Toland's claims are widely refuted, respectable historian or not, scholars agree that he is off the reservation with this one. Victor tends to source Stinnett so all we have here is repeating bad information. Coleman sources no one apparently making it completely useless.
As far as asking you to produce corroborating information. All people like LS and myself are doing is trying to keep you from spreading bad information to others. I've shown you time and time again the flaws in Stinnett's method and conclusions, but you still continue to produce him as a source of information on Pearl Harbor. By challenging you to find something to back up Stinnett's claim I'm trying to encourage you, much as a teacher will encourage his student, to look for more reliable sources of information.
It's not a case of the history scholar asking the "history buff" to do his leg work. It's the history scholar trying to make the "history buff" a better student of history.
And I marvel at how enthusiastically such normally conservative and skeptical FReepers defend the godfather of modern Liberalism, that most wily of leftist American politicians, Franklin Roosevelt.
Final thought since I found this statement interesting. So are you saying that because F.D.R. is a liberal, then we should support what are unsubstantiated and probably false accusations against the man? In my experience, that is very liberal thinking.
There's a lot of criticism I can heap on F.D.R. and you will see a lot of it when we get further in this project. But I will not just willy nilly back wild accusations against the man just because he's a liberal. Doing that devalues my own agruements against actions and positions by F.D.R. which are real and had serious consequences.
Here's my point: in a legal proceeding, if a witness is discredited -- found to be lying -- on one point, a judge will instruct the jury that it may disregard that witness on everything he or she claimed.
And that is the standard being applied here, I think.
But if you truly applied such a standard to all of history, we'd have virtually no history at all, just a bunch unsubstantiated myths.
So what real historians have to do is go through the data point by point, and evaluate how reliable is each item, separate out the wheat from the chaff, and then build their narrative on those points which hold up under scrutiny.
For an example of how it should work, just consider the "9/11 truthers'" claims.
No sooner had they published their nonsense than many different groups set to work debunking them with science, witnesses and records.
So today there is no virtually "truther" claim out there that I can't easily find the facts and argument against it.
The same is also true of Holocaust deniers -- the Internet is full of sites taking on the deniers point-by-point.
So my point here is, so far as I know, no real historian has ever published a book which takes each one of the "conspiracy nuts'" claims and answers them item-by-item.
And as with 9/11 "truthers" and Holocaust deniers, I think there's a genuine need for such detailed analysis concerning Pearl Harbor "conspiracy nuts".
Because otherwise, I'm just not convinced they are entirely nuts. ;-)