No Vet Left Behind

A little something I wrote a few years back at care2.com that's still relevant for this Memorial Day.

Jul 11, 2007

As the health care debate in America continues, so does the suffering of Vietnam veterans and citizens due to the toxic defoliant Agent Orange used in the war. The substance has been linked to everything from cancer, to birth defects of children whos parents were exposed. Gary D. Moore, SSgt USAF 1968-1972 has compiled an alphabetical index of the many diseases related to the effects of herbicide exposure, as well as medical and scientific terms used when reading about it.

Despite what any of us think about the wars our soldiers fight in, I think we can all agree our vets deserve nothing but the best health care available. Especially when one considers that many of their medical woes come as a direct result of their own Governments actions.

The Wikipedia article on the subject states that...

"At the time Agent Orange was sold to the U.S. government for use in Vietnam, internal memos of its manufacturers reveal it was known that a dioxin, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD), is produced as a byproduct of the manufacture of 2,4,5-T, and was thus present in any of the herbicides that used it."

In other words they knew the risks! In 1984 a $180 million settlement resulted in one time lump sums of $1,200 being paid out to affected veterans. I am sure many affected veterans never saw a dime of this money. For the ones that did, I am sure that $1,200 did not go far!

The US has refused to compensate Vietnam's Agent Orange victims and canceled a study looking into it's affects in the country.

It is also of interest to note that a April 17, 2003 study found that Agent Orange Use Was Underestimated. It has also been exposed that the American army tested Agent Orange in Canada.My friend Karen Stillwell has been fighting an uphill battle with the Department of Veterans Affairs. She has recently written the agency a letter detailing her struggles and pleading for help. Here is the intro to that letter...

"I am writing with regards to my husband, James Maurice Stillwell. Honorably discharged from the Army, on January 15 th, 1971, who applied for benefits through the local veterans administration, back in the first part of February 2007. James was diagnosed with agent orange in his lungs, only half of his liver is working, and getting worse daily. His spleen is enlarged, the gallbladder has already been taken and his digestive track and large and small intestines are rotting away, again, due to agent orange, environmental issues, and herbicides via the police action in Viet Nam. He is going on the list for a liver transplant if the next medicine he starts taking doesn't work. That will be probably after the month of July. He has to see the doctors again in Nashville ,TN. at the Veterans Hospital in a couple of weeks for another appointment. We have not heard from nor have we seen any type of benefits as of this date, July 11 th/2007."

I strongly suggest you read the whole letter HERE.

Their struggle detailed in the letter is amazing. At every corner they have been met with apathy and contempt. The sad thing about it is similar struggles have been taking place for decades now. Vets have been fighting for what is owed them to no avail.

Even more shocking is the fact that things of this nature still continue with our Military today.

The makers of the documentary film Beyond Treason which covers topics such as Gulf War Illness and the current use of Depleted Uranium  state in their film description...

"What you don't know about your government could kill you... Department of Defense documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act expose the horrific underworld of the disposable army mentality and the government funded experimentation upon US citizens conducted without their knowledge or consent" 

So it's a new war and basically the same old crap! Watch the trailer HERE.
 
We have to fight for justice for the veterans and citizens of Vietnam while remembering that history is repeating itself as we speak. The following links are some activist websites and petitions to get you started.   

http://www.vn-agentorange.org/petition.html

http://www.petitiononline.com/aoalert/

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/AO_takingresponsibilty/

http://www.veterans.state.ny.us/faq/faqagentorange.htm#What1

SWIPES AT TRUTHERS -- AND OUR RESPONSE

Editor's note: Kay has responded to this article. Here is my end-all be-all response to Kay.

James Hufferd
911grassroots.org
May 30, 2011

Recently, Canadian establishmentarian Jonathan Kay’s new mock-anthropological book, Among the Truthers, has caught a lot of deserved flak online on a lot of Truther web sites and in reader reviews and attendant blogs on its Amazon.com web page. Its great sin, we find, is its very m.o.: simply bad-mouthing a whole plethora of prominent Truthers for alleged nuttiness in their past and in current statements, and for alleged failure as a class to listen to “reason” (his official, name-brand type). This blanket denunciation Jonathan Kay offers without either stating or disputing a single bit of the embarrassingly ample evidence our movement relies on to make the case in multiple ways that the persistent, sacrosanct official narrative of 9/11 is an obvious and transparent cover-up, easily disprovable on a hundred counts. Mr. Kay’s fig-leaf excuse for writing a whole, full-size book lambasting us for being immune to reason and absurd without specifying any reasoning or disputing any evidence? His editor told him that debunking books don’t sell. But vacuous, name-calling ones do? The best thing about Mr. Kay’s opus, Among the Truthers, is that it’s so easy to dismiss as simply meaningless and argumentatively worthless. Enough said.

Thus, name-calling and ridicule based on that is one weapon used by detractors to bludgeon us.

The other fearsome bomb-in-print often used to blow us asunder and restore the equanimity of the reading or listening public is defaming mischaracterization. Some of us have recently blown a gasket over comedian Chris Matthews’s determined go at employing that one on his evening show on MSNBC, dismissing us as imbeciles and “nutcases” who obnoxiously claim that “George W. Bush blew up the Twin Towers by pushing a button under his desk.” Make us sound absurd and we’ll go away, he assumedly thinks. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever have any of us on to even set the record straight as to what we’re really about. Thus, in effect, continue what must be the official policy of benignly ignoring us and our bothersome claims of physical laws being violated by the stock story of what happened and impossible anomalies galore demanding real investigation.

And no less than the ACLU consistently ignores our assertions of the obvious fact that the Constitutional guarantee to all citizens that due process in pursuit of justice was never carried out – in fact, was expressly forbidden – with regard to the egregious crimes of mega mass-murder and probable high treason committed on 9/11. Thus, no weapon wielded against us, and against the victimized American people, has proven more successful over the past decade than the regular media’s wholesale and determined silence in response to our heartfelt assertions, the same powered by some of the best scientific work, documentary journalism, and legal thinking of the new century. As a rule, the implicated highest-level establishment that now owns our national media dismissively answers us with silence, rarely and, in some cases, never acknowledging that we, with our reasoned and verifiable arguments, even exist. Thus, for example, our biggest events, even our scientifically-telling press briefings and conferences and our truly major publications, are seldom covered by the mainstream press, and never in meaningful substantive detail. And when they do mention us, it seems to be to mischaracterize us in the mind of the transfixed public as impertinent to their popular story – as somehow brain-damaged snake oil salesmen, vaguely sinister imposters.

The left-wing media, not the neo-con wannabe Kay’s people at all, do, however, similarly mischaracterize us and refuse to engage, or even inform themselves of, our highly-convincing (dangerously seductive?) major points of courtroom-ready evidence, preferring to mount straw-man arguments instead and charges that we’re simply “deranged” to beg to differ with the standard account that everyone knows of foreign hoodlums armed to the chin with scalpels, ironically having come from the very lands the establishment wanted to homicidally attack.

Thus, liberal media darling Matt Taibbi, contributing editor of hipster (read “cutesy pet”) mag Rolling Stone, blurbed on the cover as “an honest political observer”, graced our movement with an entire chapter in his 2008 not-exactly-laudatory book The Great Derangement, lambasted us with collectively championing a “Bush did it conspiracy”, and accused us wholesale of mounting “a derangement of the truth”. Whatever that means. Have you ever met any Truther who maintained Bush did it? Or, is he saying that what we variously are saying is really the truth, but just some deranged form thereof? Hard to tell! (He’s right, of course, that not every Truther speaks with the succinctness of a courtroom lawyer). But, once again, not one proffered piece or point of evidence is actually stated or disputed anywhere in this “masterful” writer’s rant, either. (And, yes, I have seen his “debates” (vapid shouting matches) with whomever on various online blogs since, as you very well might have done, too).

So, what do any of these possibly otherwise reasonable people have against the set of customs that’s supposed to set us in America apart, namely, the rule of law and properly and fairly investigating any crime when one is committed? They bend themselves out of shape to call us out as idiots beyond reasoning for insisting on that!

Meanwhile, real flesh-and-blood people keep dying in the thousands in the Middle East, virtually unnoticed in our “media”, officially in retaliation for – nothing! They did nothing to us! Our truthful evidence clearly and calmly indicates beyond a reasonable doubt to anyone that the principal accusers and beneficiaries themselves had to have committed the catastrophic acts. Because there is no one else who could have.

What, then, must our response be this Memorial Day, when our valiant frontline soldiers are honored for dying for the enhancement and ease of great corporations? Two-fold: to redouble our efforts to spread the humble truth we possess in the form of certain evidence, not just back and forth among ourselves and to blog subscribers and the relatively few still uncommitted to whatever extent, but to get it across, sent, delivered, shouted, handed, and spoken to everyone! Evertibe that breathes! Until it is as pervasive, as ubiquitous in the environment shared by all of us as the official lies it exposes and counters. Or, even more so! That will take money. That will take time. That will take commitment from all of us. But, we MUST!

And the second way to counter the lies, deadly neglect, and ignorance hurled against us is to deliberately include in our messages a strong element of shaming of those who are the guilty and cowardly abetting the guilty who enjoy comfort and sanctimony and, in some cases, honor, while hundreds of millions suffer and millions die senselessly for what they did to aggrandize the oppressive rule and unprecedented, outrageous prosperity of just a mere few hundred at most – themselves. There were no other real beneficiaries.

I should add that stating the latter sanction may not be in vain, because I now know that these articles a few of us post are scanned and considered far beyond our limited number of registered Grassroots Organizers and activists. Hello, world and vile culprits!