Year: 2019

Robert B. Stinnett,  (New York, Free Press, 2000)

A Second World War Navy radioman turned journalist, Robert Stinnett was in the National Archives in Belmont, California, researching a campaign-year picture book on George Bush’s South Pacific wartime navy career in aerial reconnaissance — George Bush: His World War II Years (Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, 1992) — and encountered unindexed duplicate copies of Pearl Harbor radio intercept records of Japanese Navy code transmissions — documentary evidence of what actually happened at Pearl Harbor and how it came about.

After eight years of further research and a prolonged case at law under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain partial release of these materials, Stinnett published Day of Deceit (2000). A Japanese translation appeared within a year, understandably.

Stinnett demonstrates, on the basis of extensive incontrovertible factual evidence and self-evidently accurate analysis that President Roosevelt oversaw the contrivance and deployment of a closely-guarded secret plan to goad the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and monitor them while they did it. Stinnett hypothesizes that Roosevelt did this in order to precipitate an unwilling American public into supporting intervention in the Second World War, but whatever the motives or purposes, the facts are now abundantly clear. Stinnett establishes and proves his case with voluminous documentary evidence, including forty-seven pages of Appendices [p. 261-308] presenting photographic reproductions of key official records, as well as numerous others reproduced in the body of the text, and 65 pages [309-374] of closely detailed reference notes.

This evidence proves Stinnett’s factual assertions, arguments and conclusions. His research files and notes are deposited at the Hoover Institute library at Stanford. Day of Deceit is exemplary documentary historiography. It presents the material testimony on which its analysis and conclusions are based. Its validity will be clear to any fair-minded reader. Stinnett’s book settles and resolves rational, candid, honest, fact-based discussion and debate about the background of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

As Stinnett shows, the plan that eventuated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was set in motion in early October 1940 based on an “eight-action memo, dated October 7, 1940 … by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Navy Intelligence.” Of course, it is unlikely that McCollum drafted it on his own initiative, but this is where Stinnett’s paper trail starts. “Its eight actions call for virtually inciting a Japanese attack on American ground, air, and naval forces in Hawaii, as well as on British and Dutch colonial outposts in the Pacific region….” [p. 6-8; the memorandum is reproduced on 261-267]:

A. Make an arrangement with Britain for use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia].
C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.
D. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
F. Keep the main strength of the US Fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian islands.
G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
H. Complete embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

As the plan unfolded its development was closely monitored through decoded intercepts of Japanese diplomatic and naval radio communications. “McCollum oversaw the routing of communications intelligence to FDR from early 1940 to December 7, 1941 and provided the President with intelligence reports on Japanese military and diplomatic strategy. Every intercepted and decoded Japanese military and diplomatic report destined for the White House went through the Far East Asia section of ONI, which he oversaw.

The section served as a clearinghouse for all categories of intelligence reports…. Each report prepared by McCollum for the President was based on radio intercepts gathered and decoded by a worldwide network of American military cryptographers and radio intercept operators…. Few people in America’s government or military knew as much about Japan’s activities and intentions as McCollum.”[8] Knowledge of the plan was closely held, limited to 13 Roosevelt administration members and chief military officers and 21 members of Naval Intelligence and related operations [listed in Appendix E 307-308]. Item C was already US policy when McCollum wrote his memo. Item F was set in motion on October 8, Items A, B and G on October 16, 1940, Item D and E by November 12, 1940. [Chap. 1 n. 8 p. 311-312; 120 ff. etc.].

Meanwhile, also in the fall of 1940, campaigning for a third term in Boston on October 30, President Roosevelt said: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” On November 1 in Brooklyn he said “I am fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting.” At Rochester on the 2nd he said “Your national government … is equally a government of peace — a government that intends to retain peace for the American people.”

The same day in Buffalo he asserted “Your President says this country is not going to war,” and in Cleveland on the next he declared “The first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war.” [William Henry Chamberlin, “How Franklin Roosevelt Lied America Into War,” in Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Idaho, Caxton, 1953), Chapter Eight, p. 485-491].

Admiral Richardson, commander of the Pacific Fleet, opposed Roosevelt’s orders [Item F] to station the fleet at Pearl Harbor as putting the fleet at risk, so he was replaced with Admiral Kimmel, with Admiral Anderson of ONI as Kimmel’s third in command at Pearl Harbor, to supervise the radio intercept operation there, unbeknownst to Kimmel. [10-14; 33-34] “Anderson was sent to Hawaii as an intelligence gatekeeper”[36]. When he arrived he established his personal housing well away from Pearl Harbor, out of range of the coming attack.

Though he was commander of the seven battleships which bore the brunt of the attack with the loss of over two thousand lives, Admiral Anderson was safe at home on the other side of the mountain when the attack came. [36-37; 244, 247] Meanwhile, the commanders in Hawaii, “Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, were deprived of intelligence that might have made them more alert to the risks entailed in Roosevelt’s policy, but they obeyed his direct order of November 27 and 28, 1941: ‘The United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.’” [6-8] Afterward, they were scape-goated.

In early January 1941 the Japanese decided that in the event of hostilities with the US they would commence with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. American intelligence learned of this plan on January 27 [30-32]. On July 21, 1941 Lieutenant Commander McCollum’s Item H lit the fuse. Up through late November the White House continued to block concerted attempts by Japanese diplomats to discuss an accommodation. [On this diplomatic history see Charles Beard , American Foreign Policy in the Making (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (1948); Frederic Rockwell Sanborn, Design For War (1951); and Charles Tansill, Back Door To War (1952).]

Beginning November 16, 1941, radio intercepts revealed the formation of the Japanese fleet near the Kurile Islands north of Japan and from November 26 through the first week of December tracked it across the Pacific to Hawaii [41-59 etc.]. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Stark (one of the 34 informed participants) ordered Kimmel to dispatch his aircraft carriers with a large escort fleet to deliver planes to Wake and Midway Islands. “On orders from Washington, Kimmel left his oldest vessels inside Pearl Harbor and sent twenty-one modern warships, including his two aircraft carriers, west toward Wake and Midway… With their departure the warships remaining in Pearl Harbor were mostly 27-year-old relics of World War I.”

That is, the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor with their crews were employed as decoys [152-154]. On 22 November 1941, a week after the Japanese fleet began to assemble and four days before it sailed for Oahu, Admiral Ingersoll issued a “Vacant Sea” order that cleared its path of all shipping and on 25 November he ordered Kimmel to withdraw his ships patrolling the area from which the aerial attack would be staged [144-145]. FDR kept close tabs on the plot’s final unfolding while radio intercepts continued to track its voyage toward Hawaii [161-176].

Stinnett comments: “Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row and its old dilapidated warships presented a mouth-watering target. But it was a major strategic mistake for the Empire. Japan’s 360 warplanes should have concentrated on Pearl Harbor’s massive oil stores … and destroyed the industrial capacity of the Navy’s dry docks, machine shops, and repair facilities”[249]. Six months later, at the battles of Coral Sea (May 4-8, 1942) and Midway (June 4-7), the warships of the Pacific Fleet which were at sea when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred permanently destroyed the offensive capacity of the Japanese Navy to operate in the eastern Pacific and permanently crippled its defensive capacity in the western Pacific. Thereafter, as informed observers understood, a Japanese attack or invasion of the West Coast of America was a total logistical impossibility. Nevertheless, two months later, the internment of West Coast Japanese American citizens began in August 1942.

The Pearl Harbor coverup began immediately afterward with the court marshals of Admiral Kimmel and General Short, continued through eight Congressional investigations during and after the war, with the purging and withholding of documents and false testimony by participants and others [253-260 & passim; 309-310] and persisted through the Congressional hearings chaired by Strom Thurmond in 1995 [257-258].

At the date of publication (2000) numerous documents were still withheld from Stinnett or released in extensively censored form. But his case is conclusively proven on the basis of the evidence he presents, as any fair-minded reader can see. The only way to refute or debunk it would be to establish that his documentary evidence is forged, and prove it. In face of the character of this evidence, the idea is nonsensical.

A key break for Stinnett’s research was his discovery of duplicate copies of reports of Japanese naval code transmissions from the Pearl Harbor radio-intercept station routed after the war to the Belmont (California) National Archives, and still there long after the copies in the Washington, D.C. archive files had been disappeared.

Recent writers pretending to debunk Stinnett’s evidence have resurrected claims that the Japanese naval codes had not been deciphered and that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence — claims that have been refuted repeatedly for decades. Famously, the radio operator of the American liner Mariposa intercepted repeated signals from the Japanese fleet steaming toward Hawaii and relayed its progressive bearings to the Navy. This was well-known during the war to American seamen of the Pacific merchant marine and is mentioned in published accounts.

The pretense that the Japanese naval and diplomatic codes had not been deciphered was first refuted in a federal court in Chicago in 1943. As her biographer Ralph G. Martin recounts, Cissy Patterson, managing editor of the Washington Times-Herald on December 7, 1941 (and for decades before and after) was opposed to American intervention in another world war — like over 80% of her fellow Americans, including her brother Joe Patterson, publisher of the New York News, and her cousin Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Serving in France as a battlefield officer, Robert was wounded, twice gassed, and decorated for valor. His Chicago Tribune, like his cousins’ newspapers and numerous others, especially off the east coast, was vocally anti-interventionist — until Pearl Harbor.

In Cissy (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1979) Martin writes: “As the news of the disaster [at Pearl Harbor] kept coming in [to the Times-Herald’s newsroom], Cissy bitterly asked [her Sunday Editor] Roberts about Roosevelt, ‘Do you suppose hearranged this?’ Later when she learned that American cryptographers had broken the Japanese codes before Pearl Harbor, she was convinced that Roosevelt had known in advance that the Japanese intended to attack”[418]. “The Chicago Tribune, the Times-Herald, and two dozen other papers later printed an article by a Tribune war correspondent which indicated that the United States had prevailed [at Midway] because the Japanese codes had been broken…. The Department of Justice decided to file charges that the Tribune and the Times-Herald had betrayed U.S. military secrets…. Attorney General Francis Biddle felt the disclosure of this breakthrough had been tantamount to treason because it gave the Japanese the chance to change their codes. Waldrop [Times-Herald editor] was called to Chicago to testify before a grand jury… In the middle of the testimony, the Navy disclosed that a Navy censor had passed the Tribune article. Forced to drop the case, Biddle said he ‘felt like a fool.’” [431-432] He wasn’t the only one.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

A couple of years ago, I launched my Unz Review, providing a wide range of different alternative perspectives, the vast majority of them totally excluded from the mainstream media. I’ve also published a number of articles in my own American Pravda series, focusing on the suspicious lapses and lacunae in our media narratives.

The underlying political strategy behind these efforts may already be apparent, and I’ve sometimes suggested it here and there. But I finally decided I might as well explicitly outline the reasoning in a memo as provided below

The Mainstream Media is the Crucial Opposing Force

Groups advocating policies opposed by the American establishment should recognize that the greatest obstacle they face is usually the mainstream media.

Ordinary political and ideological opponents surely exist, but these are usually inspired, motivated, organized, and assisted by powerful media support, which also shapes the perceived framework of the conflict. In Clauswitzian terms, the media often constitutes the strategic “center of gravity” of the opposing forces.

The Media Should Be Made a Primary Target

If the media is the crucial force empowering the opposition, then it should be regarded as a primary target of any political strategy. So long as the media remains strong, success may be difficult, but if the influence and credibility of the media were substantially degraded, then the ordinary opposing forces would lose much of their effectiveness. In many respects, the media creates reality, so perhaps the most effective route toward changing reality runs through the media.

Discrediting the Media Anywhere Weakens It Everywhere

The mainstream media exists as a seamless whole, so weakening or discrediting the media in any particular area automatically reduces its influence everywhere else as well.

The elements of the media narrative faced by a particular anti-establishment group may be too strong and well-defended to attack effectively, and any such attacks might also be discounted as ideologically motivated. Hence, the more productive strategy may sometimes be an indirect one, attacking the media narrative elsewhere, at points where it is much weaker and less well-defended. In addition, winning those easier battles may generate greater credibility and momentum, which can then be applied to later attacks on more difficult fronts.

A Broad Alliance May Support the Common Goal of Weakening the Media

Once we recognize that weakening the media is a primary strategic goal, an obvious corollary is that other anti-establishment groups facing the same challenges become natural, if perhaps temporary, allies.

Such unexpected tactical alliances may drawn from across a wide range of different political and ideological perspectives—Left, Right, or otherwise—and despite the component groups having longer-term goals that are orthogonal or even conflicting. So long as all such elements in the coalition recognize that the hostile media is their most immediate adversary, they can cooperate on their common effort, while actually gaining additional credibility and attention by the very fact that they sharply disagree on so many other matters.

The media is enormously powerful and exercises control over a vast expanse of intellectual territory. But such ubiquitous influence also ensures that its local adversaries are therefore numerous and widespread, all being bitterly opposed to the hostile media they face on their own particular issues. By analogy, a large and powerful empire is frequently brought down by a broad alliance of many disparate rebellious factions, each having unrelated goals, which together overwhelm the imperial defenses by attacking simultaneously at multiple different locations.

A crucial aspect enabling such a rebel alliance is the typically narrow focus of each particular constituent member. Most groups or individuals opposing establishment positions tend to be ideologically zealous about one particular issue or perhaps a small handful while being much less interested in others. Given the total suppression of their views at the hands of the mainstream media, any venue in which their unorthodox perspectives are provided reasonably fair and equal treatment rather than ridiculed and denigrated tends to inspire considerable enthusiasm and loyalty on their part. So although they may have quite conventional views on most other matters, causing them to regard contrary views with the same skepticism or unease as might anyone else, they will usually be willing to suppress their criticism at such wider heterodoxy so long as other members of their alliance are willing to return that favor on their own topics of primary interest.

Assault the Media Narrative Where It is Weak Not Where It Is Strong

Applying a different metaphor, the establishment media may be regarded as a great wall that excludes alternative perspectives from the public consciousness and thereby confines opinion to within a narrow range of acceptable views.

Certain portions of that media wall may be solid and vigorously defended by powerful vested interests, rendering assaults difficult. But other portions, perhaps older and more obscure, may have grown decrepit over time, with their defenders having drifted away. Breaching the wall at these weaker locations may be much easier, and once the barrier has been broken at several points, defending it at others becomes much more difficult.

For example, consider the consequences of demonstrating that the established media narrative is completely false on some major individual event. Once this result has been widely recognized, the credibility of the media on all other matters, even totally unrelated ones, would be somewhat attenuated. Ordinary people would naturally conclude that if the media had been so wrong for so long on one important point, it might also be wrong on others as well, and the powerful suspension of disbelief that provides the media its influence would become less powerful. Even those individuals who collectively form the corpus of the media might begin to entertain serious self-doubts regarding their previous certainties.

The crucial point is that such breakthroughs may be easiest to achieve in topics that seem merely of historical significance, and are totally removed from any practical present-day consequences.

Reframe Vulnerable “Conspiracy Theories” as Effective “Media Criticism”

Over the last few decades, the political establishment and its media allies have created a powerful intellectual defense against major criticism by investing considerable resources in stigmatizing the notion of so-called “conspiracy theories.” This harsh pejorative term is applied to any important analysis of events that sharply deviates from the officially-endorsed narrative, and implicitly suggests that the proponent is a disreputable fanatic, suffering from delusions, paranoia, or other forms of mental illness. Such ideological attacks often effectively destroy his credibility, allowing his actual arguments to be ignored. A once-innocuous phrase has become politically “weaponized.”

However, an effective means of circumventing this intellectual defense mechanism may be to adopt a meta-strategy of reframing such “conspiracy theories” as “media criticism.”

Under the usual parameters of public debate, challenges to established orthodoxy are treated as “extraordinary claims” that must be justified by extraordinary evidence. This requirement may be unfair, but it constitutes the reality in many public exchanges, based upon the framework provided by the allegedly impartial media.

Since most of these controversies involve a wide range of complex issues and ambiguous or disputed evidence, it is often extremely difficult to conclusively establish any unorthodox theory, say to a confidence level of 95% or 98%. Therefore, the media verdict is almost invariably “Case Not Proven” and the challengers are judged defeated and discredited, even if they actually appear to have the preponderance of evidence on their side. And if they vocally contest the unfairness of their situation, that exact response is then subsequently cited by the media as further proof of their fanaticism or paranoia.

However, suppose that an entirely different strategy were adopted. Instead of attempting to make a case “beyond any reasonable doubt,” proponents merely provide sufficient evidence and analysis to suggest that there is a 30% chance or a 50% chance or a 70% chance that the unorthodox theory is true. The very fact that no claim of near certainty is being advanced provides a powerful defense against any plausible accusations of fanaticism or delusional thinking. But if the issue is of enormous importance and—as is usually the case—the unorthodox theory has been almost totally ignored by the media, despite apparently having at least a reasonable chance of being true, then the media may be effectively attacked and ridiculed for its laziness and incompetence. These charges are very difficult to refute and since no claim is being made that the unorthodox theory has necessarily been proven correct, merely that it might possibly be correct, any counter-accusations of conspiratorial tendencies would fall flat.

Indeed, the only means the media might have of effectively rebutting those charges would be to explore all the complex details of the issue (thereby helping to bring various controversial facts themselves to much wider attention) and then argue that there is only a negligible chance that the theory might be correct, perhaps 10% or less. Thus, the usual presumptive burden is completely reversed. And since most members of the media are unlikely to have ever paid much serious attention to the subject, their ignorant presentation may be quite weak and vulnerable to a knowledgeable deconstruction. Indeed, the most likely scenario is that the media will just continue to totally ignore the entire dispute, thereby reinforcing those plausible accusations of laziness and incompetence.

Individuals distressed by media failings on a controversial topic often accuse the media and its individual representatives of being biased, corrupted, or quietly under the control of powerful forces allied with the establishment position. These charges may sometimes be correct and sometimes not, but they are usually quite difficult to prove, except in the minds of existing true-believers, and they do carry the taint of “paranoia.” On the other hand, claiming that media failings are due to venial sins such as laziness and incompetence are just as likely to be correct, and these charges are much less likely to risk a backlash.

Finally, once the media itself has become the primary target of the criticism, it automatically loses its status as a neutral outside arbitrator and no longer has as much credibility in proclaiming the winning side of the debate.

The Advantage of Flooding Media Defense Zones

Individuals who challenge the prevailing media narrative with unorthodox claims are often reluctant to raise too many such controversial claims simultaneously lest they be ridiculed as “crazy,” with all their views summarily dismissed.

In most cases, this may be the correct strategy to pursue, but if handled properly, an exact opposite approach might sometimes be quite effective. So long as the overall presentation is framed as media criticism and no inordinate weight is attached to the validity of any of the particular claims being presented, attacking along a very broad front, perhaps including dozens of entirely independent items, may “flood the zone” of the media, saturating and overwhelming existing defenses. Or as suggested in a quote widely misattributed to Stalin, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

Consider the example of entertainer Bill Cosby. Over the years, one or two individual women had come forward claiming that he had drugged and raped them, and the charges had been largely ignored as unsubstantiated or implausible. However, over the last year or two, the dam suddenly burst and a total of nearly sixty separate women came forward, all making identical accusations, and although there seems little hard evidence in any of the particular cases, virtually every observer now concedes that the charges are likely to be true.

Suppose it is established that there is a reasonable likelihood that the media completely missed and ignored an important matter that should have been investigated and reported. The impact is not necessarily substantial, and many individuals stubbornly wedded to a belief in their establishment media narratives might even resist admitting the possibility that the media had seriously erred in that particular situation.

However, suppose instead that several dozen such separate examples could be established, each strongly suggesting a serious error or omission on the part of the media. At that point, ideological defenses would crumble and nearly everyone would quietly acknowledge that many, perhaps even most, of the accusations were probably true, producing an enormous credibility gap for the mainstream media. The credibility defenses of the media would have been saturated and overcome.

The key point is that all of the particular items should be presented as reasonable-likelihood cases, and indicative of media shortcomings rather than being proven or necessarily as important issues in and of themselves. By remaining aloof and somewhat agnostic regarding any individual item, there is little risk of being tagged as fanatic or monomaniacal for raising a multitude of them.

My American Pravda Series and Unz Review Webzine as Examples

The political/media strategy outlined above was the central motivation behind my American Pravda articles and Unz Review webzine.

For example, in the original 2013 American Pravda article I raised over half a dozen enormous media lapses, all of them now universally acknowledged: Enron’s collapse, the Iraq War WMDs, the Madoff Swindle, the Cold War spies, and various others. Having thereby set the stage by presenting this admitted pattern of major failure, demonstrating that a considerable suspension of disbelief was warranted, I then extended the discussion to three or four important additional examples, none of them yet acknowledged, but all of them perfectly plausible. Perhaps as a consequence, the article received reasonably good attention including by elements of the mainstream media itself, who are often willing to acknowledge the errors of their class so long as these are presented persuasively and in a responsible manner.

Following that piece, I intermittently produced additional elements in the series, some more comprehensive than others, and am now embarking upon a regular series.

The McCain/POW examples in the series perfectly illustrate the strategy I have suggested above. The Vietnam War ended over forty years ago, the POWs have probably all been dead for decades, and even John McCain is in the very twilight of his career. The practical significance of raising the scandal or providing evidence establishing its likelihood is virtually nil. But if it were to become widely recognized that our entire media successfully covered up such a massive scandal for so many years, the credibility of the media would have suffered a devastating blow. Several such blows and it would be in ruins. Meanwhile, the powerful vested interests that once so vigorously maintained the official narrative in that area are long gone, and the orthodox case has few remaining defenders in the media, greatly increasing the likelihood of an eventual breakthrough and victory.

A similar strategy in broader form is applied by my Unz Review alternative media webzine, which hosts numerous different writers, columnists, and bloggers, all tending to sharply challenge the establishment media narrative along a wide variety of different axes and issues, some of them conflicting. By raising serious doubts about the omissions and errors of our mainstream media in so many different areas, the goal is to weaken the perceived credibility of the media, leading readers to consider the possibility that large elements of the conventional narrative may be entirely incorrect.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

From LRC, here.