“Not only crop
destruction, but US policies of extensive bombing, defoliation, and
relocation of people from the countryside seem clearly to fall within
the definition of crimes against humanity and war crimes,” wrote the
Stanford Biology Group in a report entitled The Destruction of Indochina.
As part of a deliberate campaign of environmental destruction during
its war against Vietnam, the US sprayed the countryside with herbicides
containing carcinogenic chemicals to destroy tropical forest foliage
and agricultural crops. The objectives of this diabolical program, which
perhaps should be called “death by defoliant,” were threefold: first,
to deprive the Vietnamese resistance fighters of the National Liberation
Front (NLF) of hiding places and cover; second, to starve them into
surrender by wiping out their food supply; and third, to drive rural
peasants to urban areas controlled by the US-backed regime in an attempt
to decimate popular support for the NLF.
Code-named Operation Hades and later Ranch Hand, the aerial application of the defoliant known as Agent Orange, which was manufactured by Dow Chemical and Monsanto, extended from August 1961 until August 1970, before being suspended by Deputy US Secretary of Defense David Packard. Some 49 million liters of the lethal herbicide were sprayed over 12 percent of the land area of Vietnam using average application rates 13 times higher than those recommended by the US Department of Agriculture for domestic weed control.
Agent Orange, so called because of the herbicide’s orange striped container, is a mixture of 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), and n-butyl-2,3,4-trichlorophenoxyacetate (2,4,5-T), both of which are likely carcinogens according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is affiliated with the World Health Organization (WHO).
READ MORE: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/12/27/280354/vietnam-war-us-against-humanity/
No comments:
Post a Comment