Defoliants cause premature leaf abscission, which usually doesn’t kill the plant. The active ingredients in Agent Orange are members of a class of selective broadleaf herbicides that were developed under secrecy during World War II for use as biological warfare agents.

In 1961, President Kennedy approved the full-scale aerial application of these and other herbicides to deprive the “enemy” of food and cover.

Agent Orange was employed not as a defoliant, but as a lethal biological agent used on a mass scale against the people of Vietnam. It was a piece with Washington’s indiscriminant carpet bombing and napalming making the Vietnamese workers and farmers pay as heavy a price as possible for going up against U.S. imperial designs.

Karl Butts
Tampa, Florida
 
 
Air India frame-up
The article by Joe Yates on the collapse of the attempt to frame-up two Sikh religious leaders for supposedly bombing an Air India plane in 1985 continues the Militant’s fine record of exposing this and other frame-ups by the capitalist state. There is one ambiguity in Yates’ article that should be clarified. He reports that the two defendants, Ajaib Singh Bagri and Ripudaman Singh Malik, “spent well over four years behind bars in a case that was based on circumstantial evidence.”

Actually the case was not based on a shred of credible evidence of any kind, circumstantial or otherwise. The frame-up collapsed because, the “prosecution (was) based on a pack of lies,” according to Vancouver Sun columnist Ian Mulgrew. Christie Blatchford of the Globe and Mail said the crown’s case was based on a gang of “disreputable witnesses motivated by naked self-interest, few of whom could be relied upon to accurately report even the time of day.”

The names of all of the major witnesses were kept secret, supposedly for security reasons. One was an FBI informant who was paid $300,000 (U.S.) for his “testimony” and, on the very eve of the trial, tried to bargain himself another $200,000. The judge pointed out that he was able to maintain his status as a landed immigrant in the U.S. only as long as he continued as an FBI informant.

Steve Penner
Vancouver, British Columbia  
 
 
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