U.S. sailor charged with murder

A U.S. sailor has confessed to robbing and killing 56-year-old Yoshie Sato, a Japanese woman on Okinawa. The U.S. Navy has not released the name of the sailor, who is 21 years old. Sato was found brutally beaten and later died from internal bleeding.

Under a U.S.-Japanese agreement, the U.S. military command was forced to hand over the sailor to Japanese custody. Washington is in a delicate position on the island, where there are nearly 20,000 U.S. troops, half the total number of U.S. troops occupying Japan, as the U.S. has done since the end of World War II in 1945.

There have been regular protests by the local population against the U.S. bases in Okinawa, the last one in December against U.S. plans to build a new naval base.

Ten years ago, protests ignited on the island after three U.S. military personnel raped a 12-year-old girl. There have been numerous incidents, ranging from robbery to rape and murder, at the hands of U.S. military personnel.

The abuses by U.S. military forces, however, are small compared to the more than 100,000 civilian deaths suffered when the U.S. military invaded the island toward the end of the Pacific war. Those deaths can be attributed to the bloody imperialist battle over control of the sea that the U.S. waged with Imperial Japan in that brutal capitalist war.

The Pentagon has shielded its personnel around the world from being tried by foreign governments for crimes committed on foreign soil. In the Philippines, six U.S. Marines gang-raped a 22-year-old Filipino woman, but under the Visiting Forces Agreement signed by President Gloria Arroyo, the Marines have escaped being tried in Filipino courts despite huge protests. U.S. pilots whose plane sliced through a cable in the Italian mountains were tried in the U.S. and let off with a slap on the wrist, though 20 people died in the 1998 incident.

In Japan, the United States is wary of losing its junior capitalist partner during an increasing din from the Japanese people over U.S. bases, especially in Okinawa. Thousands protested after the rape of the 12 year old girl in 1995. These abusive occurrences have been frequent, from a military plane crash in 1950 that left 17 school children dead, to this recent attack, robbery and murder.

Some 10,000 Okinawans protested in Igei Park, Kin Town, Okinawa, on July 19 against increased military training with live ammunition at the U.S. Marine base at Camp Hansen, which is close to residential neighborhoods.

Washington is relying more on Tokyo, even going as far as trying to win Japan a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and seeking to have Japan forgo its “pacifist” constitution that limits the Japanese government’s ability to develop an aggressive military or to send troops overseas other than for defense.

The Bush administration last year signed a new military agreement with Japan identifying security in the Taiwan Strait as a “common strategic objective” between the U.S. and Japan. This pushed Japan to abandon decades of official pacifism by claiming a right to intervene in the Taiwan Strait.

Japan’s military role has greatly expanded, and this provocation under U.S. urging is aimed mainly at China and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. U.S. capitalists are in economic and political competition with China despite that country’s opening to capitalist markets.

This need to maintain amicable relations with Japan has deterred the U.S. military authorities from insisting on the same sort of “extraterritoriality,” that is, to control the trial of its armed forces personnel in Japan. The Pentagon has in this case so far allowed this sailor to be tried under Japanese law, while it has refused to turn over military personnel that have committed crimes in other countries to the governments of those countries, from the Philippines to Italy.