The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

dioxin: manipulation and corruption 59of the EPA, which “on more than one occasion, has punished its whistleblowersby transferring them to undesirable positions.” 22“Despite her ordeal, Cate can be proud of her work,” Sanjour says today.“It’s thanks to her that the Vietnam veterans were finally heard and that thecollusion between Monsanto and the government was uncovered. Unfortunately,it was too late for my friend Cameron Appel, who died of cancer in1976, at just thirty, leaving two orphans. He was a captain in the U.S. AirForce during the Vietnam War. I dedicated my report on dioxin to him, becauseI think the story needs to be given human faces. That’s what Monsantoseems to forget, because it’s interested only in dollars.”As the “sentinel of the EPA” says, Jenkins’s courageous memorandumopened Pandora’s box and led to an outpouring of revelations and decisionsthat benefited first of all the American victims of Agent Orange. “We wereable to get some new legislation in late 1991 and she was responsible for it,”testified John Thomas Burch, chair of the NVVC, before an administrativelaw judge of the Labor Department on September 29, 1992. “This study wasblocking us, because it was specially mentioned by those who controlled thelegislation. And once we were able to show there were defects in the study,we could get by that and we could move forward. . . . It meant thousands ofmen getting medical care who wouldn’t have gotten it otherwise.” 23In fact, the first person to react to Jenkins’s report was Admiral ElmoZumwalt Jr., who after the death of his son had been appointed special assistantto Veterans Affairs secretary Edward Derwinski. In an interview inthe Washington Post, he said he was “shocked by some studies I felt were dishonestlydone, funded by the chemical industry,” and by the fact that “theCenters for Disease Control failed to focus on veterans, who had sustainedthe greatest exposure to the chemical. ...I had no inkling how difficult itwas to get at the truth.” 24 On May 5, 1990, the admiral presented a confidentialreport in which he asserted that Monsanto’s fraud was part of a vastgovernment plot intended to prevent compensation of the victims of AgentOrange and of dioxin in general. 25For instance, the U.S. Congress in 1982 had appropriated $63 million forthe Veterans Administration (the former name of the Department of VeteransAffairs) to conduct a study of the effects of dioxin on veterans. When theVA was inordinately slow in beginning work, Congress transferred responsibilityfor the study to the CDC, to which the Pentagon was supposed toprovide details on the Air Force’s spraying program and archives detailing