Replies

1. The controversy isn’t settled: witness nine Congressional hearings.
2. Substantial circumstantial evidence suggests FDR knew Japanese were closing on Hawaii. FDR needed an attack to turn antiwar sentiment polled at 80%.
3. Whether or not FDR knew is irrelevant; like a Mafia don, one only needs to make his wishes know. The underlings do the dirty work; the don stays clean.
4. Secret documents released in 1995 included an Oct. 7, 1940 memo by Lt. Cmdr. A. H. McCollum that posited eight steps the U.S. could take to bait the Japanese to attack us (not necessarily at Pearl Harbor). All eight actions were executed.
5. British intelligence broke the Japanese Naval code JN-25 and shared it with us.
6. The codes were passed by Adm. Burnett to Washington, but denied all.
7. Over 16,000 Japanese naval messages were intercepted—not the last 400 miles.
8. FDR knew Japanese had studied Pearl Harbor defenses and equipment.
9. The Japan Fleet was observed making an easterly departure from Japan.
10. The Navy banned all merchant shipping from the North Pacific on Nov. 25, 1941.
11. Radio vector equipment in the Aleutians plotted it progress across the Pacific.
12. The Navy evacuated two carriers and newer ships from Pearl Harbor to Wake Is.
13. The Navy cancelled plans to send a third carrier from California to Hawaii.
14. Warnings of imminent attack were withheld from our Hawaiian command.
15. The U.S. denied that Japanese broke radio silence, and ordered all intercepted messages destroyed. Orders to destroy were found in New Zealand archives.
16. A naval historian testified in 1991 that US had received the messages.
17. Congress exonerated Kimmel and Short of dereliction of duty in 1995.
18. Clinton, while president, restored Kimmel and Short to their highest rank.
19. FDR, by his actions, may have saved lives by entering WWII earlier.
20. People have a hard time accepting duplicity, but democracies need crises to act.

Every one of these has been blown out of the water numerous times, most recently by Phil Jacobsen. The FDR haters need to give it a rest. He had real policies that can be criticized.

It's the kind of "evidence" listed above that gives us "Bush flew planes into the WTC." Utter bogus nonsense.

Clearly, LS thinks he's a genius, but I think he's an idiot, and so have ONLY here tried to make the SIMPLE point: that FDR & company knew ENOUGH to have provided Kimmel and Short with a much clearer warning than they received.

OESY, I'd call your remarks "state of the art" level thinking, but it's a long series of steps from where LS is today, to what serious scholars have now concluded.

That journey begins with a simpler understanding -- that Kimmel and Short were, in effect, crucified for just doing exactly what they were expected to do, imho of course.