Army captain gets 1 year for firearms conspiracy

A Fort Lewis Army captain who admitted arranging for unlicensed shipments of holographic night vision sights and other firearms components to Japan was sentenced Friday to a year and a day in prison.

Government and defense lawyers recommended that Capt. Tomoaki Iishiba, 34, of DuPont, a former intelligence liaison to the Japanese military, be let off with three years on probation, but U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman decided on a tougher sentence. She also ordered that Iishiba spend three years on supervised release after serving his prison term.

Robert M. Leen, Iishiba's lawyer, would not comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

In court, Iishiba said he sent only accessories, not the firing parts of guns, to Japanese military and law enforcement friends "because they love freedom as much as we do." He added that most of the parts were for use in games similar to paintball.

Joseph Piek, a Fort Lewis spokesman, said Iishiba eventually will be given a discharge that could be honorable, general, less than honorable or dishonorable, depending on the outcome of administrative proceedings.

Iishiba was relieved from intelligence duty and reassigned to work as an assistant operations officer shortly after the case was filed in July. He pleaded guilty later that month to conspiracy to smuggle firearms components out of the country without an export license.

According to court filings, he arranged for repeated shipments to contacts in Japan, starting in 2006, of components that included 60 EoTech 553 night vision-style sights listed at $639 each on the Web site of OpticsPlanet of Northbrook, Ill.

Government lawyers wrote in court filings that Iishiba did not "intend to threaten a security or foreign policy interest of the United States."

Pechman, however, said he was "a soldier who had abused his trust, using his military address to order parts and then shipping them to foreign nationals. ... The problem with putting something in the stream of commerce is you don't know where it will end up."

According to a profile of Iishiba published in December by The New Tribune of Tacoma, he is the son of a Tokyo police officer, moved to the United States in 1993 to serve in the American military and became a U.S. citizen.

After earning a degree at Northern Michigan University, he served with the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan in 2003 and wrote a book, "A Japanese Lieutenant from the 82nd Airborne."

He also wrote a manual for the M4 rifle, endorsed a line of knives and was credited as a technical adviser in the making of the video game "Metal Gear Solid."

Iishiba, an I Corps intelligence liaison to Japan's Northeastern Army at Yama Sakura at the time of the article, was quoted as saying the Japanese are "too soft."