Total destruction of plant life near Mexican to help the War on Drugs.

How is Bush still able to keep doing these things?

This administration, just as any other, must be held accountable for its human rights abuses.

yikes! there is nothing good about this.

even if you don't think about the long-lasting all-encompassing effects of spreading poison around, with all our technology this is also an embarrassing and shameful approach to border control.

What can we, the people of the U.S. do about this?

Right on Avery, thanks for all the data. I hope people actually read it and learn from it.

Wow, what group of dumb-fuck robots without common logic devised this plan?

Legalize it already.

Vietnam-era defoliants?

Are the usual corporate suspects at it again?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

"Early in the American military effort it was decided that since the enemy were hiding their activities under triple-canopy jungle a useful first step might be to defoliate certain areas. This was especially true of growth surrounding bases (both large and small) in what became known as Operation Ranch Hand."

"Corporations like Dow Chemical and Monsanto were given the task of developing herbicides for this purpose. The defoliants, which were distributed in drums marked with color-coded bands, included the "Rainbow Herbicides"—Agent Pink, Agent Green, Agent Purple, Agent Blue, Agent White, and, most famously, Agent Orange, which included dioxin as a by-product of its manufacture."

"About 12 million gallons (45 000 000 L) of Agent Orange were sprayed over Southeast Asia during the American involvement. A prime area of Ranch Hand operations was in the Mekong Delta, where the U.S. Navy patrol boats were vulnerable to attack from the undergrowth at the water's edge."

--- further ---

"In 1961 and 1962, the Kennedy administration authorized the use of chemicals to destroy rice crops. Between 1961 and 1967, the U.S. Air Force sprayed 20 million U.S. gallons (75 700 000 L) of concentrated herbicides over 6 million acres (24 000 km2) of crops and trees, affecting an estimated 13% of South Vietnam's land."

"As of 2006, the Vietnamese government estimates that there are over 4,000,000 victims of dioxin poisoning in Vietnam, although the United States government denies any conclusive scientific links between Agent Orange and the Vietnamese victims of dioxin poisoning."

"In some areas of southern Vietnam dioxin levels remain at over 100 times the accepted international standard."

"The U.S. Veterans Administration has listed prostate cancer, respiratory cancers, multiple myeloma, type II diabetes, Hodgkin’s disease, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, soft tissue sarcoma, chloracne, porphyria cutanea tarda, peripheral neuropathy, and spina bifida in children of veterans exposed to Agent Orange."

"Although there has been much discussion over whether the use of these defoliants constituted a violation of the laws of war, the defoliants were not considered weapons, since exposure to them did not lead to immediate death or incapacitation."

This is truly got to be the most asinine plan, whose brain child is this? From a strategic perspective, I can totally understand the need for wide visual clear zones to allow for maximum safety and monitoring, but there are some things that could impact the ecology of the area that could cause irreversible damage. This plan seems to be bordering on such damage occurring.

For one thing, as you did mention agent orange, what kind of chemicals are they going to be using on this? What impact will those chemicals have on the river? The Caribbean?

With all those satellites the government has up there watching the United States with high definition imaging devices capable of reading the license plate off a car or thermally imaging the occupants of a house; surely they would be able to observe all the people crossing the border between Mexico and the US. Some genius computer programmer should be able to write a program that acts like a motion detector while it observes the boarder, focusing video attention to the areas with the most movements.

My point is that there are more hi tech solutions that could and should be used in this operation before blindly spraying deforestation chemicals