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Scott interviews co-founder of CODEPINK Medea Benjamin about the antiwar movement and the risks brought about by the war in Ukraine. They start out with a discussion of how the antiwar movement has evolved since the George W. Bush years before digging into the need for off-ramps in the conflict against Russia. Benjamin argues the war fever in Washington is blinding the establishment to the risks and that the war-caused economic turmoil which lies ahead will breed unrest across the globe. 

Discussed on the show:

• “Biden calls the ‘prospect of Armageddon’ the highest since the Cuban missile crisis” (New York Times)
• War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies
• Peace in Ukraine Coalition

Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She is the author of ten books, and writes regularly for The Guardian, The Huffington Post, CommonDreams, Alternet, and The Hill, among others. Find her on Twitter @medeabenjamin.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot.

Charles Goyette, author of The Dollar Meltdown and Red and Blue and Broke All Over, discusses the government’s fiscal cliff; why the proposed “austerity” budget cuts are ludicrously small; how Republicans conveniently forget their own history of profligate spending; the Freedom & Prosperity newsletter; the synchronous decline of all the world’s fiat currencies; why a US economic recovery (if it ever happens) will be accompanied by serious price inflation; and the remarkable resilience of free markets in the absence of government meddling.

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Peter Hart from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) discusses the media hype on Syria’s supposedly imminent use of chemical weapons against the rebels; the prominent journalists who “sold” the Iraq War in 2003 that are attempting to do so again with Syria; and why the NY Times doesn’t think Bradley Manning’s trial is newsworthy.

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Flynt Leverett, author of Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran, discusses why Iran – contrary to popular belief – isn’t a nation composed of suicide-bombers and “Mad Mullahs;” the difficulty of debunking 33 years of anti-Iran propaganda; applying a Nixon-goes-to-China model for US-Iran reconciliation; and the numerous wasted diplomatic opportunities in the Bush and Obama administrations.

Scott Horton Interviews Flynt Levertt December 10, 2012

TRANSCRIPT (not proofed)

SCOTT HORTON:  All right, y’all. Welcome back to the show. I’m Scott Horton. Scotthorton.org is my website. I keep all my interview archives there, more than 2500 of them now going back to 2003, and you’ll find me on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at /scotthortonshow. All right. Next guest is Flynt Leverett. He keeps the website Race for Iran with his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, and he teaches at Penn State and is a fellow at the New America Foundation and formerly was with the CIA and the State Department and the National Security Council, resigned in the Bush years along with Hillary Mann now Leverett over Iran issues. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

 

FLYNT LEVERETT:  Thank you, Scott. Good to be back with you.

 

HORTON:  Well, good. I’m very happy to have you here. And you have this very important piece in Harpers. I hope a lot of people take a look at it. It’s called “The Mad Mullah Myth.”

 

And actually, I think I can be pretty good at playing the Devil’s Advocate on this one and see what you really have to say about it. In fact, I was just reading a book by my favorite, the War Nerd, Gary Brecher, not sure if you ever heard of him, but he has this thing about how the Shiites, man they’re obsessed with martyrdom, and they’re just more than happy to die in human waves without even rifles, running straight at the, you know, machine gun nest or whatever. They’re completely crazy, and that goes for their leaders too, and they’re more than happy to blow up their whole country because they want, who knows, the Twelfth Imam – I don’t think the War Nerd addressed the Twelfth Imam – but anyway, we hear this all the time that, yeah, they’re more than happy to commit suicide. If they can get one nuke off at Israel in order to destroy Israel, even at the cost of their own country, sure of course they would because it’s the end of the world and all this stuff, and also Hitler. And so, how do you debunk that?

 

LEVERETT:  Well, you know, I’m reaching a stage where I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when people who, you know, I don’t think know very much about Shia Islam, don’t know very much about Iran, haven’t spent a lot of time, I would suspect, talking about Shia Islam with people who believe it, live it, think about it.

 

But I would say, just look at the historical record. The Islamic Republic has never used weapons of mass destruction. In its war with Iraq, when the United States among others was supporting Saddam Hussein in an eight-year war of aggression against the new Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini’s own military leaders came to him and said, “We inherited the ability to produce chemical weapons agents from the Shah. We need to do that and weaponize it so that we can respond in kind. We have, you know, tens of thousands of our people, soldiers and civilians, who are being killed in Iraqi chemical weapons attacks. We need to be able to respond in kind.”

 

And Imam Khomeini said no, because this would violate Islamic morality, because it is haram, it is forbidden by God to do this, and the Islamic Republic of Iran will not do this. Both Imam Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Khamenei have said repeatedly over years that the acquisition or use of nuclear weapons would also violate God’s law. Khamenei has said to do it would be a big sin.

 

And, you know, this is not the rhetoric of people, you know, who are out to bring the apocalypse down upon everyone else and themselves. You know, there has never been an Iranian suicide bomber. Never been an Iranian suicide bomber. The most detailed, data-rich, expensive study of suicide terrorism, done by scholars at the University of Chicago and the U.S. Air War College, concluded that there literally has never been an Iranian suicide bomber.

 

HORTON:  You’re referring to Robert A. Pape and his work in Dying to Win and Cutting the Fuse.

 

LEVERETT:  Exactly. Exactly. In Cutting the Fuse. It’s right there. There has never been an Iranian suicide bomber. And so people like to talk about the Islamic Republic as, you know, run by these mad mullahs or, you know, even if the President is a layman, you know, it’s this crazy millenarian Ahmadinejad who just is waiting to get his hands on a nuke so he can turn the whole, you know, 70+ million in Iran into history’s first suicide nation. And there’s just absolutely no historical or even rhetorical support for that line of argument.

 

This is a country that since its revolution has basically been, you know, much, much more concerned about defending itself, defending the Iranian people, consolidating and maintaining its own independence in the face of hostile regional powers and hostile outside powers including most notably the United States.

 

HORTON:  Okay. Well. Lots of stuff there. First of all, I forget if it was Hannah Arendt or one of those who said that all revolutionaries become conservatives the next day after they win.

 

LEVERETT:  (laughs) Well, you know the first task of a revolutionary, once he or she has overthrown the incumbent regime that he’s opposing, the first task is to consolidate power. And that was certainly the case for the Islamic Republic, and the Islamic Republic had to do this when, in fairly short order, as I said, Saddam Hussein launches this eight-year-long war of aggression against it, supported by most of his regional neighbors and supported by the United States. So they’re having to consolidate power while they are also trying to defend the Iranian people against this onslaught.

 

And then if you look at what they did after they come out of this war in 1988, after it’s over and their military has been very, very badly decimated in this war, as has their economy as a whole, they actually divert significant resources away from military spending so that they can focus on postwar reconstruction, on building up a healthcare system, on building up an education system for their people, and if you look at the, you know, outcomes they have produced for Iranians in those areas, considering the baseline that they started from, it is really impressive what they have accomplished.

 

You know today the United States spends 70 times, seven zero times, more on defense than Iran, Saudi Arabia more than four times what Iran spends on defense, Israel spends twice as much on its military as Iran does. Iran today has basically no capability to project large amounts of conventional military force beyond its borders. The idea that Iran is going to come across its borders and, to borrow a phrase from the U.S. Army, park its tanks in somebody else’s front yard, is just – you know, it’s fantasyland.

 

HORTON:  Yeah. They have a long way to go to get to Israel, even though, you know, they have friends from Baghdad to Basra in charge there now thanks to the United States. Still, even to get from there across Jordan into Israel is pretty far without getting bombed off the face of the earth for a column of tanks, I would think.

 

LEVERETT:  Uh, yeah. That’s right. So they are no conventional military threat to their neighbors. They do have a stock of ballistic missiles, conventionally armed ballistic missiles which they have said they would use in response to attacks on them, but they are certainly not the only country in the world that makes that sort of deterrent retaliatory threat as part of its defense posture, and if you’re concerned about those missiles not flying anywhere, you know, I would suggest you don’t attack Iran, and those missiles aren’t going to go anywhere.

 

HORTON:  All right, now. Here’s the thing about all of this stuff is that – and I forget if you touch on this in your article – but it really doesn’t matter what any of the facts are, right? There’s an endless drumbeat of bad things that Iran did. It doesn’t matter that none of them are true. It doesn’t matter that, you know, a million times zero is still zero. They got a million things. And so, where there’s that much smoke, there must be fire. And I think in the popular narrative, “Iran is a terrible danger that must at some point be dealt with,” I think they’ve won, the war party has won on that, and that means it’s just a matter of time. Am I wrong?

 

LEVERETT:  Um, you may be correct. I hope you’re not. And Hillary and I have written the book that Harpers was good enough to print an excerpt from, in no small part because, you know, we want to do everything we can at least to make sure that the war party doesn’t win.

 

Now, you know, it’s a very tall order. The war party, as you describe them, we saw what they are capable of doing in terms of getting us to invade Iraq. They can manufacture intelligence. They can create threats that aren’t there. They can link a country that they don’t like to other threats that Americans are afraid of, like Al Qaeda; even though there’s no link between that country they don’t like and Al Qaeda, they can manage to pull that off. They can tie into very powerful domestic constituencies who can put lots of pressure on Congress, lots of pressure on the mainstream media, and so on.

 

We saw with Iraq what they’re capable of doing, and you’re right, they’re certainly trying to do it with Iran now. Hillary and I saw that inside government during the run-up to the Iraq war. Basically all of the institutions that Americans count on to provide a check on that sort of thing, the Congress, the media, think tanks, public intellectuals – you know with some few and extremely honorable and courageous exceptions, for the most part those institutions tanked. They provided no independent check on the war party.

 

And Hillary and I have written this book, Going to Tehran, as I said, in no small part because at least this time around we want someone to be asking the hard questions and making the kinds of countervailing arguments that should have been asked, should have been made before we invaded Iraq but to a large extent really weren’t put forward.

 

HORTON:  All right, now. I think the first time I ever heard of you, Flynt, and again it’s Flynt Leverett, teaches at Penn State and keeps the blog Race for Iran. The new book, again, is Going to Tehran. The first time I heard of you was in Gareth Porter’s work “Burnt Offering” in The American Prospect –

 

LEVERETT:  Yes.

 

HORTON:  – about what was called then, I think, I forget, this is from the article, but the golden offer, the big deal, right after I think the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Iranians said, “Hey, you know what? Let’s be friends.” Was that really credible?

 

LEVERETT:  Yeah. I mean, it was credible in the sense that the Iranians prepared it and sent it in. I certainly believe it was credible. The only way you could have really confirmed with certainty that it was credible was by testing it, by actually saying, “Okay, we’ve gotten this really interesting looking proposal from the Iranians. Let’s talk with them about it and see if they’re serious, see if they really are prepared to negotiate on this basis.” But the Bush administration, which was in office in the spring of 2003 when that offer came in, the Bush administration, you know, refused even to respond to it, much less to, you know, try and pursue some sort of diplomacy, some sort of negotiation on the basis of it.

 

HORTON:  Well, now, this proposal came from the Ayatollah, right? It wasn’t just something that someone in Iran said. It was Ayatollah saying, “Hey, we could have a deal on the nuclear issue, on our supporting for Hamas and Hezbollah and Lebanon and Palestine, and we’ll work with you on your invasion of Iraq because thanks so much for using Ahmed Chalabi’s information to get yourself into that thing, and – ” I mean, it was really substantive proposal.

 

LEVERETT:  The proposal was prepared and passed to us through Swiss intermediaries by the Iranian foreign ministry. And when the foreign ministry conveyed it, they said that this had been vetted by both, at the time, President Hattami and by the Supreme Leader. And it was, you know, an official proposal. In diplomatic parlance it’s called a “nonpaper” because it doesn’t come in on like official foreign ministry letterhead stationary, but it’s still an official communication, an official proposal. The United States uses nonpapers like this all the time in various kinds of diplomatic channels. You know, it was, by all appearances a serious official proposal, and we should have tested it. We should have responded. But we didn’t.

 

Look, I mean, this is also part of the Mad Mullah myth, that this is a regime, a government that’s too either just ideologically committed to anti-Americanism or too dependent on it for its own domestic legitimacy ever to contemplate improved relations with the United States.

 

But again, just look at the historical record. You know, the historical record is that whenever the United States has reached out to Iran and said, “We need your help with some problem,” whether it’s American hostages in Lebanon, whether it’s getting weapons to Bosnia Muslims when U.S. law prohibited the United States from doing that, whether it’s, you know, help against Al Qaeda and in Afghanistan after 9/11, whenever we have reached out like that to Iran, they have tried to respond positively. They have done much, not everything, but much of what we’ve asked of them in those circumstances, you know, in the hope that this would, you know, lead to an improvement in relations.

 

It’s never worked out, but not because the Iranians didn’t respond. It didn’t work out because we decided, you know, to just pocket their cooperation and then cut it off. They have advanced any number of proposals over the years for a more kind of comprehensive improvement in relations which, you know, we have pretty consistently rebuffed.

 

Their stated position, you know, from Ayatollah Khamenei himself, and it’s been echoed by presidents, by foreign ministers, by other senior officials, their official position is, if the United States is willing to accept the Iranian revolution, accept the Islamic Republic, the product of that revolution, as a legitimate political entity representing legitimate national interests, and to deal with us on that basis, there is no barrier to improved relations between Iran and the United States, and in fact Iran would welcome improved relations on that basis.

 

From the Iranian standpoint, it’s the United States which has never shown itself seriously willing to proceed on that basis. We think relations can only improve after Iran has surrendered to every one of our demands, and then we’ll see if it’s possible, we’ll think about it then, whether we can actually improve relations. That’s never going to work with this – [crosstalk]

 

HORTON:  Well is that meant to work or that’s just, that’s the name of the policy until regime change comes.

 

LEVERETT:  Yeah. Until regime change comes. You know, we tried that for 20 years after the Chinese Revolution with the Peoples Republic of China, and it was an utterly stupid and counterproductive policy that among other things got us bogged down in Vietnam.

 

You know, fortunately, Richard Nixon, you know, for all his other many sins, he did one unqualified great thing in his presidency, and that was the opening to China. He basically said, “This is stupid. It’s hurting the United States. The United States needs to be able to deal with this large, important country in Asia, and, you know, I am going to accept the Peoples Republic as a legitimate entity that has national interests just like we do, and we are going to see if we can’t align enough of those interests to make it possible for these two countries that have been estranged from one another since the Chinese Revolution, if we can actually have a productive relationship.”

 

And it worked. It worked brilliantly.

 

That’s the kind of approach we need to take toward Iran today, toward the Islamic Republic.

 

It’s just like China. I think for 20 years Mao and Zhou Enlai had said, “You know, we’re not, you know, unremittingly unreasonably hostile toward the United States. If the United States is prepared to accept us, accept the revolution that we came from, accept us and deal with us as a legitimate entity representing legitimate national interests, there is no barrier to good relations between the United States and China. We would welcome that. But, you know, you’re not going to be able to bully us around. You’re not going to be able to just make demands of us, and you’re not going to be able to get us to compromise our sovereignty for your, you know, to accommodate your preferences.” And, you know, it took us 20 years, but we figured out how to do that.

 

HORTON:  All right, but so now Barack Obama’s been reelected and he has failed so far to work out any kind of a deal, and I guess as long as the policy is until regime change comes, then they still want to have the nuclear issue as this sort of pseudononissue rather than have an agreement. So, I guess my prediction for the next few years is the status quo forever, right? Is that what you think?

 

LEVERETT:  I am not at all optimistic about what… [crosstalk, inaudible]

 

HORTON:  I mean the outlines of the deal –

 

LEVERETT:  …Obama’s gonna do.

 

HORTON:  It’s pretty obvious what the outlines of the deal are, if they wanted to have a deal, they really could have one, right?

 

LEVERETT:  Yeah! [crosstalk]

 

HORTON:  I mean aside from them not being crazy, I mean, on the particulars of the nuclear issue, there’s enough eye-to-eye there, even, right?

 

LEVERETT:  Look, if you accept that Iran has a legal right to enrich uranium under safeguards on its own territory if it chooses to do so, then everything becomes possible. You could have a deal – [crosstalk]

 

HORTON:  Well, and the Obama administration has even, they’ve sort of accepted that, right? At least implicitly.

 

LEVERETT:  Who’s accepted that?

 

HORTON:  The Obama administration, like their deal was go ahead and enrich to 3.6%, just not 20.

 

LEVERETT:  No! The Obama administration was never prepared to say Iran had a right to enrich at those lower levels. It was prepared to do a kind of narrow deal that would buy it a certain amount of time to figure out maybe what it wanted to do on these bigger issues, but it has never been willing to say Iran has a right to enrich, and in fact I’ve talked to senior administration officials just within the last couple of weeks who tell me that the policy is, there’s no inclination to do that. The policy is still, the goal is to get Iran to suspend uranium enrichment.

 

HORTON:  I thought that they had, by offering the deal that they had offered – not that they ever wanted to follow through on really making the deal, but I thought that they were implicitly saying we would tolerate to 3.6% [crosstalk] – not that they were outright saying it.

 

LEVERETT:  People, people wanted to construe that –

 

HORTON:  Ah.

 

LEVERETT:  – but the Obama administration was never willing to acknowledge that.

 

HORTON:  I see.

 

LEVERETT:  And, you know, a lot of people have wanted to construe it that way, but the Obama administration has never been willing to do that. And if you look at why the Obama administration rejected the deal that Brazil and Turkey brokered with Iran over this issue in May of 2010, you know, Obama administration officials and Dennis Ross, people like that, have said in public, “Oh, we had to reject it because the first point in that deal that the Brazilians and the Turks brokered was it acknowledged Iran’s right to enrich. And we couldn’t have that.”

 

HORTON:  Yeah. Even though Obama had actually asked them to negotiate the deal, right?

 

LEVERETT:  That’s right. That’s right. And they put terms on it which the Brazilians took. They took the letters that Obama had sent to the Brazilian president, the Turkish prime minister. They even showed the Iranians those letters while they were negotiating with them because the Iranians were saying, “You know, are you really sure the United States is going to sign off on this?” And they said, “Oh yes, we have letters from the President of the United States! Look!”

 

But it was really just kind of a cheap trick on Obama’s part. They thought that if the Brazilians and Turks insisted on the conditions in Obama’s letter, the Iranians would never agree, and then when the Brazilians and the Turks failed, they would have to support – they were both members of the Security Council at that time – they’d both have to support any sanctions resolutions. It was just a kind of cheap trick. They thought with these letters, if they stick to them, the Iranians will never say yes. But the Iranians said yes! And then it’s the Obama administration that can’t take yes for an answer.

 

HORTON:  Right. And, I guess somebody might have argued, “Well, that’s just because he had to get reelected and he didn’t want the Republicans to call him a wimp,” because after all Nixon was a Republican, it’s a lot easier for him to go – that’s why he could go to China, right? Because he was Mr. Red Bait Demagogue, and so if he could go and shake hands with Mao, I guess it’s all right. But Obama – you know, they call him Jimmy Carter all day and whatever. He can’t do it. Can he? I don’t know. Does he even want to?

 

LEVERETT:  Well, yeah. I mean, I think he could if he wanted to. I think more important than Richard Nixon being a Republican was that Richard Nixon actually had an accurate assessment of America’s place in the world when he entered the White House, and he had really thought through what that should mean for the United States strategically. And he understood how important it was for the United States. It’s not a favor to the Chinese. He understood how important it is for the United States to open relations with China.

 

And he put every, you know, ounce of political skill, Machiavellian calculation, diplomatic acumen, you know, capacity for secrecy – all of these things, you know, the good and maybe some of the not-so-good things in his political persona – he put all of them into this and achieved this historic breakthrough because he knew it was strategically vital for his country.

 

And, you know, I don’t think the main problem with Obama is that he’s a Democrat. I think the main problem is that he doesn’t really understand where the United States is in the world right now. He doesn’t really have a strategic vision for the United States, and, you know, whatever vision he does have doesn’t, you know, compel him enough, doesn’t matter enough to him that he’s actually willing to spend and risk political capital to realize it.

 

HORTON:  Yeah. He’ll do all – he’ll risk and spend whatever it takes to do the wrong thing, like have a war in Libya, or in Syria, but when it comes to not having a war, he just can’t find it within himself to summon the courage to (laughs) – whatever.

 

LEVERETT:  Yeah. It just doesn’t seem important enough to him.

 

HORTON:  Yep. All right. Well, listen, it’s always great to talk to you. I really appreciate your time on the show, Flynt.

 

LEVERETT:  Thank you, Scott. Good to talk to you.

 

HORTON:  Everybody, that’s Flynt Leverett, he teaches at Penn State, teaches foreign relations there at Penn State. He’s got this piece in Harpers with his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, it’s called “The Mad Mullah Myth.” It’s in the latest issue of Harpers, and it’s an excerpt from their new book, which I’m sorry I forgot to say this at the beginning, called Going to Tehran. And please keep up with their great blog, Race for Iran at raceforiran.com.

 

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Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation discusses the “individualist collectivism” in a real free market system; reasons that good-faith liberals should be receptive to libertarian-style economics; why profit isn’t necessarily theft from labor; the “sources of privilege” enabling corporate protectionism; and the pros and cons of inflation.

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Robert Stinnett, author of Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, discusses the evidence that FDR provoked the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor (8-point plan), had forewarning that the attack was coming (radio intercepts, code-breaking), and willingly sacrificed thousands of sailors to get isolationist America into WWII.

Transcript

Scott Horton: All right, y’all. Welcome back to the show. I’m Scott Horton, and our next guest is Robert Stinnett from The Independent Institute at independent.org and author of Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. Welcome back to the show, Bob. How are you doing?

Robert Stinnett: Thank you, and thank you for inviting me.

Scott Horton: Well, you’re welcome, and I appreciate you joining us very much today on Pearl Harbor Day 2012 here. So, if I remember the story right, sir, in 1995 the U.S. Senate held more hearings, as they had numerous times in the past, on the Pearl Harbor attack and on possible prior knowledge and deliberate blind eye turning by the Roosevelt administration December 7, 1941, and then as I remember the story being told in your book, Day of Deceit, they didn’t quite get to it because it was only when the Freedom of Information Act, your Freedom of Information Act lawsuits finally came through, that the last of the necessary documents were revealed that prove that the Roosevelt administration had deliberately provoked the attack and deliberately turned a blind eye to it, and that’s what Day of Deceit is. You wrote a book around the documents that prove that case for all time. Is that correct?

Robert Stinnett: Yeah, that is correct, though it was a joint congressional investigation in 1995, and they did not go into any of this information.

Scott Horton: Okay, and now how did you get interested in this case? Because I think you said before on this show, or actually I should have said in your bio that you’re a veteran of the Navy in the Pacific in WW II. In fact, you’re also a biographer of George Bush Senior and his World War II years, and so with that background in mind, could you please tell us how you got interested in the attack at Pearl Harbor in the first place?

Robert Stinnett: Yes, I was in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in World War II and we had never been told about breaking the Japanese naval code by the U.S. Navy and I first learned about it in 1982 when I read the book At Dawn We Slept and they mentioned a U.S. Navy monitor station at Pearl Harbor that was listening in on the Japanese messages prior to Pearl Harbor. And I thought that would make a good story for my newspaper I was working on at the time, the Oakland Tribune, and they agreed, and I went over to Honolulu while advanced with the U.S. Navy, and they let me into this station. And there I met cryptographers who told me about their operation and told me where I would find the corroborating documents, which started [me] on my search for about 30 years.

Scott Horton: All right. And then I had always heard as a child, or the way that the story had been explained to me, that they had the diplomatic, they had broken the diplomatic codes and so they knew what all the civilian parts, quote unquote civilian parts, I guess, of the Japanese Imperial government were saying to each other, but that the navy had just kept this radio silence and they successfully snuck across the Pacific Ocean, halfway across it, and, hey, they just got us good. You know, these things happen.

Robert Stinnett: Yes. That is the story that was instructed, it had started in right after December 7th claiming that the Japanese Hawaii force was on radio silence. But there was this monitor station in Honolulu called Station HYPO that was listening into the station and getting radio direction finders, locations, as it moved across the North Pacific. And that’s what I was able to find and which I talk about in my book, Day of Deceit.

Scott Horton: Okay, now, well — yeah, we got to break this into pieces, and I wish I had found my old notes from back when I read the book the first time, but it’s been quite a few years now. But there are a few different things here. I guess I want to rewind a little bit to before the actual attack, and it’s a really intriguing part of the story to me. My friend Anthony Gregory, who is a fellow there of course at The Independent Institute, recounted to me an anecdote that, as you had told it to him, that this McCollum memo, which is so important in your book, about the months preceding the attack, that you had just kind of found it at random in the files that had been released to you. It was not in any logical place, and in fact maybe it was even sticking out a little bit to be found. Is that about right?

Robert Stinnett: Yes, that’s right. At the National Archives in Washington, I had filed a Freedom of Information Act to see the intercept questions and all of the advance intelligence on Pearl Harbor, and I discovered this, it was a U.S. Navy document calling for the United States to aim eight provocations at Japan that they said would, that the author said would cause Japan ‘to commit an overt act of war’ against the United States. So President Roosevelt adopted that on October 8th, 1940. This was 14 months before Pearl Harbor. And he implemented the eight provocations starting early in 1941 and aimed them all at Japan including sending U.S. cruiser divisions into Japanese territorial waters, and that really ticked off the Japanese.

Scott Horton: Mmhmm. All right, now, I was hoping that you could take us through this list. I think there’s what, eight or nine different provocations, and, you know, because, you know, you might have been in the Navy back then, Mr. Stinnett, but I wasn’t born till the ‘70s and all this stuff that happened back when all the footage was black and white, it just seems so far away, you know? And so I was hoping that you could kind of, you know, make it real, you know, to the people, what it was like at that time and what it really meant to implement these, as you call them, provocations.

Robert Stinnett: Yes, you’re right, and I’m happy to do that. There were eight provocations. Several of them were to embargo the selling or delivery of oil supplies to Japan, also natural resources such as tin and other types of metals that they could use for their war machine, and then one was to send U.S. cruisers into Japanese territorial waters, that I mentioned earlier, and that was done at various times in both in the spring and summer of [1941]. And then also the main thing was to keep the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor as a lure to Japan, and the admiral in charge at the time this was adopted, he objected to President Roosevelt’s order and met him in the Oval Office and had a knock-down drag-out […] with the president telling him that the U.S. Navy has no confidence in his orders, so he was fired after that and put in — and Admiral Kimmel took over the job of commander of the Pacific Fleet. And then on July, the end of July 1941, President Roosevelt ordered the last of the provocations, which was a complete embargo of all war-making materials to Japan. And that really started them on the way, getting ready for war.

Scott Horton: Mmhmm. And then, so that really does kind of change the context. I mean, I guess in one sense you could, I could imagine that the argument at the time was that, well, hey, what the Japanese empire is doing is so horrible we shouldn’t sell them steel anymore to make these boats, especially if the theory was we’re going to end up at war with them anyway, but it’s a different context altogether when you’re saying that the reason that they did this wasn’t any morality about, you know, what the Japanese were doing in Korea or China or something, it was about trying to provoke them into feeling like they had no choice but to commit an overt act of war against us, to make a like a Hail Mary pass, try to sink as much of our fleet as possible on the first shot in a war that they saw as absolutely inevitable at that point, and we were trying to make them see it as inevitable rather than our guys were seeing it as inevitable, that’s what you’re saying here.

Robert Stinnett: Yes, that is correct, and that was President Roosevelt’s intention. It was mainly a back door to war. He really wanted to get at Germany, because Japan really was not the enemy that Germany was because they [Germany] had the huge war-making powers. So Japan and Italy and Germany, just a few days before this October 8th meeting, had signed a mutual pact that they’d come to one another’s defense if they got into a war situation. And that was on September 27th, 1940, and so the Navy made this plan to lure Japan to attack us and then that would bring us into war with Germany. And you see at the time there was a major isolation movement in this country led by leaders such as Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly the Atlantic alone, there was Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company, the Hearst newspapers and others that didn’t want to get involved in Europe’s war, and then Gold Star Mothers were picketing Congress, so this overt act of war was to end this isolation movement in this country, which by the way was favored by 80% of American people according to the Gallup poll at the time.

Scott Horton: Mmhmm. Well, and I think this is an important part of the show to stop and point out that you are not a crusty old Roosevelt-hating right-winger, but actually you agreed with the policy, that this had to be done to get the American people, that 80-something-percent majority were wrong, you say.

Robert Stinnett: Well, that’s right. I believe that this was the only option that President Roosevelt had because as the original Navy memo delivered to him said, that if we don’t do something, put these eight provocations in place, that Germany, which was bombing and getting ready to invade England at the time — that was in October 1940, that the German forces would invade and conquer England, seize the British navy, merge it with the Nazi navy, and then come over here and take over Canada, Bermuda and English possessions in the Caribbean, and at the time we did not have a navy that could fight them. So Roosevelt wanted […] or opposed to war, that’s what he saw as the only way to get in, get in at Germany.

Scott Horton: All right, now, I was hoping you could make the case here that this McCollum memo, which sure looks incriminating, actually meant anything to Roosevelt or the Secretary of War or anybody who was in charge of making the decisions here, because this guy McCollum after all was just a lowly intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy, right? How can you be so certain that his memo actually became the policy?

Robert Stinnett: Well, Commander McCollum was head of the Far East desk of the Office of Naval Intelligence. He was the man that it all passed through involving Japan and China and the Southeast Asia countries. So he was a top-notch man of getting orders, suggesting them to higher authority, and that’s what happened. His memo was written on October 7th. It moved fast and went to the office of the chief of Naval Intelligence, who gave it to Roosevelt, and he adopted that on October the 8th and then started war preparations from that time on.

Scott Horton: And they really just kind of went down the list implementing these policies.

Robert Stinnett: Yes. It’s all documented there in my book, and it’s amazing, when I found that this was all true, it was very difficult for me to believe that a president of the United States could do this type of thing, but he wanted to end — this is the only way he saw to end the isolation movement and really stop Germany in its tracks.

Scott Horton: Mmhmm. All right, now, tell me about J. Edgar Hoover’s role in this, because if I remember your book correctly, sir, he had agents in Hawaii who knew good and well that there were Japanese spies scoping out Pearl Harbor and taking notes.

Robert Stinnett: Yes.

Scott Horton: So how was he unable to make something happen there?

Robert Stinnett: Yes, that is right. After President Roosevelt’s first provocations were in place, Japan read what was happening. They sent a Japanese ensign to Honolulu. He was a lone spy, and he was attached to the consulate there and then spied on the Pacific Fleet and prepared bomb plots for the Hawaii, Japan’s Hawaii force. And all the time he was being surveilled by the FBI and Navy Intelligence. So they were getting his messages that he was sending to Tokyo, and Tokyo’s back, so they knew what he was up to. But they kept all this quiet. And then on December, the first of December, Tokyo asked him to give a military assessment of American preparations, asked are there really barrage balloons up over Pearl Harbor, and then where are the warships located? So on December 6th in the morning, the spy sent back from Honolulu to Tokyo saying that there are no barrage balloons up over Pearl Harbor and it’s all clear for a surprise attack on these places. And we intercepted that, so we knew what was going to happen, but it was never delivered to Admiral Kimmel until after the attack. So it was held up because really the cryptographic officer believed that the only way to save this country was to get an overt act of war that would unite the country and end the isolation movement.

Scott Horton: Can you connect — I also learned as a child that it was a lucky coincidence, a really lucky one, that all the modern aircraft carriers were out to sea that day and it was just the junky old World War I boats that got sank, of course with the people on them, but can you connect directly the decision to keep the best ships out at sea with the setup here for the blind eye?

Robert Stinnett: Yes. As soon as the Navy’s, U.S. Navy’s radio direction finders had located the Japanese carriers in the North Pacific, they decided to move all the modern warships out of Pearl Harbor. And that included carriers and their task forces, which included cruisers and the support ships. So there was about 25 of those modern ships were removed, ostensibly to deliver about a dozen aircraft to Wake Island and also to Midway Island, but actually these ships that were sent out, one did deliver to Wake but the other just sort of sailed around and didn’t go to Midway Island.

But — so what was left were old World War I vessels that could only go 18 knots, and these were the battleships that were sunk in Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor.

But see they couldn’t keep up with carriers to be a part of a carrier task force. You have to be able to go 36 knots. So these battleships were really worthless. But at the time, the battleships were the stars of the fleet. Most people didn’t realize that carriers were the new offense of all the navies of the world.

Scott Horton: Wow. And then, so now, what about the commanders at Pearl Harbor that morning? Were they just blind, deaf and dumb to this? Or they were in on it? Or how could it be that they didn’t have a chance to scramble any planes in defense? They didn’t shoot down — did they shoot down any of the Japanese Zeroes bombing them all morning? I mean, this was a complete disaster. How in on it were they, if at all?

Robert Stinnett: Well, you see, when the radio direction finders of our Navy located the Japanese carrier force in the North Pacific, it was dispatched, the information was sent immediately to Washington D.C. and arrived there on November 26th, and so President Roosevelt then acknowledged that and told the Hawaiian commanders and also the Philippine commanders to, the exact word was that the U.S. desires that Japan commit the first overt act. And so let them fire the first shot, but remain in a defensive position, don’t go into the offense. So that gave, that was an order from the Commander in Chief of the United States Navy, President Roosevelt. So they followed those orders, even though on the morning of December 7th when the Japanese, 300 of their aircraft were spotted by radar, nothing was done because they were following the orders of the president to stand aside and let Japan commit the first overt act. So they had a perfect alibi, but they were made the scapegoats because all of this information was withheld from the public.

Scott Horton: Yeah. And now, but at the time, well, and Roosevelt already had a hell of a lot of enemies by 1941, and many of them weren’t hesitant to accuse him of this — how widespread was the theory at the time that Roosevelt had deliberately allowed this to happen?

Robert Stinnett: Well, there was a professor of history at Yale University had written a book suggesting that Roosevelt had set up Hawaii for this attack, but he had no documentation and people believed that it was a surprise attack, that the Japanese were on radio silence, and we knew nothing about our tracking the Japanese fleet in the North Pacific because they wanted all that to be secret. It would be very harmful to President Roosevelt’s political life and the Navy if this came out. But once we got the Freedom of Information Act going, I was able to get this information. But it didn’t happen until after 1982.

Scott Horton: All right. Well, thank you so much for your time on the show today. It’s great to talk to you again.

Robert Stinnett: Thank you. I’m glad to be with you.

Scott Horton: Everybody, that is Robert Stinnett, author of Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. And you can find an article by him at antiwar.com called ‘The Pearl Harbor Deception,’ and you can find a blog entry at antiwar.com by me from a few years back called ‘Day of Deceit.’ You just google ‘Day of Deceit,’ that’ll come right up on the first page of returns there, and that has some links including to this thing The Independent Institute — it’s not a very readable address, but it’s the Pearl Harbor archive at independent.org, so just search site independent.org for the Pearl Harbor archive, and there are many, many links to all the proof you need, the McCollum memo and all the rest of it. And get the book. It’s a great book. It’s a very readable book, and then you will know for sure that it’s true.

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