George Noory has a guest on tonight talking about Pearl Harbor putting forth the views that what happened on December 7, 1941 was not a “sneak attack”, but rather FDR setting a trap to influence public opinion to finally win permission to enter the War already raging in Europe for several years. Americans were painfully aware of the cost of getting involved in wars in Europe after Woodrow Wilson pushed the country into World War One, which was wildly unpopular and led to his ouster in 1920.
The guest made a number of assertions that most people didn’t learn in government run school – the first rule of history is that the victors in war write the narrative. In 1941, Hawaii was not a state – it was an occupied territory growing pineapples and useful as a base for the U.S. Navy to project force in the Pacific. The U.S. was already on a war footing, gearing up production of armaments and training large numbers of pilots. The U.S. had taken sides in the war between Japan and China and was actively blocking access to oil in 1941 and had frozen Japanese assets in he United States.
The Phillipines were also territories held by the United States against the wishes of the people. The U.S. took control of the islands after defeating Spain in the Spanish American war – in which the U.S. also took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam. The Phillipines would be crucial to any bombing campaign against Japan and Japan understood that, which is why the 35 recently deployed B-40 bombers were destroyed on the ground in the Phillipines on December 8th. They weren’t there to help find lost fishing boats.
So Pearl Harbor was not “unprovoked” nor unexpected. People who say that the U.S. has never engaged in imperialism just don’t know history – like the 250,000 Filipinos who died in concentration camps for resisting American occupation, and the US infrastructure to monitor and eliminate dissent in the Phillipines that has morphed into today’s NSA.
So that’s potentially useful and interesting information – but then the guest went on to throw a gratuitous “connection” between the Dole pineapple company in Hawaii and former Vice President Bob Dole. There is none. While the man who established the pineapple business was named Dole, Robert Dole of Kansas is not related to James Dole, the founder of the Hawaian Pineapple Company. James Dole was a progressive who did things like shared his canning machine technology with his competitors.
http://www.dole.com/Company-Info/Timeline
Such a blatant error puts everything else under serious suspicion. If you want to believe in conspiracies, facts can be annoying things.
The guest also asserted that FDR knew the attack was coming because we had broken the Japanese Naval Code. That’s also wrong. We broke that code only in 1942 just before the battle of Midway. We knew Japan’s Navy was sending lots of messages, but not what they meant.
https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_history/pearl_harbor_review/jn25.shtml
What we had broken was the diplomatic code, which is how we knew why the ambassador of Japan was visiting with FDR and the embassy had been ordered to destroy most of its cryptographic equipment.