-Caveat Lector-
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/trask1.html
The Conspiracies of Empire
by H. Arthur Scott Trask
"Finally I say let demagogues and world-redeemers babble their
emptiness to empty ears; twice duped is too much."
~ Robinson Jeffers
Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
by Robert B. Stinnett
New York, NY: Free Press; 260pp., $26.00
The late Murray Rothbard often argued that
far from being evidence of a "paranoid" strain in the American
mind, belief in conspiracies as a factor in American history was
usually not taken far enough.
The truth behind most conspiracies, he alleged, was far
more heinous and diabolical than even the most diehard conspiracy
theorist suspected. While many have assumed Rothbard was only
being half serious, a new book on the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor by Robert B. Stinnett offers compelling evidence that
Murray had it right. The truth that emerges as one makes his way
through this exhaustively researched volume is of an American
political and military establishment whose brilliance is exceeded
only by its utter lack of moral scruple or genuine patriotism. Sixty
years after the fateful attack, Stinnett has uncovered, presented,
and substantiated the truth behind Pearl Harbor. It is now clear that
FDR did know the Japanese attack was coming. He knew more
than a year in advance of Japanese plans to bomb the United
States� Pacific fleet at Pearl, and he knew more than a week before
that the attack would come early Sunday morning.
He knew because American naval intelligence had
cracked the Japanese naval codes in the early fall of 1940, 15
months before the fateful attack.
The smoke had barely cleared from Pearl Harbor before rightwing
journalists, cranky poets, and some Republican politicians began
suspecting that somehow Pearl Harbor was all a set-up. Since
then, revisionist historians have contended that FDR both provoked
and welcomed the war; and some even charged that he knew of the
attack beforehand. Establishment historians and government
officials countered these charges by insisting that the attack was
indeed a surprise due to a failure of American intelligence and
incompetence in the naval high command. Stinnett quotes historian
Stephen E. Ambrose who claimed, as recently as a 1999 Wall
Street Journal editorial, that "the real problem was that American
intelligence was terrible." According to Ambrose (who echoes the
official story), the navy had not yet broken the Japanese naval
codes, and the Japanese task force maintained strict radio silence
on its way to Hawaii. As a result, "in late November, intelligence
�lost� the Japanese aircraft carrier fleet." Other historians have
contended that the Japanese caught us by surprise due to faulty
analysis of pretty good intelligence, bureaucratic squabbling among
high-level naval officers in Washington, underestimation of
Japanese daring and capabilities, and expectations that the attack
would come against Dutch or British possessions in East Asia, not
against Hawaii. Stinnett exposes each one of these theories to be
false. For instance, he amply demonstrates that the ships of the
Japanese carrier fleet engaged in daily radio communication with
the high command in Japan, military commands in the Central
Pacific, and with each other. Stinnett found out the truth by reading
American naval intelligence radio intercepts of the Japanese
transmissions. American intelligence did not lose the carriers.
How did Stinnett manage to uncover the truth when congressional
investigations (in both 1945-1946 and 1995) failed to do so? The
answer lies in Stinnett�s intelligence, integrity, and unflagging
research effort (lasting 17 years), qualities that we know from
experience are all too lacking in congressional investigations. But it
also lies in a crucial Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request
filed by the author in 1983. In that year, Stinnett learned of the
existence of the Pacific War communications intelligence files of
the United States Navy (a top secret file containing over one million
documents relating to U.S. communication intelligence before and
during the war). The author�s request was at first denied, but in
1994 the navy decided to declassify the records, or at least most of
them.
As the Stinnett soon discovered, key intercepts and
documents were kept back, some were missing from the records,
and other documents had been altered to conceal vital information.
However, enough information was released, perhaps inadvertently,
to enable Stinnett to piece together the truth.
American communication intelligence operations in the Pacific
theater was primarily a naval operation. The intelligence network
was composed of 21 radio intercept stations located along the
North American coast from Panama to Alaska and on Pacific
islands from Hawaii to the Philippines. As Stinnett demonstrates,
well over 90 percent of all Japanese radio transmissions were
intercepted by one or more of these stations. Once intercepted,
these messages were sent to one of three regional control centers,
two of which were also cryptographic centers, and from there they
were sent on to Station US in Washington, the headquarters for
naval communications intelligence. Of course, all official Japanese
communications were in code. Diplomatic messages were sent in
the Purple, Tsu, or Oite codes; naval communications in one of 29
codes called the Kaigun Ango, the most important of which were
the 5-Num (naval operations), SM (naval movement), S (merchant
marine), and Yobidashi Fugo (radio call sign) codes. Stinnett
conclusively demonstrates that American cryptologists
(codebreakers) had broken all four naval codes by October of 1940.
(American intelligence had broken Japanese diplomatic codes even
before: Tsu in the 1920s, Oite in 1939, and Purple in September
1940. As a result, cryptologists could intercept, decipher, and
translate almost all Japanese diplomatic and military radio traffic
within a matter of hours after receiving them. The decryption
(decoding) and translating was done at three cryptographic
centers: Station CAST on Corregidor in the Philippines; Station
HYPO on Oahu; and Station US in Washington.
The resulting intelligence information was then sent to top U.S.
military, naval, and cabinet officials, including the president (about
36 individuals in all). However, as Stinnett meticulously and
thoroughly demonstrates, crucial intelligence information indicating
a Japanese strike at Pearl was deliberately withheld from both Lt.
Gen. Walter Short, commander of army forces on Hawaii, and
Admiral Husband E. Kimmell, commander of the Pacific fleet.
Roosevelt and his advisers had set up these two distinguished
officers to be the fall guys for the catastrophe at Pearl. The story of
their betrayal by friends and colleagues in the naval high command,
all of whom knew of the impending attack and Roosevelt�s strategy
of provocation, is heartrending.
In addition to the interception and decryption of Japanese radio
transmissions, most of the radio intercept stations were equipped
with radio direction finders (RDF) which allowed trained operators to
pinpoint the exact location of specific Japanese warships once
their distinct radio call sign was identified. By means of RDF, naval
intelligence experts were able to track the movement of the
Japanese carrier force as it approached Pearl Harbor. Stinnett�s
findings confirm the truthfulness of the claim made by the Dutch
naval attach� to the United States, Captain Johan Ranneft, that
while on visits to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington on
December 2 and 6 he saw intelligence maps tracking the
movement of Japanese carriers eastward toward Hawaii. Also, his
findings support the testimony of Robert Ogg who claims that while
on assignment to the 12th Naval District in San Francisco he
located (by means of RDF intelligence) the Japanese fleet north of
Hawaii three days before the attack.
Perhaps the single most important document discovered by
Stinnett is a 7 October 1940 memorandum written by Lt.
Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the
Office of Naval Intelligence. McCollum�s memo outlines a strategic
policy designed to goad the Japanese into committing "an overt act
of war" against the United States.
McCollum writes that such a strategy is necessary
because "it is not believed that in the present state of political
opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war
against Japan without more ado." McCollum suggests eight
specific "actions" that the United States should take to bring about
this result. The key one is "Action F" which calls for keeping "the
main strength" of the U.S. Pacific Fleet "in the vicinity of the
Hawaiian Islands." McCollum concludes his memo by stating that
"if by these means Japan could be led to commit an overtact of
war, so much the better." Stinnett has little trouble demonstrating
that the strategy outlined in this memo became the official policy of
the Roosevelt administration. Not only was the memorandum
endorsed by Capt. Dudley Knox, one of Roosevelt�s most
trusted military advisers, but White House routing logs
demonstrate that Roosevelt received the memorandum; and over
the next year, Roosevelt put every one of the eight suggested
actions into effect. He implemented the last one (Action H) on 26
July 1941 when he ordered a complete embargo of all U.S. trade
with Japan.
Roosevelt�s summer embargo was the culmination of another very
clever administration policy, namely helping the Japanese to build
up their military oil reserves just enough to encourage them to
attack the United States but enough to enable them to win a long
war. In the summer of 1940, Roosevelt took two actions designed
to implement this truly Machiavellian plan. First, he signed a bill
authorizing a massive American naval build up designed to create a
two-ocean navy. Second, he required American companies to
obtain a government license before selling any petroleum products
or scrap metal to Japan. For the next 12 months, the
administration readily granted export permits to American
firms selling raw materials to Japan, and Japanese oil tankers and
merchant vessels could be seen loading up on scrap iron and
petroleum at America�s West Coast ports. Meanwhile, American
naval intelligence, using radio direction finding (RDF), tracked the
tankers to the Japanese naval oil depot at Tokuyama. Roosevelt�s
strategists calculated that helping the Japanese build up a two-
year supply of reserves would be about right. That way, if war broke
out in the second half of 1941, the Japanese would run out of oil in
mid to late 1943, just as American wartime industrial production
would be peaking and her massive carrier fleets (100 proposed
carriers) would be ready to go on the offensive. In July 1941,
Roosevelt took the final step and, together with the British and
Dutch, imposed an embargo on the sale of petroleum, iron, and
steel to Japan (McCollum�s Action H). The trap had now been laid,
and the Japanese were not slow to fall for it.
Stinnett does not ignore the moral dimensions of the Roosevelt
strategy. How did those who knew the attack was coming justify
the deliberate sacrifice of over three thousand American lives? A
bone-chilling comment by Lt. Commander Joseph J. Rochefort,
commander of Station HYPO at Pearl Harbor, provides the answer.
In a postwar assessment of the attack made to a naval historian,
he remarked of Pearl Harbor that "it was a pretty cheap price to
pay for unifying the country."
There you have it. Massive deception, lying, the sacrifice
of military careers, the betrayal of friends and fellow officers, and
the deaths of thousands of American servicemen � all is justified
for the cause of inciting a peaceful people to go to war. Stinnett
himself is far from being unsympathetic to Roosevelt�s strategy. He
agrees with the pre-war interventionists that America needed to go
to war against the Axis powers. According to Stinnett, Roosevelt
and his advisers "faced a terrible dilemma." The public was
overwhelmingly opposed to entering the war, and in a democracy
the people are supposed to rule. Yet, Roosevelt believed this war
would be both necessary and just. What to do? In the end, they
decided that "something had to be endured in order to stop a
greater evil."
Here we have yet another example of Americans making use of the
doctrine that the end justifies the means. Americans are quick to
deny the ethical legitimacy of this doctrine when it is presented to
them as a naked proposition, yet there is no doctrine that they
more readily turn to in order to justify morally questionable
practices.
Do not those who defend the nuclear holocaust of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki argue as their first line of defense that it
was morally justified because it saved American lives? And can we
not expect to hear in the near future from those who can no longer
deny the truth, "Roosevelt�s duplicity was justified because it was
necessary to stop Hitler." The Christian�s response to this
question was articulated by Paul two thousand years ago: "And
why not say, �Let us do evil that good may come�? � as we are
slanderously reported and as some affirm that we say. Their
condemnation is just." (Romans 3:8 NKJV).
We owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Stinnett. Not only has he
uncovered the truth behind Pearl Harbor, but in so doing he has
exposed one of the greatest cover stories, or con jobs, of all time �
American prewar naval intelligence and high command as keystone
cop. After sixty years, America�s brave band of revisionist
historians have been vindicated, while her servile crop of court
historians have been pretty much disgraced.
December 9, 2000
Dr. Trask is an historian.
--
I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.
-- Boss Tweed
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