Four Bloody Lies of War, from Havana 1898 to Baghdad 2003

[Ferran]

Published on Sunday, May 8, 2005 by the Columbus Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)

Four Bloody Lies of War, from Havana 1898 to Baghdad 2003

by Harvey Wasserman

The Bush Administration's lies about its rationales for attacking Iraq fit a pattern of deceit that has dragged America into at least three other unjust and catastrophic wars.

The "smoking gun" documents that emerged in the recent British election confirm the administration had decided to go to war and then sought "intelligence" to sell it.

But conscious, manipulative lies were also at the root of American attacks on Cuba in 1898, US intervention into World War I in 1917 and in Vietnam. These lies are as proven and irrefutable as the unconscionable deception that dragged the US into Iraq in 2003.

In each case, these lies of war have caused horrific human slaughter, the destruction of human rights and liberties, and financial disaster.

In Cuba, the 1898 sinking of the battleship Maine brought the US into war with Spain. The people of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines were in revolt against the crumbling Spanish empire. Media baron William Randolph Hearst, the era's Rupert Murdoch, wanted a war to sell papers and promote "jingo" power. He portrayed the Spaniards barbaric rapists and worse. In the name of democracy and freedom, Hearst and pro-war fanatics like Theodore Roosevelt demanded US intervention.

Republican President William McKinley, personal hero of today's White House dirty trickster Karl Rove, dutifully sent the battleship Maine into Havana harbor. Suddenly, it blew up, killing some 250 American sailors.

Spain was blamed, and Hearst got his war. Having just conquered and annexed what had been the sovereign monarchy of Hawaii, the Americans now annexed Puerto Rico and installed colonial regimes in Cuba and the Philippines.

But Filipino guerillas waged a jungle resistance that dragged into the new century. Thousands died in the quagmire. An angry anti-imperial movement sprung up here amongst farmers, labor unions and intellectuals like Samuel Clemens, whose writings under the pen name Mark Twain remain among the fiercest critiques of the perils of empire.

And guess what! New underwater technology has shown that the Maine actually blew up from the inside. Definitive scientific analysis says the Spaniards could not have sunk it. The explosion that brought it down most likely came from a faulty boiler or a munitions misfire, but definitely not from a Spanish mine or torpedo.

The Spanish-American War, with all its bloody imperial slaughter, had been sold on a lie.

As was US intervention in World War I. In 1915, as part of a blockade against Great Britain, the Germans downed the passenger ship Lusitania, on its way from New York to London. More than a thousand people died, many of them Americans.

President Woodrow Wilson screamed that Germany had violated international law. As Hearst had done to the Spaniards, Wilson portrayed "the Huns" as merciless, bloodthirsty barbarians.

The Germans argued that the Lusitania had been carrying weapons, and that they were within their rights to sink her. A substantial majority of Americans angrily opposed US intervention, saying only bankers would profit and that war would divert us from the real issues of unionization, poverty and Robber Baron domination of American industry.

In the face of an anti-imperial majority, Wilson withdrew troops he had sent into Mexico, then ran as a "peace candidate" in 1916 on the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War".

But in April 1917, reviving bloody images of the Lusitania, Wilson dragged the US into the slaughter. More than 100,000 Americans died. Under cover of war, federal marshals burned and blew up offices of the Socialist Party and radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World. Wilson shredded the Bill of Rights and jailed, deported or killed thousands of organizers. Eugene V. Debs, the beloved leader of the American labor movement, was thrown in federal prison. The ideological left was crushed.

Wilson did tip the military balance for Britain and France. But his high-minded rhetoric about a League of Nations and a balanced peace fell into chaos. The Allies demanded reparations which helped feed the Nazi movement and an even greater slaughter in World War II. Wilson suffered a stroke and left the country in shambles.

And guess what! Deep sea divers recently found the Lusitania, its sunken hull laden with illegal armaments. As the Germans had claimed, the ship was violating international law. Like McKinley, Wilson had duped America into a catastrophic intervention based on a "faulty intelligence."

Likewise, Vietnam, which hysterical cold warriors portrayed as the key domino in a global struggle against communism. The US had canceled 1956 elections which would have given to Ho Chi Minh control of a unified Vietnam. But nationalist guerillas were clearly on the brink of wresting South Vietnam from western control.

In 1964 North Vietnamese allegedly fired on two US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. While campaigning as a peace candidate, Lyndon Johnson used the incident to win Congressional approval for unlimited intervention. By 1967 he'd sent some 550,000 US troops into Southeast Asia.

A mirror image of the earlier war in the Philippines, Vietnam may rank as the greatest of all modern American catastrophes. It split and alienated a generation, poisoned American politics, spawned a toxic cadre of dirty tricksters and marked the downturn of the American economy. The war destroyed Johnson's Great Society, and has rendered every American tangibly poorer in more ways than can be counted.

And guess what! The Gulf of Tonkin incident probably never happened. According to then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the Vietnamese may never actually have fired shots that may or may not have put a few bullet holes in one or two US ships. Even if they did, any such attack had zero military significance.

Like the Maine and Lusitania, the guns of Tonkin were nothing more than lies of war.

Bitter debate still also rages over the origins of World War II and Korea. Many argue that Franklin Roosevelt knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and that he let it happen. Some also say that South Korea attacked North Korea, not vice-versa.

At least in terms of public consensus, these two stories still lack definitive smoking guns. But the Maine, the Lusitania and the Tonkin Gulf are known, irrefutable quantities.

To which we now must add George W. Bush's lies of Iraq. The war was primarily sold as a way to destroy Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction. The world was also told Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks on the US, and was trying to get nuclear bombs.

These were all lies. The British memos proving the Bush and Blair Administrations knew Saddam did not have WMDs, was not involved in 9/11 and had no way to make atomic weapons are now public monuments. Like the Maine, Lusitania and Tonkin, the proofs are tangible and irrefutable.

What happened to the perpetrators of those previous lies?

In 1901, William McKinley became the third sitting president (after Lincoln and Garfield) to be assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt then dragged the Philippine slaughter to its tragic conclusion. Only when his young son Quentin was killed in World War I did TR question the glories of imperial conquest.

Woodrow Wilson's debilitating stroke came as he imposed the most intense attack on civil liberties in US history destroying the Socialist Party and the ideological left. He was succeeded by the affable Warren G. Harding, who freed Eugene V. Debs from federal prison, then himself died in office (of apparent food poisoning) amidst the a sea of scandal.

After Tonkin, Lyndon Johnson's presidency descended into Wilsonian chaos. A ferocious anti-war movement forced him to duck out of running for re-election. Richard Nixon then took the lies of war to a whole new level, expanding the slaughter in Southeast Asia and becoming the first US president to resign in disgrace.

Nixon's "dirty trickster" disciples Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have now poisoned this nation with yet another ghastly lie of war. Their hopeless Iraqi slaughter has become the modern definition of cynical deceit, human butchery and economic ruin.

Exactly what will happen to us and to the liars that have dragged us into this latest bloody quagmire remains to be seen.

But history does not indicate a pretty outcome.



Source: Four Bloody Lies of War, from Havana 1898 to Baghdad 2003

[Ferran]

Who Remembers the Maine?

by Stephen Fleischman | Sep 18 2006 - 7:37am

Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain! That was the way the battle cry really went in 1898 when President McKinley needed a reason to drive Spain out of Cuba.

The Maine, a second class battleship of the US fleet blew up and sank while lolling in Havana harbor "to protect American interests", and supposedly sending a message to the Spanish who were there protecting their colony from rebellious Cubans.

The casus belli, used by President William McKinley, was a trumped up story that the Spanish had planted an explosive mine under the ship, but later investigation revealed that the explosion was probably the result of a coal bunker fire touching off some explosive ammunition in the hold. More skeptical people, however, believed that the Maine was sacrificed to rally public opinion against Spain. (Sound familiar?)

Do governments lie? Does Bush wear Prada, as the Wall Street Journal might suggest?

Government lying is as old as "civilization" itself. People, who take power, elective or otherwise, are usually alphas with their reptilian brains ready to strike. Napoleon. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great. George W. Bush. We the people, with our rational cerebral cortexes don't always know how to cope with it.

The United States government has been lying since it announced its manifest destiny sometime around 1840.

By 1898, when the US began its drive for Empire in earnest, it relied on the newly dubbed "yellow press" of Hearst's New York Journal and Pulitzer's World, viciously competing for headlines, to orchestrate the litany, Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain, a catchy phrase. It wasn't long before the American public was stoked up enough to cheer their government into the Spanish-American War. We continued the war with Spain in the Philippines until we took that country, too

Another floating example of government mendacity--the shenanigans in the Gulf of Tonkin in August of 1964.

A US destroyer was nosing around off the coast of North Vietnam (gathering intelligence?) when it was, reportedly, fired upon by North Vietnamese gunboats. President Lyndon Johnson ordered retaliatory action against the gunboats after "renewed attacks". But there were no renewed attacks.

The mainstream media, always anxious not to let facts get in the way, and with a bigger story on the horizon, did their usual thing. In this case it was the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times (big guns in the world of journalism) that picked up the battle cry. Both papers took the government propaganda handout and ran with it.

"By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam war," said Fair, the magazine of "Fairness and Accuracy in Media."

Congress, of course, played its role. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorized the President to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." (Sound familiar?)

Columnist Sydney Schanberg, prescient at the time, said, "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."

Another maritime incident? You could call this one the "granddaddy" of them all. Pearl Harbor. By December 1941, the war in Europe was going badly. The Axis--Germany, Italy and Japan--were riding high. Hitler had most of Western Europe under his heel. In the Far East, Japan was working its way through the islands of the South Pacific.

There was enormous pressure on President Roosevelt to bring the US into the war and save Britain and the Continent. The American temper was mixed. The America First Committee was strong and Nazi propagandists were invading the campuses of American colleges and universities.

Most Democrats, I, for one, do not want to believe that my hero, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had prior knowledge of that dastardly attack by the Japanese on that day that will live in infamy, December 7, 1941.

Well, there are "conspiracy theories" out there that say that he did. And there is reason to believe that perhaps they are true. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor--what an irrefutable rationale for getting us into the war! The mitigating circumstance, put forth later, was that Roosevelt didn't know it would be an attack of such massive force.

How about Korea in 1950? That was a neat one. It wasn't even called a war. It was a "police action". It precluded any need for a lie since the "action" was under the aegis of the newly created United Nations.

With Korea split at the 38th Parallel after World War II, a "civil war" inevitably resulted when the North invaded the South. There is evidence the South provoked it. UN forces, led by US forces moved in supporting the South, while Soviet and Red Chinese supported the North. The war raged for three years. 54,000 US killed-- 2-4 million North Koreans and Chinese killed. The war ended in a stalemate in 1953.

When the occupying forces on both sides finally withdrew, they left a Communist regime in Pyongyang (North Korea) and a "democratic", or shall we say, a "non-Communist" regime in Seoul (South Korea). No peace treaty was ever signed. It remains that way to this very day.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait over an oil dispute in 1991, we organized another "UN action" and recruited a magnificent coalition. We called it Operation Desert Storm.

Before the invasion, Saddam had summoned the US Ambassador, April Glaspie, to his office, for a meeting. In the version published in the New York Times on September 23, 1990, Ambassador Glaspie is quoted as saying, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait."

Saddam must have taken it as a "yes, go ahead". Like a wink and a nod, through diplomatic language, signaling an American "green light", Saddam went ahead with his Kuwaiti operation.

After all, the US was Saddam Hussein's friend and supporter during his eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s. Henry Kissinger thought we should "tilt" toward Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, went to Iraq on several occasions and was caught on camera shaking hands with Saddam in Baghdad in 1983.

The tables turned with Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Then President George Herbert Walker Bush (41) launched Operation Desert Storm, otherwise known as the first Gulf War. But George, the elder, (with the advice of General Colin Powell) knew when to stop. He had sense enough to know that taking Baghdad would open a can of worms. Why didn't his son, President George Walker Bush (43) learn that lesson?

So here we are--in 2006--three and half years after the second invasion of Iraq, listening to another battle cry, Stay the Course in the War on Terror!

Lies, lies and more lies ... to scare the people into submission.

Well, we the people, with our rational cerebral cortexes, are mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore!



Source: Who Remembers the Maine? - The Smirking Chimp

[Marcus Marulus]

From Liberty Bell:

THE FINAL SECRET OF PEARL HARBOR

by Professor Revilo P. Oliver (July 1989)


I have just seen the disclosure of a crucial historical fact, hitherto kept profoundly secret by the rulers of the United States, which will force you, as it has forced me, drastically to revise our understanding of recent history. It is an article, entitled "Tigers of a Different Stripe," by Don McLean in *Soldier of Fortune*, January 1989.

I am convinced that it is not a canard. There is no indication that Yahweh's venomous race, the world's Masters of Deceit, contrived or inspired the article, which surely does not serve their purposes. Mr. McLean gives precise references to documents now in the archives in Washington, and even reproduces two of them photographically. It is likely that there are still in the United States, and conceivably even in universities, American historians who are more interested in establishing historical facts than in pleasing their paymasters; they will surely look for documents thus specifically and precisely designated and verify them. And finally and most cogently, the fact now disclosed fits so perfectly a gap in our present knowledge that it has the logical validity of a piece of a jigsaw puzzle put into its place.

I thought that I had disclosed in *America's Decline*, the ultimate secret of Pearl Harbor, the fact that the unspeakably foul energumenon called Franklin Roosevelt, in January 1941, almost a full year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, had incited the Japanese by informing "in strict confidence" the Portuguese Ambassador that his countrymen need not be concerned about their colonies in the Orient because the United States was going to attack Japan when her military forces were extended to the limit and most vulnerable, and would thus destroy Japan. The Ambassador naturally cabled the good news to his government in his most secret code, which the Japanese had compromised and were reading currently. And the success of the diseased monster's scheme was attested a few days later when the Portuguese message was quoted in Japanese diplomatic messages that American cryptanalysts were reading. (1) The Japanese were thus led to believe that the Americans would soon attack them, and that they should therefore gain the advantage of surprising the enemy that intended to surprise them.

(1. Professor James Martin informs me that the parts of "Magic" that have been made public do not include the messages to which I refer. This would indicate that the Army is still trying to keep this much of the great War Criminal's treason secret, but after the disclosures in *Soldier of Fortune* that will no longer be worthwhile.)

I erred grossly in the conclusions which I drew from that fact. I assumed that the loathsome creature had been bluffing, and that the Japanese had blundered in being taken in by what was just another of his innumerable lies. (2) In *America's Decline*, again in "*The Yellow Peril*" and especially in *Liberty Bell*, April 1984, pp. 5-7, where I condemned the Japanese for ignoring their own best interests when they decided to attack Pearl Harbor instead of honoring their obligations under their treaty and alliance with Germany, thus precipitating the catastrophe in the West and the Suicide of Europe, I was thinking in terms of an American expeditionary force in hundreds of ships carrying thousands of American soldiers to the Orient to be killed for the delight of the monster and the ophidian race to which he partly belonged. I thought it was certain that the loathsome creature could not have sent such an expedition to attack Japan without preparations that would have alarmed even the dullest of the boobs in a nation that preponderantly wished to remain at peace.

(2. In Washington at the time, and especially among the "Liberal" bureaucrats who had to deal with the perfidious creature, there was current an epigram; "He has conscientious scruples against telling the truth.")

I knew, of course, that when the diseased and blood-thirsty animal in the White House used the Portuguese Ambassador to incite the Japanese, he had been waging for more than a year a secret war of aggression against Germany, using his command of our Navy to attack German ships, in the hope that Germany would, in exasperation, declare open war on the United States to counter the sneaking war he was waging against her, and that he apparently turned to Japan only when he found that Hitler wisely was ignoring the provocation. I considered, of course, a comparable use of the Navy against Japan, but that, I though, could not be kept secret from the American people who were eventually to be the victims. So I concluded that the great War Criminal had bluffed the Japanese.
I accordingly speculated about differences in racial mentality that prevented the Japanese from understanding the limitations of presidential power at that time. I overlooked the obvious and logical solution. Now that Mr. McLean has published it, I marvel at my obtuseness. (3)

(3. I yield to the temptation to palliate my blunder and say that it seemed to be confirmed by one of the foul fiend's attempts to create a pretext for attacking Japan. He despatched a small naval vessel into waters in which the Japanese navy was operating, hoping that the Japanese would sink it. See Admiral Kemp Tolley, *Cruise of the Lanikai, Incitement to War*, (Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 1973). One could add an inference from the anxiety, indiscreetly confessed by the Roosevelt female in her newspaper column, with which the monster was awaiting on the morning of 7 December news that the American fleet in Pearl Harbor had been destroyed. Why such anxiety, if the desired war was certain? (It probably wasn't anxiety: just impatience to get the killing and disasters started.))

I knew, of course, that a group of American mercenaries, who called themselves the "Flying Tigers" and were commanded by a Captain Chennault, had been hired by the Chinese to fight the Japanese, but I never guessed that they were a part of the War Criminal's plot.
Mr. McLean cites a secret memorandum from the Chief of Naval Operations, dated 17 January 1940, two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor and a year before the diseased monster used the Portuguese Ambassador to incite the Japanese, which, with complementary secret documents signed by Admiral Thomas C. Hart, conclusively prove that Roosevelt was then planning a devastating attack on Japan with bombers that would exploit the knowledge that "one of Japan's greatest fears rests upon [i.e., is of] bombing of the homeland." The crime was to be carried out with typical hypocrisy.

American aviators would be released from the Army, Navy, and Marine air corps to be hired as mercenaries through the Intercontinent Corporation, owned by William D. Pawley, which would hire them "under contract with the Chinese government" and with money supplied by the American government through the trick of guaranteeing loans ostensibly made by private bankers to supplement the secret loan of $100,000,000 made directly to China by Morgenthau, the Sheeny who was in charge of the American Treasury, obviously by agreement with the part-Jew in the White House. Japan would thus be unable to prove that the Roosevelt government's pretense of neutrality, which had been solemnly affirmed by the War Criminal, was odious hypocrisy. The Japanese would thus be kept inactive by American "neutrality" until the United States was ready to strike the final blow and contrive a pretext for open war.

The plan for the sneaking attack on Japan sketched in January 1940 was fully elaborated in the secret "Joint Army-Navy Board Paper 355, Serial 691," dated 23 June 1941, which described in detail the scheme that Roosevelt obviously had authorized no later than 15 April 1941, eight months before Pearl Harbor, when he ordered that American officers and servicemen on active duty should be encouraged to accept "leaves of absence" and take employment as Chinese mercenaries, with a guarantee that they could return to the armed services of the United States as though they had been serving honorably in them during their absence. The plan was to destroy first the "Japanese Industrial Establishment," thus not only halting the production of weapons and supplies for the Japanese army and navy, but also so destroying all other industry as to make the economic structure of Japan collapse. The bombers would use incendiary bombs to devastate Japanese cities and fry Japanese civilians, as was eventually done in the famous raid on Tokyo.

The plan called for diversion of armaments then being (illegally) sent to Britain. Two hundred fighter planes and one hundred bombers would go into operation against Japan by September 1941, and by December the pseudo-Chinese air force would have the full complement of five hundred planes with American aviators to man them and American technicians and mechanics as ground crews to maintain them. Thus the planned devastation of Japan would be well under way in December 1941.
Only difficulty and delay in diverting weapons promised the British prevented the plan from being carried out on schedule and enabled Japan to get in the first blow. Some American soldiers had been despatched to Chennault's secret base in China on 21 November, and more were to leave Los Angeles on 11 December. A production of Lockhead bombers destined for China was ready on 7 December, awaiting ships to load them.
These facts, of course, drastically alter your understanding of the situation. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, they were not deceived by a bluff; they were defending themselves against an act of war, a war of unconscionable aggression. They are completely absolved of all guilt, even according to the criteria of International Law that prevailed among civilized nations before that law was repudiated by Britain and the United States in their catastrophic Advance to Barbarism.

There is only one item lacking to complete the terrible history. Did the Japanese know of the detailed plan set forth in the Army-Navy Board's document of 23 July 1941? I hope that some Japanese historians will be able to answer that question definitively. In the meantime, in the absence of proof, I think it highly probable that the Japanese were fully informed of the essentials of the plot.

Although it seems that the Japanese did not succeed in reading American codes of any consequence, except some operational codes used by the Air Force, they had great success in breaking Chinese codes and ciphers, (4) and they could have obtained some information from those sources, especially Chinese messages about preparations for reception of the American forces. Japanese espionage was always highly successful in China, and sometimes elsewhere. The planned attack on Japan, although secret, was necessarily known to a very considerable number of persons, including men given to indiscretion. But the further question imposes itself: Did the Japanese intelligence have to exert itself to learn the secret?

(4. See J.W. Bennett, W.A. Hobart, and J.B. Spitzer, *Intelligence and Cryptanalytic Activities of the Japanese During World War II* (Laguna Hills, California; Aegean Park Press, 1986). The scope of this study is limited to the period after Pearl Harbor. It may underestimate the efficiency of Japanese espionage, since the authors may not have had access to highly secret information, which the defeated Japanese would prudently have kept out of the hands of the conquerors, who intended to murder some high-ranking Japanese officers after mock trials to provide a spurious legitimacy for the notorious murders at Nuremberg--both crimes, of course, in utter defiance of the International Law the United States had pragmatically repudiated and of the simple sense of decency and justice that is part of our now despised Aryan inheritance. We cannot palliate our guilt by blaming the Jews: they instigated our crimes, but *we* committed them, knowing that we were repudiating the ethics of our race and of civilized mankind to please our parasites.)

It is scarcely credible that the hypocrisy of the American scheme was intended to be successful and deceive the Japanese. When two hundred American bombing planes, some of which would inevitably be shot down, operated by officers and crew men detached from the American Army and Navy, some of whom would inevitably be killed and others captured, began to raid Japanese cities, even boobs would not have been deceived by the transparent pretext that the raiders were mercenaries hired by China. It must obviously have been intended that the Japanese would not be imbeciles and, recognizing the fact, would declare war on the treacherous Americans, with or without diplomatic formalities. Thus the monster would get his war with Japan, and Germany, honoring her obligations to her ally, would declare the war on the United States that the great War Criminal had been unable to provoke by the secret naval war he had been waging against Germany.

Now if the wanton attack on Japan was intended to provoke a war, would it not have been reasonable to make certain that the preparations for it would become known to Japan, thus confirming the information that had been transmitted through the Portuguese? That could only hasten the yearned-for day and the marching of Americans to slaughter for the glory of the Jews and Roosevelt's colleague, Stalin. And it would in the meantime effectively prevent the Japanese from taking action in Siberia. I think it likely that that is what was done.

*Soldier of Fortune* has included, obiter, a consideration that is highly relevant in this connection. It is now accepted history that the clever Communist spy in Japan, Sorge, changed the fortunes of civilized mankind when he sent to his Soviet employers on 15 October his now famous message, "Japanese carrier force attacking United States Navy at Pearl Harbor probably dawn November six." (5) It is assumed that that message enabled Stalin to transfer to the defence of Russia the army of two million men he was having to maintain in Siberia to guard his eastern border against the Japanese. The two million were hurled against the Germans, who had already occupied the outskirts of Moscow and believed Russia already defeated, and thus produced the delay that mired the Germans in the unprecedentedly sever winter and so prepared the final catastrophe of Western civilization. But for that sudden flood of Soviet troops, the war would have been over before the great War Criminal who had planned it could have herded his hated American subjects (6) into Europe to fight and die for international Jewry.

(5. Some Americans have expressed indignation because Stalin (as they assume) did not inform Washington of the impending attack. Why should Stalin have informed his American partner of what that partner already knew and, indeed, had contrived?)

(6. Even before Roosevelt got the war started in Europe, Lady Astor perceived the insane hatred that actuated the great War Criminal and his British accomplice and stooge, but she reduced her observation to a quip: "Franklin hates everyone who can walk, and Winston hates everyone who is sober." Some apologists for Roosevelt argue that his mind was perverted by the disease, probably syphilis, which left him a cripple, but a Naval officer who had dealings with Roosevelt when he was Secretary of the Navy under Wilson told me that then, before he was crippled, "He was the same arrogant and treacherous son-of-a-bitch that he is today." It is possible, however, that the creature's native viciousness, partly hereditary, was augmented by the disease. The late Professor Harris Fletcher, distinguished for his studies of Milton believed, on the basis of observation, that persons physically or mentally deformed naturally hate healthy men and long to see them suffer.)

Now Sorge sent on 4 October a first report that Japan had decided not to invade Siberia and Manchuria--and the *next day*, on 5 October, the Germans were attacked by an unexpected horde of Soviet troops, some of them identified as from the Siberian Red Army. It was, of course, physically impossible for troops to have been transferred from Siberia to Russia in that time, and although the transfer of troops from Siberia had been delayed, according to the Soviet General Zhukov, the Siberian Army was attacking the Germans on 10 October. The transfer of two million men for two thousand miles over a single-track railroad simply could not have been carried out in that time. It follows that the transfer had been begun, and Stalin had been *authoritatively* informed that Japan *could not* invade Siberia long before he received Sorge's message. (It is furthermore obvious that no sane ruler would stake the survival of his r‚gime on an uncorroborated message from a spy.)

It is obvious, therefore, that Stalin must have been informed of the American plan and preparations for a sneak attack on Japan long before 3 October. He must have been authoritatively informed from Washington. The article tactfully suggests that the information was sent by Lauchlin Currie, the notorious Communist agent and spy who was Roosevelt's closest adviser and associate, and who had acted for him when the document of 23 July 1941 was drawn up for Roosevelt's approval. (7)

(7. *Soldier of Fortune* prints on p. 71 a picture that shows Currie in fraternal association with Felix Frankfurter, the Sheeny and known Communist agent to whom Roosevelt gave the job of liquidating juridically the scraps of the American Constitution that were still left.)

If Currie, who not his principal? Even in his desperate situation, Stalin would have hesitated to stake everything on the report of a spy, however efficient, but he would have accepted the assurances of his partner in Washington, the unspeakable monster who had contrived the war in the first place.

I need not expatiate on the conclusions to be drawn from the great clarification of the most sinister and tragic event in American history. Now we know, more securely than ever, on what infamous creature rests the guilt for our ruin. (8)

(8. The author, to protect himself, has had to seem to acquiesce in the current form of the Big Lie about the most loathsome War Criminal of all history. Since it is now fairly well known that the diseased and part Jewish monster called Roosevelt contrived the catastrophic war that was the Suicide of Europe and induced the Japanese to destroy the American fleet that he had put in Pearl Harbor as tempting bait, the revised version now is that the foul anthropoid had to start the war to save mankind (i.e., the Sacred Sheenies) from Aryan civilization. That he promoted the catastrophic war is, as I have said, now established to the satisfaction of everyone willing to read and think, and will be even more generally known, now that the original text of David Hoggan's *The Forced War* has at last been published in English. I have not yet seen the new book, but I read and reviewed the German translation, *Der erzwungene Krieg*, twenty-five years ago. Much information has become available since Hoggan wrote, but none, I believe, as crucial as the article in *Soldier of Fortune*, which enormously strengthens Hoggan's conclusions.)

Now we know what happened and why. There remains one question, futile, to be sure, but posed by our minds' proclivity to ask whether a given result was inevitable. We all wonder what would have been the outcome, if Pickett had made his famous charge at Gettysburg earlier and Lee had been victorious. Likewise we ask ourselves whether Japan would have done better, and would have escaped eventual defeat, if, despite the dire menace of American aggression, she had honored her commitment to Germany and invaded Siberia in October or as much earlier as she knew of Roosevelt's plan. The Germans would have attained a decisive victory in October and destroyed the Soviet before the bombing of Japan could have begun, and after the German triumph, the foul thing that hoped to become the American Lenin would have been quite unable to persuade the American people to countenance an attack on either Japan or Germany. Our civilisation and our race might have been saved from suicide. The question is tantalizing, but the hypothesis is only an inference from ambiguous evidence made in the light of subsequent events.

[source]

[Marcus Marulus]

THE SECRET OF PEARL HARBOR

FDR's role exposed – in 1944

Today's column is an introduction to today's "Spotlight," John T. Flynn's classic pamphlet The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, which you can check out here.

The smoke barely had time to clear before a dark cloud of intrigue and suspicion formed around the circumstances leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When the shock had worn off, questions began to be asked, at least by the most sober and realistic Americans: why had the US military been taken by surprise, and who, the Congress and the public wanted to know, was responsible?


John T. Flynn was one of the first to stand up to the war hysteria, defy the atmosphere of political intimidation, and start asking questions. Flynn was an old-style liberal journalist, a former columnist for The New Republic, author of God's Gold (1932), a best-selling book on the rise of the Rockefeller oil fortune, and also Men of Wealth: the Story of Twelve Significant Fortunes from the Renaissance to the Present Day (1941), who had been purged from the precincts of "respectable" journalism for his unrelenting opposition to US entry into World War II. Flynn labored mightily to avert that disaster, joining with others – conservatives, mostly, and nascent libertarians – in the antiwar America First Committee, writing, speaking, rallying and lobbying to stop FDR's drive to war.

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the America First Committee disbanded, and the "isolationists" were driven practically underground, hounded by the government, driven out of politics and journalism, and in some cases prosecuted for "sedition." Flynn, however, would not be cowed. He wrote two scathing pamphlets, The Truth About Pearl Harbor (1944) and The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor (1945), that raised the question for the first time: did FDR have advance warning of the Pearl Harbor catastrophe? Flynn answer was yes.

It is amazing how much he gleaned from contemporary accounts – in spite of the repressive wartime atmosphere that allowed the President to avoid a real investigation – and it's nothing short of astounding how he was able to cut like a searchlight through the cloud of obfuscating murk and get at the essential truth. As it was, given what we now know, his conclusions were fairly mild. Flynn makes the case that FDR had every reason to expect the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, that he ignored the advice of his generals, and that he deliberately bottled up the fleet there. He reveals that the Japanese code had been cracked, and that the diplomatic messages being sent back and forth between Tokyo and its various embassies had been intercepted by the British, delivered to the Americans, and decoded. But what he didn't know – couldn't know – was that much more than that had been intercepted. As revealed in Robert Stinnett's book, Day of Deceit, a whole series of military messages sent by Japanese commanders betrayed the day and the hour of the attack – and Stinnett shows that FDR had to have known this. Flynn couldn't have had access to the thousands of pages of documents – recently released under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act – that prove FDR's foreknowledge, and that of top figures in his administration. But Flynn saw the pattern of deception, fifty years ago, even if he couldn't have known the full extent of it. He is the father of Pearl Harbor revisionism, the first writer to collect the evidence and indict an American President for a heinous war crime – one committed against his own soldiers and sailors.

Originally a supporter of the President, Flynn became one of FDR's bitterest, most relentless critics: his book, Country Squire in the White House, so enraged its subject that FDR wrote to one editor, at the Yale Review, demanding that Flynn be "forever barred" from the pages of the "respectable" media. Flynn's 1948 book, The Roosevelt Myth, is the definitive study of Roosevelt the opportunist and autocrat; Flynn's 1944 volume, As We Go Marching, cited the fascist proclivities of the New Deal in wartime. Yet in concluding that the Pearl Harbor affair was the result of a "miscalculation," Flynn was giving the President far too much credit. As Stinnett makes all too clear: instead of being a miscalculation, the Pearl Harbor disaster was a very carefully calculated catastrophe, one orchestrated as much from Washington as from Tokyo. "When the attack came," writes Flynn, "[FDR] was appalled and frightened. He dared not give the facts to the country. To save himself he maneuvered to lay the blame upon Kimmel and Short." If the President was appalled, it was at his own handiwork, but there is no record of his fear. Harry Hopkins, his top aide – and, as we now know, a Soviet agent – reported that the night before, when told that the Japanese had rejected his ultimatum, the President had said simply and quite matter-of-factly, "This means war."

But if the enormity of FDR's deception was inconceivable to even such a staunch opponent of the President as Flynn, still he managed to glean the broad outlines of it: Flynn knew something was very wrong about the circumstances surrounding the biggest disaster in US military history, and he courageously took up the cudgels on behalf of historical truth. It is true that, as Flynn said, FDR dared not give the facts to the country. For half a century, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter Short were blamed for the disaster and the deaths, while the man who set them up went down in the history books as the "Soldier of Freedom." But now, all these years later, the truth is coming out at last. Congress officially exonerated Kimmel and Short in 1998, and Senator Joe Biden, in his speech to the Senate, described the great injustice done to them as a classic case of scapegoating:

"These officers were publicly vilified and never given a chance to clear their names," declared Biden. "If we lived in a closed society, fearful of the truth, then there would be no need for the President to take any action today. But we don't. We live in an open society. Eventually, we are able to declassify documents and evaluate our past based on at least a good portion of the whole story. One of our greatest strengths as a nation comes from our ability to honor truth and the lessons of our past.. . . I can not accept that there is a reason for continuing to deny the culpability of others in Washington at the expense of these two officers' reputations fifty-seven years later."

But if Kimmel and Short weren't responsible for US vulnerability at Pearl Harbor, then who was? In his speech, Biden said that the burden of guilt must be "shared" – but between who and whom?
Flynn's trenchant pamphlet was prescient in its conclusion that FDR had to have known a good deal about the Japanese plans. Aside from his prescience, however, the author of The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor was brave beyond measure: for this was wartime America, where fear of "sedition" suppressed virtually all dissent, and Flynn, whose work had appeared in The New Republic, Collier's, and Harper's, now found himself confined to a few conservative publications, such as the Readers Digest – and the Chicago Tribune, whose publisher, Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, was the great enemy of the New Deal and the journalistic champion of America First. It was McCormick who printed the first of Flynn's Pearl Harbor articles, on October 22, 1942, and this was reproduced in pamphlet form as The Truth About Pearl Harbor (New York: Privately printed, 1944). When the war ended, the "national security" dodge that had let the administration stonewall on the Pearl Harbor question was no longer applicable, and the cry for an investigation went up, led by Flynn and the Tribune. On September 2, 1945, the Tribune printed another piece on Pearl Harbor by Flynn – which we have posted as today\'s Spotlight article – that contained what the editor called "the blackest charge ever made against an American." Addressing his readers, the editor exhorted: "Read it. Read it in full. In occupies a good many columns in today's Tribune. That space would not have been made available if the report had not been of such transcendent importance. We call on true Americans everywhere to join us in seeing that the nation is told how it was carried into the war."

Today, as the myth of Pearl Harbor is invoked by FDR's idolators – in Hollywood as well as Washington – we offer it to you with that same sense of urgency.

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