"ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE."

About 50 years ago I read a column by I. F. Stone. He said “All governments lie.”  That idea has never left me and I think of it whenever a controversy or war erupts.  It was reinforced when I did the research for a book on Agent Orange which I shelved.  I read hundreds of declassified documents and I also attended an International Conference on Agent Orange in Ho Chi Minh City.  I learned that a major reason for classifying documents as secret is not to prevent an enemy to know our plans but to shield our government from embarrassment. Thus in the early phase of the Vietnam War when we were still advisors and not participants, we arranged for US trained South Vietnamese pilots to use our planes modified for spraying but had these painted with Vietnamese identification.  We could then pretend that this was a Vietnamese operation. When I visited the War Museum the North Vietnamese built after the war, its exhibit on the war included some misleading representations of the effects of Agent Orange, including a picture of a child with advanced retinoblastoma in one eye.  No data supporting the incidence of exposed and unexposed populations was used.  The data was misleading but I can understand why Vietnamese would want to blame Agent Orange for any child born with a birth defect. At the conference when I pointed out the low frequency of birth defects among non-exposed populations in a paper presented on Agent Orange and birth defects and why the US and Europe and other industrialized nations have incidences ten to one hundred times higher, he said this was because Vietnam had virtually no industrial pollution.  I suspect, but cannot prove, that most of the data was compiled by self reporting from parents who would claim exposure to Agent Orange if they had a child with a birth defect. Today’s reports on the Ukrainian disaster with a Malaysian plane shot down likely by Russian trained missile operators reflects Stone’s insight as we listen to each side blame the other for an event that should not have happened had more thoughtful people been in the decision making process. Similarly it is small comfort in wars to victims of “surgical strikes” if innocent families are trapped in their neighborhoods to be told that “every effort” was made to avoid civilian casualties.   If they are not “precision bombings” then we invoke another lie.  We say it was to save more lives that would have been lost if we didn’t ….[fill in the blank: kill the Jews in death camps before they destroyed our German culture and way of life; drop the bomb on Hiroshima to end the war and spare American lives; cluster bomb Coventry and London to break the will of the British people; fire bomb Tokyo and break the will of the Japanese people]. The list of rationalizations is quite large.  A corollary of Stone’s comment is “the first casualty of war is truth.”  What is remarkable is how effective lies are in convincing the public that its government is righteous and our sacrifices are both noble and necessary.  It works with the same certainty as Lucy pulling the football as Charlie Brown tries to kick it in Peanuts.

March 21 2011 The questionable use of the phrase TOP SECRET

Whistle blowing has been of enormous help to law enforcement in revealing embezzlement, corporate theft, corporate piracy, stock market manipulation, tax evasion, and other illegal practices that might otherwise have gone undetected. Sometimes, as in Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon papers for the Vietnam War and for the presently imprisoned Wiki-leaks whistleblower, Bradley Manning and Wiki-leaks founder Julian Assange, public reaction is mixed. We don’t like snitches and sometimes we prefer loyalty to a scoundrel rather than the betrayal of the companies that employ the whistleblowers. I am much more sympathetic to the whistleblowers than I am to those with power who are doing something wrong.

I was shifted to this view while researching a book on Agent Orange which I am still writing and revising. Almost all of what I have written is based on primary sources obtained from documents in the Kennedy Library in Boston and in the Matthew Meselson collection at Harvard University. A substantial number of those documents are declassified from their status as Top Secret or Confidential. This is what I learned. Most of the documents involving policy decisions on the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War were not military documents but civilian documents from government agencies and White House personnel. Most had little to do with military secrets of importance to the enemy. They had a lot to do with finding ways to describe the use of Agent Orange as “weed-killers,” or as essentially harmless to human health, or as a Vietnamese program rather than a US program before we got heavily involved in that war. They included quite a few military documents that expressed doubts about the usefulness of using Agent Orange for defoliation of tropical forests, for revealing enemy bases hidden in those forests, or for starving the enemy troops into submission.
When one weighs the terrible damage done to people’s lives in times of war, especially so-called “collateral damage,” I believe the status of real heroes should be assigned to those who release these documents before they are declassified. A healthy debate on those issues by Congress (most of whom were not privy to these secret documents) might have saved more US lives (not to mention civilian and military Vietnamese lives) if the debates were informed with these findings. Instead policy was based on inadequate information or misleading information. It certainly illustrated to me the reporters’ credo that in times of war the first victim is truth.

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AGENT ORANGE

During the Vietnam war the US sprayed jungles to defoliate broad leafed plants and make visible places where Vietcong and their supporters would hide. Millions of tons of this mixture of two herbicides (2,4-D and 2,4,5-T) were used over a period of several years. After the war our veterans complained of symptoms and illnesses from exposure to agent orange sprays. The cold war prevented recognition of Vietnam until recently and thus a laboratory of contaminated soil and contaminated villagers was closed off to investigation by the US and its allies. The Vietnamese lacked the resources to carry out effective chemical and medical studies on their own population.

In 1983 I was one of a dozen or so Americans who met in Ho Chi Minh City with about 100 European and other scientists to discuss our work at an International Symposium on Agent Orange. I had studied 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T on fruit flies and found many biological effects. They were alone or in combination lethal at certain doses to the developing flies (as embryos and larvae). They inhibited egg-laying by the fertile females. They forced the larvae to crawl to their death before they were mature enough to undergo metamorphosis. Females (which contain more fat) were more drastically killed at sublethal doses and I would get bottles with almost all males emerging. I did not find mutations, gains or losses of chromosomes, or breakage of chromosomes.

The trip was arranged through the UN by our US representative (as an advisor since he could not formally act on behalf of the US government). I was not impressed by the Vietnamese data on birth defects because they had control values that were unrealistic. But they did have an incredible excess of molar pregnancies, which are implanted sacs lacking an embryo. These appeared among women in the sprayed regions and not among the wives of male veterans who returned to the unsprayed Northern cities and villages. I suspect that the dioxins or agent orange components caused the eggs to extrude a nucleus and when the sperm entered, a molar pregnancy formed. Since the male-only composition of these molar pregnancies appeared in print about two years after the conference, it couldn’t have been faked data based on prior knowledge.

Our veterans, and the Vietnamese, lost an opportunity to study the effects of these compounds in the food chain. Both 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T decay from sunlight and other environmental activities within a few years. Dioxins last longer but it has been more than 25 years since these sprayings took place.

Congress finally pressured the US government to compensate the veterans exposed to these dangerous compounds regardless of the strength of evidence for or against the harmful effects of these compounds. Officially we only recognize a skin disease, chloracne, as caused by agent orange exposure, but many reports of soft tissue cancers, and neurological damage have been dismissed as unproved or consequences of shell shock. When I spoke to veterans groups during the 1980s I was not convinced these men were the alcoholics, drug abusers, and malingerers many of their government critics claimed them to be.

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THE IRVING LIKE COLLECTION OF AGENT ORANGE DOCUMENTS AT STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY


For the past year I have been working on a book on Agent Orange and have made several trips to Harvard to read a massive collection of unpublished and declassified documents in the Matthew Meselson archive that he has generously allowed me to read. I also used the J. F. Kennedy Library in Boston, which had a number of key documents on the years 1961-1962 when the Kennedy White House explored the use of herbicides as a possible war weapon. I thought I had done most of my necessary readings when I learned at a meeting from the head of Stony Brook University’s Melville Library that they had a special collection of Agent Orange documents donated by Irving Like.

Irving Like was one of the lead attorneys involved in a 1979 case brought by American veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. They sued seven chemical companies (Dow chemical being the primary company named in the lawsuit). I went through those 25 boxes of documents and was impressed by what I found. Dow defended itself in several ways. First it initiated a counter suit against the US government for not following its warnings on the use of herbicides and not allowing the company to put such warnings on the drums that contained Agent Orange (a mixture of two herbicides known as 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T). They also planned a defense strategy by interviewing about 50 people who were involved (since the 1940s) in the manufacture and testing of these herbicides. Those depositions were summarized neatly for the lawyers in this very complex case. A third effort (the bulk of it) was devoted to challenging the jurisdiction of the courts in this case. Dow felt this should be the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Veterans Administration and not for the courts to decide.

The Veterans likewise built their case with summarized accounts from an equally large number of scientists willing to testify on behalf of the veterans. There are about seven veterans who joined in this class action suit with a number of illnesses they attributed to Agent Orange exposure. Some claimed that the Agent Orange led to birth defects in their children. The Eastern District Federal Court rejected the legal arguments about jurisdiction and the two sides (both well represented from this exchange of documents from both sides) were preparing for a lengthy case in 1980 when Dow and the other companies agreed to a settlement without admitting that any harm was done by Agent Orange. The 180 million dollars was to be distributed among 500,000 veterans and an elaborate questionnaire and legal panel in several districts around the US allotted awards (the maximum was $3400 and most got $1000) which was an enormous disappointment for the veterans and their families.


Since the case never went to trial, this remarkable collection of documents was never made public and for scholars it shows us the importance of generous and thoughtful people such as Irving Like, who donate their papers to universities so that these valuable historical documents can resurrect the past.