FAIR USE NOTICE

FAIR USE NOTICE

A BEAR MARKET ECONOMICS BLOG

OCCUPY THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD


This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates
FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates

All Blogs licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Inside the Mind of a Psychopath

Scientific American


Inside the Mind of a Psychopath

Neuroscientists are discovering that some of the most cold-blooded killers aren't bad. They suffer from a brain abnormality that sets them adrift in an emotionless world



In Brief

  • Aided by EEGs and brain scans, scientists have discovered that psychopaths possess significant impairments that affect their ability to feel emotions, read other people’s cues and learn from their mistakes.
  • These deficiencies may be apparent in children who are as young as five years old.
  • When you tally trials, prison stays and inflicted damage, psychopaths cost us $250 billion to $400 billion a year.
  • Psychopaths have traditionally been considered untreatable, but novel forms of therapy show promise.

The word “psychopath” conjures up movie images of brutal, inexplicable violence: Jack Nicholson chasing his family with an ax in The Shining or Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, his face locked into an armored mask to keep him from biting people to death. But real life offers another set of images, that of killers making nice: Ted Bundy as law student and aide to the governor of Washington State, and John Wayne Gacy as the Junior Chamber of Commerce’s “Man of the Year.” Psychopaths are likable guys when they want to be.

Between the two of us, we have interviewed hundreds of prison inmates to assess their mental health. We are trained in spotting psychopaths, but even so, coming face to face with the real article can be electrifying, if also unsettling. One of the most striking peculiarities of psychopaths is that they lack empathy; they are able to shake off as mere tinsel the most universal social obligations. They lie and manipulate yet feel no compunction or regrets—in fact, they don’t feel particularly deeply about anything at all.

So much of the way regular people make sense of the world is through emotion. It informs our “gut” decisions, our connections to people and places, our sense of belonging and purpose. It is almost impossible to imagine life without feelings—until you meet a psychopath. But psychopaths often cover up their deficiencies with a ready and engaging charm, so it can take time to realize what you are dealing with.

One of us (Kiehl) used to ask inexperienced graduate students to interview a particularly appealing inmate before acquainting themselves with his criminal history. These budding psychologists would emerge quite certain that such a well-spoken, trustworthy person must have been wrongly imprisoned. Until, that is, they read his file—pimping, drug dealing, fraud, robbery, and on and on—and went back to reinterview him, at which point he would say offhandedly, “Oh, yeah, I didn’t want to tell you about all that stuff. That’s the old me.”

This appearance of normalcy—the so-called mask of sanity—has bedeviled the study of psychopaths. Though guilty of the most erratic and irresponsible, sometimes destructive and violent behavior, they show none of the classic signs of mental illness. They don’t have hallucinations or hear voices. They aren’t confused, or anxious, or driven by overwhelming compulsions. Nor do they tend to be socially awkward. They are often of better-than-average intelligence. Add that they do not express true remorse or a desire to change, and it has been easy to view psychopaths not as victims of a dire mental instability but simply as opportunists. To paraphrase the dilemma: Are they mad or simply bad?

From the biblical Cain to the kunlangeta of the Yupi Eskimos and the arankan of Nigeria, nearly every culture on earth has recorded the existence of individuals whose antisocial behavior threatens community peace. But thanks to technology that captures brain activity in real time, experts are no longer limited to examining psychopaths’ aberrant behavior. We can investigate what is happening inside them as they think, make decisions and react to the world around them. And what we find is that far from being merely selfish, psychopaths suffer from a serious biological defect. Their brains process information differently from those of other people. It’s as if they have a learning disability that impairs emotional development.

In a collective throwing up of hands, psychiatrists have long written psychopaths off as beyond help. But now that science is unraveling the mechanisms behind the disorder, it’s time for that attitude to change. If specific physiological deficits prevent psychopaths from empathizing with others, forming stable relationships and learning from their mistakes, then elucidating them could lead to new treatments: medications, perhaps, or targeted behavioral strategies.

Kiehl has launched an ambitious multimillion-dollar project—funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) and Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation—to gather genetic information, brain images and case histories from 1,000 psychopaths and compile it all into a searchable database. To speed the work, Kiehl helped to design a portable scanner—a functional MRI machine housed in a trailer—that can be brought inside prison walls, obviating the need for high-level clearances to bring dangerous prisoners off-site.

We believe psychopaths are as deserving of treatment as anyone with a mental illness, but you don’t have to feel sympathy to want to help them. Between 15 and 35 percent of U.S. prisoners are psychopaths. Psychopaths offend earlier, more frequently and more violently than others, and they are four to eight times more likely to commit new crimes on release. In fact, there is a direct correlation between how high people score on the 40-point screening test for psychopathy and how likely they are to violate parole. Kiehl recently estimated that the expense of prosecuting and incarcerating psychopaths, combined with the costs of the havoc they wreak in others’ lives, totals $250 billion to $400 billion a year. No other mental health problem of this size is being so willfully ignored.

Level Heads, Empty Hearts
A man we will call Brad was in prison for a particularly heinous crime. In an interview he described how he had kidnapped a young woman, tied her to a tree, raped her for two days, then slit her throat and left her for dead. He told the story, then concluded with an unforgettable non sequitur. “Do you have a girl?” he asked. “Because I think it’s really important to practice the three C’s—caring, communication and compassion. That’s the secret to a good relationship. I try to practice the three C’s in all my relationships.” He spoke without hesitation, clearly unaware how bizarre this self-help platitude sounded after his awful confession.

Charming as they may seem, psychopaths can also be tone-deaf because they lack access to their own feelings and those of others. Imagine what it would be like never to be depressed or anxious, never to have regrets or low self-esteem but also never to care deeply for anyone or anything. Psychopaths’ emotions are shallow: they feel irritated when they don’t get their way and turn to risky behaviors for the flimsiest of reasons. Bereft of loyalties and passions, they wander through life, often straying into criminality on a whim—forgeries, thefts, assaults, even murders may be committed out of some trivial impulse. As for complex emotions such as devotion, guilt or joy, theirs remains a textbook understanding—it has been said that they “know the words but not the music.”

Dozens of studies reveal that psychopaths experience the world differently from other people. They have trouble making appropriate moral value judgments and putting the brakes on their impulses. They are also hampered in how they respond to emotions, language and distractions—a disconnect that is sometimes seen as early as age five.

Psychopaths are curiously oblivious to emotional cues. In 2002 James Blair of the NIMH showed that they are not good at detecting emotions, especially fear, in another person’s voice. They also have trouble identifying fearful facial expressions. And a classic experiment in 1991 co-authored by psychologist Robert D. Hare of the University of British Columbia, a pioneer in the field (and a mentor to Kiehl during graduate school), found that psychopaths miss the emotional nuances of language. The investigators flashed real and nonsense words in front of prisoners, some of whom were psychopaths, and asked them to press a button when they saw a dictionary word. Psychopaths were as quick as nonpsychopaths to differentiate between real and fabricated words. But the experiment went a level deeper, because among the real words some had positive or negative connotations (“milk,” “scar”) whereas others were neutral (“gate”). For the nonpsychopaths, emotionally charged words leaped off the screen; their automatic brain responses, measured by electroencephalograms, showed a distinctive electrical surge, and they pushed the button faster. Psychopaths did not react faster to emotional words, and their brain waves did not change.

Evidence is mounting that language bedevils psychopaths in other ways. Psychopaths have trouble understanding metaphors—for example, they are more likely than others to judge as negative the phrase “Love is an antidote for the world’s ills.” Additionally, Kiehl found in a 1999 study that psychopaths make more errors when identifying abstract nouns—words such as “love,” “deceit,” “trust,” “dedication” and “curiosity.”

Yet another deficiency of psychopaths has to do with how they pay attention. In an ingenious gambling experiment, Joseph P. Newman of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with whom one of us (Buckholtz) has worked extensively, showed that psychopaths have trouble shifting gears, even when their current strategy for obtaining their goal is failing. Participants were given a computerized deck of 100 cards that had been arranged so that nine of the first 10 cards were face cards, eight of the next 10 were face cards, seven of the next 10 were face cards, and so forth. They were told that each time they turned over a card they would receive a point if it was a face card and lose a point if it was not. They could end the game at any time. Players earned easy points at first, but as the odds worsened, nonpsychopaths noticed and stopped playing, usually after about 50 cards. Psychopaths, on the other hand, kept on until the deck was almost finished and their winnings had vanished.

Newman believes that the apparent callousness of psychopaths is actually the result of an attentional quirk: they do not take in new information when their attention is otherwise engaged. Previous research has suggested that psychopaths are unreactive: their palms do not sweat when they are exposed to foul odors or shown images of mutilated faces. But Newman and his colleagues recently demonstrated that psychopaths actually have normal physiological responses to unpleasant stimuli, like the threat of an electric shock—except when their attention is directed elsewhere. Once fixed on a goal, psychopaths proceed as if they can’t get off the train until it reaches the station. This narrowly focused, full-speed-ahead tendency, paired with the psychopath’s impulsivity, may produce the kind of horror described in In Cold Blood: an all-night torture fest that appears almost aimless, the work of two criminals who, having begun the violence, are blind and deaf to information that might halt it (such as a victim’s pleas), unable to turn away until it has been completed.

An Altered Brain
In 1848 a handsome, dark-haired young man named Phineas Gage was working as a construction foreman on the Rutland & Burlington Railroad in Vermont. He and his crew were clearing a rocky area when an accidental explosion blew Gage’s tamping iron—a heavy metal rod more than three feet long—through the left side of his face and out the top of his head. Such an injury seemed sure to kill or at the very least cripple him. But although “half a teacupful” of his brain leaked onto the floor, as the attending doctor recalled, Gage apparently never lost consciousness and on his recovery remained relatively fit. His compatriots noticed a change in him, however—one that was more disturbing than if he had lost the use of his limbs. Formerly savvy, even-tempered and responsible, Gage was now churlish and unpredictable, driven by his immediate passions. Gage’s story became a classic of neuroscience because it revealed that behavior, which seems a matter of personal will, is fundamentally biological.

Gage lost the use of a part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Located behind the eyes, this area is structurally similar to its neighbor, the orbitofrontal cortex—which many scientists believe malfunctions in psychopaths. The orbitofrontal cortex is involved in sophisticated decision-making tasks that involve sensitivity to risk, reward and punishment. People whose brains are damaged in this area develop problems with impulsivity and insight and lash out in response to perceived affronts—much like Gage. In fact, such patients are often said to suffer from “acquired psychopathy.”

But transformed as Gage was by his accident, he did not show all the characteristics of psychopathy, such as lack of empathy. This fact suggests that other brain structures are also involved. One likely candidate is the almond-shaped amygdala, which generates emotions such as fear. Monkeys with amygdala damage walk right up to people. Psychopaths, too, are notable for their fearlessness: when confronted with images such as a looming attacker or a weapon aimed their way, they literally don’t blink.

But evidence suggests that one or two brain areas are not enough to produce the profound impairments of psychopaths. Kiehl recently proposed that psychopathy emanates from the paralimbic system, a group of interconnected brain structures that are involved in emotion processing, goal seeking, motivation and self-control. Supporting this hypothesis are fMRI images of psychopaths’ brains made by Kiehl and others, which show a pronounced thinning of the paralimbic tissue—indicating that this part of the brain is underdeveloped, like a weak muscle.

GET THE COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE

Sunday, May 1, 2011

America, the Great Satan, Poisons its Own and the World's Food Supply

Real Free Speech

America, the Great Satan.



MONSANTO our new "safe" food supplier



'Last ghost' of the Vietnam War: From: Governor

More than three decades after the fall of Saigon, the spectre of Agent Orange still haunts the estimated three million children and grandchildren of its initial victims. As Vietnam presses a reluctant U.S. government to help mop up the damage, the taint of the chemical concoction still lingers in a sleepy Ontario farming town that brewed millions of litres of the stuff for the American war effort
GEOFFREY YORK AND HAYLEY MICK

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

July 12, 2008 at 12:05 AM EDT

Hanoi and Elmira, Ont. — When the white powder started falling from the sky, the soldiers were puzzled. Usually the American planes dropped bombs. Now, they were unleashing clouds of something that looked like fog, smelled like garlic and burned their eyes.

"The whole earth was covered with it," remembers Tong Van Vinh, who was a 26-year-old truck driver in the North Vietnamese military at the time. "We thought they were dropping smoke bombs on us. We didn't know it was a chemical."

A few weeks later, Mr. Vinh began to understand the terrible power of the strange clouds. "The trees died. Even the grass died. When we went to collect branches and leaves to disguise our trucks, there were none left."

This was Agent Orange doing its job. Keen to destroy the enemy's crops as well as the forest concealing its troop movements and supply lines, U.S. forces had resorted to the most powerful defoliants they could find, dropping about 80 million litres in all. But the chemical concoction killed more than plants; laced with dioxin, it was one of the more toxic substances known to humanity – so toxic, in fact, that the man who invented Agent Orange spent much of his life trying to keep it from being used.

Enlarge Image

Nguyen Thi Kieu Nhung sits inside her family home next to the Danang airbase in Danang, Vietnam on Thursday, May 21, 2007. The girl was born with physical deformities, including twisted limbs, a misshapen head, and protruding eyes suspected by local health officials to have been caused by dioxin in the chemical defoliant Agent Orange.
(David Guttenfelder/Associated Press)
Photogallery
  • Agent Orange

"Nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result in benefits for mankind," said U.S. biologist Arthur Galston, who died last month at the age of 88. "Any discovery ... can be turned either to constructive ends or destructive ends."

As the North Vietnamese soldiers were to discover, the "destructive ends" for Agent Orange were anything but fleeting; in fact, they have yet to subside. More than three decades after the fall of Saigon, the scourge known as the "last ghost" of the Vietnam War still haunts the children, and now the grandchildren, of its initial victims – an estimated three million people.

First sprayed in 1968, Mr. Vinh was plagued by muscular and skeletal disorders. But after the war ended in 1975, his health deteriorated rapidly. By 1994, he was paralyzed and spent six months in hospital, being fed liquids through his nose. He recovered, but not enough to work on his rice farm. Today, his voice is hoarse, he can't swallow solid food, his spine is numb and often he is too weak to walk or even to turn over in bed.

Dioxin interferes with reproduction, so Mr. Vinh's nightmare swept up his children and grandchildren as well. One son is blind and mentally handicapped. Another is deaf. A third has spinal problems. One daughter is partly paralyzed, another mentally handicapped, the third chronically weak with children born blind.

Vietnam estimates 400,000 people were killed or maimed by the defoliants, 500,000 children have been born with defects from retardation to spina bifida and a further two million people have suffered cancers or other illnesses. Yet they have received no compensation from those who produced the chemicals and those who made them a weapon of war.

Mr. Vinh survives on a $60 monthly pension – far from enough to cover his medical expenses, let alone those of his children. "We hope the U.S. will provide help for us," he says quietly.

So far, that seems unlikely. In February, a U.S. court rejected the latest appeal by Vietnamese victims who were suing the manufacturers of Agent Orange for billions in compensation. As an act of charity, Washington has offered a paltry $3-million not only to help treat the victims of America's biggest experiment with chemical-warfare tactics but to clean up the contamination that keeps adding to the toll.

The Vietnamese have suffered the most and received the least help, but they aren't the only victims. Agent Orange tainted everyone it touched, and so binds Vietnam not only to the United States, whose fighters also paid a price for the misery they created, but to Canada as well.

More than two decades after ailing U.S. veterans were awarded $180-million in compensation (in addition to the billions spent on their medical care), Ottawa is offering $20,000 each to an estimated 4,500 Canadian soldiers and civilians exposed when Agent Orange was secretly tested on a New Brunswick military base.

And just as Vietnam continues to press a stubborn U.S. government to help clean up the damage Agent Orange caused, a sleepy Ontario farming town is still struggling 40 years after the fact to rid itself of the fallout from a local chemical plant that brewed up millions of litres of the stuff for the U.S war effort.

WELCOME TO THE HOME OF THE 'TOXIDOME'

Susan Bryant steers her silver Toyota down a gravel lane in a cemetery overlooking Elmira, a community of 12,000 surrounded by lush farmland about 15 kilometres north of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.

But the 59-year-old English instructor at the University of Waterloo isn't here to commune with the dead. "There's the toxidome," she says, pointing beyond the barbed-wire fence to a massive, windowless structure. "My favourite view is looking back through the headstones."

Being next to a cemetery is a fitting location because the building is a kind of tomb – one designed to house the putrid remains of Canada's contribution to the Vietnam War. In the 1960s, the plant now known as Chemtura was owned by Uniroyal Ltd., one of seven suppliers of Agent Orange to the American military. About 2.6 million litres of the herbicide sprayed on the jungles and people of Vietnam were made here.

And like Vietnam, Elmira remains tainted by the experience: Dioxin still pollutes the soil in parts of town, its groundwater and, some whisper, its people.

The dome housed more than 46,000 tonnes of toxic waste that was generated by the plant, excavated in 1993 – more than two decades after Agent Orange production halted – and eventually shipped to a hazardous-waste landfill site near Sarnia, Ont. And yet the province has ordered a further cleanup, and local wells remain so poisoned that drinking water has to be piped in from Waterloo.

Even the cemetery is affected: The area adjoining the plant's old dumping ground is still too contaminated for burials. "I think," Ms. Bryant says dryly, "it could be a selling point: 'You will never decay. You will be pickled.'"

This long after the fact, few Canadians are aware of their country's infamous role in Vietnam, but the past weighs heavily on some.

"You'd do it all differently now," says Fred Hager, a chemical engineer who spent his 42-year career at the plant before retiring in 1986 as head of research and development. "Everybody would."

Now 88 and still a resident of Elmira, Mr. Hager will never forget the day in 1970 he travelled to Ottawa to test Uni-royal's herbicide with a new machine that could detect dioxin as low as one part per billion. The reading came back at more than one part per million – 10 times the level now generally considered safe.

"We shut the whole damn thing down," he says, "and made no more."

BEWARE THE LAKE OF THE KILLER FISH

The U.S. began experimenting with defoliants in Vietnam in 1961, giving its first lethal herbicides such names as Agent Purple, Agent Blue, Agent Green, Agent White and Agent Pink after the colour of an identifying band on the drums in which they were stored.

Agent Orange, which was based on research Mr. Galston had conducted at the University of Illinois just before the Second World War (others used his research notes after he enlisted), was the last and most potent concoction employed in the defoliation campaign initially called Operation Hades (later renamed Operation Ranch Hand).

Despite warnings that it could harm humans, an estimated 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed. To make matters worse, the chemical was sprayed in concentrations higher than anything recommended for weed clearance even though by then the toxic effects of dioxin were well known. (Just one-millionth of a gram per kilo of body weight can cause birth defects and reproductive failure in laboratory animals.)

In total, the equivalent of at least 366 kilograms of pure dioxin were dropped. The compound takes decades to break down in the environment, and today millions of Vietnamese are still exposed to it in a series of "hot spots" where Agent Orange was stored during the war.

The cost of cleaning up just three of these sites has been estimated at $60-million, and an extreme example is Bien Hoa, a town not far from Ho Chi Minh City where 32,000 litres of Agent Orange that were spilled at an air base leaked into nearby Lake Bien Hung.

Now a placid pond shaded by willows in the middle of the town's most popular park, the lake remains heavily contaminated – sediment samples show dioxin at levels hundreds times what is safe. It teems with fish, but they are potentially deadly, so warning signs have been posted and 15 security guards work around the clock to keep people from catching them.

"Most people know it's contaminated, but they still go fishing here," one guard says. "We have to call the police to ask them to enforce the ban."

Nguyen Thi Gai, 66, lives in a one-room house on the edge of the park, and says her family often ate fish from the lake – until 1995 when tests found dioxin in the blood of her two teenage sons and in a well she had to stop using.

"I waited for years for the government to provide medical treatment for my sons," she says. "But they never gave us any treatment. So I had to treat them with traditional herbs."

This year, Vietnamese scientists asked for further blood samples from her family, but she refused, still angry at the lack of treatment.

Hatfield Consultants Ltd., based in Vancouver, has been documenting dioxin levels in Vietnam. "The lake should be sealed off and all fishing activities banned," company president Tom Boivin says. In fact, he adds, "removing the fish population is probably worth considering."

At another hot spot, the former U.S. air base at Danang, a key staging point for Agent Orange spraying missions, the company took blood samples from residents, expecting that their dioxin levels might be 10 times the international limit.

When some samples were 300 to 400 times that limit, "my eyes popped out of my head," Mr. Boivin recalls. "They were the highest levels ever recorded in Vietnam, and among the highest ever found in the world. If this was Canada or the United States, … the government would immediately bulldoze the site."

Instead, there have been long and frustrating delays, he says. "People have been talking about it for 40 years, and only now are they finally beginning to clean up the sites. It's ridiculous that it's taken so long. There's been a lot of stonewalling and political bickering. There's no excuse for it."

The U.S. government, he notes, has repeatedly demanded proof that the presence of dioxin and the Vietnamese health problems are related to Agent Orange.

"It's pretty mind-blowing. The Vietnamese had done tons of research, but they weren't believed until our results came out. The evidence is so strong. Study after study has clearly demonstrated that these sites are a very high risk for human health.

"Under international rules, the polluter pays, so the U.S. clearly has to step up."

So far, the U.S. has been unwilling to step up, except for the offer of $3-million, which is widely ridiculed in Vietnam. "That's only a dollar for each victim," says Nguyen Trong Nhan, vice-president of the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange. "How can they survive on a dollar?"

Dr. Nhan's group launched the lawsuit against the chemical companies in 2004 and now has lost the first two rounds but is determined to keep fighting. "We are very poor, and these U.S. corporations are very rich …," he says. "So we know it's very difficult. We must be patient. But we will continue."

They persist because the damage is far from finished. "The consequences for humans and the environment are very heavy, not just from the past 40 years but also for the next 40 years," explains Le Ke Son, editor of a toxicology magazine and director of a national committee to combat the effects of Agent Orange.

"There will be consequences for our great-grandchildren and for our great-great-grandchildren," he says.

"It has a much heavier impact on Vietnamese veterans than on American veterans. I think the U.S. government is afraid of these consequences, so they try to find ways to reject our court cases."

Vietnamese scientists, who have been studying the effects of Agent Orange for decades, are frustrated by the U.S. judges and lawyers who demand proof of a link to the devastating illnesses among Vietnamese veterans. They say that link is as strong as the one between cigarettes and lung cancer – but the evidence relies on statistical patterns, rather than documented proof in each case.

Dr. Son cites a recent study of 47,000 Vietnamese veterans and their children. Those who were exposed to Agent Orange had a much higher rate of cancer and birth defects. "Even their grandchildren had a higher rate of cancer."

Another scientist, Nguyen Ngoc Hung of Hanoi Medical University, points to statistics showing that the rate of birth defects is far higher in provinces that were heavily sprayed, but to prove this to the satisfaction of the U.S. courts, he says, may be impossible.

THE CASE THEY THOUGHT WOULD JUST GO AWAY

Coping with chemical fallout is a familiar burden to the people of Elmira, still grappling with the aftermath of poor disposal practices for wastes from the manufacture of Agent Orange and other chemicals. Local wells have been closed since 1990, when hazardous levels of a carcinogen (this time, not one associated with Agent Orange) was discovered.

Yet the Ontario government has given the company until 2028 to clean up the site, and no serious study has looked at whether area cancer rates are higher than normal.

Why? Activists such as Susan Bryant blame the politics of denial that characterizes Agent Orange battles around the world.

For example, it was only after years of lobbying by determined veterans that Ottawa finally agreed last November to pay $95.6-million for what happened at Camp Gagetown in 1966 and 1967.

Canadian commanders at the sprawling military base east of Fredericton needed to have brush cleared to conduct training exercises, so they struck a deal with the Americans, who needed a place to test their defoliants.

Former soldier Jim Cadger remembered seeing planes spew out the powder, green grass turn brown overnight and Americans soldiers who sauntered into the bar after a day's defoliation. "They stunk to high hell."

Now, the federal government is paying $20,000 to those who can prove that they lived on or within a five-kilometre radius of the base and developed a health problem that is associated with Agent Orange, which can include several cancers, diabetes and spina bifida, a congenitally malformed spinal cord.

Despite the settlement, a group of veterans and former Gagetown residents is pressing the government for more damages in a class-action lawsuit now winding its way through the Federal Court. They claim the 1966-67 time frame is too narrow and effectively shirks responsibility for spraying they claim went on for years before and after the Americans came to Gagetown.

"The hope is to make the government accountable," says Art Connolly, a spokesman for Agent Orange Alert, a group also pushing for an inquiry into the situation. "All we want is the truth … and to me that isn't too much to ask for."

The Vietnamese are asking for the same.

For more than 25 years, U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War have received huge sums in damages and medical benefits from the U.S government and the manufacturers that supplied it with Agent Orange. In 2006, their South Korean allies received a $63-million (U.S.) court-ordered settlement from two of the companies.

And now the Canadians at Gagetown have a package that so far has seen 1,483 cheques worth almost $3-million issued. Even a British soldier who was there at the time has received a special pension from his government.

In all, the various payouts surpass $25-billion, but the chances of the Vietnamese receiving something similar are increasingly slim.

The latest dismissal by their damage suit – which claims the U.S. chemical companies committed war crimes by supplying Agent Orange – frustrates supporters, who call it misguided and unfair.

"The government has already paid 20 to 25 billion dollars to the people who did the spraying," says Johnathan Moore, a New York lawyer who represented the Vietnamese plaintiffs. "How can you then deny compensation to those who were sprayed?"

The answer to that is a complicated mix of intricate legal manoeuvres, fuzzy science and the tricky issue of who bears responsibility for the aftermath of war.

In 1984, after years of arguing over health risks linked to Agent Orange, the seven chemical companies settled a massive class-action suit by U.S. veterans for $180-million after a judge persuaded them to buy themselves out of protracted litigation.

By 1997, after the last of the money had been paid out, 291,000 people had received benefits.

For the chemical companies, the settlement was the final chapter. "The assumption was that this would go away," says Peter Schuck, a Yale University law professor whose 1987 book Agent Orange on Trial: Mass Toxic Disasters in the Courts detailed the landmark case.

But they were wrong. For two decades, they faced a succession of new lawsuits, all of which were dismissed because, in the eyes of a U.S. Federal Court, the 1984 case had settled the matter.

Then, in 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed an appeals-court decision that allowed Vietnam veterans who had opted out of the original settlement, or were diagnosed afterward, to sue the manufacturers.

The door was opened to a new wave of lawsuits, and American veterans weren't the only ones paying attention. Around the world, people injured by Agent Orange were inspired to take action.

In May, 2005, Mr. Cadger, who had worked at Gagetown as a communications technician, saw a CBC television report revealing that the U.S. military had tested Agent Orange at the base.

"I remember thinking, 'This is going to be another government cover-up.' And I got involved."

He joined other veterans and former Gagetown residents seeking redress, a group that included Mr. Connolly, who had spent part of his childhood at the base when his father worked in the army.

A year later, Mr. Connolly flew to Hanoi for a conference on illness and pollution related to Agent Orange that was also attended by delegates from South Korea and the United States.

It was a depressing trip – he toured an orphanage for children with ghastly deformities – but inspiring too, he says. A few months earlier, veterans from South Korea – the United States' biggest ally during the Vietnam War – had won their $63-million settlement from Dow Chemical and Monsanto. And then, on Sept. 12, the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that it would compensate the Gagetown residents.

Mr. Cadger, who had developed diabetes, received his $20,000 in December, paid a few bills and banked the rest. "I took it because I had it coming," he said of the money, "but it angered me more than anything."

Despite his anger, he conceded that he was better off than his Vietnamese counterparts. But last month, at the age of 64, he suffered a heart attack and died.

'WE KEPT HOPING WE WOULD HAVE A HEALTHY CHILD'

With his health problems and those of his children and grandchildren, Tong Van Vinh, the former truck driver, tells a sad tale. But it is no less heartbreaking than those of his roommates at Friendship Village, a huddle of buildings on the outskirts of Hanoi where Agent Orange survivors receive temporary respite and health assistance from their government and foreign charities.

Quang Van Tuoi, a 65-year-old veteran of the Viet Cong, shows a small photo of his youngest daughter, born with deformed limbs and mental handicaps. Her eyes are glassy and unfocused, and her body is partly paralyzed.

All five of his children, born from 1975 to 1994, have similar mental problems. "We kept hoping we would have a healthy child," he says. "But they all suffered the same illness."

Although the Vietnamese government tries to discourage Agent Orange victims from trying again if their first child is born disabled, most are impoverished farmers who rely on children for help. Persuading them to give up their dreams of having a large family isn't easy.

Some can't have children at all. Ha Van Mang, 64, was digging a bunker when the Agent Orange fell on him in 1968. Ever since, he has endured numbness and migraine headaches, and after the war, his wife gave birth to a son with no legs or hands.

The baby died two months later, he says, and "no matter how sorrowful we were, we were never able to have any more children."

Mr. Mang's body twitches uncontrollably, day and night, and he is tormented by rashes that feel like ants crawling on his skin. He feels guilty that he has been unable to work on his rice farm since 1978.

"I get headaches so strong that it brings tears to my eyes, and sometimes I just cry and can't do anything else."

Like Jim Cadger, he gets angry when he thinks of how the U.S. courts have rejected appeals from the only victims of Agent Orange yet to receive assistance.

"It's an injustice," he says. "An unfairness."

Geoffrey York is The Globe and Mail's correspondent in Beijing. Hayley Mick is a Toronto-based reporter with Globe Life.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080711.worange1107/BNStory/Front/home/?pageRequested=all



--
Regards,

Eileen Dannemann
former director, National Coalition of Organized Women (NCOW)
www.ProgressiveConvergence.com
917 804-0786