Agent Orange lawsuit thrown out
A Federal District Court in Brooklyn, New York, has rejected a lawsuit filed on behalf of millions of Vietnamese that claimed American chemical companies committed war crimes by supplying the military with the defoliant Agent Orange.
The New York Times reports the civil suit, filed last year, had sought what could have been billions of dollars in damages and the environmental clean-up of Vietnam. The suit claimed that the defoliant, which contained the highly toxic substance dioxin, left a legacy of poison in Vietnam that caused birth defects, cancer and other health problems and amounted to a violation of international law. However, Judge Jack Weinstein sided with the chemical companies and the Justice Department, which argued that supplying the defoliant did not amount to a war crime. Full report in The New York Times