Agent Orange Released, again
by proud incompetents
From the indispensable ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-halted-agent-orange-cleanup-dioxin-vietnam-poison-risk
“Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind. …
U.S. officials in Vietnam grew increasingly panicked. The ambassador sent a diplomatic cable to Washington, and Congress and USAID’s inspector general each received a whistleblower complaint, multiple people told ProPublica.
“Halting a project like that in the middle of the work, that’s an environmental crime,” said Jan Haemers, CEO of another organization that previously worked in Vietnam to clean up Agent Orange in the soil. “If you stop in the middle, it’s worse than if you never started.
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“One might imagine a less reckless government looking at what we’re doing carefully and then deciding what’s in our interest,” David Shear, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam under Barack Obama, told ProPublica.
“But,” he said, “this is government reform by meat cleaver.”