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US admiral taking apology to Japan
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IN a bid to assuage Japanese anger, the Bush administration is sending a senior Navy admiral to Tokyo this week with a presidential letter and an apology for the sinking of a Japanese trawler that left nine people lost at sea.
Adm. William J. Fallon, the vice chief of naval operations, was named ``special envoy to Japan'' and will arrive in Tokyo with a letter from President Bush to Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori.
Mori has called it ``extremely deplorable'' that civilians were at two control stations aboard the USS Greeneville when the submarine hit the fishing boat.
Fallon will ``explain the progress of the ongoing investigation,'' the Navy said in a statement last Friday, and will discuss prospects for salvaging the Japanese vessel, which was accidentally rammed on February 9 and sank in 2,000 feet of water off Honolulu. The boat was on a trip to teach Japanese high school students commercial fishing, and four of the missing are students.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, acting in response to the accident, ordered an indefinite moratorium last Friday on permitting civilian visitors to operate any item of military equipment, including ships, aircraft and vehicles, ``when such operation could cause, or reasonably be perceived as causing, an increased safety risk.''
``This moratorium is not designed to restrict civilian visitors from observing their military; it is designed to ensure their visits are conducted as safely as possible,'' Rumsfeld wrote, not mentioning the sub accident specifically.
The sailor told investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board that he stopped plotting sonar contacts before the accident because he was distracted by civilians in the control room.
It remains to be determined whether the presence of 16 civilians aboard the Greeneville contributed to mistakes that led to the accident.
(SD-Agencies)
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