Aug 17, 2005
OTTAWA (AFP) - The Canadian government has opened an investigation into the use of agents Orange and Purple in the 1960s at a military base in Gagetown in eastern Canada, officials told AFP.
The tests of the highly toxic defoilants were apparently conducted at the request of the US military, which used Agent Orange to flush out communist Vietnamese soldiers during the Vietnam war.
"The government has named an official to take charge of the investigation into the events that occurred in Gagetown," said Jae Malana, a military spokseman.
Ottawa hopes to determine if any people may have been affected by the lethal herbicides, he said.
Investigators will meet with active and retired members of the Canadian military and retired civilian employees who were present during the tests, officials said in a statement.
In 1966 and 1967, various defoliants were used to clear forests in New Brunswick. The thick vegetation in the province reminded US military experts of the dense jungles in Vietnam and thus seemed a good place to test the agents.
They were also sprayed over 0.03 percent of the military base in Gagetown as part of a top secret operation that was not exposed until the 1980s.
Last year, Ottawa admitted that its soldiers, civilian contractors and local residents may have been exposed to the agents and as a result may have suffered health problems.
The herbicides can cause leukemia and diabetes and other major health problems, including congenital malformations and miscarriage.
US military team tried to alert FBI about attack in 2000
UPDATED: 08:52, August 18, 2005
A US military intelligence team had tried to alert the FBI in 2000 about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, but its efforts had been blocked by US military lawyers, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The newspaper quoted Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a veteran Army intelligence officer, as saying that the small, highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with FBI agents to share its information.
But according to Shaffer, US military lawyers forced members of Able Danger to cancel three scheduled meetings with the FBI at the last minute because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.
The information that Able Danger tried to pass on to the FBI might have led to Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 attacks were still being planned, Shaffer said.
Shaffer also told the newspaper that he was not involved in the details of the procedures used in Able Danger to gather information from terrorist databases, nor was he aware of which databases had supplied the information that might have led to the name of Atta or other terrorists so long before the Sept. 11 attacks.
But he said he did know that Able Danger had made use of publicly available information from government immigration agencies, Internet sites and paid search engines like LexisNexis.
Source: Xinhua
http://english.people.com.cn/200508/18/eng20050818_203177.html