Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [245]
58. Editorial, “The Fingerprints on Agca’s Gun,” New York Times, October 30, 1984.
59. Barbara Crossette, “Hanoi Said to Vow to Give M.I.A. Data,” New York Times, October 24, 1992.
60. For many years U.S. officials used the claim that Vietnam had not accounted for all U.S. prisoners of war and M.I.A.s to justify hostile actions toward that country. This is discussed later in this Introduction, under “Rewriting Vietnam War History,” and in the main text, pp. 224–25.
61. Leslie Gelb, “When to Forgive and Forget: Engaging Hanoi and Other Outlaws,” New York Times, April 15, 1993.
62. Quoted in William Buckingham, Jr., Operation Ranch Hand: The Air Force and Herbicides in Southeast Asia, 1961–1971 (Washington: U.S. Air Force, 1982), p. 82.
63. See Arthur Westing, ed., Herbicides in War: The Long-Term Ecological and Human Consequences (Stockholm: SIPRI, 1984), pp. 5ff.; Hatfield Consultants Ltd., Development of Impact Mitigation Strategies Related to the Use of Agent Orange Herbicide in the Aluoi Valley, Viet Nam, vol. 1 (West Vancouver, B.C., April 2000).
64. Buckingham, Operation Ranch Hand, p. 127.
65. Cited in Seymour Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 153. See also J. B. Neilands et al., Harvest of Death: Chemical Warfare in Vietnam and Cambodia (New York: Free Press, 1972).
66. First use of chemicals is contrary to the Geneva Protocol of 1925, and food crop destruction violates numerous international rules of war. The latter was even illegal according to the rules laid out in the U.S. Army’s own field manual in use during the Vietnam war. See Edward Herman, Atrocities in Vietnam (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970), pp. 81–83.
67. Harvard University physician Jean Mayer, “Crop Destruction in Vietnam,” Science (April 15, 1966).
68. Alistair Hay, The Chemical Scythe: Lessons of 2,4,5-T and Dioxin (New York: Plenum Publishing, 1982), pp. 187–94.
69. General Assembly Resolution 2603A (XXIV), December 16, 1969, “viewed with horror” and strongly condemned the U.S. chemical war.
70. Peter Waldman, “Body Count: In Vietnam, the Agony of Birth Defects Calls an Old War to Mind,” Wall Street Journal, December 12, 1997.
71. Barbara Crossette, “Study of Dioxin’s Effect in Vietnam Is Hampered by Diplomatic Freeze,” New York Times, August 19, 1992.
72. Matthew Meselson, Julian Robinson and Jeanne Guillemin, “Yellow Rain: The Story Collapses,” Foreign Policy (Fall 1987), pp. 100–117; Edward S. Herman, “The Wall Street Journal as a Propaganda Agency,” in Herman, Myth of the Liberal Media, pp. 103–10.
73. Peter Kann, “Clinton Ignores History’s Lessons in Vietnam,” Wall Street Journal, September 9, 1992.
74. When Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran and his indigenous Kurds in the 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations made no protests and continued to treat him as a valued ally. It was only after he invaded Kuwait in 1990 that he became a menace and his possession of “weapons of mass destruction” was deemed intolerable. See citations in note 29 above.
75. In 1999, Lloyd Gardner found that the Barnes & Noble Web site contained 1,920 titles on some aspect of the Vietnam war and over 8,000 out-of-print and used books on that topic. “Going Back to Vietnam for a Usable Past,” Newsday, November 14, 1999 (a review of Michael Lind’s Necessary War).
76. For this viewpoint, see Michael Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
77. Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
78. For details and analysis of this onslaught on the people of South Vietnam, see Eric Bergerud, The Dynamics of Defeat (Boulder, Colo: Westview, 1991); Chomsky and Herman, Washington Connection, chap. 5; Bernard Fall, “2000 Years of War in Vietnam,” Horizon (Spring 1967),