Blunders fuel sub row

US embarrassment grows as more details come to light

By defence correspondent Jonathan Marcus

The tragic sinking of a Japanese fishing vessel by a US Navy submarine - the USS Greeneville - turned into a public relations disaster for the military, threatening to damage relations between Washington and Tokyo.

Nine people on board the Ehime Maru died, after the Greeneville conducted a practice emergency surfacing manoeuvre directly below the ship.

The navy accepted that the submarine's crew may have been distracted by the presence of a party of visitors on board the boat.

And the commander of the US Pacific Fleet, Admiral Thomas Fargo, told a US Senate panel in unequivocal terms that the nuclear submarine's captain should have seen the Japanese vessel before he gave the order to surface.

Now the captain, Commander Scott Waddle has said he wants to go to Japan to meet relatives of the nine people who lost their lives.

He was found guilty of dereliction of duty at a final hearing into the accident and given a formal reprimand.

Concerns

While they alerted the appropriate authorities at the time of the accident, the crew made no direct effort to rescue any of the survivors - impractical because of the huge cylindrical hull of the surfaced submarine explained the Pentagon.

Rescuers saved 26 but nine others are missing, presumed dead

And, according to US press reports, the navy has so far failed to provide civilian accident investigators with tapes of the sonar signals just before the crash.

This sorry tale is further complicated by several other factors which are bound to resonate in Japan.

The USS Greeneville's home port is Pearl Harbour - the site of Japan's surprise air attack on the US fleet that brought America into World War II.

The civilian visitors on board the submarine were being rewarded for their fundraising activities that help maintain the USS Missouri - the battleship on board which Japan formally surrendered at the close of the war in the Pacific.

Worse still, the man who arranged the trip was a former US admiral, Richard Macke, who was forced to retire in 1995 after he made an offensive remark about a young Japanese girl raped by a US serviceman.

With growing condemnation from Japan, the Bush administration now needs to move quickly to address the concerns of one of its most important regional allies.