Agent Orange victims fight back

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/HC21Ae03.html

Vietnam, which is bidding for World Trade Organization membership and is already signatory to a trade deal with its former nemesis in Washington, is still grappling with the huge social and economic consequences of its military conflict with the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

The legacy of the United States' use of Agent Orange tops that list. From 1962 to 1971, the US military dumped an estimated 83 million liters of highly toxic herbicides, including Agent Orange, mostly over Vietnam but also Laos and Cambodia, in an attempt to flush out jungle-covered guerrilla fighters. Agent Orange contained trace amounts of dioxin, a toxic substance known to cause cancer in humans at high doses.

A group of alleged Vietnamese victims are the first to seek legal redress and compensation from the US companies, namely Dow Chemical and Monsanto Corp, that then manufactured the chemical. In their complaint filed in New York, they claimed the defoliant had caused widespread birth defects, miscarriages, diabetes and cancer, and should be considered a war crime against millions of Vietnamese.

The chemical companies, for their part, have maintained that no such scientific link has ever been proved, and that the US government, not the companies, should be held responsible for how the chemical was deployed.

A US judge this month threw out the case against the companies, ruling that there was no legal basis for the alleged victims' claims. The court had come under heavy lobbying from the US Justice Department to rule against the plaintiffs, because of Washington's fears of the legal precedent it would set in other countries ravaged by US military interventions.

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the only measly thing I can say to the Vietnamese is that agent orange has poisoned americans here in america too. which is not much comfort

we owe reparations to a lot of countries that will never see them as our corporations have a strangle hold on america.

[flamin lib]

1. Reparations, yes.

In the civil courts that is known as punitive damages. If an offender knows that the loss of a suit may result in damages so costly that they are hard to pay it tends to modify future behavior.

Can you imagine what Depleted Uranium will cost the Pentagon in another 10 years?

[donsu]

2. the pentagon are us. we citizens pay.

our children pay

the 9 million orphans to AIDs mothers in Africa pay

[flamin lib]

3. And we extract revenge on those who would abuse our tax dollars.

As it is now nobody cares as long as it is 'over there' and it's 'them'. Make a difference to us over here and maybe we'd pay attention to what the fuckers are doing.