Japan to come clean on secret nuke deals with US

[demoleft]

Source: ap

TOKYO – To the government's critics, it was a long and shocking act of official stonewalling: Agreements long hidden in Foreign Ministry files allowed nuclear-armed U.S. warships to enter Japanese ports, violating a hallowed principle of postwar Japan. Yet their very existence was officially denied.

Now, in a clear break from the past, a new prime minister has gone where none of his predecessors dared go: He has ordered a panel of ministry officials and academics to investigate the secret agreements.

The findings, due out this month, are part of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's wide-ranging campaign to wrest power from the bureaucracy and make government more open than under the conservatives, who ruled Japan for most of the past 50 years.
...

"The Foreign Ministry repeatedly denied their existence, even in statements before Parliament," lawmaker Muneo Suzuki said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100110/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_us_secret_pacts

[Overseas]

1. K&R. //nt

[Bonobo]

2. Wowza. nt

[Vidar]

3. K&R.

[Mojorabbit]

4. This will not go well

over there.

[hunter]

5. And, oh yeah, the Marines are leaving Okinawa for Guam...

I think we are in the place where our empire is looking a little ragged around the edges, a little bit like the Soviet Union was with Poland or Hungary in 1989.