It's happened befo

December 7, 1941: A Setup from the Beginning
December 7, 2000
Robert B. Stinnett
Honolulu Advertiser



As Americans honor those 2403 men, women, and children killed-and
1178 wounded-in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on
December 7, 1941, recently released government documents concerning
that "surprise" raid compel us to revisit some troubling questions.

At issue is American foreknowledge of Japanese military plans to attack
Hawaii by a submarine and carrier force 59 years ago. There are two
questions at the top of the foreknowledge list: (1) whether President
Franklin D. Roosevelt and his top military chieftains provoked Japan
into an "overt act of war" directed at Hawaii, and (2) whether
Japan's military plans were obtained in advance by the United States
but concealed from the Hawaiian military commanders, Admiral Husband E.
Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short so they would not interfere
with the overt act.

The latter question was answered in the affirmative on October 30,
2000, when President Bill Clinton signed into law, with the support of
a bipartisan Congress, the National Defense Authorization Act. Amidst
its omnibus provisions, the Act reverses the findings of nine previous
Pearl Harbor investigations and finds that both Kimmel and Short were
denied crucial military intelligence that tracked the Japanese forces
toward Hawaii and obtained by the Roosevelt Administration in the weeks
before the attack.

Congress was specific in its finding against the 1941 White House:
Kimmel and Short were cut off from the intelligence pipeline that
located Japanese forces advancing on Hawaii. Then, after the successful
Japanese raid, both commanders were relieved of their commands, blamed
for failing to ward off the attack, and demoted in rank.

President Clinton must now decide whether to grant the request by
Congress to restore the commanders to their 1941 ranks. Regardless of
what the Commander-in-Chief does in the remaining months of his term,
these congressional findings should be widely seen as an exoneration of
59 years of blame assigned to Kimmel and Short.

But one important question remains: Does the blame for the Pearl Harbor
disaster revert to President Roosevelt?

A major motion picture based on the attack is currently under
production by Walt Disney Studios and scheduled for release in May
2001. The producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, refuses to include America's
foreknowledge in the script. When Bruckheimer commented on FDR's
foreknowledge in an interview published earlier this year, he said
"That's all b___s___.

Yet, Roosevelt believed that provoking Japan into an attack on Hawaii
was the only option he had in 1941 to overcome the powerful America
First non-interventionist movement led by aviation hero Charles
Lindbergh. These anti-war views were shared by 80 percent of the
American public from 1940 to 1941. Though Germany had conquered most of
Europe, and her U-Boats were sinking American ships in the Atlantic
Ocean-including warships-Americans wanted nothing to do with
"Europe's War."

However, Germany made a strategic error. She, along with her Axis
partner, Italy, signed the mutual assistance treaty with Japan, the
Tripartite Pact, on September 27, 1940. Ten days later, Lieutenant
Commander Arthur McCollum, a U.S. Naval officer in the Office of Naval
Intelligence (ONI), saw an opportunity to counter the U.S. isolationist
movement by provoking Japan into a state of war with the U.S.,
triggering the mutual assistance provisions of the Tripartite Pact, and
bringing America into World War II.

Memorialized in McCollum's secret memo dated October 7, 1940, and
recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the ONI
proposal called for eight provocations aimed at Japan. Its centerpiece
was keeping the might of the U.S. Fleet based in the Territory of
Hawaii as a lure for a Japanese attack.

President Roosevelt acted swiftly. The very next day, October 8, 1940,
the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet, Admiral James O. Richardson,
was summoned to the Oval Office and told of the provocative plan by the
President. In a heated argument with FDR, the admiral objected to
placing his sailors and ships in harm's way. Richardson was then
fired and in his place FDR selected an obscure naval officer, Rear
Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, to command the fleet in Hawaii. Kimmel was
promoted to a four-star admiral and took command on February 1, 1941.
In a related appointment, Walter Short was promoted from Major General
to a three-star Lieutenant General and given command of U.S. Army
troops in Hawaii.

Throughout 1941, FDR implemented the remaining seven provocations. He
then gauged Japanese reaction through intercepted and decoded
communications intelligence originated by Japan's diplomatic and
military leaders.

The island nation's militarists used the provocations to seize
control of Japan and organized their military forces for war against
the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands. The centerpiece-the
Pearl Harbor attack-was leaked to the U.S. in January 1941. During
the next 11 months, the White House followed the Japanese war plans
through the intercepted and decoded diplomatic and military
communications intelligence.

Japanese leaders failed in basic security precautions. At least 1,000
Japanese military and diplomatic radio messages per day were
intercepted by monitoring stations operated by the U.S. and her Allies,
and the message contents were summarized for the White House. The
intercept summaries were clear: Pearl Harbor would be attacked on
December 7, 1941, by Japanese forces advancing through the Central and
North Pacific Oceans. On November 27 and 28, 1941, Admiral Kimmel and
General Short were ordered to remain in a defensive posture for "the
United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act." The
order came directly from President Roosevelt.

As I explained to a policy forum audience at The Independent Institute
in Oakland, California, which was videotaped and telecast nationwide
over the Fourth of July holiday earlier this year, my research of U.S.
naval records shows that not only were Kimmel and Short cut off from
the Japanese communications intelligence pipeline, so were the American
people. It is a coverup that has lasted for nearly 59 years.

Immediately after December 7, 1941, military communications documents
that disclose American foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor disaster were
locked in U.S. Navy vaults away from the prying eyes of congressional
investigators, historians, and authors. Though the Freedom of
Information Act freed the foreknowledge documents from the secretive
vaults to the sunlight of the National Archives in 1995, a cottage
industry continues to cover up America's foreknowledge of Pearl
Harbor.


It's not the Jap's fault. Blame FDR!

Banzai!