There is a book entitled "Day of Deceit" written by Robert Stinnett. Stinnett proffers evidence that FDR had prior knowledge of the attack and let it happen so as to create a public pretense for US involvement in WW2.
I haven't read the book, but given the Hegelian dialectic and its historical employment plus Roosevelt's status as a traitor, I have little doubt it is true.
"Hegelian dialectic and its historical employment"? What is
that supposed to mean, other than serving as a smokescreen for selecting evidence to fit a predetermined conclusion?
The bit about "Roosevelt's status as a traitor" smells of circular "logic" to me:
Why did Roosevelt expose the Pacific Fleet to attack?
- Because he was a traitor.
How do we know he was a traitor?
- Because he exposed the Pacific Fleet to attack.
As it happens, I've been rereading
Eagle Against The Sun: The American War With Japan by Ronald H. Spector, and in chapter 5, "The Issue Is in Doubt," he discusses fairly extensively how the Japanese managed to surprise the Pacific Fleet the way they did.
Some "revisionist" historians have argued the President Roosevelt and his close associates in the cabinet (Hull, Stimson and Knox) deliberately exposed the fleet to destruction at Pearl Harbor in order to ensure support for America's entry into World War II. Authors such a Charles C. Tansill, Charles A. Beard, Robert Theobald, and Harry Elmer Barnes claim [all circa 1950!] that since the U.S. was reading the Japanese code, Washington must have known in advance about the attack, and that Roosevelt consciously withheld vital information from the Hawaiian commanders. It was his purpose, they maintain, to keep the fleet in harbor and thus vulnerable to attack.
Although revisionists are convinced that Roosevelt purposely kept [General] Short and [Admiral] Kimmel in the dark, it might as plausibly be argued that both of them conspired to ignore Washington's repeated warnings. [Spector goes on to list a series of warning transmitted in the two weeks preceding the attack.]
The fact was that Kimmel and Short were alert to the possibility of imminent war with Japan. They simply did not expect it to begin at Pearl Harbor. Despite repeated fleet exercises, war games, studies, plans and discussions concerning the danger of surprise air attack, despite repeated surprise alerts and drills, the fact remained that American army and navy leaders at the highest levels simply could not really believe that a surprise air attack on the fleet would actually take place. In the most exhaustive study of Pearl Harbor, Gordon Prange singles out this fundamental belief as the root of the whole tragedy.
This is entirely consistent with the point Spector makes in earlier chapters that, at the time, the upper echelons of both the US and Japanese navies consisted of students of Alfred Thayer Mahan's doctrine of "command of the sea," which required a concentrated fleet of battleships to defeat the enemy's naval forces in a single decisive engagement. As the cliché goes, military commanders tend to prepare for the next war by re-fighting the last one, and when they were the winners last time round, they tend to stick with what works. In the case of both the Americans and the Japanese, Mahan's doctrine had worked, but the problem was that those occasions were, respectively, the Battle of Manila Bay (1898) and the Battle of Tsushima (1905), both of which, like Mahan's doctrine, predated the development of combat aircraft and aircraft carriers. Even by 1941, both naval staffs were firmly convinced of the battleship's supremacy; carrier-based aircraft were thought to be good for scouting and supporting combat role at most. At first glance, the nature of the Pearl Harbor attack would appear to contradict this notion, conducted as it was almost entirely by carrier-based aircraft, but closer examination supports it: the attack was aimed specifically at the American battle line, since the Japanese believed this to form the primary threat to their own fleet. Moreover, the Japanese that the only way aircraft could defeat battleships was by catching them by surprise while they were in port, which is why the attack was carried out the way it was. Even so, Yamamoto's plan met with considerable skepticism on the part of the Japanese Naval General Staff.
On
the site of some Greek television show, I found some stuff on Stinett:
64 years later a number of historians believes that President Roosevelt and the American leadership as a whole provoked the Japanese in the Pacific while later deliberately ignoring all warnings of the attack on Pearl Harbour in order to achieve America's involvement in the war. "We now know that firstly, there was a plan for an overt act of war and that, secondly, we had de-coded the Japanese Naval code. That was all kept secret for 60 years," according to journalist and author Robert Stinett who for the last 17 years has studied more than 2 million classified Naval documents. As for the so-called Provocation Policy of President Roosevelt, Stinett is firm: "The President wanted us to enter war operations. He followed what Plato had said; 'a noble lie will sacrifice the few to save the many.' That was the idea".
The position of the American author of the book Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbour is shared by British historian David Irving: "We knew it was going to happen. Churchill knew also because he had a variety of sources. There had been a great cover up on the side of the Americans."
(Punctuation edited)
Stinett's assertion that "that was all kept secret for 60 years" is false right off the bat. Despite the fact that it was first published in 1985, and cites earlier sources,
Eagle Against The Sun extensively covers the American war plans--"Orange" and "Rainbow"--as well as the American gathering of signal intelligence on Japanese operations. In fact, if Stinett's statement were true, it would have been impossible for Stinett to publish
Day of Deceit in 2000!
There was indeed "a plan for an overt act of war," the aforementioned "Orange Plan." What Stinett neglects to mention was that Orange was first drafted in
1905 (almost thirty years before FDR became president!) as part of a series of
contingency war plans against
potential enemies. Other "color plans" were "Green" against Mexico, "Black" against Germany, and "Red" against Great Britain. The existence of the latter indicates that the existence of a "color plan" did not
ipso facto indicate that military action against a particular country was a given. "Orange," moreover, was based from its inception on the assumption that the Japanese would first attack the Philippines, and subsequently engage the US Pacific Fleet when it entered the western Pacific on its way to relieve the Philippines. This assumption, again, led to the refusal to genuinely believe that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.
That Stinett's assertion is supported by David Irving does not exactly inspire confidence, given that Irving is primarily known for being a Holocaust denier.
Regarding the signal intelligence, well that's been thrashed out, and not just in
Eagle Against The Sun. Spector continues:
Among the mass of secret Japanese messages which were being intercepted and decoded in Washington there were signs that pointed towards Pearl Harbor, but many others seemed to indicate an attack on the Philippines and Singapore--or even against the Soviet Union. As Roberta Wohlstetter, a perceptive student of the Pearl Harbor debacle observes: "We failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor not for want of the relevant materials but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones. . . . There is a difference between having a signal available somewhere in the heap of irrelevances and perceiving it as a warning, and there is also a difference between perceiving it as a warning an acting on it."
Spector then addresses the claims made by John Toland in his 1982 book
Infamy, pointing out the likely inaccuracy of the
Lurline intercept, the clutter in which the Twelfth Naval District intercept got lost, and the fact that the Dutch East Indies intercept was relayed to DC without any reference made to Hawaii. He then turns to Toland's claim that, had Washington alerted Kimmel and Short, Nagumo's strike force would have turned back without attacking Pearl Harbor.
The problem with Toland's claim, as with every other "FDR let the Pacific Fleet be attacked to get the US into the war" claim, is that
Nagumo's orders explicitly included instructions to go ahead with the attack even if his force were discovered out of range of Hawaii. The die was cast the moment Nagumo sailed for Hawaii on November 26th, so what FDR, Stimson, Hull, Knox and/or Marshall did or did not know by December 4th is academic.
Punctuation edited)
Wow! "Prison Planet"? The same guy who thinks there's RFID chips in $20 bills? Who thinks bin Ladin makes video/audio tapes under the direction of the CIA? You're joking, right?