Vietnam Looks to Win Agent Orange Law Suit

HO CHI MINH CITY (Reuters) - It is a classroom full of sunlight in Vietnam's southern city formerly known as Saigon, with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck painted on the wall overlooking several computers.

But one pupil writes with a pencil held between his toes, another cannot close her smiling mouth properly and the oldest of them, Tran Thi Hoan, wheels herself in and out as her legs have no calves.

They are residents of Ho Chi Minh City's Peace Village 2, a state project set up in 1990 from a ward of Tu Du Maternity Hospital to help disabled children, mostly victims of the Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange.

On Monday, a New York court will begin hearing a lawsuit brought by more than 100 Vietnamese seeking compensation and a clean-up of contaminated areas from more than 30 firms, among them Dow Chemical Co and Monsanto Co, the largest makers of Agent Orange.

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http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2005/02/25/vietnam_looks_to_win_agent_orange_law_suit/

but anyway, not that american courts under bush will steal even a penny from their beloved corporations. assholes all.

snip> It is unclear whether the Vietnamese plaintiffs will succeed, but there are precedents in a 1984 agreement by Dow and Monsanto to pay $180 million to U.S. veterans. The U.S. government has refused consistently to discuss compensation.
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Three million vics in Vietnam -It even looks like their country is funding the "Peace Villages".

to die off could be another reason.... just trying to do the right thing and spread democracy you know.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/docs00/envrn.htm
The declaration proclaimed wars to be the greatest source of environmental destruction and demanded an end to the production and trade of all weapons. It cited defoliant used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War and depleted uranium projectiles used by the United States and Britain in the Persian Gulf War as examples of weapons causing both human and environmental destruction. As for overseas U.S. bases, the declaration reads, "The U.S. military is implementing a pollution clean-up program for its domestic installations, but does not carry out a similar program for overseas bases." It called for an end to such double standards.

My step-dad receives VA notices on Agent Orange check-ups all the time. He's lucky as he has no obvious symptoms, but I've met veterans with chronic rashes and kidney/liver disease from it. My step-dad said they were literally bathed in it from above.

stupid was that.... not the fyfe and drum mind you... just a drum full of poison. Who is the greatest perp of environmental damage on the planet?? We are. No discussion. End of story. Just more evidence for the executioner... that's all it is.

http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2004/sep/policy/pt_military.html
>>The stakes are huge and highly complex. Of the 158 federal facilities on Superfund’s National Priorities List, DOD is responsible for 129; the projected cleanup cost for these sites is more than $14 billion. On the other hand, DOD invests $4 billion annually in environmental protection and provides more funding for marine-mammal research than any other federal agency. And with 25 million acres of property, DOD houses the greatest concentration of endangered species on any federal land. So while critics complain about the military, they also tip their hats. The problem, they say, is that elements within the current Bush Administration and the Pentagon are leading an unfounded campaign against environmental laws.

In September 2002, 14 whales became stranded on the Canary Islands just 4 hours after the onset of a naval training exercise. Necropsies found tissue damage consistent with trauma due to in vivo gas bubble formation (Nature 2003, 425, 575).

“It’s not clear if the sound is so loud it damages the animals directly or if it triggers a behavioral response so that the animals surface too quickly and get something like the bends,” says Peter Tyack, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “In the end, we know there is some correlation between these sounds and the animals ending up on the beach.”<<

and then my mind went from democratic underground to depleted uranium.