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[Opinion: Letters to the Editor]

Your editorialists are once again spouting inane half-truths and biases about the SOFA and the U.S. military in general ("Time to revise SOFA," May 2).

In every country in which the United States has military personnel stationed at the invitation of the host country, it has a Status of Forces Agreement. Even Korean soldiers fall under a form of SOFA when they perform peacekeeping duties under the authority of the United Nations.

In the United States, a suspect is considered innocent until proven guilty. In Korea, in the words of one of your local prosecutors and a local Korean attorney, all suspects are considered guilty and it is up to the legal system to decide who is most guilty.

We, as Americans who voluntarily send our young men and women to defend another country, want to give them the benefit of the doubt when they are accused of a crime. I would welcome one solid fact that suggests that even one U.S. soldier guilty of a crime has escaped punishment because of the SOFA.

As for the soldier who escaped from U.S. custody last week, he was caught after a short time and didn't run around the country becoming a modern "Robin Hood" for several years while the Korean police bungled one recapture after another.

Some so-called informed people say that the Korean government carries a disproportionate share of the costs of stationing U.S. military personnel here. For facilities and local hires there is indeed an agreed upon method of cost sharing. That is only fair when you consider that Korea's own defense budget is only 50 percent of what would have to be if the United States was not here holding the big stick. But it has never been the policy of the U.S. government to accept payment for its personnel stationed overseas.

What about the claim that the U.S. military corrupts the communities it lives in? To begin with, I have never seen more brothels and areas of prostitution in one city than in Seoul. I am not even talking about the tiny little area of Itaewon. You can't go 100 meters in this city without seeing either an open display of prostitution in a storefront or one of the city's numerous "love hotels." Based on Korean TV shows, I think I am safe in saying that prostitution was not brought to Korea by foreigners.

What about the "fact" that the U.S. soldiers don't pay Korean taxes? Again, this is a distortion. When a soldier buys a product downtown, he is paying part of the taxes that merchant pays to the Korean government for operating his business. When U.S. soldiers pay their rent and utilities, they are helping pay someone else's taxes.

The only tax U.S. soldiers don't pay is Korean income tax on their U.S. paychecks. Of course, most Koreans don't seem to pay income tax either, if newspaper reports are any guide. Why should U.S. soldiers pay taxes to a government that doesn't provide them any benefits?Finally, the editorial states that the United States doesn't own the land it uses. Yet the writer wants it to pay property tax on this land. This one doesn't even rate a reply!Haney RobinsonSeoul