Local Vet Counters the Big Lie about Pearl Harbor

By Captain O�Kelly McCluskey, WWII DAV

�There was a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.� Not true! I have informally asked more than a hundred fellow WWII vets in the area, and not one believes that then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt was surprised by the Japanese military. A formal poll conducted by the Global Peace Task Force found that 80 percent of surviving WWII vets do not believe there was a surprise attack on that day.

This information may seem unreal to younger people who have been raised on movies and documentaries that look only at the attack, not the months of political maneuvering preceding it. Granted, the attack itself was a surprise to most of the soldiers and commanders at Pearl Harbor, and to most of the American public. But for Roosevelt and cohorts, it was practically a date in their planner.

Vets know this because vets remember that in polls prior to December 7, 1941, a large majority of the American public were against entering the war unless the US was attacked first by Germany or Japan (detailed history on this is in the book The New Dealers� War by Thomas Fleming). After all, Americans had fought in WWI and no one could explain why many of them died �over there.�

In order to get elected in 1940, Roosevelt went around the country promising repeatedly that he would never �get your boys into a foreign war.� He won on that promise. Then Roosevelt adopted a plan of luring the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. No �smoking gun� document has yet been released pinpointing Roosevelt�s fingerprint on this plan (curiously, much information prior to the attack is still classified), but there is substantial evidence for this. For example, Admiral Richardson confronted Roosevelt about the vulnerability of the fleet at Pearl Harbor prior to the attack. Roosevelt fired Richardson and replaced him with Admiral Hummel, who Roosevelt later made a scapegoat after the attack occurred. This and other evidence are detailed in the recent book Day of Deceit, by Robert Stinnett.

Morton A. Kaplan, emeritus professor of political science at Chicago University, upon reading Stinnett�s tirelessly documented book, changed his mind after 50 years of supporting the surprise-attack theory. Kaplan, who is also the editor and publisher of the magazine The World and I, wrote that Stinnett�s book provides �massive evidence that Roosevelt intended to goad the Japanese into an overt attack.� (The World and I, October 2000.)

Stinnett�s book has opened many minds on this piece of history, but the overriding issue here is whether we can trust the presidents we elect as our leaders. When Roosevelt and subsequent presidents failed to speak the truth to their citizens they perpetuated a myth that there was a surprise attack and that we were the innocent victims of a monstrous yellow race of fanatics who attacked us without cause. In fact, Roosevelt was goading and luring the Japanese in a number of ways, such as by leading an international blockade of Japan, described in Stinnett�s book.

Why would Roosevelt do this? He surely had a number of motives. One is the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about. When politicians are owned by large industrial corporations, they favor war. We can see the same happening now. Senator Patty Murray quietly attached to a transportation bill a gift of $20 billion for the Pentagon to lease Boeing airplanes that the military never even requested (see �She Loves Pork� Seattle Weekly, Jan 3, 2002).

We must get the living former presidents and the National Security Agency to release all the facts about Pearl Harbor. To this day, the NSA and Naval intelligence will not admit that we broke the Japanese naval code, and that we in fact knew the exact positions of the Japanese fleet as they approached. Stinnett�s book provides overwhelming documentation of this knowledge, including testimony of soldiers who helped plot the location of the Japanese ships.

When Eisenhower was caught red-handed with our secret spy plane over Moscow, he had to confess his lie to the world. It�s time for all our presidents, including our current one, to �fess up� to the world about the Big Lie about Pearl Harbor. We surviving vets owe it to our grandchildren to set the record straight so they won�t be duped like we initially were.

Stinnett and others have fought to pull teeth from the NSA under Ralph Nader�s Freedom Of Information Act. The sunshine they bring fosters democracy. As citizens, we must join together in a groundswell of public opinion to force the remaining lock boxes open.

Cheney and Bush want us to trust them, but already there are facts coming out that indicate both the CIA and FBI had foreknowledge of suicide airplane attack plans in the US (see Seattle Times, Jan. 6, 2002, pA1).

Similar reports came out shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack as well, but were dismissed. How different the world might have been if these reports had been taken more seriously.

Many Americans died in WWII. Now, the death rate of the WWII surviving vets is about 1100 per day (Boston Herald, June 25, 2000). Justice needs to be done now while there are still some survivors and witnesses.

The author resides in Lynnwood, Washington. His cousin John P. M�Keon was killed in combat during WWII. The author encourages you to ask your congresspeople to schedule testimony for surviving witnesses of the Pearl Harbor cover-up, and call on the NSA to release all documents regarding the Pearl Harbor attack.