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. ;-)
So there are books out there which look at this, they just don't get much press because there is not an interest why these conspiracies exist, just the conspiracy itself.
If I, for example, was to do a scholarly book and the Pearl Harbor attack, it probably wouldn't sell very well since it would not sensationalize the event. It would just show the fact that there were screw-ups all the way up the chain of command along with some serious flaws in the system for sharing information in general.
There are two seminar papers I will be writing this spring which both may be a chapter in just such a book, but would probably be better served as publications in military history, or political science journals.