by James Glaser
March 14, 2005

American Judge Jack B. Weinstein ruled this week, "No treaty or agreement, express or implied, of the United States, operated to make use of herbicides in Vietnam a violation of the laws of war or any other form of international law until at the earliest April of 1975."

That ruling let off the hook the chemical companies who we being sued by the people of Vietnam for producing the chemical Agent Orange that made tens of thousands of Vietnamese sick. Vietnam was looking for funds to do an environmental cleanup of their country where the United States of America sprayed something like 1.85 million gallons of these chemicals.

In 1984 the Vietnam Veterans sued these same companies in American courts and won. American troops were exposed to these chemicals for months, while the Vietnamese people have been exposed for their whole lives.

One of the reasons that we attacked Iraq in our ongoing war was because we were afraid that they might be developing chemical weapons and now a Federal Judge has told the world that our country is not responsible for using chemical weapons on the largest scale in history.

The companies involved in the suit were Dow, Monsanto, Diamond Shamrock Corporation, Hercules, Uniroyal Inc., and T-H Agricultural & Nutrition Company. These are the same companies that American veterans sued.

Today there are thousands of Vietnam Veterans and some of their children who are being paid compensation for the sicknesses and birth defects they have, from their exposure to Agent Orange while serving in Vietnam. We know the chemicals we used over there killed and injured our troops.

The veteran's lawsuit proved that our government and the chemical companies knew we were hurting out own troops and we continued to use Agent Orange on a larger and larger scale showing total disregard for our own men and women and thinking nothing of the millions of Vietnamese we were spraying.

Now we tell the Vietnamese people we did nothing illegal, but the thousands of our troops we hurt know that is a lie. Even if technically we can get by with what we have done to tens of thousands of innocent people in Vietnam there should be a moral responsibility. Time after time we claim to the world that we are a Christian nation and if we really are, then we should know that the Vietnamese people are our "neighbors" and Christ told us to love them. What we have done to them is a real War Crime and America should show these people we know we were wrong to use chemical weapons on them. We must clean up the damage we have done.

We admit we have harmed our own troops, so we must admit that we have harmed the Vietnamese people and I don't care at all if we can play word games about legal or illegal. What we did was wrong and we should own up to that fact.