Foil contingency bills without leaving any flashpoint -- Akahata editorial, July 11 (excerpts)

In an extended Diet session, the government and the ruling parties are maneuvering to get the contingency bills enacted, or, at least, to leave a chance for them to be passed in the next Diet session.

Through questions and answers in the parliament, the true nature of the three wartime bills have been exposed; the bills are designed to allow Japan's participation in U.S. wars overseas by mobilizing the public.

Public actions have widely and rapidly developed against the bills constituting the "legislation to provide for responses to incidents involving armed attack."

We must note that the architect of these anti-constitutional bills is the U.S. Especially, they are on the agenda in Japan's parliament when the Bush government, under the "counter-terrorism" pretext, has been outspokenly escalating its retaliatory wars in the world based on its "preemptive strikes" policy against some "axis of evil" countries.

Also, advocating that the U.S. must work out a plan to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, Iraq, and other countries, the Bush administration is stepping into a dangerous new policy of unilaterally launching nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries.

It was at this time that Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro expressed his understanding of such a U.S. call as one of its options. How can we allow this as the people of A-bombed Japan?

What is designed by the Koizumi Cabinet with the contingency bills is to enable Japan to take part in U.S. wars under the preemptive strike policy.

In 1990, when the government failed to pass the bill to send Self-Defense Forces units abroad because of public opposition, the then parties including the Liberal Democratic Party agreed on relaying the bill to the next Diet session. This resulted in the enactment of the bill under the argument that Japan must "cooperate with United Nations peace keeping operations."

Therefore, we can never allow the current Diet to relay the contingency bills to the next session. We must develop further public movements to foil the bills entirely. (end)