12/08/14 – Robert Stinnett – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
The 8th of December.
Can you believe it?
Already.
2014.
That means yesterday was Pearl Harbor Day.
I try every year, if I can, almost every year.
I interviewed the great Robert Stinnett, author of Day of Deceit, the truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor, which was published in 1999, and finally made the case that many had long suspected, including John T. Flynn, going way back to the very beginning, that the government of Washington, D.C. knew a lot more than they let on about the oncoming Pearl Harbor attack and turned a blind eye, really deliberately provoked it, and then turned a blind eye and allowed the attack to take place.
Again, the book is Day of Deceit, and you can find tons of source material and background and research and interviews and all sorts of expanded materials at independent.org.
That's the website of the Independent Institute where Mr. Stinnett is a fellow.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
Thank you.
Glad to be here.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
So let's start, as we always do, with your time in the U.S. Navy.
Yes, I was in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1946.
I was attached to the Pacific Fleet in the Pacific.
So where were you, say, at the end of the war?
Were you to be part of the invasion force of Japan or something like that?
No, I was ship's company on the aircraft carrier San Jacinto, and we were part of the offensive arm of the Pacific Fleet.
After the Japanese surrendered, or were about to surrender, our ship was sent back to Alameda, California.
We'd been out for about two years.
Oh, I see.
Okay, right.
So now we fast forward to, I believe, the very early 1980s, correct?
And then you were, I guess someone drew your interest back to the story of the attack at Pearl Harbor.
How is that?
Yeah, that's right.
I had read a book called At Dawn We Slept.
It said that the U.S. Navy had a monitoring station that was intercepting the Japanese Navy's instructions to all their warships, and I thought that would be a good 1982 article on Pearl Harbor Day.
And I worked for the Oakland Tribune at that time, and the editor agreed, and he sent me over to Honolulu to see what this intercept station was all about.
And so we were the first American newspaper or media to be admitted to this intercept station.
The Japanese company had done it about a month before.
I met the cryptographers at that time, and they told me how they were intercepting the Japanese naval information that was broadcast on the Japanese Morse code.
And now, I guess the story had always been that, well, yes, they'd broken the diplomatic codes, but the diplomats weren't in the loop on the attack, and so that was it.
But so what you were finding out then in the 1980s was incredibly shocking, that they had this entire separate source of information on military communications that they had always lied and said never existed even up to that day, right?
Yes, that is correct.
That was the first I had heard about breaking the Japanese military code, the Japanese Navy's military code.
And then, so now, it took you a long time to get the book together.
Did you start writing it way back then, and you just had to wait to get all the proper documents?
Well, you know, I believed our story that it was a surprise attack.
So this was a major new development, and so I wanted to check it out.
And my editor sent me over to Pearl Harbor, and I filed a Freedom of Information Act with the Navy, and they opened up the quarters of the building that still existed, but it had a different use.
But while I was there, I met some of the cryptographers, and they told me where I would be able to find other information, which I did.
But it took five or six years before I actually was able to substantiate all the information.
All right.
Now, I know it's terribly unfair to do this in a format like this, but is there a way that you can briefly sum up what exactly it was that they knew and pretended not to know?
And by they, I mean Washington, D.C., and the leadership.
Right.
Well, the main thing is we had broken the Japanese naval code.
We had already admitted to breaking the diplomatic code, but this was the orders that went out to the Japanese Navy warships, and that was a major break.
And that's what I confirmed.
And I'm the only author that interviewed the codebreakers themselves.
There's about 3,700 Pearl Harbor books, and the authors never attempted to interview the codebreakers.
I was the only one.
All right.
Can you tell us, please, sir, about the McCollum Memo?
Yeah.
One of the things that I found was that in using the Freedom of Information Act, which is a federal law that the Navy or the military has to respond to anybody filing an FOIA.
And I did file that in 1983 and was able to see the records.
It took about eight years before I was able to confirm that we had broken the code and we were monitoring the Japanese messages and using radio direction finders to locate the warships that were in the North Atlantic heading from Japan along 40 degrees north latitude really towards Hawaii.
And it included the Pearl Harbor Task Force as well as submarines.
And then I was able to get an interview with the Navy codebreakers, and the whole story came together, and I published the book in 1999.
Right.
And again, the book, everyone, is Day of Deceit, the truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor.
And I guess I want to get back to McCollum and the eight-point plan in a minute here.
But I guess just real quickly here before we have to go out to this break, you write in the book, and we've spoken about this before, are you still of the opinion that it was the right thing for FDR to do this in order to get the American people to support the war?
I think it's an important point to make because people think, oh, well, he's just some old right-wing crank who doesn't like FDR kind of thing.
But that's not the point of view that you're coming from here, correct?
Oh, no.
I had to verify everything that McCollum said in this memo, and it took me a year to do that.
And then I was convinced that we were monitoring and intercepting the Japanese naval messages.
Okay.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Robert Stinnett, author of Day of Deceit, the truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor.
Hang tight right there.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with historian Robert Stinnett from the Independent Institute at Independent.org.
Check out their Pearl Harbor resources page there and a lot of other great material.
Stinnett is the author of the book Day of Deceit.
The truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor came out in 1999 and proves the case for the deliberate provocation and then the turning of the blind eye to the impending attack at Pearl Harbor by the FDR administration in order to get us into a war in Europe, the war in Europe, I guess I should say.
Now, can you tell us very briefly here, sir, who was this naval officer McCollum?
What do you know about him?
He was a graduate of the Naval Academy.
He was born to Baptist ministers in Nagasaki, so he learned to speak Japanese before he learned English.
He was the one that provided the idea of the overt act of war to get Japan to commit it so it would allow Roosevelt and the United States Navy to go after Germany, which they were trying to do away with the isolation movement of 1940, Scott.
And the idea was to get Japan to attack us at Pearl Harbor and thus unite Americans.
And that's what happened.
And as you say, McCollum, he was a real expert because he had been born and raised in Japan and he understood very well, and I guess as he explained in his memo, he understood their culture very well and I guess he thought he had a pretty good read on the military leaders as well.
And basically the plan, the eight-point plan, if I count the letters right here, is meant to make the Japanese feel like they're completely backed into the corner and they have absolutely no choice but to wage what George Bush would call a preemptive strike against the American Navy before they lose their access to oil forever, that kind of thing.
Yes, absolutely right.
And you see, American parents were sick and tired of war and more World War I.
And so that's why they did not want to send their sons in another war.
And so the opposition was unique.
Eighty percent of the public did not want to go into war.
But with the sneak attack, it changed everything.
And people, the young man joined the Navy on December 8, 1941, as a result of what they figured was an outrage.
And I did also.
That's why I joined the Navy.
Yeah, that was certainly the end of the argument for getting into the war, no doubt about that.
And now it could be pointed out here as well that this eight-point plan, this Arthur McCollum memo, this is no joke.
These points are things like give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek and their war against Japan.
Convince our European allies to embargo the Japanese from all oil and steel trade in the Mideast, in the Far East there and in the Indies, from their colonial possessions.
And they create a serious economic war and even a shooting war, in a sense, on the Chinese end, in order to provoke Japan into making this, as they call it, overt act.
That's right.
And President Roosevelt sent the United States naval cruisers into Japanese territorial waters to tick off the Japanese nationalistic ideas.
And then another very interesting part of your story is the, at least one Japanese spy, the way I remember, it's been a little while since I read the book, but there was this Japanese spy who was very conspicuous there in Hawaii and the FBI was on his case from the very beginning.
J.
Edgar Hoover knew all about this guy and that he was scouting out Pearl Harbor, basically picking targets, right?
Yes, that's right.
He was a lone Japanese spy.
He was a graduate of the Japanese Naval Academy and he was assigned to the Japanese consulate in Honolulu.
But his main thing was to spy on the Pacific fleet, prepare bomb plot messages, and keep America advised of what, or keep Japan advised of where the locations of the Japanese fleet or the American fleet was in Hawaii.
I'm interested, sir, whether very many of the members of the mainstream academic historical type FDR, you know, court historian community, whether any of them have been honest enough to go ahead and come over to your camp after the evidence that you've laid out in this book, or do they all just stick their fingers in their ears and scream la, la, la really loud?
President Eisenhower warned America of the military industrial complex that backed all of this overactive war plan, and most authors believe all that.
But you've got to get it straight for the code breakers.
Nobody did that.
Nobody went to Hawaii to see the intercept stations.
There were not only in Hawaii, but the Pacific Coast.
And I did that, and that's what convinced me that I had the right information.
Sure.
Well, and this is in your book and all over, too.
This has been quoted multiple times that it's even in the diary of the Secretary of War, Stimson, that our only goal was figuring out how to maneuver them into firing the first shot and make them pretend to be the victims.
That's exactly right.
And your listeners can see a memo in my book that tells exactly what he proposed to President Roosevelt, and President Roosevelt adopted it in October 1940, which is about a year before Pearl Harbor.
And, in fact, if you guys will Google up Day of Deceit, I have a blog entry at antiwar.com from 2005 that has links to all of this stuff, including a link, which I just checked, still works, to the McCullough memo.
You can see it online, which, by all means, buy the man's book.
I'm not saying that.
But you can look at the McCullough memo right now and just look for the items marked A through H, the eight-point plan, how to provoke, or whatever it was, I forget, I think eight-point plan, how to provoke Japan into attacking us so that we can pretend to be on the defensive in this thing.
It's really an incredible document.
And not just the list, but also the entire memo and the context of it and everything.
It's really incredible stuff.
I will thank you very much again for coming back on the show, Mr. Stinnett.
It's very important work and very well done.
I'm delighted to talk to your listeners.
All right, Joe.
That is Robert Stinnett.
The book is Day of Deceit, the truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor.
We'll be right back.
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