Vietnam // Current

Don't repeat Vietnam in Afghanistan Pt.3

Daniel Ellsberg: The counter-insurgency plan in Afganistan is similar to Viet Nam Pt3

therealnewsnetwork
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5 days ago
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Don't repeat Vietnam in Afghanistan Pt.2

Daniel Ellsberg: The counter-insurgency plan in Afganistan is similar to Viet Nam Pt2

therealnewsnetwork
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8 days ago
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Don't repeat Vietnam in Afghanistan Pt.1

Daniel Ellsberg: The counter-insurgency plan in Afganistan is similar to Viet Nam

therealnewsnetwork
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9 days ago
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Vietnam - Lungo la strada

Vietnam, ai bordi delle strade le donne si adoperano per asciugare il riso. © Edoardo... more

LuisB
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9 days ago
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Know Your Meme; Where The Hell is Matt

http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/ I LIKE MATT-THE CULT OF DANCE dance, dance,... more

remanns
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12 days ago
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5 comments

Ellsberg: From Vietnam to Afghanistan

Ellsberg: As President Obama decides what to do in Afghanistan he must learn the... more

therealnewsnetwork
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19 days ago
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Why Liberals Kill

The left may be pressuring President Obama to exit Afghanistan. But their... more

atomiclegion
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27 days ago
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5 comments

Facebook family find

WSVN reports on a man who found his son on Facebook after 36 years of searching.

MotherForTruth
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28 days ago
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US offers aid to Veterans exposed to Agent Orange but not to Vietnamese who suffer the most

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined, “Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13 ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic hedart disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the VA will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by exposure to Agent Orange.

This is another belated step forward in the decades-long struggle by Vietnam War veterans to get the Defense Department and the VA to acknowledge the American government’s responsibility for poisoning them and causing permanent damage to them and often to their children and grandchildren. Dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to man, is known to cause many serious systemic diseases, autoimmune illnesses, cancers and birth defects. (It is also a warning about the general Pentagon and government approach to other hazards caused by its battlefield use of toxins—most significantly the increasingly common use of depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and bullets—an approach which features lack of concern about health effects on troops and civilians, denial of information to troops, and denial of care to eventual victims.)

Missing from the Times article, written by military affairs reporter James Dao, which did include mention of the obstructionist role the government has played through this whole sorry saga, was a single mention of the far larger number of victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam—the people on whose heads and lands the toxic chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant refusal by the US government to accept any responsibility for what it did to them.

According to the article, the VA estimates that there may be as many as 200,000 US veterans who are suffering from Agent Orange-related illnesses. But according to a court case brought on behalf of Vietnamese victims, which was dismissed by a US Federal District Judge who ruled that there was “no basis for the claims,” there are at least three million Vietnamese, and possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses as American veterans and their children.

more at link...On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined, “Door Opens to Health... more

WakeUpPeople
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30 days ago
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Judge Blocks Public from Blackwater Hearings

"A federal judge Wednesday blocked the public from attending a critical set of pretrial hearings in the prosecution of five U.S. security contractors accused of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in a 2007 shooting.

The hearings, which are expected to last through Friday, will examine whether the government improperly used immunized statements by the Blackwater Worldwide security guards in its investigation. The guards gave the statements to the State Department shortly after the controversial shooting Sept. 16, 2007, in a busy Baghdad square.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina said Wednesday that he was closing the hearings because he wanted to shield witnesses and potential jurors from pretrial publicity. He also cited concerns about the disclosure of grand jury material. Urbina said he wanted to ensure the guards received a fair trial.

The five guards -- Paul Slough, Nicholas Slatten, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Donald Ball -- are charged with voluntary manslaughter and weapons violations in the killing of 14 civilians and the wounding 20 others. The Justice Department alleges that the guards unleashed an unprovoked attack on Iraqi civilians in Nisoor Square while in a convoy. One guard, Jeremy P. Ridgeway, has pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against the others.

Blackwater, which has since renamed itself Xe, had a contract to provide security for the State Department in Iraq.

The proceedings underway in the District's federal court, known as Kastigar hearings, will probe how well investigators gathered evidence without being tainted by those immunized statements. If the judge finds the government's case is tainted, he might be forced to throw out the indictment."

Fair trial? Throw out the indictment?

Contractors are mercenaries under a contract, hence the name, and part of the contract is that they cannot be prosecuted for crimes that the average American soldier would be under United States and International Law. Essentially, the have immunity.

So, when Blackwater, Xe, Executive Outcomes, Halliburton, KBR, BAE Systems have their mercenaries shoot up villages and revel in the plunder of heroin and prostitutes, American soldiers get hit with the retaliation, and in the case of Afghanistan, they're about to hit back real hard. Think Vietnam was bad? Wait til he Taliban start their "Tet Offensive."

These "peacekeepers" are now patrolling the streets of the US as part of an international police force. Google 'G20 police pittsburgh' and click on images. Remember, contractor=mercenary and they have no allegiance to the United States or the Constitution. They work under a different contract and they get private trials."A federal judge Wednesday blocked the public from attending a critical set of... more

rodstradamus
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1 month ago
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McCain Warns Obama Against “Half Measures" In Afghanistan

President Obama told Congressional leaders that he would not substantially reduce... more

jimhager
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1 month ago
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6 comments

Hanoi la mia sete di emozioni

È forse la giornata più calda ed umida del mio soggiorno in Vietnam e l'attrezzatura... more

LuisB
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1 month ago
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U.S. troops call Afghan region 'Vietnam without napalm'

The men of Bravo Company have a bitter description for the irrigated swath of land... more

Future_America
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1 month ago
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1 comment

Cheers! Oktoberfests outside Germany

SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) - The original Oktoberfest is underway in Munich but beer... more

arcticspirit
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1 month ago
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Remembering 9/12 and Every Day Thereafter

Millions of innocent Iraqi and Afghan civilians and have died at the hands of the... more

JonRaymond
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2 months ago
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1 comment

Unusual trips and unique accommodations: Trip on a Deal Ep. 8

http://wwwtriponadeal.com: We scour the NY Travel Show for some of the most bizarre... more

triponadeal
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3 months ago
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MIGHTY MOVIE PODCAST on HuffPost: Ang Lee on TAKING WOODSTOCK

If I was to be completely honest about it, I’d have to say that my disappointment at... more

DanPersons
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3 months ago
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"Things you didn't do..." Leo Buscaglia

This poem is so beautiful. Leo Buscaglia was so inspirational and I wish he were... more

TheNaderRaider
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3 months ago
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The Comedy Stylings Of Tron Van Nguyen

A short stand up set from Vietnamese refugee, entrepreneur and amateur comedian Tron... more

Simon_S
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3 months ago
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A Legacy of War: Fake Art in Vietnam

"Even the director of the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum here doesn’t know how many of the artworks and artifacts under his care are genuine and how many are extremely skillful copies. But he says he is going to try to find out.

There are nearly 20,000 of these mystery objects, on the walls and in storage, including paintings, sculpture, lacquerware, pottery, ancient statues and traditional crafts.

“We are making efforts to have a comprehensive review of items on display and in our warehouse,” said the director, Truong Quoc Binh. “After we evaluate the whole exhibit, we will try to label them all to show if they are original or not.”

Mr. Binh has been addressing questions about authenticity a lot lately. Curators and artists have been aware of the issue for years, but it became a matter of public discussion only in April, when it was raised at a conference on copyright in Danang.

In large part, the confusion is a legacy of the war with the United States, which ended in 1975, and to a lesser extent of a brief border war fought with China in 1979.

In the late 1960s, fearing that the United States would bomb Hanoi, then the capital of North Vietnam, museum officials removed hundreds of important artworks for safekeeping in the countryside.

To replace them on the museum walls, it commissioned copies: some by the original artists, some by the artists’ apprentices, some by skilled copyists in the museum’s restoration department. They were brilliant reproductions — or variants, as the Vietnamese called those paintings copied by the original artists.

But now “it’s a disaster,” said Bui Thanh Phuong, the son of Bui Xuan Phai, a prominent painter. “Viewers can’t be sure if what they are looking at is genuine or fake.” Mr. Phuong said he does not know which of the museum’s seven paintings attributed to his father, who died in 1988, are real.

In some cases it was apparently not even clear whether the originals or their copies were sent into hiding, said Nguyen Do Bao, the former chairman of the Hanoi Fine Arts Association, who delivered the paper that gave rise to the controversy at the copyright conference in April.

“There was no oversight,” Mr. Bao said in an interview. “When the artists took them home, they could make more than one copy. They could keep the original. We had no way of knowing.”

At the conference he told the audience, “Owing to poor management, the museum lost many original artworks during this time,” and added that researchers had not been allowed to examine works “while the public doesn’t know that they are reproductions.”

Asked in the interview why he was bringing up the issue now, after so many years of public silence, he said, “Now we have more freedom and democracy and we want to raise our voices to make sure the museum is not displaying copies.”""Even the director of the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum here doesn’t know how many of the... more

St_Alia_10191
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3 months ago
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tagged w/ Vietnam

Don't repeat Vietnam in Afghanistan Pt.3

Don't repeat Vietnam in Afghanistan Pt.2

Don't repeat Vietnam in Afghanistan Pt.1

Vietnam - Lungo la strada

Know Your Meme; Where The Hell is Matt

Ellsberg: From Vietnam to Afghanistan

Why Liberals Kill

Facebook family find

US offers aid to Veterans exposed to Agent Orange but not to Vietnamese who suffer the most

Judge Blocks Public from Blackwater Hearings

McCain Warns Obama Against “Half Measures" In Afghanistan

Hanoi la mia sete di emozioni

U.S. troops call Afghan region 'Vietnam without napalm'

Cheers! Oktoberfests outside Germany

Remembering 9/12 and Every Day Thereafter

Unusual trips and unique accommodations: Trip on a Deal Ep. 8

MIGHTY MOVIE PODCAST on HuffPost: Ang Lee on TAKING WOODSTOCK

"Things you didn't do..." Leo Buscaglia

The Comedy Stylings Of Tron Van Nguyen

A Legacy of War: Fake Art in Vietnam

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