The Vietnamese press has been relatively kind to the U.S. for the past year, reflecting a Vietnamese desire to strengthen the ties with its old enemy. With China perched on its border, Vietnam could really use a powerful friend.
However, a federal judge recently dismissed the class action lawsuit filed by Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange against its manufacturers. That’s brought out some nasty headlines here, though I have barely seen it mentioned in the U.S. press. The judge’s reasoning seems to be that there is no definite proof linking Agent Orange and the horrible deformities suffered by its first and second generation victims.
Points for debate:
Has this link been studied and proven?
If not, who should be responsible for funding the scientific studies to establish (or disprove) the link?
If the link is proven, are the manufacturers liable, or the U.S. government, or is it just part of war?
In 2001, in Stephenson v Dow Chemical, 273 F.3d 249, the Second Circuit overturned a settlment of a class action suit for American servicemen exposed to Agent Orange. This was later affirmed by the SUpreme Court (but on a 4:4 split, so no precedential value there).
The decision had nothing to do with the merits of the case itself, but if you look back to the original class action, Judge Weinstein, the district court judge, got really heavily invovled in encouraging a settlement, essentially telling the plaintiff’s lawyers that they had no case and should take what they could get and run. As a result, the case settled at the 11th hour for $180mm, though the approval of that settlement was, of course, later revoked.
What appears to be the case, however, is that the scientific evidence the plaintiffs’ attorneys had to demonstrate a link between disease and exposure was too weak to hold up in court. I’m not a scientist, and I was pretty shocked by that. Of course the ase for the Vietnamese is different, with much longer exposures, and things like ground water contamination. So they may have a much better chance of showing the necessary proof.
Though this doesn’t answer you directly, I hope it helps in some way.
The case against Agent Orange is very weak. It contained trace amounts of dioxin, so it was presumed to be really bad. However, the ill effects of small amounts of dioxin have not been demonstrated in humans, despite a fair number of people who have been exposed at levels higher than the rest of us.
The highest exposures to Agent Orange in Vietnam were to the men who loaded the planes with the herbicide. As a rite of initiation, they even drank it. Follow-up studies of these Operation Ranch Hand soldiers over the last 35 years has found no increased risk of disease to them. Since their exposure was massively larger than any that a regular foot soldier received, it’s not too plausible that Agent Orange caused problems in them.
Also, harm caused by a war is not generally actionable. The State (and its agents) can kill in war and not be punished for it.
If a successful civil suit could be brought against the US Government for killing and injuring these unfortunate civilians, could our wounded bring suit against the Vietnamese (or Germans or Iraqis) for their injuries?
Right or wrong, it is the convention that each side takes care of its own in war. To do otherwise would tend more to bring war to the court than the court to war.
I’d really like to believe that. However the link you provided isn’t all that convincing. The author does provide some references, but it’s clear he’s using them to support a conclusion he’s already reached. Are the references representative, or culled so as to support his point? It’s hard to tell. He’s also talking about the soliders that sprayed the chemicals, not the people the chemicals fell on, and he’s specifically looking at reports of cancers.
Now I don’t know specifically what the Vietnamese in the class action suit are claiming, but the beneficiaries of Agent Orange fundraisers here are usually people with birth defects. Now there’s no doubt there are many examples of people born here in the right time frame with unspeakably hideous birth defects. Are there more or less than in other time frames? I don’t know. It seems like there are. Anyway, they are claimed quite definitely to be victims of Agent Orange that their parents were exposed to. I always assumed there was some kind of evidence of that, but maybe not. A U.S. study into the effects was apparently called off recently, so we may never know for sure.
That’s true, but he had already reached that conclusion because he had long ago dug into the research to see what it said and written several articles about it. By the time this one came out, the facts had been in for a long time.
Neither the number of cites nor the tone of the writing have anything to do with the validity of the argument. He could be supporting a predetermined opinion, or it might just be an issue that he comes across so because he is summarizing a larger article or book that he wrote more objectively. You just don’t know do you?
Research those cites, use all of the flaws each article talks about in other’s theories when critiqueing each article you find on the subject, and once you have done this you will have an answer. Cites exist so that readers can confirm whether there is any validity there, not because X number of cites in and of themselves creates truth.
As an example, my mother refused to believe the statement that the US is the greatest releaser of CO2 gasses into the atmoshphere. After telling her that the UN had studied and announced it so, she simply delared the UN as a shallow group of politicers more concerned with making the US look bad than observing any scientific standards. Ok then… So I just do more searching, looking for any source that fulfills a minimum requirement of 1) impartial towards the US or for, and 2) capable of and thorough in their study. In the end, the Department of Energy of the US itself had the same numbers as the UN. Personally I am satisified with just the UN and the US agreeing on the same number–others might want three or four more reliable seeming sources, dependent on how distrusting you are.
So I mean, until you do any research for yourself and actually attempt to cut through all the BS you aren’t going to be any better off asking any of us than reading a couple of random articles on the internet.* Particularly not if you’re going to discount the responses based on their “just not jiving with what feels like is so.”
Either believe what’s on the BBS or do your own research (perhaps using the BBS as a leaping point…hint hint); that’s all the choices you got.
Unless the master writes an article about it of course. Then you know for a fact (that he feels comfortable in his sources)
Hmm … good points. I’ll read some more of those cites as I get time. I genuinely would like to believe that the horrible deformities I’ve seen were not caused by us. I’m not sure what to make of the background risk of “two or three chances out of 100 that their babies will have serious structural birth defects.” By 100, do you mean 100,000 or maybe 1,000,000?
Anyway, let’s move on to the second part of the debate, which is more opinion based. If Agent Orange is proven to be what caused these people to be born, for example, without arms, or with stubs for legs, do they deserve compensation from the chemical companies, from the U.S., or none at all?
Well changing the question like that certainly makes it a great debate!
I would suppose the ancient rule that each combatant country takes care of its own injured still applies. Wounded people deserve compensation, but from their own government.
No, it’s two or three out of 100 babies born. Kind of scary to become a parent, huh? It sure scared me both times we were expecting a child. You can read more at the CDC’s Birth Defects FAQ.
As for your second (I consider hypothetical) question, it doesn’t seem to me that the manufacturer should be held responsible for making something for the US military to use. It would be like people who were injured by bombs suing the defense contractor who made the bomb, or the airplane that delivered it.
I have a friend whose job in 'Nam was working with this herbicide. We had a big discussion when Agent Orange was banned from use as a forestry herbicide in the U.S.
He thought banning Agent Orange was silly: “Every day over there, I’d come back from work with my clothes soaked in the shit. It looked like we’d been swimming in it with our clothes on.”
He has two children born after his service. They are in their late 20’s now and neither has any health problems.
Small sample, I know, but the levels of Agent Orange these soldiers were exposed to are several thousand times the level of exposure someone on the ground would have experienced.
Now, if there really were reliable studies done that those who worked with Agent Orange have no greater risk than the average population, I’d say it means A.O. is pretty harmless. However, there’s still a lot we don’t know about medicine, especially epidemiology.
While a lot of risk factors are on a near-linear scale of exposure, it is conceivable that someone who drinks gallons of A.O. will be not much more likely to be adversely affected by it than someone who is just exposed to the spray once or twice.
Namely, it’s possible that some people are particularly suseptible to even small amounts of dioxin (or other agents,) and if they get exposed to it their risk shoots all the way up to high, same as if they’d chugged it. Which makes especial sense for carcinogens, since mutations can be nature’s way of saying “well, since I’m in a hostile environment, may as well mutate to try to evolve a mutation that will solve this problem.”
Not that there is any known substance that acts like that, it’s just the situation can’t be ruled out.
Another factor to think of, on preview: re: the CDC’s study of defectprone veterans versus general population. Could it be that Vietnam would have been an even HEALTHIER place to live, mutanogen-wise, than the USA but for Agent Orange, considering our prodigious use of pesticides? [sarcasm]And A.O. merely brought us up to the minimum amount of pesticides considered patriotic in the Western World? [/sarcasm]
The studies I see listed in these posts are checking on birth defects in children of MEN exposed to Agent Orange (correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just going by the posts themselves).
The mechanism could have nothing to do with the men and everything to do with the women bearing the child being exposed.
Until that is checked out we don’t really know if it is causing birth defects or not.