Today in History - Nov 24 - Agent Orange

November 24 is the anniversary of the day in 1961 that the Secretary of State told the US president that the use of Agent Orange was not a war crime, and has some precedence, as the British had done it before in Malaya. I have to wonder if the same logic would have been used about gassing the Vietnamese population.

Regardless, that's close to what they were doing. Agent Orange is a particularly nasty defoliant. Before the US even started using it in Vietnam, they knew it would cause birth defects, and it was quickly discovered that it also caused many forms of cancer, as well as skin and respiratory problems. They didn't care.

The US wanted to use a strong defoliant in Vietnam for two reasons. To destroy crops, and to destroy forests to remove cover from the Viet Cong. They used it fairly indiscriminantly. They destroyed over 31,000 square kilometers of forest with 76 million liters of Agent Orange. And not just in Vietnam, but Laos and Cambodia as well. They exposed more than 4 million Vietnamese, and 2 million of their own soldiers to it. The red cross says that over a million people have health problems as a result. And that's WITH glossing over that a big part of the reason for doing this was to STARVE the Vietnamese people.

US veterans of the war were of course quite upset when they found out the chemicals they were dropping on people was also going to affect them. Numerous lawsuits have been filed. The US regime gave a pittance to their soldiers (about $100 per month for 10 years). They still deny its toxicity and deny victims of appeals. Of course they gave even less to the Vietnamese who still have to live in it.