A key chemical of one of the most horrifying elements of the Vietnam War — Agent Orange — may soon be unleashed on America’s farmlands. Considered by world nations to be a “Weapon of Mass Destruction” (WMD), Agent Orange was dropped in the millions of gallons on civilian populations during the Vietnam War in order to destroy foliage and poison North Vietnamese soldiers. The former president of the Vietnamese Red Cross, Professor Nhan, described it as, “…a massive violation of human rights of the civilian population, and a weapon of mass destruction.”
A key chemical in that weapon — 2,4-D — is just months away from being dropped on agricultural land across the United States. Dow AgroSciences, which along with DuPont and Monsanto is heavily invested in genetically engineered crops, has petitioned the U.S. government to deregulate a variety of GE corn that’s resistant to 2,4-D, which comprises 50% of the recipe of Agent Orange.
Agent Orange is one of the most devastating weapons of modern warfare, a chemical which killed or injured an estimated 400,000 people during the Vietnam War — and now it’s being used against the Amazon rainforest. According to officials, ranchers in Brazil have begun spraying the highly toxic herbicide over patches of forest as a covert method to illegally clear foliage, more difficult to detect that chainsaws and tractors. In recent weeks, an aerial survey detected some 440 acres of rainforest that had been sprayed with the compound — poisoning thousands of trees and an untold number of animals, potentially for generations.
Officials from Brazil’s environmental agency IBAMA were first tipped to the illegal clearing by satellite images of the forest in Amazonia; a helicopter flyover in the region later revealed thousands of trees left ash-colored and defoliated by toxic chemicals. IBAMA says that Agent Orange was likely dispersed by aircraft by a yet unidentified rancher to clear the land for pasture because it is more difficult to detect than traditional operations that require chainsaws and tractors.
Last week, in another part of the Amazon, an investigation conducted by the agency uncovered approximately four tons of the highly toxic herbal pesticides hidden in the forest awaiting dispension. If released, the chemicals could have potentially decimated some 7,500 acres of rainforest, killing all the wildlife that resides there and contaminating groundwater. In this case, the individual responsible was identified and now faces fines nearing $1.3 million.
Inhaled or ingested DU particles are highly toxic, and DU has been classified as an illegal weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations.
“More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing [of nuclear bombs] has been released from DU weaponry since 1991,” said Leuren Moret, a U.S. nuclear scientist.
“The genetic future of the Iraqi people, for the most part, is destroyed. The environment now is completely radioactive.”
“Because DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, the Middle East will, for all practical purposes, be radioactive forever.”
The US is using depleted uranium in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Israel used depleted uranium in Gaza and the US in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan
A series of disturbing reports from Iraq and Vietnam (backed up by a horrific collection of videos) have exposed a hidden legacy of war — weapons that continue to create victims years after the conflict has ended.
Thanks to the US military’s embrace of Mutagenic Weapons — technologies that can poison cell tissue and ransack the human DNA far into the future — babies and children have become the latest form of “collateral damage.” Today, in Vietnam and in Iraq (and in Kosovo and Afghanistan), children are being born with deadly cancers, grotesque tumors, twisted or missing limbs, freakishly enlarged heads, and a range of horrific mutations.
In Vietnam, the US sprayed an estimated 20 million gallons of chemical defoliants over the country to kill vegetation that provided cover for the insurgent armies. The Pentagon and the manufacturer (Dow Chemical) knew as early as the 1950s that Agent Orange contained dioxin, an intensely dangerous chemical that could poison the ground and water and kill animals and people long after application. Today, 35 years after the war’s end, three million Vietnamese live with compromised health and crippling deformities attributed to exposure to Dow’s long-lasting poisons. Every day, mothers give birth to deformed babies as the latest generation of Vietnamese children struggles to survive America’s legacy of Agent Orange.
Wounds of the Vietnam War
Toxic Legacy of the Vietnam War
In Iraq, Baghdad’s hospitals are filled with grieving families of children born with deformities and cancers. In Fallujah (the site of two devastating US attacks in 2004), children now suffer from cancer at rates greater than those experienced by the survivors of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In November 2004, Operation Phantom Fury destroyed 70 percent of the homes and shops in “the City of Mosques.” An Iraq Health Ministry official charged that US used “internationally banned weapons” in the assault — including napalm, phosphorous bombs, chemical weapons and shells containing depleted uranium.
US Ammunition Blamed for Iraqi Cancer Hike
In July 2010, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health published a report on cancer rates and infant mortality in Fallujah. An extensive survey of nearly 5,000 individuals revealed that survivors of the 2004 assault experienced a 12-fold increase in childhood cancers, a 10-fold jump in breast cancers and significant hikes in adult lymphoma and brain tumors. Fallujah has also seen an unprecedented 38-fold increase in leukemia. (By comparison, leukemia rates following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima increased 17-fold.) Infant mortality in Fallujah hit 80 per 1,000 births (compared to 9.7 percent in neighboring Kuwait) and the number of male births has plummeted — another sign of genetic damage.
Dr. Chris Busby, one of the report’s authors, concluded that the “congenital illness and birth defects” were likely linked to “very major mutagenic exposures [that] must have occurred… when the [US] attacks happened.” Noam Chomsky called the report “vastly more significant” than the disclosures in the “Afghan War Diaries” released by Wikileaks. Regrettably, the findings have received little to no coverage in the US media.
Once again, there is harrowing video evidence to support these conclusions. Warning: these videos are very disturbing but they must been seen — and shared. Here is the link:
Deformed Babies in Fallujah
These stories — along with many videos now circulating on the Internet — carry a powerful message to viewers around the world. Protestors in the Middle East once held aloft a banner that read: “America! Ask Why You Are Hated!” The answer is found in the images of these young victims, born with missing limbs, missing eyes and stolen lives.
We can never win a “war on terrorism” with more war. War and terrorism are mutually self-enforcing. The simple fact is: War IS terrorism. And now, in the name of “national security,” we are attacking tomorrow’s children.
Gar Smith is Editor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal and co-founder of Environmentalists Against War.
Gar Smith, Environmentalists Against War
Wednesday February 09, 2011
- Exposed: the great GM crops myth:
“Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.”
Three types of Monsanto genetically modified corn are under scrutiny in the wake of a new study published by the International Journal Of Biological Sciences which found that rats ingesting the corn were subject to statistically significant amounts of organ toxicity. These three types — Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup® herbicide-absorbing NK 603 — have been approved for consumption in the US and several countries in Europe.
(NaturalNews) The Border Patrol has temporarily postponed — but refused to cancel — plans to use helicopters to spray herbicide along the banks of the Rio Grande between the cities of Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in order to kill a fast-growing river cane that provides cover for undocumented migrants, smugglers and other border crossers.
The controversial plan has drawn fire for its similarities to the U.S. government’s defoliation strategy during the Vietnam War, in which the government sprayed more than 21 million gallons of “Agent Orange” and other herbicides in order to eliminate hiding places for Vietnamese guerillas. An estimated 4.8 million Vietnamese citizens and thousands of U.S. soldiers were exposed to the dioxin-based chemical, resulting in more than 500,000 birth defects and 400,000 deaths and disabilities among adults.
The Border Patrol proposed to begin by defoliating 1.1 miles of the river, possibly eventually expanding the program to 130 miles and perhaps even to other parts of the border.
Local citizens and environmentalists on both sides of the border have widely criticized the plan. The Mexican government has objected that there is insufficient scientific data over the health risks of imazapyr, the herbicide to be used, and that it wants to conduct its own assessment. The Border Patrol has postponed the plan, but has not promised to await the results of further studies.
In March, 2003 my sister, Army Captain Chaplain Fran E. Stuart was deployed to Iraq with the rest of her battalion, from Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, the 101st Airborne. The uncharted desert would not only hold uncertainty for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, but if she survived during her one-year deployment, she would return to the U. S. forever changed.
Although the changes that would occur two years to the day from her return home were changes she never could have fathomed. Not only had the desert sand, gun blasts and heat penetrated the armor of her psyche, but a carcinogen did too. It made a home in her body, mixed between the Anthrax Vaccine, depleted uranium, crude oil smog, and contaminated water dished up with every meal. It would, in two years, become part of the wrapping around her inner organs like an Octopus, gathering its fuel from her central abdomen. The volleyball size tumor would become the pregnancy she never had — and the birth of cancer she’d never forget.
In March 2006, the 41-year-old captain was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive, stage IV Dysgerminoma cancer, the “germ cell” cancer usually only seen in pregnant women, or teenage girls. Captain Stuart was medevaced from her new tour in Germany to Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) in D.C. to undergo further testing and immediate surgery to remove the massive tumor, only to discover three more. It would take ten months of treatments to corral the cancer. After 35 rounds of chemotherapy and two more surgeries was she deemed in clinical remission.
While her family was supporting Captain Stuart at WRAMC, my exclusive access to WRAMC exposed cancer as a affliction suffered by many soldiers are returning from Iraq/Afghanistan, unknown to the public and unacknowledged by the military.
Although WRAMC Forrest Glen Fisher House provides housing exclusively for soldiers with cancer, undergoing surgeries, chemotherapy or radiation treatments at Walter Reed — the DoD hasn’t gone public with their findings. WRAMC has dedicated floors six and seven to the stricken soldiers arriving daily — their life may have been spared on the battlefield, but the savage beast within — cancer — had created its own war.
Soldiers face a more deadly and rapidly moving carcinogen that covertly infiltrates all ranks, ethnicities, gender and ages from 21-57. Developing different stages and forms of rare cancers within 4-24 months, a portion are medevaced to WRAMC from Iraq already ill. Others, like my sister, are diagnosed two years post-deployment. Since soldiers are uninformed about depleted uranium (DU), they are not wearing protective gear and are unknowingly inhaling and ingesting the toxic dust.
Think U.S. health authorities have never conducted outrageous medical experiments on children, women, minorities, homosexuals and inmates? Think again: This timeline, originally put together by Dani Veracity (a NaturalNews reporter), has been edited and updated with recent vaccination experimentation programs in Maryland and New Jersey. Here’s what’s really happening in the United States when it comes to exploiting the public for medical experimentation:
(1845 – 1849) J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the “father of gynecology,” performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns’ skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker’s awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).
Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston’s Children’s Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful (Sharav).
(1906)
Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).
Medical experimenters “test” 15 children at the children’s home St. Vincent’s House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent blindness in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished for the experiments (“Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).
(1915)
Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through “a thousand hells.” In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates (Greger; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.). Continue reading »
On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television (ARTE – French-German cultural TV channel) by French journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto – A documentary that Americans won’t ever see. The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.
I highly recommend this video. This is so important.
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