Thailand, Guam and Okinawa are three places where the government denies liability for using herbicides.     In my capacity with the army engineers in Thailand for two years from January 17, 1968 to January 10, 1970, it is my duty to present an alternative position or theory which a reasonable mind (judges of the BVA) may consider.     Keep in mind, though, it should also be presented by Thailand veterans secondary to the (insisted) agency regulations of "visitation to Vietnam," ie, often referred to as "boots on the ground."


The Trilogy:   Thailand, Guam and Okinawa

The Hypocrisy:   Government Cover-Up;
    Denial of Herbicide Usage

    Here is a presentation of an alternate theory which should only be given in a BVA hearing and only as secondary grounds for Thailand veterans at the present time.

    The V.A., "agency," continues to deny the use of herbicides in these three places (Thailand in a limited period and limited area.)

.. ain't the last time the DOD would not accept liability:

E. EXPOSURES AND VA MEDICAL PROTOCOLS FOR GULF VETERANS

In view of DOD's admission on June 21, 1996, after 5 years of denial, that Gulf War troops were presumed exposed to chemical warfare agents at the Khamisiyah bunker detonations, and in view of the missing or inadequate medical records of veterans and chemical detection logs, Human Resources Subcommittee Chairman Shays wrote to then VA Secretary Jesse Brown calling for an immediate re-evaluation of the diagnostic and treatment protocols, and compensation practices, for Gulf War veterans.

Source:   Article
 
Okinawa:

    Recent news presented in the Marine Times and investigative reporting in a local newspaper in Okinawa has brought to light a veteran's claim for disability benefits based solely on exposure in Okinawa versus service or visitation to Vietnam, the primary applications of presumptive exposure.

OKINAWA AGENT ORANGE USE:     According to a board ruling uncovered by Kyodo News, the U.S. Board of Veterans' Appeals found in 1998 that the hazardous chemical defoliant Agent Orange was most likely used in Okinawa, and ruled in favor of a former U.S. service member who sought compensation for prostate cancer he blamed on his work there in the early 1960s.     The discovery comes as the Defense Department has still to confirm whether Agent Orange was stored or used in Okinawa during the Vietnam War that ended in 1975.     In its ruling, issued on 13 JAN 98, the board concluded that "credible evidence sustains a reasonable probability that the veteran was exposed to dioxins while serving in Okinawa."     The board further said it was granting him service-connected disability compensation "for prostrate cancer as being the result of Agent Orange exposure" while in Okinawa between 1960 and 1961.     It found entirely believable his testimony about the U.S. military's mixing, storage and even use of Agent Orange in Okinawa at a time when Japan's southernmost prefecture was still under the control of the United States, which used it as a strategic transport hub during the Vietnam War.

    Agent Orange, a herbicide mixture containing the highly toxic substance dioxin, was sprayed by U.S. military aircraft over the southern portion of Vietnam from 1961 to 1971 to clear jungles and deny cover to communist fighters.     It has since been blamed for numerous health problems, including various types of cancer and birth defects.    The former service member, who worked as a motor transport operator on Okinawa Island, but had never been to Vietnam, said in his testimony that while Agent Orange was mainly used to defoliate trees and shrubbery in lush war zones like Vietnam,   "in Okinawa, we had other uses for it, particularly near base camp perimeters."    He said herbicides thought to include Agent Orange were sprayed from trucks or backpacks along roadsides, used for landscaping and also taken to the densely forested northern part of Okinawa Island to clear foliage to facilitate war game maneuvers there.     Subtropical Okinawa's heavy rainfall, he said, created a demand for non-water-soluble defoliants such as Agent Orange that would not just wash away with the next rain.     He testified that personnel were not told or warned about the hazards of the herbicides that they were handling, nor were they issued any protective clothing".

    As recently as NOV 04, DoD stated that it has been unable to find any records of Agent Orange being used or stored on Okinawa Island during the Vietnam War era.     The statement came in response to queries made in JUL 04 by then U.S. Rep. Lane Evans, a ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives Committee on Veterans' Affairs, who wrote to then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld requesting any information on the use or storage of Agent Orange on Okinawa.     That was replied to by Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told Evans in NOV 04 that "records contain no information linking use or storage of Agent Orange or other herbicides in Okinawa."     Myers further said there was "no record of any spills, accidental or otherwise, of Agent Orange.     Therefore, there are no recorded occupational exposures of service members in Okinawa to Agent Orange or similar herbicides."     The Board of Veterans' Appeals ruling said that while the U.S military had been "generally unable to document the use of herbicides in Okinawa," experts who attempted to verify specific dioxin exposure there "do not negate that possibility."

    Hundreds more former U.S. service members who were stationed in Okinawa during the Vietnam War have lodged medical compensation claims with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, citing Agent Orange exposure, according to information viewable online in the archives of the Board of Veterans' Appeals.     But, most cases have either been denied or sent for review on the grounds of insufficient evidence linking their illnesses to Agent Orange exposure.     The various documents surface at a time when Washington and Tokyo are realigning the U.S. military presence in Japan following years of protests from Okinawans who have long complained about crime, noise and crowding associated with U.S. bases on the island since the end of World War II in 1945.     U.S. bases occupy about 20 percent of Okinawa's land area and have also been viewed as being a large part of the island's environmental problems.     Under the realignment, about 4,000 hectares of the 7,800-hectare U.S. jungle warfare training area in northern Okinawa, mentioned as a place where Agent Orange was sprayed, are due to be handed back to Japan.     Kunitoshi Sakurai, President of Okinawa University who specializes in environmental engineering, expressed concern over the possibility of residual dioxin there,, pointing out that the northern area is the source of most of Okinawa's water supply.

[Source:   Marine Corp Times 9 Jul 07 ++]

Editorial:     I had previously uncovered this ruling, but was not under the impression that it was not resolved in 1998.     See original story on Okinawa ..

Source:   VBA 9800877   (Granted)     See HadIt.com Forum.

 
Guam:   Contamination Reports
  Anderson AFB       re:   Legal Precedence Cited #0527748

    The veteran and his brother testified in support of this claim at a hearing held at the RO before the undersigned in May 2004. In September 2004, the Board remanded this claim to the RO via the Appeals Management Center in Washington, D.C.

    In multiple written statements submitted during the course of this appeal and during his personal hearing, the veteran alleged that he developed diabetes mellitus as a result of his exposure to herbicide agents while serving on active duty in Guam. His military occupational duties as an aircraft maintenance specialist allegedly required him to work in an air field, the perimeter of which was continuously brown due to herbicide spraying every three months. The veteran also alleges that he recalls seeing storage barrels at the edge of the base, which he now knows housed herbicides. Following discharge, Anderson Air Force base in Guam, where the veteran was stationed, underwent an environmental study, which showed a significant amount of dioxin contamination in the soil and prompted the federal government to order a clean up of the site.

    The Secretary of Veterans Affairs has determined that there is no positive association between exposure to herbicides and any other condition for which the Secretary has not specifically determined that a presumption of service connection is warranted. See Notice, 59 Fed. Reg. 341, 346 (1994); see also 61 Fed. Reg. 41,442, 41,449 and 57,586, 57,589 (1996); 67 Fed. Reg. 42,600, 42,608 (2002).

    Notwithstanding the aforementioned provisions relating to presumptive service connection, which arose out of the Veteran's Dioxin and Radiation Exposure Compensation Standards Act, Pub. L. No. 98-542, § 5, 98 Stat. 2,725, 2,727-29 (1984), and the Agent Orange Act of 1991, Pub. L. No. 102-4, § 2, 105 Stat. 11 (1991), the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has determined that a claimant is not precluded from establishing service connection with proof of direct causation. Combee v. Brown, 34 F.3d 1039, 1042 (Fed. Cir. 1994); see also 38 C.F.R. § 3.303(d).

    In order to prevail with regard to the issue of service connection on the merits, "there must be medical evidence of a current disability, see Rabideau v. Derwinski, 2 Vet. App. 141, 143 (1992); medical or, in certain circumstances, lay evidence of in-service incurrence or aggravation of a disease or injury; and medical evidence of a nexus between the claimed in-service disease or injury and the present disease or injury. See Caluza v. Brown, 7 Vet. App. 498, 506 (1995), aff'd, 78 F.3d 604 (Fed. Cir. 1996).

    Except as otherwise provided by law, a claimant has the responsibility to present and support a claim for benefits under laws administered by the Secretary. The Secretary shall consider all information and lay and medical evidence of record in a case before the Secretary with respect to benefits under laws administered by the Secretary. When there is an approximate balance of positive and negative evidence regarding any issue material to the determination of a matter, the Secretary shall give the benefit of the doubt to the claimant. 38 U.S.C.A. § 5107 (West 2002); see also Gilbert v. Derwinski, 1 Vet. App. 49, 53 (1990).

    The veteran's service medical records reflect that, during service, the veteran did not report herbicide exposure. In addition, he did not receive treatment for and was not diagnosed with diabetes mellitus. His DD Form 214, DD Form 7 and Airmen Performance Reports dated in March 1968 and October 1968, however, confirm that he had active service from December 1966 to December 1970, including at Anderson Air Force base in Guam from December 1966 to October 1968.

    He has submitted copies of articles indicating that Agent Orange may have been stored and/or used on Guam from 1955 to the late 1960s, which is the time period during which the veteran served there. These articles also reflect that in the 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency listed Anderson Air Force base as a toxic site with dioxin contaminated soil and ordered clean up of the site. Given this evidence, particularly, the articles reflecting the latter information, and the veteran's testimony, which is credible, the Board accepts that the veteran was exposed to herbicides during his active service in Guam.

    The veteran did not serve in Vietnam; therefore, he is not entitled to a presumption of service connection for his diabetes mellitus under the aforementioned law and regulations governing claims for service connection for disabilities resulting from herbicide exposure. As previously indicated, however, the veteran may be entitled to service connection for this disease on a direct basis if the evidence establishes that his diabetes mellitus is related to the herbicide exposure.

    Post-service medical evidence indicates that, since 1993, the veteran has received treatment for, and been diagnosed with, diabetes mellitus. One medical professional has addressed the question of whether this disease is related to such exposure. In June 2005, a VA examiner noted that the veteran had had the disease for 12 years, had no parental history of such a disease, and had served in Guam, primarily in an air field, which was often sprayed with chemicals. She diagnosed diabetes type 2 and opined that this disease was 50 to 100 percent more likely than not due to the veteran's exposure to herbicides between January 1968 and April 1970, when he served as a crew chief for the 99th bomb wing on the ground and tarmac. She explained that such exposure, rather than hereditary factors, better explained the cause of the disease given that the veteran's parents did not have diabetes.

    As the record stands, there is no competent medical evidence of record disassociating the veteran's diabetes mellitus from his in-service herbicide exposure or otherwise from his active service. Relying primarily on the VA examiner's opinion, the Board thus finds that diabetes mellitus is related to the veteran's service. Based on this finding, the Board concludes that diabetes mellitus was incurred in service. Inasmuch as the evidence supports the veteran's claim, that claim must be granted.

ROBERT E. SULLIVAN
Veterans Law Judge, Board of Veterans' Appeals
Decision Date:   10/13/05       DOCKET NO. 02-11 819


 
"Key US lawmaker vows to back veterans
    sickened by Agent Orange"
Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Variety News Staff

    THE Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs vowed to look into the use of Agent Orange on Guam and support the claims of veterans who developed diseases resulting from their exposure to herbicides and other toxic chemicals while stationed in the territory during the Vietnam conflict. “I believe all veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange, and who developed illnesses as a result of that exposure, deserve to receive disability benefits and compensation for their sacrifice,” said committee chairman Rep. Bob Filner, D-Ca.

    “Please rest assured that I will continue to work hard to honor our nation’s promise to care for our veterans and provide them the benefits they earned and deserve,” Filner stated in an Oct. 24 letter, responding to a veteran’s request that Guam be included in the list of locations under investigation for herbicide contamination.

    Pending before Filner’s committee is HR 972, also known as the “Civilian Agent Orange Act,” which establishes a program to compensate veterans who are suffering from illnesses and disabilities as a result of their exposure to Agent Orange and similar herbicides. The bill fixes the compensation amount at $100,000, payable either to the employee or his or her eligible survivor. In a letter to Filner, Vancil Sanderson, who was stationed at the Naval Communication Station on Guam between 1966 and 1967, provided comprehensive information describing the extent of herbicide contamination on Guam, particularly the island’s drinking water aquifer.

    “While stationed on NCS… I could taste, see and smell what appeared to be a solvent in the drinking water. According to ATSDR, the level of TCE would have to have been at least 1,000,000 ppb. What this means is that all the levels of contaminants in the drinking water would have been much higher than indicated by the Department of Defense,” Sanderson wrote. “With my personal knowledge and hearings held before congress in November 1987, this shows the contamination was extremely high,” he added. Sanderson corroborates the statements made by other veterans who have disclosed in various forums that Agent Orange and other herbicides were stored in Guam during the Vietnam War.

    Some veterans stationed on Guam between 1960s and 1970s also revealed that these herbicides were sprayed in Guam for thinning jungles as well as for building and maintenance of military infrastructure. “I personally am in contact with five veterans who used AO on Guam in the sixties, the earliest being 1962 and the latest 1969. Veterans who worked in the storage areas of Guam have taken pictures of the various herbicides. They have also written letters in support of the pictures and also stated they used these herbicides on Guam. It was even used in aerial spraying according to veterans,” Sanderson said.

    “The way the military handled its toxic waste for years was by dumping or burning and that was how it was done until the 80s. On Guam, you have three military installations over the Northern Guam lens drinking water aquifer. The amount of contamination generated by Andersen during the Vietnam conflict would have been the highest in the world. All of this had rapid transfer to the aquifer,” Sanderson said.

    The Guam Legislature last month passed a resolution seeking the inclusion of civilian employees stationed in Guam during the Vietnam conflict in the proposed compensation program for those suffering from illnesses and disabilities related to Agent Orange exposure. “Existing federal legislation provides compensation for those in the military service who suffered disability or death because of exposure to Agent Orange, but the law does not cover civilian employees, some of whom have also been exposed,” Resolution 95 reads.

    “Because it has already been determined that members of the armed forces during the Vietnam War era were exposed to Agent Orange while stationed in Guam and they are being compensated for their disability or death,” the resolution adds, “it is only fair and just that the civilian employees of the federal government physically present in Guam be included in HR 972 so that they can be compensated if there is service connection for illness or death due to herbicide exposure.”

Volunteer Veterans Advocate
TVVET Group
Silver Rose Director
www.silverrose.info

Review

    Okinawa and Guam were two major areas of operation in the Pacific to which the government, even the Chief of Staff, emphatically denied the storage and/or usage of herbicides.     As you can see, reasonable minds (judges) versus agency adjudicators have reversed rating decisions in favor of the claimants providing them under VCAA/2000 the benefit of the doubt.

    It is incredible how many claims should be literally recalled because the veterans either through intimidation quit their claims or did not have proper representation, legal or competent VSO, to obtain their rights to disability benefits.

 
Thailand:

Thousnads, if not tens of thousands, of primarily army and air force veterans are affected by any decision in favor of exposure to herbicides in Thailand.

    Camp Friendship (photo to the right) was not built in a desert environment, but carved out of the jungles of the plateau area known as Korat.

    Unlike both Okinawa and Guam, Thailand military bases served many purposes during the Vietnam War.     Counterinsurgency, Secret Wars in Laos and Cambodia, Air Force Bombing Missions in both North and South Vietnam, and Army Engineer Operations in support of both the Thai government and U.S. interest in preparation for "quarterback," home of the 25th Infantry Division in Korat as a contingency to potential involvment in the Vietnam War in a flanking movement.

    Many aspects of the support role military personnel played in Thailand were either not de-classified until the early 90's or remain classified for reasons that the government really has no excuse for except to provide necessary information for veterans exposed to herbicides and developing a wide range of serious medical conditions (liability.)

    You do not have to look any further than the various scandals that have come to light since the war regarding the burial of drums of herbicides and the demands by the Thai government for the United States to clean up those area.     A major project scheduled for Camp Friendship in Korat by the Army Corps of Engineers to build a major 55,000 drum storage area for these toxins.  

    See Drum Storage Project,   Plumber's Helper Testimony,   and   Korat Cover-Up ..

    We know even today, how are government covers things up where there may be serious liability.


    How is it that I can make these observations and allegations?

    Simple.     First, I was Company Clerk for Headquarters Company of the 44th Engineer Group during the height of construction projects in Thailand and second, Company Clerk for a line company with a mission of providing military base pipelines and air force petroleum tank support all over Thailand.

    Furthermore, I later married a Thai in my first tour of duty and then proceeded to extend my tour for a second one and my army enlistment long enough to accommodate same.     During this 24-month tour, I had acquired (first) two motorcycles and later a late model Toyota auto which provided my wife and I with adequate transportation to see things all over Thailand beyond the areas in which the army had projects.

    I have never broken off relations with my prior wife's family in Bangkok and have made many long visits back to Thailand; most recent was a 5-week vacation that span from Vietiane, Laos, NKP (and Laos twin-city on the Mekong) to Korat and Satahip (Camp Samae San.)     You see, today in Satahip, Camp Samae San is not easily found or recognized for the overgrowth of three decades of jungle since we built the camp for the Thai army today.     Like Camp Friendship (or any other military base we constructed,) the camp in Satahip looked like the desert here in Las Vegas .. totally leveled for all vegetation!

    Other general background you should be aware of as an expert on the area is that my wife of ten years today was a Laotian refugee, living in the Nong Khai refugree camp along the Mekong for five years before coming to the United States.     I attempt to maintain a proficiency with the Thai language via satellte Thai TV each week and on-going relations and friendships with participants in the Secret War of Thailand including the No. 1 Ace Lao pilot that has flown thousands of missions, Lao army special forces personnel, expatriate U.S. Army Special Forces personnel responsible for recovery of downed pilots in Laos or Cambodia and the daughter of a major army general Lao allie to the United States that died in the Communist orientation camps * after we pulled out in 1975.

* Several such P.O.W.s that escaped and live today in Las Vegas and in California.

    I also have an incredible knowledge base of unit operations, specifically in Thailand, and subjective reporting such as After Action Reports for projects such as the Drum Storage Facilty Project 20% completed before "going underground" and pertinent unit readiness and daily morning report documents.

Other Assignments:

Sr. Programmer/Analyst
USARPAC
    Mgt Info System Office
    5 Years

Assistant Team Leader
Overseas Replacement Depot
Ft Lewis, Washington;
18 months

.. coordinating some 300-500 daily deploying troops to Vietnam via McChord AFB (second army port of debark-ation for thE westcoast; Oakland AB was first and have intransit there four (4) times spanding a couple of weeks at the "enlisted suites.")     Ten years in the army, overall, with a few months as a Finance Specialist with Hawaii Army National Guard (E-6/Staff Sergeant.)

[Clicking on the above photo at my desk in MISO/USARPAC, you will see the top of a cardboard cut-out (white with red background) for the Western Airlines big "W" logo ("The Only Way To Fly") and my long standing dream to work some day in the industry; first for Hawaiian Airlines in the Islands and then either Western or Continental in L.A.     I was fortunate enough to gain a position with Continental.]

In my first data processing assignment with the 9th Infantry Division, I learned how to program the division computer, a 4K UNIVAC 1005.     That's right.     It was a (mere) 4K in memory and its only input source was computer cards that would be read until finished or memory overflow in which case, you had to go back to the drawing board in designing a data flow program in SAAL (Single-Addressed Assembly Language.)

Computer cards are very fragile and integrity for archiving was zero.

In 1979, as a senior programmer at Continental Airlines in Los Angeles, provided design training for the entire commercial division, some 50 programmers.     As a model application, rewrote the Flight Profitability System, a system based upon all aspects of revenue-generated data of a given flight; flight connections including finance summary data, ticketing system data for passengers and cargo system data for other transported items.     In those days, hard documents were usually transformed into punched computer cards and then read into a reel of tape; retained for 30-60-90 days as input to front-end data flow programs.     The volume of such cards (and tapes) would be momentous and could not be retained past summary level.

Therefore, being familiar with both Continental and at the time, Western Airlines, a sister truck carrier based in Los Angeles and systems based on computer cards, it comes at no surprise that record-keeping at the time was not state-of-the-art and such documents as flight manifest were of no significance to corporate ledgers.     My chief programming responsibility was for maintenance of the Corporate General Ledger System and author of a data flow chart to all applications that that entailed.

For more on specific Mac Flight Info regarding statements and routing charts from CONUS to SEA, click here.

The two years that followed the above staff position was as a senior programmer/analyst for aerospace leader McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, maker of civilian airlines such as the DC-10 and DC-9.     If anything, the state-of-the-art for achiving data was found in the form of microfiche and again, normally at some summary level versus detailed transaction retention.

Thailand Bases and Construction Projects:

    No where the army engineers worked was there an issue of jungle growth.     It was leveled.     You look at the perimeters of all major army or air force installations and they were cleared of jungle.     How do you think that happened?     Not by domestic home weed killer products or any industrial strength sprays.     The same crap we were going to store in Korat until they went underground and not discovered until decades later when (example) drums were uncovered at a resort area when they were going to expand the runway of a tourist attraction airport.

    Construction work on Friendship Highway which bypassed Bangkok and was designed as the main artery for military logistics between the deep water port in Satahip and the air force bases in the Northeast was thick jungles and every mile was a major accomplishment.     I will never forget riding our motorcycle from Korat to Satahip prior to redeployment in Satahip.     The road was not paved and the red soil baked on my bike and me.     I can just imagine how much toxins was in that soil and that construction area.

    U.S. Army major installations, radio communication detachments, Thai army camps, U.S. Air Force and Royal Thai counter-parts in the south, Bangkok, Northeast and other areas such as Takli and Kanchanaburi.     You name it, we did it.

Two types of spraying:   ironically, our camp hootch line for barracks living was along the perimeter of our small camp on the outskirts of Korat and nightly, the most horrible mist or spray for mosquito-control took place by hand manually.     Defoliation or jungle control, secret.     No -- magically, like any homeowner with lawn weed problems, it just browned by itself due to adequate rainfall on a daily basis and good soil for vegetation growth .. right.     It wasn't until decades later that the overgrowth decided to return .. right.     And, I'm the original London Bridge salesman for Bullhead City in Arizona...
 
The Government Practice of Cover-Ups ...

Is the practice of covering up what the government does not want everyone to know, common?     We know President Nixon was a crook, but his policy as to Cambodia and the Geneva Covention (even though our enemies regularly used both Laos and Cambodia for protection and the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail for supplies, ordered covered up.     And, our State Department (National Security Council) and the recent declassification of documents 30-40 years old.     Why?     What did they contain that was so harmful to know by the general public other than information pertinent to veterans filing disability claims?         Members of Congress being misinformed by the agency entrusted with the care and administration of disability benefits to veterans of all wars and conflicts.     See the recent denial of disability compensation of David Adkison, a Thailand veteran; denied by the VARO/St Petersburg where David provided the new declassified extract of the USAF CHECO Report, "Base Defense in Thailand!"

I know it all seems unfair where the "fox is guarding the henhouse" and Congress doesn't even provide for just compensation for penalties and interest and the total disregard for disabled veterans' rights to judicial due process.     These House and Senate committees have so-called "Oversight and Investigations" Subcommittees to what avail?     I know the past 18 months that I have been pleading for a hearing on the atrocities found affecting my class of veterans, Thailand vets.     Acknowledgement by both the DOD and VA. -- Heck, it would be nice to get a response to my correspondence with the V.A.!     As the "whistle blower" for the DOD List injustice for all Thailand bases, since I made that phone call on 11 Oct 07 (almost said "67" ..) the official list has not been updated nor corrective action on all claims denied based upon it, or the lack of content therein.     This is ridiculous as a private citizen as well as a veteran, we can not take action against this executive agency and the head of such agencies is always a political appointee that never has the interest of the veterans in mind.     It is a broken system, adversarial in nature; with an arrogant, pompous position that they are guarding against potential fraud .. potential fraud -- while claimants die or waste in poverty!

I call for the termination of everyone associated with the system of adjudication up through judicial practice because they have created an artificial backlog, one, and deny claims groundless under a system that was supposed to adopt a "benefit of the doubt" doctrine to replace a "well-grounded" evidence doctrine in consideration of the amount of time since the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the World War II (there isn't any claimants left from World War I.)     The incompetence levels of the staffers is outrageous as simple chores like having a help line where 3 our of 4 responses to inquiries is either completely wrong or for a great deal partially wrong.     And, my experience with the arrogance that comes across on the phone of military retiree-types holding such helpline positions and abusing their authority.     Management that condones unlawful stay on the Appeal Court rulings, writing memos instructing regional offices to not process claims by Vietnam service veterans recipient of the Vietnam Service Medal.     Claimant retirees having their service or service records questioned.     Does that mean if you did not keep a copy of your pay voucher indicating your APO and unit, and the government loses the archived records, you are denied on those grounds?

Diabetic veterans with exposure to herbicides service connection denied benefits before 2001 where it was well known ten years earlier.     2001 .. 30 years after the conflict and abuse of the health welfare of those that served, lawsuits that go unanswered by politically correct district courts in class actions.     How many more claims, if properly notified and discovered in time for inclusion go uncompensated?     How many have died without recognition and/or compensation?     I recently heard of government employees being recognized for their "whistle blowing" courage with a "<"Profiles in Courange" distinguished honorary medal award.     The hypocrisy is horrific.

And, for the first time, I have a serious complaint with the healthcare system.     In February, I go to my primary care physician complaining about my eyes and he acts as if that care is no longer provided and directs me to a medical clerk to give me an impromptu eye exam in the hallway.     I felt dizzy and off balanced and the clerk did not press me for reading a silly chart before signing off for my physician.     I asked my doctor how long would I have to wait because this was the first time since 2003 that I did not receive automatic annual eye examinations.     He really did not provide me with an answer, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear that I would be seen in 30 days, March.     I called the clinic to see if it was possible to get any earlier and they indicated that that was the earliest.     At the exam, I was notified that my eyes had cataracts and I would be scheduled in June (3-4 months later) for both eyes surgury, same day.     At this point, if you have ever had cataracts, you know that it is difficult enough to see, let alone try to work and do such things as this advocacy publishing.     No, this is a serious issue that should have been given a high priority and local surgeon "fee basis" authorization.     It is nonsense.

Summary

    Now, you should know, when it came to the Vietnam War, the involvement both in Guam (B-52s at Anderson AFB) and Okinawa (traditional support facilities since the Korean and World War II with Japan) were nothing compared to military operations, assets and defense in Thailand with our Thai/Lao allies.     To say that we did a few spray test in the early '60s and nothing more is ludicrous.     With some of the highest rainfall levels in the entire world and soil to match vegetation (superior) growth just a few years later (1968,) and see with my own eyes two significant years of such operations and deny that there was some form of toxin spraying is ridiculous.

 
Alaska Cover-Up
  (Revealed by DOD employee "whistle-blower")


"Army to hunt for Agent Orange in Tok"
The Associated Press     (Published: July 24, 2007)

FAIRBANKS -- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will start digging in Tok this summer in the search for six barrels of the dangerous herbicide Agent Orange.

    It is presumed that Agent Orange was buried in the area nearly 40 years ago. The Army Corps learned about the barrels in 2002 when a former Department of Defense employee claimed to have been on a team ordered by the Army in the late 1960s to bury the 55-gallon barrels at what was then a military equipment yard in Tok.

    Electromagnetic surveys in the area last summer detected something buried about six or seven feet below ground in an area of town less than a mile from the Alaska Highway. The Army Corps will dig in the area to look for the barrels starting this summer and possibly extending into next summer.

    If the dig reveals that the barrels exist and are filled with Agent Orange, the Army Corps will begin sampling soil in the area for signs of leaks or contamination. The Agent Orange used as a herbicide during the Vietnam War contains dioxin, an incredibly toxic and persistent substance that is now banned in the United States. It has been linked to cancer, diabetes and birth defects.

    So far, neither the state nor the Army Corps has found any contamination in the Tok area, about 200 miles southeast of Fairbanks. Tok does not have a central water or sewer system. Most homes use individual wells.

    The project won’t get under way until the state finishes reviewing the Army Corps’ work plan for digging up the barrels, according to John Halverson with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

    The barrels are one of two known uses of Agent Orange in the Tok area. When it learned about the barrels, the Department of Environmental Conservation began investigating Army correspondence from the late 1960s indicating the military used Agent Orange to clear vegetation along a 626-mile pipeline connecting Fairbanks and Haines.

    The area where the barrels are believed to be buried originally served as a special communications outpost for the U.S. Air Force and then as a military equipment yard into the 1970s, but it now belongs to Nugget Construction, a private company.

    The Army Corps originally planned to dig up the barrels in 2005, but a dispute with the construction company delayed the project.

Marilyn Oliver
Volunteer Veterans Advocate
TVVET Group
Silver Rose Director

 
Canada
  August 25, 2007
INTERVIEW WITH GLORIA SELLAR, THE CANADIAN AGENT ORANGE WHISTLEBLOWER
-- For three days in 1966 and four days in 1967, Agent Orange, the infamous chemical efoliant used over Vietnam by the U.S., was sprayed over a small area of Gagetown as part of a U.S. military test.

The Macleans.ca Interview: Gloria Sellar

The Agent Orange whistleblower on being there when Gagetown was sprayed, the toll it took and why compensation for victims could finally be on the horizon
By KATE LUNAU -- Maclean's


A crash course in... Agent Orange

    From 1963 to 1966, Gordon Sellar (who would retire with the rank of Brigadier-General) was stationed at CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick. His wife, Gloria, and three young children joined him there.

    For three days in 1966 and four days in 1967, Agent Orange - the infamous chemical defoliant used over Vietnam by the U.S. - was sprayed over a small area of Gagetown as part of a U.S. military test. The herbicide, according to the U.S. Institute of Medicine, has since been associated with an array of medical conditions including leukemia, prostate cancer and diabetes.

    In 2004, the Canadian government granted Sellar what's widely believed to be the first-ever medical disability pension related to his exposure. When Sellar died months later, his wife of 60 years went public with the news of his pension.

    That revelation led to the creation of a fact-finders' project by the federal government, which is due to release an epidemiological report - the first ever done on the Gagetown-area population - on Tuesday.

    Since breaking the news of her late husband's pension, Gloria has also been a tireless campaigner for Agent Orange victims. She sits on the advisory board of the fact-finders' mission, and - like everyone else - is eagerly anticipating the report's release on Tuesday.

(Note: The above-mentioned report has been released. You can find a story about the report here... click here.)

Macleans.ca: Tell me how you got involved in all this.

Gloria Sellar: My main interest in all of this, right from the very beginning, is that it killed my own husband. We were there, in Gagetown, staying at the hotel with the people who were doing the spraying - the Americans with their trucks and barrels were staying across the hall from us.

We were between houses at the time and my husband was commanding the Black Watch [regiment]. And of course we chatted with them. [The sprayers] would come in at night just absolutely filthy dirty, smelling of petroleum. They were just covered with this stuff and [our] children wondered why they were out there killing the trees.

When [Gordon] came in from the field, he'd always have this smell on him, all over his uniform. He'd walked through [the herbicides]. Soldiers are down on their stomachs all the time - they don't stand up or they're getting shot. So they crawled through this stuff, and walked through it. It sprayed all the vehicles that they had. They were all camouflaged at night in the woods and of course when they went out, in the morning, all this stuff had dripped off the trees all over their jeeps and what have you.

M: Tell me about when your husband came home from the field.

GS: He'd scrub and shower, and I'd take all his clothes and put them in the washing machine. Once the soap and hot water hit them, it was overpowering. And I laughed at myself, because there was such a smell of petroleum I was always afraid the dryer might blow up.

One night we were both restless; it was hot. And I woke up and turned over, and he was awake. And I said, "You know darling, you smell as if you worked in a service station." It was in his system. It got in through his skin. It soaked into their bodies, all of them.

M: And I'm assuming that at the time your husband didn't know Agent Orange might be dangerous?

GS: They were constantly told there was nothing dangerous about it. That it was perfectly alright, and just to carry on. He had no idea, and was absolutely horrified when he found out. Because, of course, he and all of his men had been out there - but it wasn't just them, everyone was out there. The artillery and the service corps and the tanks. They were all over that area.

M: When did your husband become ill?

GS: My husband became ill about 20 years before he died [on Oct. 1, 2004]. I kept saying to everyone, "This man has been exposed to Agent Orange." By then, we were all learning what terrible stuff it was. He was having dizzy spells, he was weak, he just wasn't himself. And he was having appalling nosebleeds and headaches.

Our own doctor was very concerned about Gordon and had a lot of tests run on him, and found to his horror that he had leukemia - chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which is the most prominent disease that this causes.

The last five years or so, he was in and out of hospital all the time. All this was just terrible for someone like him, who'd always been such a strong, quiet leader. He led by example and just to suddenly have all of that on him, it was pretty awful.

M: And then you yourself got sick?

GS: Well, I have cancer. It was diagnosed in 2004; maybe it was before Christmas. My husband had died, and I was absolutely distraught because I'd done nothing but nurse him for 20 years. Day and night I just never left him, and so I was utterly exhausted.

I went in to my own doctor, and I said, "I'm worried because I can feel something in my breast." I'd had regular mammograms and they all said, "Don't worry it's perfectly normal," but it turned out not to be. I was told that I would have to have surgery.

This is very common among the wives of Gagetown servicemen. Many of these women have beaten their husbands into the graveyard.

M: How are your children doing?

GS: Mine are alright, so far. But many, many other children are not. I deal with [Agent Orange victims and their children], it's part of what I do. They have brain tumours and clubfeet and are born deaf - all sorts of terrible chronic illnesses which should not happen to young, healthy people such as all of us were.

Miscarriages were very common. Nurses would say they were surprised by the number of miscarriages that were coming out of Camp Gagetown.

M: Tell me about the pension your husband received.

GS: I applied for it as soon as I could. It was awarded in the summer of '04. I'm very methodical - I submitted all his doctors' reports and everything. We sent it all off, and they did look after him. Our doctor specified [that his illness was likely related to Agent Orange].

M: And it was the first medical pension awarded to a veteran in connection with the use of Agent Orange at Gagetown?

GS: I believe so. Some people say it was the second, but I wouldn't haggle over a point. It was a groundbreaking thing.

M: When did you decide to go public with the news of the pension Gordon received?

GS: After Christmas, it seemed to me that nothing was happening, so I decided to publish. And it took more courage than I had. I phoned the editor of the Globe and Mail - they'd already done a wonderful obituary on Gordon, and I'd written on him too.

So, the Globe and Mail had their journalists and photographer ready; they were to come and to interview me on the Agent Orange part of this. Then Belinda Stronach crossed the floor. And they phoned me and said, "Can you wait a week, because everyone's rushed off to Ottawa for this big news about Belinda?" And I said, "I'm sorry, I can't." The reason that I couldn't was that I was booked for surgery in less than a week, but I didn't tell the editor why.

I phoned my son that night, and I told him what had happened. I said, "It took all of my courage to gather this up, and now it isn't going to happen." And he said, "As a matter of fact, I'm having Greg [Weston] over for dinner," who was at Sun Media.

Greg phoned me the next morning, woke me up, and said, "I've got to have this story. I'll be down there in two hours." He went through all of these files and papers and clippings and everything else that I had, and wrote that wonderful article that appeared in the Sun.

That lit up the switchboards. Because at this stage, we all knew that something was terribly wrong, but no one was talking about it. And this blew the whistle.

M: Because nobody knew a pension had been awarded?

GS: That's right, and I wanted people to know. And Gordon had said, "You've got this through for me; now see what you can do for my soldiers." So that was my impetus right there. My husband and I were very much in love.

M: And now the first-ever epidemiological study is due out Tuesday. Do you think its contents could push the government to finally announce compensation?

GS: Probably, if they're going to be pushed. Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson has said that he hopes to have an announcement by Labour Day weekend, and I will be down in Gagetown at that time. Minister Thompson is a nice man - he thinks very kindly of these people.

It's all in the hands in the government. All we can do is send in our reports and information. Ideally the government should compensate anyone who was exposed. Some people, I'm sure, will be happy, and others I'm sure will not. That's always the case. I would hope they'd at least be able to move forward.

Follow-Up Artice:   Macleans.ca

Orange Alert:   'We were told it wouldn't hurt us'

Those who were poisoned by Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown may finally get paid
BY KATE LUNAU | September 3, 2007 |

    John Chisholm remembers when Agent Orange came to Gagetown in New Brunswick in 1966. Stationed on the military base as a member of the artillery unit, the young soldier was assigned with a handful of others to help spray the chemical defoliant. Some days Chisholm would mix it; others he'd stand out in the field, hoisting a giant flag to mark where helicopters should drop their load. "It would sting to the high heavens," recalls Chisholm, now 69, who was repeatedly doused in the herbicide. "But I'll tell you one thing we did notice right off the bat: there were no more mosquitoes out there. It'd kill them in no time."

    Agent Orange -- famously used by the U.S. military to clear swaths of the Vietnamese jungle from 1962 to 1971 -- was sprayed over a small area of CFB Gagetown for three days in 1966 and four days in 1967 as part of a U.S. military test project. Agent Purple, its lesser-known cousin, was also sprayed, as was Agent White -- together, the so-called "rainbow drugs," as Chisholm knows them. "We were told it wouldn't hurt us," he says, recalling one fellow soldier eating a boxed lunch off a barrel of Agent Orange, and others even spraying one another with it to cool off.

    Agent Orange exposure has since been associated with an array of medical conditions, from leukemia to diabetes to prostate cancer, according to the U.S. Institute of Medicine (the IOM is recognized by the Canadian government as the leading scientific authority on the herbicide). Chisholm now has prostate cancer. He hasn't received a cent in compensation from the Canadian government, money he feels he deserves. Now, after years of delay, a compensation package could be on the horizon. Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson recently told Maclean's to expect an announcement "before summer passes." Veterans, civilians and communities around the base are all being looked at, Thompson said. "We've tried to come up with a package that is fair to all those considerations," he explained.

    While it's not yet clear who would be eligible for compensation, thousands of Canadians who have worked or lived on or near CFB Gagetown feel they're owed it -- and say the problem extends well past the test use of Agent Orange. Many claim they've been harmed by other herbicides sprayed on areas of the base almost annually since 1956 to remove cover and reduce the risk of forest fires during soldiers' exercises. "In our community, anecdotally, there seems to be an awful lot of cancer," says Jody Carr, MLA for Oromocto-Gagetown.

    In the early years of the spray program, "the contaminants of the annual spray were one and the same as the contaminants of Agents Orange, White and Purple," says former New Brunswick health minister Dennis Furlong, who's led an inquiry into the use of herbicides on the base, adding that the contaminants were spread unknowingly at the time, according to his research. While Ottawa insists herbicide spraying on the base has been tightly controlled, defoliants did drift on the wind to nearby Upper Gagetown and Sheffield in 1964, wiping out some farmers' crops. "Tomatoes just crack," farmer's daughter Gwen Harvey, 15, told the Aug. 8, 1964, edition of the local Daily Gleaner newspaper. The government paid out about $250,000 in reparations and modified its spray program to reduce drift as a result.

    Ottawa's sluggish response to calls for Agent Orange compensation stands in stark contrast to the U.S. and New Zealand. In the U.S., Vietnam veterans are paid automatically if they develop a medical condition associated with Agent Orange exposure. New Zealand last year announced a $22-million compensation package that includes ex gratia payments of $30,000 to its Vietnam vets suffering from certain conditions. The package also included a formal apology. Britain has even compensated a British soldier exposed to Agent Orange at Gagetown: Keith Pilmoor, who was stationed at the base in 1966 and said he was sick for decades after, was awarded a special pension earlier this year.

    Ottawa, meanwhile, didn't publicly acknowledge that veterans had been harmed by the use of Agent Orange at Gagetown until 2005. That was the year Gloria Sellar broke the news that her husband had received a medical disability pension for exposure, widely believed to be the first pension of its kind. Retired Brig.-Gen. Gordon Sellar, who commanded the Black Watch regiment at Gagetown and was later diagnosed with leukemia, died on Oct. 1, 2004, only months after the pension was awarded. "We all knew something terrible was happening, but no one was talking about it," Sellar says. She's been a strong advocate for victims ever since.

    When Chisholm learned that Sellar had received a pension, he was angry. "I said, 'What the hell's going on?' They may have slept in it; they may have been sprayed. But they were never in it like I was." Chisholm has applied for a disability pension from Veterans Affairs four times, and four times he's been turned down for lack of documentation. "You can't get [documentation]. There is none," he says.

    While DVA says it can't discuss specific cases, disability pension applications must be "evidence-based," says spokesperson Janice Summerby. Applicants must prove they were exposed to the herbicides, and have a medical condition the IOM associates with exposure. Eight pensions have been awarded so far to veterans exposed to Agent Orange and other herbicides at Gagetown (and 32 to peacekeepers for exposure in Vietnam after the January 1973 peace accords), while 1,652 applications have been filed, the vast majority of them related to Gagetown.

    For civilians who worked on the base during the Agent Orange spraying, the fight for compensation has been even more difficult. A teenager in the summer of 1966, Ken Dobbie worked at CFB Gagetown cutting and burning defoliated brush. Dobbie, who now heads the Agent Orange Association of Canada, has suffered a rash of health problems -- from diabetes to brain atrophy -- ever since. But civilians aren't eligible for DVA pensions, so those who claim to have been affected must apply for worker's compensation. "They wanted my supervisor's signature," says Dobbie. "Who at CFB Gagetown or at DND am I going to get to sign my form, 40 years later?"

    A total of 22 injury compensation claims related to Agent Orange exposure have been filed to the Workplace Health, Safety and Compensation Commission in New Brunswick. Of those, 15 have been rejected. The rest are still under review. But Dobbie's not waiting anymore: in 2005 he launched a class-action lawsuit in the Federal Court against the Department of National Defence. After the government sued Agent Orange manufacturers Dow Chemical Company and Monsanto Company as third parties, the action moved into the provincial courts. Class action lawsuits are now being pursued in eight provinces, and about 2,500 people, represented by lawyer Tony Merchant, have signed on. The suit in Newfoundland recently became the first to get the go-ahead when it was certified in the Newfoundland Supreme Court. DND, Dow and Pharmacia (formerly Monsanto) intend to appeal.

    In 2005, shortly after Sellar broke the news about her husband's pension, Ottawa initiated a fact-finding mission to examine the herbicide spraying at Gagetown from 1952 to now. Furlong is at its head, and Chisholm and Sellar both sit on an advisory panel. While Carr notes that the project (which is to wrap up imminently) has been generally well-received, it's attracted some controversy. An environmental consulting company tied to the mission recently threatened to sue Green party leader Elizabeth May after she publicly criticized it. "[Cantox Environmental Ltd.] does have a reputation for having done health risk assessments and generally concluding there isn't a problem," May said in June, after the company (recently renamed Intrinsik) concluded in most of its studies that herbicides used at Gagetown posed no health risks. May did not retract her statement.

    Retired Brig.-Gen. Ed Ring spent 34 years in the military, including several posted at Gagetown in the 1970s and '80s. He now suffers from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (a condition the IOM associates with Agent Orange exposure). His take on the fact-finding mission is subdued; Ring hasn't been contacted by them, nor has he sought them out. "I'm sure they're reputable people," he says. "But it's irrelevant as far as I'm concerned for the soil to be tested at Gagetown [today]. For me, the damage was done then, when the stuff was on the ground." Ring is the lead plaintiff of the class-action suit in Newfoundland.

    The most recent fact-finding mission report, released on Tuesday, also elicited some criticism. The first-ever epidemiological study of the Gagetown-area population, it concluded that people living there are no more prone to cancer than those living elsewhere in the province. Furlong admits the report isn't flawless. It only dates back to 1980, when medical records were digitized. With a project mandate of 18 months (that's already been exceeded by half a year), going back any further just wasn't possible, Furlong says. He stands by the work, noting that every study put out by the fact-finding project was twice peer-reviewed. "We can't make assumptions or work on emotion," Furlong says. "We have to use the best science we have, and that's what we've done."

    As of yet, it's unclear what impact these findings will have on the long-awaited compensation package. Reports issued by the fact-finding mission are "all being reviewed by the people who are preparing a package," says the DVA's Summerby, adding that the information is also drawn upon when rendering decisions on disability pensions. But for those still awaiting compensation, is it only about the money? "I suspect it may be to a point," says Ring. "But a lot of people are looking for some kind of closure. I would like to see this through, and close the book on it."

Source:   Email from Marilyn Oliver   (Quilt of Tears)
Volunteer Veterans Advocate
TVVET Group
Silver Rose Director

 
Hawaii Cover Up

University vulnerable to pitfalls of secret experiments
By Beverly Deepe Keever, Special to the Star-Bulletin     Sunday, March 27, 2005

    It was 37 years ago that James Oshita and William Fraticelli were regularly drenched with the cancer-causing Agent Orange on the Kauai Agriculture Research Station.

    They performed the core part of the University of Hawaii's contract with the U.S. Army to test the effectiveness of the herbicide laden with dioxin, one of deadliest of chemicals, that was then being sprayed in South Vietnam to defoliate its wartime jungles.

    Their saga and the Agent Orange experiment are now being recounted amid the controversial question of whether Hawaii's only public university should enter into a new kind of contract for military research, this time with the U.S. Navy, specifically to establish a University Affiliated Research Center, to which the Board of Regents has already given its preliminary approval. It's a watershed, which-way question for UH -- and, as UH goes, so goes the state.

    Oshita and Fraticelli marked their bulldozers with flags to serve as targets and stayed there while the planes swooped down to spray the defoliants. "When the plane came to spray, someone had to guide him," Oshita told a reporter in a Page 1 report in the campus newspaper, Ka Leo O Hawaii, on Feb. 3, 1986. "We were the ones."

    Testing was done without warning UH employees or the nearby Kapaa community even though in 1962, just months before being assassinated, President Kennedy was told that Agent Orange could cause adverse health effects, U.S. court documents show. And a 1968 test report written by four UH agronomists said that on Kauai Agent Orange, alone or combined with Agent Pink, Purple or Blue, was effective and "obviously may also be lethal."

    When the testing finished in 1968, five 55-gallon steel drums and a dozen gallon cans partially filled with the toxic chemicals were buried on a hilltop overlooking a reservoir. There they remained until the mid-1980s when the Ka Leo reporter's questions led to their being excavated, supposedly for shipment to a licensed hazardous waste facility. They left behind levels of dioxin in some soil samples of more than five times normal cleanup standards.

    The barrels were then placed in a Matson shipping container. There, instead of being shipped out of state as promised, they sat for another decade. Then, in 1997, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Health discovered that UH had failed to dispose properly of the hazardous materials and included this infraction along with a Big Island one in a $1.8 million fine against the institution. In April 2000, the barrels were finally shipped out of state.

    Oshita and Fraticelli have since died. A year after his Agent Orange work, Oshita was diagnosed with liver dysfunction, bladder cancer, diabetes, chronic hepatitis and a severe skin disease called chloracne. Fraticelli died in April 1981 from lung and kidney cancer; he also had bladder cancer and a brain tumor, court documents indicate.

    Since 1984, with the settlement of a $180 million class- action lawsuit, 10,000-plus Vietnam veterans receive disability benefits related to Agent Orange, which has been linked to various cancers, diabetes and birth defects. Earlier this month, a federal judge, citing insufficient research data, dismissed a case filed on behalf of 4 million-plus Vietnamese claiming that Agent Orange had caused their ailments.

    The legacy of the Agent Orange experiment and its aftermath exemplifies how UH was duped into conducting military research that the U.S. government knew could create adverse health effects, how the costs and risks of such research were latent for years and how UH demonstrated decades-long disregard for environmental and health hazards.

    UH's Agent Orange experiment was not secret. The student journalist found a thick report about it in Hamilton Library. But some of the Navy's research now being debated at UH would be secret, a condition that the Faculty Senate on the Manoa campus voted down in terms of withholding publication of scholarly discoveries.

    But even the Navy's unclassified, non-secret work within the UARC has raised two broad concerns among faculty: the anti-business restrictions governing privileged information accessible to researchers, and murky legal issues.

    Those favoring the Navy contract note that it proposes a ceiling for UH-M over five years, the normal duration of a UARC, of a sum of up to $50 million. This amount of about $10 million annually is small compared to the $54 million received by UH this fiscal year alone from Pentagon research and is but a fraction of the $160 million the Penn State University UARC received in one year.

    Another advantage cited on the Manoa chancellor's Web site is "our faculty will not have to write specific proposals for funding." Instead, faculty will pick and choose -- or opt out of -- work on "task orders" from the Navy or other Pentagon sponsors. Others argue, however, that working only on this military-initiated to-do list will squelch faculty initiative and innovation.

    Several faculty have noted that the "research" performed by the UARC through Navy "task orders" is distinctly different from the faculty-directed research that UH researchers currently pursue in an open academic environment. UARC activities must be aligned with the Navy's war-fighting mission through the approved core competencies, and because the UARC acts as a trusted agent of the government, are also subject to extremely restrictive regulations managing conflict of interest.

    The UARC would give rise to a whole new bureaucracy, according to a posting on the Manoa chancellor's Web site (see box on F5). The UARC would be an organized research unit that reported to the vice chancellor for research and graduate education and would be managed by an executive director to be selected from a national search. A director would head each of UH's four research specialities in ocean science; astronomy; advanced electro-optics and sensing; and senors, communications and information technology. Another director of business and admini- stration would oversee UARC operations. These administrators would work in leased space at the Manoa Innovation Center.

    Unclassified research would be conducted on the Manoa campus but classified research would be performed on military facilities in the state or on the mainland. More bureaucracy will be needed to screen personnel for security clearances required for classified research.

    Instead of providing an economic stimulus for the state, some faculty delving into operations of the proposed UARC find a restrictive, anti-business environment.

    In scanning conflict-of-interest and other regulations, they found in effect a firewall circumscribes the UARC. Those accepting UARC funding are barred from working with local industry in ventures outside the UARC or in licensing their intellectual property in work outside the UARC in areas in which they may have gained information giving them a competitive advantage, regardless of whether that information is classified.

    Researchers accepting UARC funding also are barred from submitting new proposals, entering collaborative relationships, undertaking consult- ing work or continuing work outside the UARC in their specialties that might benefit from their access to information within the UARC that is generally unavailable to the public. Moreover, they found, these restrictions will continue for three years after they leave the UARC.

    None of these restrictions is explained on the chancellor's Web posting, although Vassilis Syrmos, technical officer for the UARC proposal, spoke at length in an interview published March 2 in Ka Leo that certain conflict-of-interest restrictions would apply to those who accept UARC funding.

    "Trying to predict the effect of the UARC on potential licensing income is almost fruitless," Richard F. Cox Jr. of UH's Office of Technology Transfer and Economic Development said in an e-mail last week. He estimated UH would bring in about $900,000 in licensing income for the year ending June 30.

    Others raise murky legal issues. Some question whether the Navy met the legal requirements of open announcement in approving the UARC at UH-M and thus in providing adequately fair competition to other qualified universities. For example, the Army, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security have all recently established new UARCs and federal research centers through open announcements and national competition. And the same statutory authority cited to establish UH-M's UARC was found as insufficient justification for awarding a UARC contract to Johns Hopkins University by NASA without full and open competition, that agency's inspector general found.

    Such broad agency announcements serve not only a legal requirement. They also contain critical information on the purpose of the UARC, a description of the mission and type of research, the constraints and restrictions on qualified and successful applicants, and important evaluation and selection criteria to be included in the proposal. Thus, the UH-M UARC omitted critical information on the actual faculty and staff who would perform the research and important industrial affiliations that is normally required in such proposals. Without such a broad agency announcement for the Navy UARC, neither the public nor the UH faculty have the guidance needed to determine exactly what their participation would involve, what they will be asked to do for the Navy or what the Navy will be doing, perhaps near their own neighborhood.

    In addition, the Navy is conducting a potentially criminal investigation into allegations of mismanagement of classified military contracts by UH and its affiliated Research Corporation, Ka Leo O Hawaii reported on March 2.

    Mismanagement of federally funded research and misstatements in applying for that funding is viewed seriously. A federal judge took the unusual step of sentencing to three months in jail a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and fining him $10,000 for lying on a grant application he made to the National Science Foundation.

    In handing down that sentence, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education on Jan. 25, 1999, U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker said, "Within the academic community, those who follow the rules must be assured they are not chumps, fools, or suckers."

    As important as these issues are, many faculty have expressed as their greatest concern the absence of a forum for the community and campus and the general lack of faculty consultation to examine these questions in detail. In a meeting with faculty on March 16, Chancellor Peter Englert apologized "for not having come forward or having made this particular presentation a little bit sooner." But the stipulation that full consultation take place with concerned stakeholders was directed by the Board of Regents in its November 2004 meeting, and efforts to establish a UARC at UH-M date from September 2002. Given the history surrounding Agent Orange, many faculty feel that UH should be very careful to examine all such questions with complete openness and good faith.

Beverly Deepe Keever is a University of Hawaii-Manoa professor of journalism. She discusses federal information policies related to U.S. Pacific nuclear weapons tests (1946-62) in her newly published book, "News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb."

 
Panama Cover Up

News Note: Agent Orange in Panama

    The Dallas Morning News recently reported that the U.S. military conducted secret tests of Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides in Panama in the 1960s and '70s, potentially exposing civilians and soldiers to highly dangerous chemicals. According to eyewitness accounts and documents, hundreds of barrels of Agent Orange were shipped to Panama during the Vietnam War to be tested in simulated tropical battlefield conditions of Southeast Asia. The chemical was a mixture of the herbicides 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T and also contained dioxin generated during formulation of 2,4,5-T. While the two herbicides break down in the environment rather quickly, dioxin is a highly persistent compound that remains in the environment for decades and can cause cancer, birth defects and other health and developmental problems.

    The U.S. Southern Command, the operational authority in Panama, said it was not aware of any tests using Agent Orange that had taken place there. However, the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department acknowledged that use of Agent Orange or similar herbicides contributed to the deaths of at least three U.S. servicemen stationed in Panama in the 1960s and '70s. In testimony at a Veterans Affairs hearing regarding one of these cases, a former operations officer for herbicide research at the Army biological research and development laboratories in Maryland stated that "several hundred drums" of Agent Orange were shipped to Panama in the late 1960s.

    For years, the Panamanian government has been trying to find proof that the U.S. used chemical weapons and herbicides there in an effort to obtain compensation for cleanup costs as well as possible damages. Panama is already seeking as much as US$500 million from the U.S. military in damages and cleanup costs related to thousands of acres used for weapons tests since World War II.

    Sources: "Report: U.S. Exposed Many in Panama to Agent Orange," San Francisco Examiner, August 20, 1999. "Report: Agent Orange in Panama," Associated Press, August 20, 1999.     Global Pesticide Campaigner (Volume 09, Number 2), August 1999

 
Taiwan - Okinawa - Phillipines @ USAF official report

Converted PDF Report     Excerpt -


Indorsement - Materiel Service Division

Items #1, 2, 7, and 8 (Herbicides)

Source:   BlueWaterNavy.org



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