where this was sprayed.
Now, there is – there are some positive things happening here.
For one thing, on Friday, last Friday, August 10th, which is annual Agent Orange Day, that's the 51st anniversary – it was the 51st anniversary of the first spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
The New York Times carried a big feature about the United States actually paying to clean up one of these hotspots around the Da Nang Air Base, a $43 million joint project with Vietnam expected to be completed in four years.
And this is an important start, but there are many other hotspots that need to be cleaned up.
And the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange Dioxin, which is VAVA, has established what are called Peace Villages in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange with severe deformities.
And there aren't nearly enough of them, so there is – there is a real need for money to help care for these victims of what is really the ongoing legacy of the Vietnam War.
And another piece of good news is that Congressman Bob Filner introduced into the House of Representatives H.R.
2634, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2011, which would provide medical, rehabilitative, and social service compensation to the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange and cleaning up the dioxin-contaminated hotspots, and also medical services for the children and grandchildren of U.S. Vietnam vets and Vietnamese Americans who have been born with the same diseases and deformities.
And I work with an organization called Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign.
And we initiated a campaign on Friday, which was Agent Orange Day, that people – it was, of course, the 51st anniversary of the first spraying of Agent Orange – that people take 51 seconds of silence to commemorate this atrocity, and then 51 seconds of action.
And the 51 seconds of action is to go to our website and send an email to your congressperson to sign on to this bill, which now has 13 co-sponsors in the House, H.R.
2634.
And I'm going to give you the website, Scott, because people may want to participate.
This is something we can actually do, something concrete.
It's www.vn – like Vietnam – vn-agentorange, A-G-E-N-T-O-R-A-N-G-E, one word, agentorange.org, www.vn-agentorange.org.
And it will take probably less than 51 seconds to send an email to your representative saying, we want you to support this important bill, which will help the Vietnamese and U.S. vets and Vietnamese-Americans.
Yeah, well, you know, this is about the only foreign policy that I would support at all, would be cleaning up the poison on the ground here, the depleted uranium dust in Fallujah and in Bosnia and wherever else they've left that, the unexploded cluster bomblets in the Plain of Jars in Laos and these kinds of things.
There's a foreign policy that's worthwhile, maybe going around saying sorry to some of the people killed in our drug wars in Latin America.
But otherwise, I don't know what else we're doing.
The people that agentoranged Vietnam going around, waging war and regime changes all around the world in the name of being on the side of these poor people that we're waging war against.
It's pretty incredible.
Well, I agree with you, Scott.
There's generally going to be an ulterior motive to any kind of U.S. foreign policy that really is helpful, and there is not much that is helpful.
We have 700, 800 U.S. bases all around the world, where we maintain control of many countries.
And you're right, we commit war crimes against people using weapons of war on civilian populations, which violates the Geneva Conventions.
And this is just a continuation of when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed 100,000 civilians in Tokyo.
So we're just continuing this same failed policy.
Indeed.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time.
Thank you very much for your time, Marjorie, as always.
Thank you, Scott.
Keep up your good work.
Marjorie Cohen, everyone, professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law.
I guess if you've got to teach law, that's pretty much the place to do it, right?
We'll be right back.