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.” Nottrue! I have informally asked more than a hundred fellow WWII vets inthe area, and not one believes that then-president Franklin D.Roosevelt was surprised by the Japanese military. A formal pollconducted by the Global Peace Task Force found that 80 percent ofsurviving WWII vets do not believe there was a surprise attack on thatday.

This information may seem unreal to younger people who have beenraised on movies and documentaries that look only at the attack, notthe months of political maneuvering preceding it. Granted, the attackitself was a surprise to most of the soldiers and commanders at PearlHarbor, and to most of the American public. But for Roosevelt andcohorts, it was practically a date in their planner.

Vets know this because vets remember that in polls prior to December7, 1941, a large majority of the American public were against enteringthe war unless the US was attacked first by Germany or Japan (detailedhistory on this is in the book The New Dealers’ War by ThomasFleming). After all, Americans had fought in WWI and no one couldexplain why many of them died “over there.”

In order to get elected in 1940, Roosevelt went around the countrypromising repeatedly that he would never “get your boys into a foreignwar.” He won on that promise. Then Roosevelt adopted a plan of luringthe Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. No “smoking gun” documenthas 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, AdmiralRichardson confronted Roosevelt about the vulnerability of the fleetat Pearl Harbor prior to the attack. Roosevelt fired Richardson andreplaced him with Admiral Hummel, who Roosevelt later made a scapegoatafter the attack occurred. This and other evidence are detailed in therecent book Day of Deceit, by Robert Stinnett.

Morton A. Kaplan, emeritus professor of political science at ChicagoUniversity, upon reading Stinnett’s tirelessly documented book,changed his mind after 50 years of supporting the surprise-attacktheory. Kaplan, who is also the editor and publisher of the magazineThe World and I, wrote that Stinnett’s book provides “massiveevidence that Roosevelt intended to goad the Japanese into an overtattack.” (The World and I, October 2000.)

Stinnett’s book has opened many minds on this piece of history, butthe overriding issue here is whether we can trust the presidents weelect as our leaders. When Roosevelt and subsequent presidents failedto speak the truth to their citizens they perpetuated a myth thatthere was a surprise attack and that we were the innocent victims of amonstrous yellow race of fanatics who attacked us without cause. Infact, Roosevelt was goading and luring the Japanese in a number ofways, such as by leading an international blockade of Japan, describedin Stinnett’s book.

Why would Roosevelt do this? He surely had a number of motives. One isthe military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about. Whenpoliticians are owned by large industrial corporations, they favorwar. We can see the same happening now. Senator Patty Murray quietlyattached to a transportation bill a gift of $20 billion for thePentagon to lease Boeing airplanes that the military never evenrequested (see “She Loves Pork” Seattle Weekly, Jan 3,2002).

We must get the living former presidents and the National SecurityAgency to release all the facts about Pearl Harbor. To this day, theNSA and Naval intelligence will not admit that we broke the Japanesenaval code, and that we in fact knew the exact positions of theJapanese fleet as they approached. Stinnett’s book providesoverwhelming documentation of this knowledge, including testimony ofsoldiers who helped plot the location of the Japanese ships.

When Eisenhower was caught red-handed with our secret spy plane overMoscow, he had to confess his lie to the world. It’s time for all ourpresidents, including our current one, to “fess up” to the world aboutthe Big Lie about Pearl Harbor. We surviving vets owe it to ourgrandchildren to set the record straight so they won’t be duped likewe initially were.

Stinnett and others have fought to pull teeth from the NSA under RalphNader’s Freedom Of Information Act. The sunshine they bring fostersdemocracy. As citizens, we must join together in a groundswell ofpublic opinion to force the remaining lock boxes open.

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

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

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

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