Dear President Bush,
It is time for the US to accept responsibility for unintended environmental and health consequences of the use of defoliants such as Agent Orange in Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia and of their production and testing in the US and other countries.
There are two practical steps that can be announced when you visit Viet Nam in November that will begin to address this persistent deadly legacy of war:
1) Comprehensive response to current hot-spot pollution from toxic wastes around former military bases, crash sites and production and testing facilities.
There is no debate about the existence of deadly dioxin contamination that is still entering the environment and that can be controlled using available technology.
2) Immediate medical and humanitarian assistance to persons suffering from cancers and birth defects that could be caused by dioxin and who lived in areas sprayed with defoliants or who reside now in dioxin contaminated communities.
A generous and humane nation should not hold hostage to long term definitive research the desperate needs of probable victims of wartime defoliants containing dioxin, whether In Indochina or in the US.
Sincerely,