In New York, the Justice Department is asking a federal judge in Brooklyn to toss out a lawsuit filed by one hundred Vietnamese citizens seeking compensation for being exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. The Justice Department claims the lawsuit is a dangerous threat to the president’s power to wage war. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for today. The class action suit charges that Dow Chemical and other U.S. chemical companies committed war crimes by supplying the military with Agent Orange. The suit seeks billions of dollars in damages and for an environmental clean-up of Vietnam. Agent Orange contained the toxic dioxin which has been blamed for causing health disorders and birth defects in both the Vietnamese population and U.S. war veterans. The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates 150,000 children have been born with birth defects since 1975 because of Agent Orange. The National Academy of Sciences has concluded that the U.S. military sprayed over 3,000Vietnamese villages with Agent Orange affecting between two and five million people.