It’s been almost 10 years since Welsh investigative journalist Jon Mitchell first broke the news in The Japan Times about the American military’s use of Agent Orange on Okinawa. Mitchell says that discovery was only the beginning: “My initial research snowballed into a 10 year accumulation of facts on the persistent military contamination of Okinawa and beyond, an ongoing list of environmental crimes that have been perpetrated throughout the entire Pacific region.”
Mitchell has doggedly followed the contamination trail, accessing over 12,000 pages of documents under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and visiting sites and sources across the Asia-Pacific region. He even flew to the U.S. to record numerous accounts of personal tragedy as uncompensated veterans shared their experiences with the debilitating effects of working alongside chemical agents.
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