Vietnamese appeal "agent orange" suit in New York

By Christine Kearney

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Several major U.S. chemical companies are directly accountable for supplying the U.S. military with dioxin, or "agent orange," during the Vietnam War and causing widespread dioxin poisoning, a lawyer for Vietnamese plaintiffs told a federal appeals court on Monday.

The plaintiffs appealed a lower court decision that dismissed a civil suit seeking class-action status on behalf of more than 3 million Vietnamese people against the chemical companies. It could have resulted in billions of dollars in damages and the environmental cleanup of Vietnam.

More than 30 companies, including Dow Chemical Co. and Monsanto Co., are named in the lawsuit.

U.S. warplanes dumped about 18 million gallons (70 million liters) of the defoliant on Vietnamese forests between 1962 and 1971 to destroy Vietnamese sources of food and cover. The plaintiffs seek damages from dioxin poisoning which decades later they say has caused cancer, deformities and organ dysfunction.

Jonathan Moore, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the chemical companies knew that the "agent orange" herbicide containing dioxin was harmful but did nothing.

"They knew how it was going to be used and they had reason to believe the effect would be disastrous and they did it anyway," Moore told the panel of three judges for the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. "We are now seeing years later the fruit of that terrible poisonous product."

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The judges appeared unmoved by previous cases from years following World War Two, when makers of the gas Zyklon B, used in Nazi death camps, were convicted of crimes.