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Did the Cold War End So that the War on Terror Could Begin?

Did the Cold War End So that the War on Terror Could Begin?

Did the Cold War End So that the War on Terror Could Begin?

By James Perloff | Red Pill Reports

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. This marked the beginning of glasnost and the end of the Cold War. Communism, we were soon told, was no longer a threat.

Did the Cold War End So that the War on Terror Could Begin?

Portrait Of Ronald Reagan & Mikhail Gorbachev

PeaceMakers

Many of us regarded the mysterious transition with skepticism. Why would communism, which had slain some 100 million people1 during is ruthless conquest of half the planet, suddenly don a smiley-face, introduce freedoms, and abandon its sworn goal of world domination?

Mainstream media alleged the Soviet Union fell apart because, under Ronald Reagan, the U.S. successfully tested an anti-ballistic missile, demonstrating our capacity to put up the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). If implemented, this system, nicknamed “Star Wars,” could have repelled a missile attack. The USSR allegedly collapsed because it couldn’t meet the cost of competing with SDI.

This explanation didn’t hold much water, however. As I document in Truth Is a Lonely Warrior (pp. 113-15), by 1985 the Soviet had achieved a decisive lead over the United States in virtually every category of nuclear and conventional weapon. Furthermore, Congress, then controlled by Ted Kennedy and the Democrats, vigorously opposed SDI. They were only willing to fund research, not deployment. Why would the Soviets cave in over such an improbable threat?

New Lies for OldSkepticism was bolstered by discovery of Anatoliy Golitsyn’s remarkable book New Lies for Old. Golitsyn, the highest-ranking KGB officer to defect during the Cold War, had predicted glasnost with stunning accuracy five years before it started. He forecast everything from the rise of a Gorbachev-like leader to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Furthermore, he stated that the liberalization would only be a temporary deception. Ultimately, he said, “all the totalitarian features familiar from the early stages of the Soviet revolution and the postwar Stalinist years in Eastern Europe might be expected to reappear.”2

Nevertheless, over time it became clear that the changes to communist nations were more genuine and durable than skeptics had anticipated. For example, although China remains statist, its economy has undeniably been overhauled and significantly Westernized since the days of Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolution.

However, with the disappearance of Communism as “the enemy,” a new one almost immediately emerged: Islamic terrorist threats. In 1985, Gorbachev came to power. Just one year later, 1986, Reagan launched air strikes on Libya, the first round in what would be a growing, never-ending conflict with the Muslim states of MENA (Middle East and North Africa).

In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 republics. That same year, Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, oversaw the First Gulf War, America’s first land war in the Middle East. Since 9/11, the United States has been involved in so many wars, in so many Middle East regions, that they’ve become hard to keep track of.

Nearly all Truthers today know that 9-11 was a false flag. What is less widely known is that Reagan’s air strikes on Libya were also predicated on a false flag.

In 1986, U.S. soldiers were frequenting a Berlin discotheque called La Belle. On April 5, a bomb tore through it, killing two American servicemen and wounding well over 50 others. U.S. intelligence then intercepted radio messages, originating in Libya, that congratulated alleged perpetrators of the crime. President Reagan sent bombers which struck Libya. The adopted daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was killed in those raids. This was the first blood drawn in what the Reagan administration then called “war against terrorism,” meaning that America would punish not just terrorists, but any nation it believed guilty of sponsoring terrorism. (Based on this definition, the United States could have declared war on Israel several times, going back to the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty, if we define that incident as terrorism.)

La BelleOstrovsky
Victor Ostrovsky is a former agent of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. In his book The Other Side of Deception, Ostrovsky revealed that the Mossad originated the radio signals from Libya, completely deceiving U.S. intelligence:

A Trojan was a special communication device that could be planted by naval commandos deep inside enemy territory. The device would act as a relay station for misleading transmissions made by the disinformation unit in the Mossad, called LAP [LohAma Psicologit – psychological warfare], and intended to be received by American and British listening stations. Originating from an IDF navy ship out at sea, the prerecorded digital transmissions could be picked up only by the Trojan. The device would then rebroadcast the transmission on another frequency, one used for official business in the enemy country, at which point the transmission would finally be picked up by American ears in Britain.

The listeners would have no doubt they had intercepted a genuine communication, hence the name Trojan, reminiscent of the mythical Trojan horse. Further, the content of the messages, once deciphered, would confirm information from other intelligence sources, namely the Mossad. The only catch was that the Trojan itself would have to be located as close as possible to the normal origin of such transmissions, because of the sophisticated methods of triangulation the Americans and others would use to verify the source.3

After detailing how the Mossad succeeded in planting a Trojan in a Tripoli apartment in 1986, Ostrovsky describes the results:

By the end of March, the Americans were already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan, which was only activated during heavy communication traffic hours. Using the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world . . . . As the Mossad had hoped, the transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and construed as ample proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of terrorism. What’s more, the Americans pointed out, Mossad reports confirmed it. . . .

Heads of the Mossad were counting on the American promise to retaliate with vengeance against any country that could be proven to support terrorism. The Trojan gave the Americans the proof they needed. . . .

Ultimately, the Americans fell for the Mossad ploy head over heels, dragging the British and the Germans somewhat reluctantly in with them. Operation Trojan was one of the Mossad’s greatest successes. It brought about the air strike on Libya that President Reagan had promised . . . . 4

Glaspie meets Hussein

Likewise, the 1991 Gulf War was contrived though deceptions. First, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie deceived Saddam Hussein by assuring him that the United States was indifferent to his conflict with Kuwait. Glaspie has been muzzled ever since. And when polls showed the American public divided on the prospect of the war, a story was fabricated about Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators:

Each of America’s Middle East wars has been based on false pretexts. The 14-year-old war on Afghanistan was predicated on 9/11, the false flag which spurred the nationwide Truth Movement, populated by responsible groups such as Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

The War in Iraq was based on falsified claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell, Bush’s Secretary of State, who made such definite assertions of WMDs before the UN, has admitted his claims were based on faulty intelligence. Well before the UN speech, Scott Ritter, the UN’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq, had confirmed that Saddam had no WMDs:

Perhaps most pathetic was George Bush joking about the missing WMDs while American soldiers were dying in Iraq:

Watch Reg Keys, father of a serviceman who died in Iraq, take down Tony Blair for misleading Britons on this matter:

In 2011, NATO attacked Libya on the pretext of supporting a “popular democratic uprising against a dictator.”

Libya bombing

In fact, Gaddafi had turned Libya into the most prosperous nation in MENA, and had proposed a gold-backed currency for Africa, which was apparently the last straw for the banksters. The “popular uprising” consisted largely of mercenaries sent in by foreign intelligence services. For truth about Libya, I suggest this short article and this one, and the following video:

In 2013, it was Assad’s turn to get hit. The U.S. government claimed the Syrian leader had used chemical weapons on his own people. This seemed unbelievable since UN weapons inspectors had just arrived in Syria at Assad’s invitation. Many believed it was the Western-backed insurgents themselves who wielded the weapons as a yet another “false flag,” a view thought credible by Ron PaulPat Buchanan, and other responsible observers. Obama was unable to procure support for air strikes on Syria from a war-weary American public.

So it was back to the drawing board. In 2014, in a brazen paradox, the Obama administration sought air strikes on Syria again – this time not against Assad, but upon the very “rebels” the U.S. had backed the year before! Uploaded beheading videos proved more effective in garnering support than the previous year’s “chemical weapons” dud.

Watch as General Wesley Clark reveals that in 2001, a plan already existed in the Pentagon to “take out” seven MENA nations, including Iraq, Libya and Syria:

Buchanan

These same intentions were discussed by syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan (above), who was the Reform Party’s Presidential candidate in 2000. He wrote in 2004:

In 1996, in a strategy paper crafted for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser urged him to “focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power” as an “Israeli strategic objective.” Perle, Feith, Wurmser were all on Bush’s foreign policy team on 9-11.

In 1998, eight members of Bush’s future team, including Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, wrote President Clinton urging upon him a strategy that “should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein.”

On Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9-11, Wurmser called for U.S.-Israeli attacks “to broaden the [Middle East] conflict to strike fatally . . . the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Teheran and Gaza . . . to establish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal.”

“Crises can be opportunities,” added Wurmser.

On Sept. 11, opportunity struck.5

Clearly, an entrenched plan already existed, long ago, to attack the nations of the Middle East. To justify each of these attacks in the public’s view, false flags would be necessary. Thus 9/11, “weapons of mass destruction,” “chemical weapons attacks,” viral beheading videos, and, yes, the Charlie Hebdo incident:

What has all this to do with glasnost? As many students of realpolitik know, the Bolshevik Revolution, which created the Soviet Union, was financed by the same Rothschild-centered banking cabal that runs our world today. This support continued even during the Cold War through trade, financing, and technology transfers.  I will not elaborate all the details here, but for those who wish to learn more, see my article on this blog, chapter 9 of Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, and such books as Juri Lina’s Under the Sign of the Scorpion (now available in an updated 2014 edition), Antony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, and Joseph Finder’s Red Carpet. What the banksters turned on, they could also turn off.

As many students of realpolitik also know, the cabal has supported a three-headed hydra of “isms”: globalism, communism and Zionism. Globalism expresses their ultimate goal of a tyrannical world government; communism, posing as a movement of “the people,” used revolution to overthrow governments to make way for that world government; and Zionism is the plot to create the seat of this government in Jerusalem – a city holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Need I mention that this plot is satanic?

Given the degree of design and planning that has gone into all of this, I make a radical suggestion: that the timing of the ostensible end of communism, coinciding with the beginning of America’s “war on terror,” was not by chance. Communism was being given a back seat to Zionism. To throw the entire weight of the American military machine against all of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East, Americans had to be persuaded that the threat of communism no longer existed. This, I believe, is the most probable solution to the riddle of glasnost.

NOTES

  1. Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4.
  2. Anatoliy Golitsyn, New Lies for Old (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1984), 347.
  3. Victor Ostrovsky, The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad’s Secret Agenda (New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1994), 143-44.
  4. Ibid., 146-48.
  5. Patrick J. Buchanan, “Have the Neocons Killed a Presidency?” WorldNetDaily, February 16, 2004, www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37139.
Posted by Red Pill Reports in Learn, War
The American Revolution, Part I: The Secrets Buried at Lexington Green

The American Revolution, Part I: The Secrets Buried at Lexington Green

The American Revolution, Part I: The Secrets Buried at Lexington Green

By James Perloff | Red Pill Reports

The American Revolution, Part I: The Secrets Buried at Lexington Green

Who Really Fired “The Shot Heard Round The World”?

FOREWORD: I do not expect this two-part article to be very popular among American patriots, many of whom are my dear friends. They are among the core of America’s best citizens; men and women who fight to protect constitutional liberties from the police state, and to preserve U.S. national sovereignty from the tyranny of world government.

The following article raises questions about the American Revolution, which many patriots regard as the foundation of their beliefs. It can be dangerous to shake a good man’s foundation – even if the foundation is flawed – because it might cause him to question his worldview, and weaken his resolve. However, no historical event should be held so sacred as to be immune to examination. Our country is in too much trouble to make truth secondary.

Many patriots say the solution to our problems is to return to the “principles of the Founding Fathers.” I strongly agree with this view in part; I certainly believe in limited government and the Bill of Rights, and that these fundamental doctrines have been eroded to the point of national peril. However, I also believe that much of the trouble actually traces to America’s founding. Despite ubiquitous descriptions of the Founding Fathers as Christians, revolutions are – with rare exceptions – contrary to Biblical doctrine. In Part II, we will explore this issue, and the revolution itself in depth. Right now, we focus on the flashpoint that ignited the war between Britain and her American colonies.


I grew up mostly in Lexington, Mass., where the famed “shot heard round the world” was fired. On my way home from high school each day, I would pass Lexington Green, where colonial militia had assembled on the morning of April 19, 1775, and encountered a force of British redcoats who were on their way to neighboring Concord to confiscate armaments. Shots rang out; eight militiamen died; nine were wounded; the Revolutionary War had begun. The redcoats suffered only one minor wound and continued to Concord, where they found fewer munitions than expected. They spent the rest of the day being routed by superior numbers of militia, on a long and bloody retreat back to their garrison in the city of Boston.

As I walked home, I would pass still-standing Buckman’s Tavern, where the militia had assembled before the battle; and continuing my trek up Hancock Street, would pass the Hancock-Clarke House, another historic site. It was here that Samuel Adams and John Hancock – leaders of the revolution in Massachusetts – had been staying the night before the battle. Paul Revere stopped there to see them on his famous “Midnight Ride.”

These historic matters were hardly on my mind at the time. However many years later, having written widely on political affairs, I took my son on a tour of historic Lexington at his request, and questions began troubling me.

Who fired the first shot has been controversial for over two centuries. Was it the British or Americans? Each side accused the other.

A patriotic friend of mine, who publicly lectures on the battle in a tricorn hat, told me, “Jim, the Americans would never have fired first. You’ve got 80 militia facing 700 British regulars. It would have been suicidal.”

“I see your point,” I said, “but it also seems to me that British troops, under tight discipline, would not have fired without provocation. It’s not like they were on a mission to start battles that day.”

So who did fire the “shot heard round the world”? The answer is important, because that shot ignited the American Revolution, which in turned engendered the world’s most powerful nation. I believe the answer was a dark secret, buried with the dead that April morning.

The Amazing Changing Lexington Portrayals

I direct the reader to the battle’s first artistic depiction, the engraving rendered by Amos Doolittle in the fall of 1775, just a few months after the event.

doolittle

Note that all the militiamen are retreating or casualties. Not one colonist is firing his gun or even loading.

Next we have the lithograph produced by William S. Pendleton in about 1830:

pendleton

While a number of militiamen are retreating, some are now shooting.

Next comes Hammatt Billings’s rendering of 1868:

billings

Here very few men retreat; most are engaged.

And finally we have “The Dawn of Liberty,” painted by Henry Sandham in 1886:

sandham

Every man is now standing his ground.

Note the transition from Picture 1 to Picture 4 – from 100 percent retreat to 100 percent defiance. The credit for discovering this revealing sequence goes not to me, but to historian Harold Murdock, who expounded on it nearly a century ago. While the casual observer might dismiss these changes as artistic license or patriotic pride, the truth about Lexington’s “Picture of Dorian Gray” runs much deeper.

Doolittle’s 1775 picture very accurately represented how Massachusetts rebels wanted the event portrayed at that time. Here is how the newspaper Massachusetts Spy reported it in an article widely reprinted throughout the colonies:

Americans! forever bear in mind the BATTLE of LEXINGTON! where British Troops, unmolested and unprovoked wantonly, and in a most inhuman manner fired upon and killed a number of our countrymen . . . It is noticed they fired upon our people as they were dispersing, agreeable to their command, and that we did not even return the fire. Eight of our men were killed and nine wounded; The troops then laughed, and damned the Yankees.

As you can see, the article denied that the militia fired any shots. This accords with the official report authorized by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, A Narrative, of the Excursion and Ravages of the King’s Troops. It contained the depositions of many Lexington militiamen. All stated the king’s troops began firing on them. Not one deponent expressly admitted to firing a shot, even in retaliation, though they did not deny firing retaliatory shots.

It also agrees with the account by William Heath, the brigadier general who took overall command of the militias as they pursued the redcoats back to Boston. In his postwar memoirs, Heath described the British shooting at the Lexington militia, but made no mention of return fire.1

So, what changed perception of the event? In 1824, as the revolution’s 50th anniversary was approaching, politician Samuel Hoar was giving a public address in Concord. The aging Marquis de Lafayette (who had been a general in the Revolution) was there; Hoar told him he was standing where “the first forcible resistance” to the British occurred. Concord residents affirmed that their town should be credited with firing, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would later phrase it, “the shot heard round the world.” After all, nothing on the official record indicated the Lexington militia had discharged even one round.

This prompted outrage in Lexington, whose denizens insisted the honor belonged to them. And to prove their case, they obtained depositions from 10 aged veterans and witnesses of the battle on Lexington Green. In a stunning variance from the original sworn statements, all deponents now vigorously insisted that the militia fired upon the British, though still claiming the redcoats began hostilities.

This inter-town debate raged for years, and was said to be symbolized in our annual Thanksgiving Day football game, played between Lexington and Concord high schools. Virtually all historians today concede that the Lexington militia fired; the controversy now is over who fired first. The Americans said it was the British; the British said the Americans.

Americans or British?

Though it may offend some U.S. patriots, I agree with Derek W. Beck, American author of the forthcoming book 1775, who concedes that the British reports were more credible. Why?

• The British freely admitted shooting first at the subsequent battle of Concord. Why would they tell the truth about Concord, but lie about Lexington?
• British soldiers said the Americans fired first in their personal diaries, which were not intended for publication. Why would the British lie to themselves in their diaries?
• As we have seen, in 1825 the Lexington militiamen amended the story given in their original 1775 depositions. This shows they were guided by political exigencies of the day, weakening their credibility.

But why would a militia force commence hostilities when outnumbered ten to one? The solution to this mystery requires understanding the historical context.

Freemasonry

Freemasonry deserves mention. In the late 18th century, two bloody anti-royalist revolutions erupted. One, of course, was the French Revolution. Few would deny Freemasonry played a major role in it. This was not only documented by contemporary writers such as Augustin Barruel in Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinsm (1797) and John Robison in Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798), but by Bonnet, orator of the Convent of the Grand Orient Lodge of France, who later declared:

During the 18th century the glorious line of the Encyclopedistes found in our temples a fervent audience, which, alone at that period, invoked the radiant motto, still unknown to the people, of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” The revolutionary seed germinated rapidly in that select company. Our illustrious brother masons d’Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, d’Holbach, Voltaire and Condorcet, completed the evolution of people’s minds and prepared the way for a new age. And when the Bastille fell, freemasonry had the supreme honor to present to humanity the charter which it had friendly elaborated. . . . On August 25, 1789, the Constituent Assembly, of which more than 300 members were masons, finally adopted, almost word for word, such as it had been for long elaborated in the lodges, the text of the immortal declaration of the Rights of Man. At that decisive hour for civilization, French masonry was the universal conscience . . . .2

Of course, many have noted a distinction between Grand Orient Masonry, practiced on the European continent, and Scottish Rite Masonry, practiced in Great Britain and North America, which they consider more benign. Nonetheless, it is difficult to deny Freemasonic components to the American Revolution.

Paul Revere was dispatched on his famous ride from Boston by Joseph Warren. Warren also sent a second rider, William Dawes, whom history has never glamorized like Revere. Revere and Dawes took different routes and both arrived at the Lexington house where John Hancock was staying. What history books usually omit is that Joseph Warren was Grand Master of St. Andrew’s Lodge in Boston; and that Revere, Dawes and Hancock were all members of that same Lodge. Thus the entire circuit of Revere’s ride, from beginning to end, consisted of Freemasons bound to oaths of secrecy. So we could reasonably ask if there was something to the ride beyond what history reports.

After the war, Revere became Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, which probably did not impair his subsequent rise to historic glory.

green-dragon-tavern

Above: Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern, headquarters of both the Sons of Liberty and St. Andrew’s Lodge

Many other Freemasons were involved in the Revolution. Benjamin Franklin served not only as Grand Master of Pennsylvania, but Grand Master of the Nine Sisters Lodge in Paris, as well belonging to Britain’s satanic Hellfire Club.

Nearly half the generals in the Continental Army were Freemasons – most famously, of course, George Washington, who was later sworn in as President by Robert Livingston, Grand Master of New York’s Grand Lodge.

If you visit Lexington today, at the National Heritage Museum you will see a statue of George Washington donning his Masonic apron. Not surprising, since the museum is run by the Freemasons (its legal name is Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, Inc.). In fact, the entire Northern Masonic Jurisdiction of the United States has its headquarters in Lexington. I do not believe this location was selected by chance.

None of this imputes anything sinister to the vast majority of Freemasons in America today. But it is difficult to dismiss, as coincidental, the influence of Freemasonry on these two revolutions that exploded just a few years apart on separate continents.

Brewers of Revolution

But by far the most important insights into Lexington’s secrets derive from examining the two men who Paul Revere rode to meet there – Samuel Adams and John Hancock.

When most Americans hear “Founding Fathers,” they typically think of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and Hamilton. John Hancock is usually remembered only for his extra-large signature on the Declaration of Independence. If an Adams is recalled, it is John Adams, second President of the United States, rather than his second cousin Sam, whom most Americans today identify only as a figure on beer labels.

But Americans of the colonial era would be surprised to learn that Sam Adams has faded into semi-oblivion. Thomas Jefferson said “he was truly the Man of the Revolution.” When he died, the Boston press called him “Father of the American Revolution.” Indeed, the revolution was in many respects a “Massachusetts event” – here was the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the battle that started the war. Sam Adams was entangled in them all.

sam-adams1

During the French and Indian War (1754-1763), colonists and British troops had fought on the same side. Samuel Adams, who biographer John Miller called “pioneer in propaganda,” was instrumental in abruptly changing Americans’ perception of British soldiers from “good guys” to “bad guys.”

Britain’s national debt had nearly doubled by the long war’s end, and Parliament felt the burden of paying it off should not be borne by British taxpayers alone, but by the colonists as well, especially since they were the main beneficiaries of the war’s victorious outcome. The result was the Sugar Act of 1764, which placed a tax on molasses of three pennies per gallon.

Sam Adams, a member of the Massachusetts state legislature, was the most outspoken opponent of the Act. Widely quoted in newspapers and pamphlets, he declared:

For if our Trade may be taxed, why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & everything we possess or make use of?. . . If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?3

This established two patterns to Adams’s rhetoric: (1) amplify a perceived wrong far beyond its actual boundaries – i.e., if you gave the king a penny today, tomorrow he would demand a pound; (2) equate British taxation policies with images of slavery.

The Sugar Act was repealed, but it was Britain’s next revenue measures – the Stamp Act of 1765 (repealed in 1766) and the Townshend Acts of 1767 – that catapulted Adams to power. (The Stamp Act would have placed tax on many documents, such as contracts, licenses, diplomas and newspapers, each to require a revenue stamp; the Townshend Acts placed duties on various imports from Britain.) These measures were protested throughout the colonies, but nowhere more violently than Boston. As historian William H. Hallahan notes:

Samuel Adams was gathering and organizing a collection of waterfront mobs who were controlled by his lieutenant, Will Molineaux, a draper; and on occasion even by Paul Revere. Henceforth, Boston was controlled by a “trained mob” glorified by its title: the Sons of Liberty. Sam Adams was its keeper. Adams fashioned another powerful revolutionary tool when he helped spread Sons of Liberty organizations elsewhere in the colonies, where they could be orchestrated into mobs for demonstrations, intimidation, and street violence coordinated with events in Boston.4

Adams became Boston’s political boss, running the city in an early Tammany style. Even before town meetings took place, Adams and his cronies would pre-select candidates at Adams’s private smoke-filled “Boston Caucus” room; votes were often bought at the price of a few tavern drinks, and his thugs ensured control of town meetings at Boston’s Faneuil Hall.

During this rise, Adams recruited the most important ally of his political life: John Hancock.

hancock1

Both men came from prosperous families. But while Sam Adams turned all his father’s businesses – including a malt house for brewers – into ruins, Hancock became the wealthiest man in Massachusetts, primarily through smuggling operations. A peerless fop, Hancock rode about in a gilded carriage he had specially built in England. Before the revolution began, he even had tailors make him a collection of ornate military costumes he imagined he would wear as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. When this distinction instead went to George Washington, he bore a grudge that festered for years. Although his extra-large signature on the Declaration of Independence has been popularly ascribed to courageous defiance, it might also be seen as characteristic of his overbearing vanity.

Adams recruited Hancock to be financial angel of the revolution in Massachusetts. Playing to his ego, he allowed Hancock to take the most publicly prominent positions, but there was no doubt that Adams, the back-room intriguer, was the revolutionary mastermind. He soon brought political enemies to heel.

Andrew Oliver, who had been designated distributor of stamps in Boston, was hung in effigy by a mob, had his office vandalized and his home stoned. Adams then forced him to publicly resign before a mob on Boston Common.

Adams learned that terror tactics could be employed to intimidate elected officials as well – by filling the legislature’s gallery with hundreds of his “Mohawks” (Sons of Liberty) and posting the names of legislators considered Tories (British loyalists) on Boston Common’s “Liberty Tree.”

John Mein, who began Boston’s first circulating library, ran an opposition newspaper called the Boston Chronicle. While Adams was forcing Boston merchants to boycott British goods – at great loss to themselves – Mein published ships’ manifests proving that certain traders, including John Hancock, were secretly continuing profitable trade with Britain. A mob then ransacked Mein’s office, and he was attacked on the street by twenty thugs armed with clubs and spades. Orders were handed down for Mein’s arrest, and Sam Adams personally assisted in searching for him. Mein successfully escaped the city, but freedom of the press departed with him.

boston-chronicle

Home after home of “Tories” were set upon by Adams’s mobs at night. Before undertaking their tasks, they would first get “liquored up“ in Boston’s taverns (making it not inappropriate that Sam Adams is now immortalized on beer bottles). Summoned by bells, whistles, and a horn, the mobs would pour out of the taverns, and descend on the houses of their designated victims, first giving Mohawk “war whoops,” then terrorizing the families and ransacking their homes.

Looting became a “patriotic” act. Destroying the ledger books of creditors was not overlooked. Many loyalists were stripped naked and made victims of the gruesome act of tarring and feathering.

But Adams went too far when he singled out Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Adams roused passions by falsely proclaiming the Stamp Act had been Hutchinson’s brainchild. This was a glaring slander – the Massachusetts-born Hutchinson had opposed the Stamp Act. This mattered little to the drunken mob of some 500 that descended on the lieutenant governor’s house on the night of August 26, 1765. Hutchinson and his family barely escaped with their lives. The mob set upon the house for the entire night, breaking the windows, destroying the walls and furniture with axes, stealing all clothing, silverware and money, obliterating Hutchinson’s library (which contained priceless books and manuscripts) and even pulling down the house’s cupola.

hutchinson-house

The specter of Hutchinson’s destroyed home sparked an outcry in Massachusetts – Deacon Timothy Pickering, Sr. of Salem later compared the mob to the one that surrounded Lot’s house in the Bible. Throughout the colonies, shame fell on Boston. As a result, Adams was forced to publicly criticize the incident, but he blamed it on “vagabond strangers.”

Eight of the perpetrators were arrested in Boston, but another mob simply broke into the jail and freed them. They were never brought to trial.

Hutchinson minced no words about Sam Adams: “I doubt whether there is a greater Incendiary in the King’s dominions or a man of greater malignity of heart, or who less scruples any measure ever so criminal to accomplish his purposes; and I think I do him no injustice when I suppose he wishes the destruction of every Friend to Government in America.”5

In the manner of Orwellian Newspeak, Sam Adams espoused “liberty” while destroying it; he denounced “tyranny” while establishing it. Liberty is meaningless when granted only to people agreeing with those in power. Edward Bacon, the state legislator from Barnstable, Mass. – where an elderly widow named Abigail Freeman was tarred and feathered by a gang of young thugs for expressing “Tory” opinions – said he preferred the master 3,000 miles away to the one in Boston.6

By 1768, under Adams’s tutelage, Boston had become a bedlam of mob rule and violence. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and justice were perishing. At this juncture, British troops were sent to Boston to restore order. One Captain Evelyn would later write to his father, a clergyman in England: “Our arrival has in a great degree restored that liberty they [loyalists] have been so long deprived of, even liberty of speech and security to their persons and property, which has for years past been at the mercy of a most villainous mob.”7

Adams immediately sought to expel these troops. He began circulating to other colonies a “Journal of Events” which alleged that British soldiers were regularly beating small boys and raping the city’s virtuous maidens. Adams did not publish the “Journal” in Massachusetts, where its contents were known to be untrue; but other parts of the continent were easy prey for his atrocity tales. Francis Bernard, governor of Massachusetts, said of Adams’s journal that, even “if the Devil himself” had taken a hand, “there would not have been got together a greater collection of impudent virulent & Seditious Lies, Perversions of Truth & Misrepresentations than are to be found in this Publication.”8 In their own defense, the British soldiers said it would hardly be necessary to resort to rape in a city already so teeming with women of easy virtue.

Adams’s Sons of Liberty began picking fights with redcoats in Boston taverns. One of the trademark quotes of Sam Adams’s career was: “Put your enemy in the wrong, and keep him so, is a wise maxim in politics, as well as in war.” With this principle in mind, Adams sought to generate a catalytic incident – one that would be prelude to Lexington Green.

The Boston “Massacre”

On March 5, 1770, citizens of Boston found handbills posted around the city which read:

this is to inform ye Rebellious People in Boston, that ye Soldiers in ye 14th and 29th Regiments are determend to Joine together and Defend themselves against all who Shall opose them

Signed ye soldiers of ye 14th and 29th Regiments

If, in fact, the redcoats had planned violence against Boston’s citizens, it seems odd that they would broadcast their intentions in advance. Nonetheless, the handbill was used to stir passions among Bostonians.

That evening, summoned by bells, a huge mob, many armed with clubs and staves, descended on King Street. They surrounded the lone sentry on duty near the customs house, taunting him and pelting him with chunks of ice. The sentry called for help. Captain Thomas Preston, officer of the watch at the nearby barracks, came to the sentry’s rescue with seven soldiers. As the bells continued tolling, the crowd grew to some three or four hundred. They closed in on the nine soldiers, hurling rocks, ice and snowballs, and daring them with chants of “Fire!” for they knew the redcoats had orders not to shoot at citizens. As the crowd surrounded the soldiers, they began striking them, and hitting the muzzles of their guns, with cudgels. One soldier, knocked to the ground by a blow from a club, and hearing the word “Fire!” amid the chaos, jumped to his feet and shot at his assailants. Other soldiers fired as well. When it was over, three of the mob lay dead; two were mortally wounded.

The next morning, Sam Adams delivered a fiery speech, and appointed himself and John Hancock heads of a committee that demanded immediate removal of all British troops from Boston. Propaganda went full tilt. Adams’s lieutenant Paul Revere swiftly produced a widely reproduced print of the “massacre” (five deaths being a somewhat hyperbolic use of that term).

revere-print1

It has been noted that Revere’s print included numerous misrepresentations, the most distinct its depiction of the shooting as an orderly volley, given on an officer’s command, suggesting it was a premeditated expression of official British policy. Adams’s committee, which also included Joseph Warren – Grand Master of Boston’s Freemasons – and mob leader William Molineux, ordered publication of A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston. It contained dozens of collected depositions, depicting the incident as unprovoked wanton murder. Reading them, one is impressed that there was hardly a citizen of Boston who was not molested by Captain Preston and his men that night. The depositions read as though written by a seedy playwright of maudlin melodramas. Perhaps Adams had discovered that depositions, like votes and rioters, could be bought with a few tavern drinks (and possibly with Masonic countersigns, for anyone who considered an oath to the brotherhood to outweigh an oath to tell the truth).

Two samples:

Deposition number 31:

I, Nathaniel Appleton, of lawful age, testify, that on Monday evening the 5th instant . . . I went to my front door and saw several persons passing up and down the street, I asked what was the matter? was informed that the soldiers at Murray’s barrack were quarrelling with the inhabitants. Standing there a few minutes, I saw a number of soldiers, about 12 or 15, as near as I could judge, come down from the southward, running towards the said barrack with drawn cutlasses, and appeared to be passing by, but on seeing me in company with Deacon Marsh at my door, they turned out of their course and rushed upon us with uplifted weapons, without our speaking or doing the least thing to provoke them, with the utmost difficulty we escaped a stroke by retreating and closing the door upon them. I further declare, that at that time my son, a lad about 12 years old, was abroad on an errand, and soon came home and told me that he was met by a number of soldiers with cutlasses in their hands, one of which attempting to strike him, the child begg’d for his life, saying, pray soldier save my life, on which the soldier reply’d, No damn you, I will kill you all, and smote him with his cutlass, which glanced down along his arm and knocked him to the ground where they left him, after the soldiers had all passed, the child arose and came home, having happily received no other damage than a bruise on the arm.

Deposition No. 66:

I, John Wilson of lawful age testify, that on monday evening the 5th current, I . . . heard the bells ring and . . . I asked what was the matter? The people said the soldiers had insulted the inhabitants . . . . Then I came down King street opposite the custom-house, and saw a man with a light color’d surtout coming from the main guard go up to the centry, and lay his hand on his shoulder and speak some words to the centry, and then enter the custom-house door. On this the centry grounded the breech of his gun, took out a cartridge, primed and loaded, and shoulder’d his firelock. After this I drew back opposite Mr. Stone’s, & in a few minutes saw a party of soldiers headed by an officer coming down from the main guard, crying to the inhabitants, Damn you, make way you boogers! I not moving from my place was struck by one of them on the hip with the butt of his musquet, which bruised me so much that it was next day very sore, and much discoloured. The officer seeing the soldier strike me said to the soldier in an angry manner why don’t you prick the boogers? The party drew up before the custom-house door, and ranged to the west corner in a half circle, and charged their pieces breast high. Some small boys coming up made a noise to the soldiers, on which the officer said to them why don’t you fire? Damn you, fire! They hereupon fired, and two men fell dead in my sight.9

These depositions portrayed the soldiers “Adams style” – cowards who beat children, who shot without provocation, their conduct motivated by officers. (Note the claims of having received bruises, which fade away and, unlike wounds, leave no scar that could corroborate injury.)

The soldiers were tried for murder, and Sam Adams expected that, with a jury stacked with his “Mohawks,” he would soon see redcoats swinging from gallows on Boston Common. But the defense was led by Sam’s second cousin John – the future President – who, despite threats against himself, did a creditable job. He saw to it that the jurors came from outside Boston, and 38 witnesses testified that there had been a plot that night to attack the redcoats. The prosecution did not even enter into evidence the threatening handbill alleged to have been written by the soldiers.

The most crushing blow for Sam Adams came with the deathbed confession of one of the two mortally wounded men – Patrick Carr. Carr said the soldiers had been provoked into shooting; that they had shown far greater restraint than the British soldiers Carr had seen facing mobs in his native Ireland; and he forgave the soldier who shot him, as he had pulled the trigger in self-defense.

Outraged, Sam Adams publicly denounced Carr’s confession. Playing to the prejudices of the day, he said it should be disregarded because Carr was a “Papist.”10

The jury acquitted all but two of the soldiers, who were convicted of manslaughter. No redcoats swung from the gallows. Sam’s cousin John – tactfully without naming names – remarked of the incident: “I suspected that this was the explosion which had been intentionally wrought up by designing men who knew what they were aiming at, better than the instruments employed.”11

The verdict stung Sam Adams, but taught him lessons that would prove useful. And he continued to play the massacre for all it was worth. As the master of melodramatic propaganda, it is believed he had a great hand in writing John Hancock’s torrid Boston Massacre fourth-anniversary oration, of which here is a small sampling. Bear in mind these words were being spoken more than three years after a Massachusetts jury rejected the murder charges brought against the troops:

But I forbear, and come reluctantly to the transactions of that dismal night . . . when Satan, with his chosen band, opened the sluices of New England’s blood, and sacrilegiously polluted our land with the dead bodies of her guiltless sons! Let this sad tale of death never be told without a tear . . . let every parent tell the shameful story to his listening children until tears of pity glisten in their eyes, and boiling passions shake their tender frames . . . let all America join in one common prayer to heaven that the inhuman, unprovoked murders of the fifth of March, 1770 . . . executed by the cruel hand of Preston and his sanguinary coadjutors, may ever stand in history without a parallel. . . . And though the murderers may escape the just resentment of an enraged people; though drowsy justice . . . still nods upon her rotten seat . . . . Ye dark designing knaves, ye murderers, parricides! how dare you tread upon the earth which has drunk in the blood of slaughtered innocents, shed by your wicked hands?

The Boston Tea Party

As it did with the Sugar Act, England had repealed the Stamp Act (from which it never collected one penny) in response to colonial protests.

In 1766, a frustrated Parliament, still seeking a practical means of raising revenues from the colonies, summoned Benjamin Franklin, the leading representative of American interests in Britain. The following exchange is of interest:

Q. What was the temper of America toward Great Britain before the year 1763?
A. The best in the world. They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid, in their courts, obedience to acts of Parliament. . . .

Q. Did you ever hear the authority of Parliament to make laws for America questioned till lately?
A. The authority of Parliament was allowed to be valid in all laws, except such as should lay internal taxes. It was never disputed in laying duties to regulate commerce. . . .

Q. Was it an opinion in America before 1763 that the Parliament had no right to lay taxes and duties there?
A. I never heard an objection to the right of laying duties to regulate commerce; but a right to lay internal taxes was never supposed to be in Parliament, as we are not represented there. . . .

Q. On what do you found your opinion that the people in America made any such distinction?
A. I know that whenever the subject has occurred in conversation where I have been present, it has appeared to be the opinion of every one that we could not be taxed by a Parliament wherein we were not represented. But the payment of duties laid by an act of Parliament as regulations of commerce was never disputed.12

Based on assurances, such as these from Franklin, that the colonies would respect Britain’s right to place duties on her own commerce, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, assigning duties on various British goods sold in America. Sam Adams then coerced Boston merchants to sign his “nonimportation agreement” on pain of being otherwise named a public enemy and subject to mob violence (this had been prior to the arrival of the British troops). As we have seen, while Boston merchants were going broke from the boycott, Adams looked the other way as his friend John Hancock continued profitable trade with Britain – to borrow Orwell’s phrase, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

In response to colonial protests, Parliament caved in – again. They removed duties on all goods except one: tea, via the Tea Act of 1773. The tea duty was nominal – three pennies on a pound. (It would be interesting to measure this against the 6.25% sales tax Massachusetts currently levies on its citizens.) Furthermore, the tea, which was surplus tea of the East India Company, was offered to colonists at half the price Englishmen paid for it.

In fact, the tea was so cheap that it was underselling the Dutch tea John Hancock’s ships were smuggling in. In the Boston Tea Party of December 1773, of course, the Sons of Liberty, after being customarily liquored up, hurled hundreds of chests of English tea into Boston Harbor. From Hancock’s perspective, this was largely cutthroat business tactics: to maximize your profits, destroy your competitor’s merchandise. Although I have friends in today’s “Tea Party” movement, I regret that its name is fashioned after an act of vandalism. This is our inheritance from Sam Adams, who, by semantics, transformed criminal deeds into patriotic ones.

While Hancock had an ulterior motive of profit in the Boston Tea Party, Adams’s motive was to push the nation toward revolution. The dependable Paul Revere was dispatched to New York and Philadelphia with the news. Moreover, the incident was bound to push England into reacting, as had been the strategy of the Boston Massacre – to, as Adams liked to phrase it, “Put your enemy in the wrong.”

The “Tea Party” sparked outrage in Britain. Parliament, feeling that they had tolerated enough from Boston, ordered the port closed until the damage was paid for. General Thomas Gage was sent as military governor.

This played right into Sam Adams’s hands. Many in Massachusetts wanted the East India Company compensated, but Adams blocked every move to pay for the tea.13 The prolonged port closure brought Boston commerce to a standstill, inciting sympathy for the city in the other colonies.

A reading of British newspapers and speeches in Parliament reveals that Britain considered Boston the source of more trouble than all the other colonies combined. But characteristically, Adams projected the measures, aimed solely at Boston, as aimed at all colonies. In a letter to the Philadelphia Committee of Correspondence, he wrote:

This attack, though made immediately upon us, is doubtless designed for every other colony, who will not surrender their sacred Rights & Liberties into the Hands of an infamous Ministry. Now therefore is the Time, when ALL should be united in opposition to this Violation of the Liberties of ALL.14

First Continental Congress

As Miller notes, “No American patriot had demanded more vigorously than Sam Adams a Continental Congress to unite colonial opposition to Great Britain.”15 The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1774, and into this city Sam Adams brought his Boston brand of politics. Quoting Hallahan:

Sam Adams’s first step on arriving at Philadelphia was to visit the docks and piers of the riverfront with a local politician, Charles Thomson, who liked to describe himself as the Sam Adams of Philadelphia. Adams spent some time on the docks and in the taverns talking with the workingmen there, pressing the flesh and preaching his incendiary politics. He quickly won many converts – and lined up some muscle.16

Although Joseph Galloway, moderate delegate from Pennsylvania, had proposed the Pennsylvania State House as the venue for the convention, Sam Adams pressed for meeting in the smaller, somewhat cramped quarters of the more populist, recently built Carpenter’s Hall because the workingmen of the city identified with it. . . . Galloway noted that it was no coincidence that workingmen from the docks were loitering on the grounds around Carpenter’s Hall in an intimidating manner.17

Sam Adams ran Carpenter’s Hall much like he did Faneuil Hall, doing back-room politicking before actual votes. Through such machinations, he had himself made temporary secretary of the convention, then Thomson permanent secretary.

Meanwhile back in Boston, by prearrangement, Adams’s lieutenant Joseph Warren hosted a meeting of radicals at Faneuil Hall; they passed a resolution called the “Suffolk Resolves” (Suffolk is Boston’s county). The resolves called for a boycott of all British goods, for all towns to raise militias, and for “the inhabitants of those towns and districts, who are qualified, to use their utmost diligence to acquaint themselves with the art of war as soon as possible, and . . . appear under arms at least once every week.” This was a radical step toward war. Warren then dispatched Paul Revere – as he would on the “Midnight Ride”– to Philadelphia with a copy of the resolves, which the Continental Congress officially endorsed.

Joseph Galloway, leader of the moderates, proposed a plan of reconciliation with Great Britain. Later, a gallows noose was delivered to his door, and the next night a message that read: “Hang yourself or we will do it for you.” Galloway said he lived “in the utmost danger from the mobs raised by Mr. Adams of being hung at my own door.”

Every night I expected would be my last. Men were excited by persons northward [Boston], by falsehoods fabricated for the purpose, to put me to death. Several attempts were made.18

Sam Adams’s climactic maneuver at the Continental Congress was procuring a pledge from the delegates that, should armed conflict erupt between Massachusetts and British troops, the other colonies would come to the aid of Massachusetts. However, the delegates, distrustful of Adams, attached an important condition to this pledge. They would only help Massachusetts if the British fired first. When Sam Adams returned home, he had one paramount goal: to produce just such an incident.

Lexington Coming

However, all during the winter of 1774-75, General Thomas Gage, commander of British forces in Boston, gave Adams no opportunity. As political flames raged, loyalists sought refuge in Boston, while many rebels evacuated the city. Boston became a loyalist stronghold, surrounded by a sea of hostile patriots, and Gage had no desire to venture his troops against the increasingly prepared – and mandatory – minutemen militias.

gage

General Gage

In April 1775, the Second Continental Congress – at which Hancock would preside as president – was due to begin the following month. Sam Adams desperately needed a “British fired first” incident to bring before the Congress. Otherwise, the passion for revolution might wane, the moderates would prevail, and there would be no war.

At this juncture, what Hallahan calls “bait” was offered to lure Gage out. Adams and Hancock had been attending the Massachusetts Provincial Congress (the colony’s provisional independent government) in Concord. General Gage began receiving intelligence reports that large amounts of munitions, including cannons, were stored in Concord for an army the Provincial Congress planned to raise. Some of the reports exaggerated the quantity of munitions. A number of Gage’s reports came from Benjamin Church, the notorious double agent whose true loyalties have long been controversial.

Gage now made the fateful decision to send troops to neutralize the Concord munitions before they could be deployed against his own forces. En route, they would have a “date with destiny” in Lexington.

Can it only be coincidence that, on the night before the battle, Adams, Hancock and Revere – the apparent mastermind and leading propagandists of the “Boston Massacre” – were congregating in a house a few hundred feet behind Lexington Green? (The house, still standing, is called the Hancock-Clarke House.) It was owned by Reverend Jonas Clarke, Lexington’s firebrand patriot-preacher whose wife was Hancock’s cousin.

hancock-clarke-house

It has been traditionally reported that Revere rode to the house to warn Adams and Hancock that the British forces might be on a mission to arrest them. However, although England had authorized Gage to apprehend revolutionary leaders, including the famous pair, evidence repudiates that this was Gage’s intention that day:

(1) Gage’s orders to Lieutenant Colonel Smith, who commanded the expedition, only discuss securing the Concord munitions, and make no mention of arrests;
(2) A force of 700 foot soldiers would be an extremely inefficient instrument for performing an arrest;
(3) In Lexington, the British made no movements toward the Hancock-Clarke House;
(4) After his initial meeting with Adams and Hancock, Revere rode on toward Concord, but was captured by an advance British patrol at 1 AM. The British knew they had Adams’s famed lieutenant Paul Revere in their hands – but eventually turned him loose. Had they truly been after Adams and Hancock, they should have held on to Revere, for no one would better know their whereabouts. (After being released, Revere rejoined Adams and Hancock in Lexington.)

If, in fact, Adams and Hancock were worried about arrest by the British, they displayed little alarm, tarrying at the house long after Revere’s warning. Furthermore, examination of a letter written by Hancock reveals they had already received intelligence about the British movements at 9PM on the 18th – three hours before Revere’s arrival. See the New York Times article “Letter Deepens Doubt on Paul Revere’s Ride.”

Revere’s 1775 deposition, describing his midnight ride, makes little mention of alarming the countryside, or shouting that the regulars were coming, as is famously ascribed to him. He very probably did so, and he certainly discussed it in his postwar account many years later, but in the original deposition he emphasizes going straight from Joseph Warren to see Adams and Hancock – this, apparently, was his foremost objective.

In the wee hours of the morning of the 19th, Adams, Hancock and Clarke walked down to Lexington Green and had a discussion with the militia that had gathered at Buckman’s Tavern in response to the town’s alarm bells. Half a century ago, historian Arthur B. Tourtellot wrote:

Adams and Clarke unquestionably made up a policy between themselves. Adams knew the broad strategy of the resistance, because he was at this point its sole architect. Clarke knew the men of Lexington and, what is more, could control them as no outsider could. The policy determined upon between the time of Revere’s first alarm and of the minutemen’s first muster and the time of the actual arrival of the British troops, was for the minutemen, however outnumbered, to make a conspicuous stand but not to fire.19

The conversation between Adams, Hancock, Clarke and the militia at Buckman’s Tavern has never been revealed, but we know that:

• Adams urgently needed a “British fired first” incident to bring to the upcoming Continental Congress.
• Adams had famously said, “Put your enemy in the wrong, and keep him so, is a wise maxim in politics, as well as in war.”
• Adams had evidently orchestrated the “Boston Massacre.”

Boston Massacre/Lexington Massacre

Indeed, the Lexington affair was sometimes styled the “Lexington Massacre,” and uncanny parallels exist between the two events:

• Prints of each were made. Compare Revere’s notorious misrepresentation of the Boston Massacre to Doolittle’s depiction of Lexington:

revere-print2

doolittle

In each picture, the colonists, who offer no provocation, are being slaughtered by a synchronous, orderly volley from redcoats upon an officer’s command. This in spite of British reports that shooting at both incidents was sporadic and not in response to orders. You might recall the words of John Wilson, a deponent, regarding the Boston Massacre:

“Some small boys coming up made a noise to the soldiers, on which the officer said to them why don’t you fire? Damn you, fire! They hereupon fired.”

Now look at the words of William Draper, a deponent regarding the battle of Lexington:

“The commanding officer of said troops (as I took him) gave the command to the troops, fire, damn you fire, and immediately they fired.”

Two separate incidents five years apart, two different officers. Was it standard practice for British officers to instruct their men to shoot with the words, “Fire, damn you, fire”? One gets the impression that these depositions were scripted by the same writer.

• Indeed, depositions were another common denominator to both events – collected, widely published, and claiming the colonists offered no provocation whatsoever. But as we have also seen, for the Boston Massacre, these claims did not stand up in court. In the case of the “Lexington Massacre,” Adams knew the depositions would not be tested by cross-examination, since war had commenced and there would be no trial. However, the Lexington depositions received their own taint 50 years later, when town pride demanded new depositions amending the first ones. (At that point, Sam Adams was long dead and no one feared his vengeance.)

• Both incidents were followed by intense communications with neighboring communities via dispatch riders. For the latter event, the History of the Town of Lexington notes:

The report of the bloody transaction at Lexington spread as on the wings of wind, and the fact that the regulars had fired upon and killed several citizens was known not only in the neighboring towns, but to the distance of forty or fifty miles in the course of the forenoon. The people immediately flew to arms. . . .20

Other colonies were also rallied to arms by reports of the Lexington “massacre” from dispatch riders traversing the coast.

• Both incidents were the subject of vitriolic, dishonest depictions of the British troops’ behavior. Do you recall Hancock’s florid language in his Boston Massacre oration, and Adams’s claim that soldiers were regularly raping Boston ladies? Now let’s examine more closely the widely distributed report of Lexington, in the newspaper the Massachusetts Spy. Bear in mind that the newspaper’s publisher, Isaiah Thomas, met with Adams and Hancock in Worcester, Massachusetts, before printing this:

Americans! forever bear in mind the BATTLE of LEXINGTON! where British Troops, unmolested and unprovoked wantonly, and in a most inhuman manner fired upon and killed a number of our countrymen, then robbed them of their provisions, ransacked, plundered and burnt their houses! nor could the tears of defenseless women, some of whom were in the pains of childbirth, the cries of helpless babes, nor the prayers of old age, confined to beds of sickness, appease their thirst for blood!—or divert them from the DESIGN of MURDER and ROBBERY! . . . It is noticed they fired upon our people as they were dispersing, agreeable to their command, and that we did not even return the fire. Eight of our men were killed and nine wounded; The troops then laughed, and damned the Yankees.

Massachusetts Spy

The report speaks of “defenseless women, some of whom were in the pains of childbirth.” It is true that, during the bloody retreat back to Boston, the British burned a number of houses, especially those from which they were fired on. However, no historian has ever found a case where a woman in childbirth was in any way molested. The closest instance was Hannah Adams, who had an 18-day-old baby, and was forced to evacuate her home. Hannah was not injured, nor the child, who grew up and was herself married.21

As for those in “old age,” again, there is no known case except 79-year-old Samuel Whittemore. When the British were retreating through the town of Menotomy, Whittemore, a feisty old war veteran, fired at them from behind a stone wall with a musket and pistols – killing two redcoats and mortally wounding another. The British troops furiously shot and bayoneted him. Obviously one cannot plead “old age” when bearing arms, and clearly he was not, as the Spy put it, “confined to a bed of sickness.” Whittemore survived and died at 97 of natural causes.22

The Hannah Adams/Whittemore incidents were inflated by the Massachusetts Spy into countless assaults upon the gentler sex and elderly. People reading the broadsides in other colonies had no way of knowing these tales were false. This helped establish a pattern – for the last two centuries, Americans have been provoked to war by fabricated atrocity stories spun in the press. In the Spanish-American War, it was Spaniards throwing Cubans to sharks and roasting Cuban priests; in World War I it was German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies; in the 1991 Gulf War it was Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators. Small wonder that Thomas Jefferson, himself later victimized by newspaper smears, wrote:

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.23

Oddities at Lexington Green

What really did happen in Lexington on April 19, 1775? My patriot lecturer friend had told me the militia would not have fired first, because they were outnumbered ten-to-one. But this begs another question: if hopelessly outnumbered, why stand on the green in the first place?

The Lexington militia behaved very distinctly from other militias that day. When the British reached Concord, the militia there wisely withdrew to the safety of a hill, then waited until strong reinforcements arrived from other towns. And all through the day, as the British retreated to Boston, the militias attacked, but from behind trees, walls, and house windows.

How different was the Lexington militia! They stood on an open green, holding their rifles in formation. Did this not invite confrontation? The redcoats could obviously not march past a hostile armed force on their flank, or leave it threatening their rear.

Adams and Hancock, who conferred with the militia before the incident, were the two most powerful figures in Massachusetts (after the war, Hancock became the state’s governor, with Adams his lieutenant governor). The Lexington militia was under the immediate command of Captain John Parker, an old French and Indian War scout. However, all Massachusetts militias fell under the authority of the Provincial Congress, of which Hancock was president, and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, of which Hancock was chairman. And since Hancock had already had several uniforms tailored for his self-envisioned role as commander of the entire Continental Army, he would hardly demur at giving orders to a local militia captain.

Although Adams and Hancock fled to neighboring Woburn before the shooting began, Paul Revere himself arrived at the green about a half-hour prior to the redcoats marching in at dawn. This bears comment.

Supposedly, Revere went to the green with Hancock’s clerk John Lowell (yet another Freemason from Boston’s St. Andrew’s Lodge), because Hancock had forgotten that he had stored, at Buckman’s Tavern, a heavy trunk containing important documents he feared the British would discover. This means Revere was mingling with the Lexington militia, who were also at Buckman’s Tavern, until the moment the British arrived – when, he said, he and Lowell then hurried along with the trunk on foot.

While this story may be entirely true, it presents peculiarities:
• Hancock himself had already been to Buckman’s Tavern that morning. If the trunk was so vital, one would think he would have remembered it then.
• It seems an unlikely concern that the British would have diverted from their expedition to search Buckman’s Tavern, which of course they didn’t.
• It seems strange that Hancock did not send his coach for the trunk, which could have spirited it away expeditiously. Surely having Revere and Lowell haul it on foot posed greater danger of its apprehension by the British.
• In case anyone thinks Hancock couldn’t risk sending his gilded coach back to Lexington – he did send it back, famously, to the Hancock-Clarke house, to fetch a salmon he wished for his breakfast. While Hancock was enough of a fop for such a vain stunt on the morning that a war was beginning, it begs the question of why he sent the carriage for the salmon, but not the all-important trunk.

The Shot(s) Heard Round the World

Early in this article, we listed reasons why British accounts of Lexington are more credible than American ones. So let’s reconstruct the event based on their reports. Bear in mind that the British were already under strict orders not to fire unless fired upon.

Lieutenant William Sutherland and Lieutenant Jesse Adair were riding ahead of the marching column. As they approached Lexington village, they heard shots to their left and right, but hearing no balls whistling, assumed it was a local alarm signal. Then they then saw a colonist aim his musket at them and pull the trigger – but it “flashed in the pan”; that is, the primer powder failed to ignite the charge in the musket.

Sutherland and Adair rode back and reported this incident to Major John Pitcairn, commander of the lead column. Pitcairn, who had already heard warnings along the road that a hostile force was waiting at Lexington, now told his troops to load their guns and fix bayonets. He then ordered them to advance, but not to fire under any circumstances without orders.

Here is a map of the disposition of the Lexington battle:

Lexington battle map

When the British troops spotted the militia on the green, they split left and right to flank them. At this point, the first shots at the green itself were fired. Quoting Lieutenant Sutherland:

We still went on further when 3 shot more were fired at us, which we did not return, & this is sacred truth as I hope for mercy These 3 shots were fired from the corner of a large house to the right of the Church.24

The house Sutherland referred to is Buckman’s Tavern. (The “church” and the “meeting house” on the map are one and the same.) Since there were, of course, no repeating rifles then, this means three shooters. The first of these shots might technically be the “shot heard round the world.” But though the militias were noted for their marksmanship, all three shooters missed their targets.

Ignoring the shots, the British kept focused on the militia on the green. Major Pitcairn rode up toward them, and ordered them to throw down their guns and disperse. At this point, both British and American accounts concur that the militia began dispersing. However, according to the British, four or five of the militia suddenly dove behind a wall and fired:

Major Pictairn: “some of the rebels who had jumped over the wall, fired four or five shots at the soldiers.” Lieutenant Sutherland: “instantly some of the villains who got over a hedge [wall] fired at us which our men for the first time returned.” Ensign Jeremy Lister, writing an account several years later, reversed the sequence and said: “they gave a fire then run off to get behind a wall.” Since Pitcairn’s and Sutherland’s accounts were written shortly after the event, they can be assumed more chronologically accurate. Pitcairn’s report also noted that his horse was hit by shots fired from “some quarter or other” and “at the same time several shots were fired from a Meeting House on our left.”25

(I would like to interject here that Major Pitcairn, who later died at Bunker Hill, was not a man to whitewash a report; he was widely known for his integrity and courage, such that even the Sons of Liberty paid him respect, a high compliment indeed.)

So, not counting the “flash in the pan,” we have three shots from Buckman’s Tavern, four or five shots by the men who jumped behind the wall, perhaps more from “some quarter or other,” and “several” from the meeting house. Based on the British reports, it appears that possibly upwards of ten shots were fired on the redcoats before they returned fire. According to all British accounts, their return fire was not based on orders given, but was a spontaneous, disorderly reaction to the multiple shots the Americans fired. The green now billowed with musket smoke, and the British officers had to restrain their men with considerable difficulty.

The three men who fired from the corner of Buckman’s Tavern surely knew they were jeopardizing the militia on the green. So must have the men who jumped the wall. It is noteworthy that Paul Revere – whose alarm brought the militia out in the first place – had been at Buckman’s Tavern only moments before the “shot heard round the world” was fired from that very place. The map details Revere’s path, which took him from Buckman’s right through the militia. Was he really there just to haul a trunk, or was he choreographing the incident, passing instructions as he moved along?

Buckman's Tavern

Buckman’s Tavern still stands across from the green.

Of course, I don’t believe for a moment that the Lexington militiamen were planning to sacrifice themselves as cannon fodder, any more than the mob at the “Boston Massacre.” I suggest that only a few were “in the know” – the individuals who fired the opening rounds from protected places, leaving the men on the green to absorb the fury of British retaliation.

But is there any evidence that there was a group separate from the Lexington militia? There is. Later in the day, as the redcoats were retreating from Concord, General Gage sent a relief column from Boston under Brigadier Hugh Percy. Riding as a scout for Percy’s column was an American loyalist, George Leonard. His statement is among General Gage’s papers:

George Leonard of Boston deposes that he went from Boston on the nineteenth of April with the Brigade commanded by Lord Percy upon their march to Lexington. That being on horseback and having no connexion with the army, he several times went forward of the Brigade, in one of which excursions he met with a countryman [fellow American] who was wounded supported by two others who were armed. This was about a mile on this side of Lexington Meeting House. The deponent asked the wounded person what was the matter with him. He answered that the Regulars had shot him. The Deponent then asked what provoked them to do it – he said that some of our people fired upon the Regulars, and they fell on us like bull dogs and killed eight and wounded nineteen. He further said that it was not the Company he belonged to that fired but some of our Country people that were on the other side of the road. The Deponent enquired of the other men if they were present. They answered, yes, and related the affair much as the wounded man had done. All three blamed the rashness of their own people for firing first and said they supposed now the Regulars would kill everybody they met with.

Boston, May 4, 1775
George Leonard 26

Note Leonard’s report that the wounded man said “it was not the Company he belonged to that fired but some of our Country people that were on the other side of the road.” This indicated the Buckman Tavern area, across the street from the green. It shows that Lexington’s armed men were not one cohesive unit.

The phrase “not the Company he belonged to” adds interest to the wording of the Lexington militia’s depositions. 34 deponents signed a statement declaring that “not a gun was fired by any person in our company on the regulars to our knowledge before they fired on us.” Another 14 signed a statement that “the regulars fired on the company before a gun was fired by any of our company on them.” (Emphasis added.) These statements don’t exclude the first shots being fired by Americans – rather, they deny any such shots came from our company.” This nuance may have been important in persuading some militiamen to sign the collective depositions. If anyone’s conscience gave him pause, men like Reverend Clarke could always assure him that the statement was, technically, true; and that one’s patriotic duty to avenge the dead outweighed considerations over exactness.

Who were these gunmen who fired the opening shots from protected places? It seems highly doubtful that they were members of the Lexington militia, who would not have willfully endangered their friends and kinsmen. Of course, some shots came from the four or five men who, having been on the green, jumped a wall and fired; but not every man that had assembled on the green was from Lexington; some told Parker they had come from neighboring districts, having heard the town’s bells tolling. William Draper (who signed the deposition saying the British officer cried “Fire, damn you, fire!”) gave his residence as the faraway town of Colrain. Is it possible that John Lowell was not the only Freemason from St. Andrew’s Lodge whom Revere brought to the green shortly before the British arrived? A number of Sam Adams’s “Mohawks” had fled Boston after its loyalist consolidation and would have been at large that April. Was the “Boston Massacre” strategy being replayed?

Though I will doubtlessly be accused of gross speculation, I would like to know a better reason why, with the militia hopelessly outnumbered, a few men fired on the redcoats from concealed locations, leaving the militia on the green to bear the consequences. And I would also like to hear why the town of Lexington kept its firing – of shots of any kind – essentially a secret for fifty years.

I now offer further speculation. You will recall that when lieutenants Sutherland and Adair, riding in advance, approached the green, they saw a colonist aim his musket and pull the trigger, but the powder “flashed in the pan.” The officers thought they had been spared by a lucky “misfire.”

Then we have three shots from Buckman’s Tavern that all missed. And with the shots from the wall and the meeting house, and any in the subsequent exchange, the British suffered only one wound; none were killed. This is quite a contrast to the rest of the day, when the redcoats suffered some 250 casualties. Remember, even 79-year old Samuel Whittemore killed three redcoats firing from behind a wall. Yet the Lexington men, with a multitude of shots from various locations, couldn’t inflict one significant hit on the troops amassed before them.

Perhaps there were no British dead at Lexington Green because Adams and Hancock wanted none. If redcoats had to be buried in the village, it might have cast doubt on the tale of an “unprovoked massacre.” I suggest that some shooters may have missed on purpose, perhaps even firing “without ball.” Perhaps the “flash in the pan” was not a misfire but an attempt to provoke without drawing blood.

What the British marched into was a trap. No matter the precise details, the outcome was virtually guaranteed:
• The militia standing in battle formation guaranteed the redcoats would confront it.
• Firing shot after shot at the British guaranteed that at some point a threshold would be reached, and the redcoats would fire reciprocally – very parallel to the “Boston Massacre,” where soldiers were pelted and clubbed to the point of shooting in self-defense.
• Firing but deliberately missing guaranteed the British would experience few if any casualties; there would be high colonist casualties by comparison. Thus statistics would corroborate the “Lexington massacre” story.

Perhaps John Adams’s comment on the Boston Massacre bears repeating here: “I suspected that this was the explosion which had been intentionally wrought up by designing men who knew what they were aiming at, better than the instruments employed.”

For John Hancock, the battle of Lexington, like the Boston Tea Party, was profitable; with the outbreak of war, some 500 smuggling indictments, pending against him in the courts, vanished.27 But for Sam Adams, the picture was much broader. Upon hearing the distant Lexington gunfire, he turned to Hancock and famously said, “What a glorious morning is this!” As historian William Hallahan put it, “For the price of a few dead farmers, Adams could buy his war.”28

Afterword

Obviously, Samuel Adams is “the villain of my piece.” Am I obsessed with hating him? Have I nothing good to say of the man?

To Adams’s credit, he was not, like Hancock, a materialist. He lived a simple, frugal lifestyle, and did not seek riches from his revolutionary agitations.

In fact, it has been said that he sought to emulate his Puritan forefathers. He prayed, read the Bible, and, after the war, even publicly opposed amusements such as clubs for card-playing. However, to oppose card-playing, while suborning mob violence and property destruction, and habitually engaging in “ends justify the means” lying and slander, is to mis-prioritize virtues, a practice that Jesus Christ condemned the Pharisees for.

To his credit, Adams opposed centralization of government under the Constitution unless amendments (i.e., the Bill of Rights) were appended. Yet many found Adams’s postwar views on liberty self-contradictory. For example, when rural Massachusetts farmers and veterans, finding their property confiscated for inability to pay state taxes and debts, began what was known as “Shay’s Rebellion,” Sam Adams (then president of the Massachusetts senate) called the rebels “traitors,” declared that their leaders should be executed (two were hung), and helped push through a senate bill suspending the right of habeas corpus during the crisis.

But my article raises a far more significant matter. It has concluded that the Massachusetts events, used to spark the Revolutionary War, were predominantly specious. What, then, does that say about the war itself, the American nation it spawned, and the Founding Fathers in general? I will address these issues in Part II. However, since that will take time to write (I am still researching Part II and will probably post other articles before its completion), I am going to cast water at some fires I have already lit.

Some may accuse me of being an “anglophile” for writing the preceding article. But – other than enjoying old comedies with Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness – I plead innocent. I have never visited the UK, and no British blood flows in my veins. I have no motive other than seeking truth.

I am not, repeat not, seeking to bring America back under British dominion. In point of fact, a destructive Anglo-American political alliance, nurtured by banks and multinationals, has been in effect for over a century, and anyone familiar with my other writings knows how bitterly critical I have been of those interests.

As an American, I may also be accused by a few of being unpatriotic, perhaps even treasonably so. I would like to answer that potential charge.

I have lived nearly all my life in and around Boston. As is well known, Bostonians have long had a near-fanatical love of their baseball team, the Red Sox, a passion matched only by their hatred for the team’s nemesis, the New York Yankees.

At a sporting event, it is OK, if one wants, to imagine that the home team consists only of angelic heroes, while all of the opposing club’s players personify evil.

But history is not a game, nor is war. Patriotism is a virtue, that is very true. But truth is also a virtue. Of these two virtues, which ranks higher? Which is numbered in the Ten Commandments?

Where does my patriotism end? Only where it asks me to forsake the truth.

Source

NOTES

1. William Heath, Memoirs of Major-General Heath, (1798; reprint, New York: William Abbatt, 1901), 5-6.
2. Vicomte Léon De Poncins, Freemasonry and Judaism: Secret Powers behind Revolution (1929, reprint; Brooklyn, N.Y.: A & B Publishers Group, 1994), 33-34.
3. Les Standiford, Desperate Sons: Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the Secret Bands of Radicals who Led the Colonies to War (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 35.
4. William H. Hallahan, The Day the American Revolution Began: 19 April 1775 (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 234.
5. John C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (1936, reprint; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1966), 239.
6. Ibid., 267.
7. Harold Murdock, The Nineteenth of April 1775 (1923, reprint; Cranbury, N. J.: The Scholar’s Bookshelf, 2005), 18-19.
8. Miller, 175.
9. A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston (Boston: Edes & Gill, 1770).
10. Miller, 189.
11. Paul M. Zall, ed., Adams on Adams (Lexington, Kent.: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 38.
12. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1 (London: British and Foreign Public Library, 1818), xxxv-xxxvi.
13. Hallahan, 54.
14. Standiford, 220-21.
15. Miller, 306-7.
16. Hallahan, 132-33.
17. Ibid., 133.
18. Ibid., 143.
19. Arthur B. Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord: The Beginning of the War of the American Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1963), 112.
20. Charles Hudson, History of the Town of Lexington, Massachusetts, vol. 1, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 155-56.
21. Murdock, 121-24.
22. Ibid., 125-27.
23. Letter to John Norvell, June 14, 1807, The Letters of Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826.
24. Allen French, General Gage’s Informers (1932, reprint; New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 58.
25. Ibid., 53, 55, 59.
26. Ibid., 57-58.
27. Hallahan, 25.
28. Hallahan, 33.

This article was originally published, with slight modifications, in 2013 on Paul Noble’s website http://www.redcoat.me.uk/. Paul is a true gentleman, a British patriot active in the movement to keep his country independent of the EU. I am most grateful to Paul for hosting the article and for acquainting me with British perspectives on the Revolutionary War.

 

Posted by Red Pill Reports in Learn, War
Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s 9/11

Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s 9/11

Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s 9/11

By James Perloff

False flags do not stand alone. They are better understood – and more credibly explained to skeptics – when seen in history’s context.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese planes, launched from aircraft carriers, attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking or heavily damaging 18 ships (including eight battleships), destroying 188 planes, and leaving over 2,000 servicemen killed.

The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced this “day of infamy” before Congress, from whom he secured an avid declaration of war.

Up until then, however, Americans had overwhelmingly opposed involvement in World War II. They had been thoroughly disillusioned by the First World War:

  • although they had been told they would be fighting for “democracy” in that previous war, taxpayers learned from the postwar Graham Committee of Congress that they’d been defrauded out of some $6 billion in armaments that were never manufactured or delivered1;
  • atrocity tales about German soldiers (such as cutting the hands off thousands of Belgian children) had turned out to be fabrications;
  • the sinking of the Lusitania – the central provocation that ultimately led to the U.S. declaration of war – had been committed by Germany not to kill women and children (as propaganda claimed), but to prevent tens of tons of war munitions from reaching the European front. (Click here for a debunking of the Lusitania myth.)

When the Maine sank, the proactive Assistant Secretary of the Navy had been Teddy Roosevelt. After the 1898 Spanish-American War he became governor of New York, and by 1901 was President of the United States. When the Lusitania sank, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy was his distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt – who likewise went on to become governor of New York and then President.

Just as coincident: during the Lusitania affair, the head of the British Admiralty was yet another cousin of Franklin D. – Winston Churchill. And in a chilling déjà vu, as Pearl Harbor approached, these two men were now heads of their respective states.

In a 1940 (election-year) speech, Roosevelt stated typically: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”2 But privately, the President planned just the opposite: to bring America into the World War as Britain’s ally, exactly as Woodrow Wilson had done in World War I. Roosevelt dispatched his closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, to meet Churchill in January 1941. Hopkins told Churchill: “The President is determined that we [the United States and England] shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it. He has sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him – there is nothing he will not do so far as he has human power.”3 William Stephenson, who ran British intelligence operations in the U.S., noted that American-British military staff talks began that same month under “utmost secrecy,” which, he clarified, “meant preventing disclosure to the American public.”4

Churchill and FDR

The President offered numerous provocations to Germany: freezing its assets; occupying Iceland; shipping 50 destroyers to Britain; and having U.S. warships escort Allied convoys. Roosevelt and Churchill hoped to duplicate the success of the Lusitania incident. But the Germans gave them no satisfaction. They knew America’s entry into World War I had shifted the balance of power against them, and they shunned a repetition of that scenario.

As Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of Germany’s U-boat fleet, stated during the Nuremburg trials:

A 300 mile safety zone was even granted to America by Germany when international law called for only a three mile zone. I suggested mine fields at Halifax and around Iceland, but the Fuehrer rejected this because he wanted to avoid conflict with the United States. When American destroyers in the summer of 1941 were ordered to attack German submarines, I was forbidden to fight back. I was thus forced not to attack British destroyers for fear there would be some mistake.5

After being pursued by the destroyer USS Greer for more than three hours, the German submarine U-652 fired at (but did not hit) the Greer. President Roosevelt bewailed this to the American public as an unprovoked attack:

But most Americans were unmoved. Not even another Lusitania would have motivated them to send their sons to die in another European war.

America First

It was going to take a whole cluster of Lusitanias, and since this would not come from the cautious Germans, it could only come from Germany’s Axis partner, Japan. As Interior Secretary Harold Ickes put it in 1941: “For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan.”6 This required three steps: (1) build anti-Japanese sentiment in America; (2) provoke Japan to the flashpoint of war; (3) set up an irresistible target to serve as a false flag.

Demonizing Japan

Americans were subjected to a stream of propaganda depicting Japan as bent on “world conquest” even though it is smaller than Montana. In the wartime government-produced film, Our Enemy: The Japanese, narrator Joseph Grew (CFR) told the public the Japanese believed it was the “the right and destiny of Japan’s emperors to rule the whole world . . . to destroy all nations and peoples which stand in the way of its fulfillment. . . . [Their] national dream is to see Tokyo established as the capital of the world . . . . world conquest is their national obsession.”

Grew neglected to mention that Japan had been a closed isolationist country until Commodore Perry compelled them to sign a trade agreement under threat of U.S. naval bombardment. Perry was the father-in-law of August Belmont, the Rothschilds’ leading financial agent in America during the 19th century.7

As proof of “Japan’s plot to conquer the world,” the American press played up Japanese troops entering Manchuria in the 1930s. But the fact that the Soviets had first seized Outer Mongolia and China’s northwestern province of Sinkiang drew no notice.  As Dr. Anthony Kubek, chairman of the history department at the University of Dallas, wrote in How the Far East Was Lost:

It was apparent to Japanese statesmen that unless bastions of defense were built in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, Communism would spread through all of North China and seriously threaten the security of Japan. . . . But the Department of State seemed not to regard Japan as a bulwark against Soviet expansion in North China. As a matter of fact, not one word of protest was sent by the Department of State to the Soviet Union, despite her absorption of Sinkiang and Outer Mongolia, while at the same time Japan was censured for stationing troops in China.8

Kubek

Dr. Kubek’s remarks highlight a policy consistent throughout the Second World War: condemn “fascist aggression” while tolerating – without limit – communist aggression. For example, when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Yet when the Soviet Union invaded Poland that same month, the West . . . yawned.

Tank crew

Above: Japanese tank crew rests during 1939 fighting against the Soviets near Mongolia.

To those who might contend Japan had no right to enter China to oppose communism, let’s remember that the United States sent its troops around the globe to Vietnam on the principle that stopping communism was in its national interests. By what logic, then, could Japan not oppose communism on its doorstep? A glance at a map shows how close communism was drawing to Japan, having methodically enslaved all the nations embodying the Soviet Union, and it was now boring southward into China. In sending troops to Manchuria and China, Japan was invoking her own version of the Monroe Doctrine.

Japan and mainland

The Soviets, for their part, wanted war between the United States and Japan, knowing that with Japan neutralized, Communism would engulf Asia. In 1935, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow William C. Bullitt sent a dispatch to Secretary of State Cordell Hull:

It is . . . the heartiest hope of the Soviet Government that the United States will become involved in war with Japan. . . . The Soviet Union would certainly attempt to avoid becoming an ally until Japan had been thoroughly defeated and would then merely use the opportunity to acquire Manchuria and Sovietize China.9

Benjamin Gitlow, founding member of the U.S. Communist Party, wrote in I Confess (1940):

When I was in Moscow, the attitude toward the United States in the event of war was discussed. Privately, it was the opinion of all the Russian leaders to whom I spoke that the rivalry between the United States and Japan must actually break out into war between these two.10

Gitlow I Confess

Roosevelt Provokes Japan

On June 23, 1941, Interior Secretary Ickes wrote in a memo to Roosevelt:

There will never be so good a time to stop the shipment of oil to Japan as we now have. . . . There might develop from embargoing of oil such a situation as would make it, not only possible but easy, to get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus indirectly be brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of communistic Russia. 11

The memo’s date is significant: the day after Germany and her allies (Italy, Hungary, Romania, Finland and Croatia) launched Operation Barbarossa: the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Why did Ickes say an oil embargo would make it “easy to get into this war”? The answer lies in an eight-point plan of provocation toward Japan which had been previously drawn up by Lt. Commander Arthur McCollum of Naval Intelligence. The eighth of the eight-step plan was: “Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.” McCollum’s next sentence was: “If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.”12

IckesMcCollum

Ickes; McCollum

What McCollum, Ickes and Roosevelt envisioned was antagonizing Japan to the point that it would attack the United States. And thus – in the tradition of the Maine and Lusitania – America, as the “innocent victim of unprovoked aggression” – would go to war. Here is how War Secretary Henry Stimson (CFR, Skull and Bones) phrased it in his diary, after meetings with the President that autumn: “We face the delicate question of the diplomatic fencing to be done so as to be sure that Japan is put into the wrong and makes the first bad move – overt move.”13 “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot….”14

Between July 26 and August 1, 1941, FDR seized Japanese assets in America, closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping, and enacted the sweeping trade embargo that McCollum and Ickes had urged. Britain and the Netherlands followed suit with similar embargoes. For the Japanese, this constituted a death threat. Japan heavily depended on imports for raw materials, for 88 percent of its oil and 75 percent of its food.

The timing of these measures was again significant. In July 1941, all reports indicated the Germans and their allies were crushing the Red Army. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were surrendering; as they did, many shouted “Stalin kaput!”  Stalin himself was nearly paralyzed with fear. He had only fought wars of aggression and was unprepared for defense. If Japan, Germany’s ally, joined Operation Barbarossa from the East, Stalin would be trapped in a vise, and communism – which was an Illuminati creation – destroyed.

Roosevelt’s trade embargo guaranteed that Japan would not join Operation Barbarossa, but would instead turn its attention south. No nation can prosecute war without oil. Tanks, trucks, ships and aircraft require it. If Japan attacked Russia through Siberia, there would be no oil to be confiscated. But there was abundant oil to the south, in the Dutch East Indies. And Southeast Asia held many other resources the embargo denied Japan, such as rubber, tin and iron ore. 

Why Did Japan Go to War with America?

British historian Russell Grenfell, a captain in the Royal Navy, wrote In 1952:

No reasonably informed person can now believe that Japan made a villainous, unexpected attack on the United States. An attack was not only fully expected but was actually desired. It is beyond doubt that President Roosevelt wanted to get his country into war, but for political reasons was most anxious to ensure that the first act of hostility came from the other side; for which reason he caused increasing pressure to be put on the Japanese, to a point that no self-respecting nation could endure without resort to arms. Japan was meant by the American President to attack the United States.15

Grenfell Lyttelton

Grenfell; Lyttelton

On June 20, 1944, Oliver Lyttelton, Britain’s minister of production, said before the American Chamber of Commerce in London: “America provoked Japan to such an extent that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history ever to say that America was forced into war.”16 Why did Lyttelton make this startling accusation (for which he was later compelled to apologize)?

Following the U.S. embargo, Japan’s representatives in Washington earnestly negotiated for the embargo’s repeal, to no avail.  On November 26, 1941, the State Department delivered an ultimatum to Japan: sanctions would only be lifted if all overseas Japanese troops were withdrawn to Japan. Although the ultimatum or “Hull note” was officially credited to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, it is now known that it was drafted by Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, a Soviet operative.

White

Harry Dexter White

The White/Hull ultimatum was a deliberate catch-22. If the Japanese refused it, the embargo would continue, and they would collapse from economic strangulation. If they complied, and withdrew all troops from the mainland, communism would sweep Eastern Asia (exactly as happened after the war, resulting in Communist China, and the Korean and Vietnam wars). The Japanese were thus given a two-headed coin: die by starvation, or die by communism. They decided to reject both options, and fight instead.

To have any hope of success in a war against the mighty USA, Japan would need an edge. Franklin D. Roosevelt made sure they got one in the form of attractive bait.

The Decision to Base the Fleet at Pearl Harbor

In 1940, President Roosevelt decided that the Pacific Fleet should be based indefinitely at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, instead of its usual berths on the U.S. West Coast. This was a bad idea for many reasons:

  • In the middle of the Pacific, Hawaii is surrounded by uninhabited waters, making it susceptible to surprise attack from 360 degrees. By contrast, no surprise attack could have been launched if the fleet was kept on the West Coast; assailants would have encountered innumerable commercial vessels before reaching it.
  • At Pearl Harbor, the fleet was boxed together like sardines, making them ideal targets for bombers.Pearl Harbor map
  • In Hawaii, oil and others supplies had to be brought across 2,000 miles of the Pacific.
  • Pearl Harbor lacked adequate fuel and ammunition storage facilities, dry docks, and support craft (such as tugs and repair vessels). The fleet could have been maintained on a superior war footing if kept on the West Coast.
  • 37 percent of Hawaii’s population was ethnically Japanese, rendering the fleet vulnerable to espionage and sabotage.
  • Basing the fleet in Hawaii would separate sailors from their families, creating morale problems.

U.S. Fleet Commander Admiral J. O. Richardson was outraged by Roosevelt’s decision and met with him on October 8, 1940 to protest it. Richardson presented the President with a list of logical reasons why the fleet should not be based in Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt could not rebut these objections and simply said that having the fleet there would exert a “restraining influence on the actions of Japan.”17

Richardson said: “I came away with the impression that, despite his spoken word, the President was fully determined to put the United States into the war if Great Britain could hold out until he was reelected.”18

Richardson 2

On February 1, 1941, Richardson was relieved of his command without any explanation. Richardson met with Navy Secretary Frank Knox to inquire about it, and related: “When I saw the Secretary, I said, ‘In all my experience in the Navy, I have never known of a flag officer being detached in the same manner as I, and I feel I owe it to myself to know why.’ The Secretary said the President would send for me and talk the matter over.” However, Roosevelt never sent for Richardson; the only explanation the admiral ever received were these words from Secretary Knox: “The last time you were here you hurt the President’s feelings.”19

Roosevelt’s sole pretext for basing the fleet in Pearl Harbor – that it would deter Japanese aggression – was resoundingly discredited on December 7, 1941. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Roosevelt was never held accountable for his action. All blame was instead leveled at the Navy, especially Richardson’s successor as Pacific Fleet Commander, Admiral Husband Kimmel, who accepted the position believing Washington would notify him of any intelligence pointing to a threat.

This trust proved misplaced. As Washington watched Japan prepare for the attack, it kept Kimmel and his army counterpart in Hawaii, General Walter C. Short, well out of its intelligence loop.

Kimmel 3 Short

Kimmel and Short

The False Flag Foreknown (1): “Magic”

The Japanese used a code called “Purple” to communicate to their embassies and major consulates throughout the world. Its complexity required that it be enciphered and deciphered by machine. The Japanese considered the code unbreakable, but in 1940 talented U.S. Army cryptanalysts cracked it and devised a facsimile of the Japanese machine. As the result, U.S. intelligence was reading Japanese diplomatic messages, often on a same-day basis.

US Purple decoding machine

A U.S. Purple decoding machine

Copies of the deciphered texts, nicknamed “Magic,” were promptly delivered in locked pouches to select individuals, including President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark. Copies also went to Harry Hopkins, FDR’s shadowy advisor who held no cabinet position.20

Hopkins Hopkins and Roosevelt

(It is worth digressing for a paragraph about Hopkins, who lived in the White House; he has been aptly compared to Woodrow Wilson’s Wall Street controller, Edward Mandell House, who also lived in the White House. Like House, Hopkins acted as a special emissary, paying visits to Churchill and Stalin. After the war, it was revealed that as head of Lend-Lease, he secretly shipped both the materials and blueprints for the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. This was documented by Lend-Lease expediter George Racey Jordan in From Major Jordan’s Diaries. Some may find interesting John T. Flynn’s remarks in The Roosevelt Myth on the favors bestowed upon Hopkins by British press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook and bankster Bernard Baruch on the occasion of Hopkins’s third wedding.)

Jordan From Major Jordan's Diaries

Although Hopkins had access to “Magic” intercepts, our commanders in Hawaii did not. And what did these intercepts reveal?

  • that Tokyo had ordered its Consul General in Hawaii to divide Pearl Harbor into five areas and, on a frequent basis, report the exact locations of American warships there. Nothing is unusual about spies watching ship movements – but reporting precise whereabouts of ships in dock has only one implication.
  • that on November 29th (three days after the U.S. ultimatum), Japan’s envoys in Washington were told a rupture in negotiations was “inevitable,” but that Japan’s leaders “do not wish you to give the impression that negotiations are broken off.”
  • that on November 30th Tokyo had ordered their Berlin embassy to inform the Germans (their allies) that “the breaking out of war may come quicker than anyone dreams.”
  • that on December 1st, the Japanese had ordered all of their North American diplomatic offices to destroy their secret documents.21 (Once war breaks out, the offices of a hostile power lose their diplomatic immunity and are seized.)

In the 1970 movie Tora, Tora, Tora, a Hollywood depiction of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor, Japan’s ambassadors are shown presenting their message breaking relations (meaning war) to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, after the attack on Hawaii, and Hull reacts with surprise and outrage.

tora-tora-tora Cordell Hull

In reality, however, Hull was not shocked at all. On the previous day (December 6), he had already read the translated intercept of Japan’s declaration – 13 parts of the 14-part message – as had President Roosevelt.

The False Flag Foreknown (2): East Wind, Rain

An additional warning came via the so-called “Winds” message. A November 18th intercept indicated that, if a break in U.S. relations was forthcoming, Tokyo would issue a special radio warning. This would not be in the Purple code, as it was intended to reach consulates and lesser agencies of Japan not equipped with the code or one of its machines. The message, to be repeated three times during a weather report, was “Higashi no kaze ame,” meaning “East wind, rain.” “East wind” signified the United States; “rain” signified diplomatic split (war).

This prospective message was deemed so significant that U.S. radio monitors were constantly watching for it, and the Navy Department typed it up on special reminder cards. On December 4th, “Higashi no kaze ame” was broadcast and picked up by Washington intelligence.

The False Flag Foreknown (3): Personal Warnings

During 1941, the Roosevelt administration also received several personal warnings regarding Pearl Harbor:

  • On January 27th, our ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, reported to Washington: “The Peruvian Minister has informed a member of my staff that he has heard from many sources, including a Japanese source, that in the event of trouble breaking out between the United States and Japan, the Japanese intended to make a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor with all their strength. . . .”22
  • Brigadier General Elliott Thorpe was the U.S. military observer in Java, then under Dutch control. In early December 1941, the Dutch army decoded a dispatch from Tokyo to its Bangkok embassy, forecasting an attack on Hawaii. The Dutch passed the information to Thorpe, who considered it so vital that he sent Washington a total of four warnings. Finally, the War Department told him to send no further warnings.23
  • The Dutch Military attaché in Washington, Colonel F. G. L. Weijerman, personally warned U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall about Pearl Harbor just days before the attack.24
  • Dusko Popov was a Yugoslavian double agent whose true allegiance was to the Allies. Through information furnished by the Germans, Popov deduced the Japanese were planning to bomb Pearl Harbor. He notified the FBI; subsequently FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warned Roosevelt.25
  • Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa received information from Kilsoo Haan of the Sino-Korean People’s League that the Japanese intended to assault Hawaii “before Christmas.” Gillette briefed the President, who said the matter would be looked into.26
  • U.S. Congressman Martin Dies of Texas came into possession of a map revealing the Japanese plan to attack Pearl Harbor. He later wrote:

As soon as I received the document I telephoned Secretary of State Cordell Hull and told him what I had. Secretary Hull directed me not to let anyone know about the map and stated that he would call me as soon as he talked to President Roosevelt. In about an hour he telephoned to say that he had talked to Roosevelt and they agreed that it would be very serious if any information concerning this map reached the news services . . . I told him it was a grave responsibility to withhold such vital information from the public. The Secretary assured me that he and Roosevelt considered it essential to national defense.27

Thorpe

Popov Martin Dies

Thorpe (on the left); Popov; Dies

The False Flag Foreknown: (4) Naval Intercepts

In his book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (2000), Robert Stinnett proved, from documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, that Washington was not only deciphering Japanese diplomatic messages, but naval dispatches also.

Stinnett Day of Deceit

It had long been presumed that as the Japanese fleet approached Pearl Harbor, it maintained complete radio silence. This was not the case. The fleet observed discretion, but not complete silence. U.S. Naval Intelligence intercepted and translated numerous dispatches, which President Roosevelt had access to through his routing officer, Lieutenant Commander McCollum, who had also authored the original eight-point plan of provocation. The most significant message was sent by Admiral Yamamoto to the Japanese First Air Fleet on November 25, 1941:

The task force, keeping its movement strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet and deal it a mortal blow. The first air raid is planned for the dawn of x-day. Exact date to be given by later order.28

Here is more on the interception of this message:

Maximizing the Risks

MSM historians have traditionally censured the Hawaiian commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Short, for failing to detect the approaching Japanese carriers. What goes unsaid: Washington denied them the means to do so.

During the week before December 7th, naval aircraft searched more than two million square miles of the Pacific29 – but never saw the Japanese force. This is because Kimmel and Short had only enough planes to survey less than one-third of the 360-degree arc around them, and intelligence had advised (incorrectly) that they should concentrate on the southwest.

There were not enough trained surveillance pilots. Many of the reconnaissance craft suffered from lack of spare parts. Repeated requests to Washington for additional patrol planes were turned down. As George Morgenstern noted in Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War: “While the Hawaiian air commanders were clamoring for planes to safeguard the base, 1,900 patrol planes were being lend-leased to foreign countries between February 1 and December 1, 1941. Of these, 1,750, or almost ten times the number which would have rendered Oahu safe, went to Great Britain.”30

Rear Admiral Edward T. Layton, who served at Pearl Harbor, stated: “There was never any hint in any intelligence received by the local command of any Japanese threat to Hawaii. Our air defenses were stripped on orders from the army chief himself. Of the twelve B-17s on the island, only six could be kept in the air by cannibalizing the others for spare parts.”31

Radar, too, was insufficient. And when General Short attempted to build a radar station on Mount Haleakala, Harold Ickes’ Interior Department withheld permission, stating that it would harm the beauty of the landscape.32

Advance Damage Control: the “War Warning”

It was clear, of course, that once disaster struck Pearl Harbor, there would be demands for accountability. Washington seemed to artfully take this into account by sending an ambiguous “war warning” to Kimmel, and a similar one to Short, on November 27th. This has been used for years by Washington apologists to allege that the commanders should have been ready for the Japanese.

Indeed, the message began conspicuously: “This dispatch is to be considered a war warning.” However, it went on to state: “The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organizations of naval task forces indicates an amphibious expedition against the Philippines, Thai or Kra Peninsula, or possibly Borneo.” None of these areas were closer than 5,000 miles to Hawaii (that is further than the distance from New York to Moscow). No threat to Pearl Harbor was hinted at. It ended with the words: “Continental districts, Guam, Samoa take measures against sabotage.” The message further stated that “measures should be carried out so as not repeat not to alarm civil population.” Both commanders reported the actions taken to Washington. Short followed through with sabotage precautions, bunching his planes together (which hinders saboteurs but makes ideal targets for bombers), and Kimmel stepped up air surveillance and sub searches. If their response to the “war warning” was insufficient, Washington said nothing. The next day, a follow-up message from Marshall’s adjutant general to Short warned only: “Initiate forthwith all additional measures necessary to provide for protection of your establishments, property, and equipment against sabotage, protection of your personnel against subversive propaganda and protection of all activities against espionage.”33

Short testifies before Congress after the war:

On December 1, Naval intelligence sent Kimmel its fortnightly intelligence summary entitled “The Japanese Naval Situation.” It stated: “Major capital ship strength remains in home waters, as well as the greatest portion of the carriers.”34 Contrast that to the diary of Captain Johann Ranneft, the Dutch naval attaché in Washington, who was awarded the Legion of Merit for his services to America. Ranneft recorded that on December 2nd, he visited the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Ranneft inquired about the Pacific. An American officer, pointing to a wall map, said, “This is the Japanese Task Force proceeding East.” It was a spot midway between Japan and Hawaii. On December 6th, Ranneft returned and asked where the Japanese carriers were. He was shown a position on the map about 300-400 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. Ranneft wrote: “I ask what is the meaning of these carriers at this location; whereupon I receive the answer that it is probably in connection with Japanese reports of eventual American action. . . . I myself do not think about it because I believe that everyone in Honolulu is 100 percent on the alert, just like everyone here at O.N.I.”35

Admiral Kimmel testifiying after the war:

Strange Activity on December 7

On the morning of the Sunday the 7th, the final portion of Japan’s lengthy message to the U.S. government (rupturing relations, effectively declaring war) was intercepted and decoded. Tokyo added two special directives to its envoys. The first, which the message called “very important,” was to deliver the statement at 1 PM. The second directive ordered that the last copy of code, and the machine that went with it, be destroyed. The gravity of this was not lost in the Navy Department: Japan had a long history of synchronizing attacks with breaks in relations (e.g., in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, it had attacked Port Arthur on the same day it notified Russia that it was declaring war). Sunday was an abnormal day to deliver diplomatic messages — but the best for trying to catch U.S. armed forces at low vigilance; and 1 PM in Washington was shortly after dawn in Hawaii.

Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, arrived at his office at 9:25 AM. He was shown the message and important delivery time. One junior officer pointed out the possibility of an attack on Hawaii; another urged that Kimmel be notified. But Stark refused; he did nothing all morning. Years later, he told the press that his conscience was clear concerning Pearl Harbor because all his actions had been dictated by a “higher authority.”36 As Chief of Naval Operations, Stark had only one higher authority: Roosevelt.

Stark and FDR

In the War Department, where the statement had also been decoded, Colonel Rufus Bratton, head of Army Intelligence’s Far Eastern section, understood the message’s terrible significance. But the head of intelligence told him nothing could be done until Chief of Staff General Marshall arrived. Bratton tried reaching Marshall at home, but was repeatedly told the general was out horseback riding. The horseback ride turned out to be a very long one. When Bratton finally reached Marshall by phone and explained the emergency, Marshall said he would come to the War Department. Marshall took 75 minutes to make the 10-minute drive. He didn’t come to his office until 11:25 AM – an extremely late hour with the nation on the brink of war. He perused the Japanese message and was shown the delivery time. Every officer in Marshall’s office agreed these indicated an attack in the Pacific at about 1 PM EST. The general finally agreed that Hawaii should be alerted, but time was running out.

Marshall had only to pick up his desk phone to reach Pearl Harbor on the transpacific line. Doing so would not have averted the attack, but at least our men would have been at their battle stations. Instead, the general wrote a dispatch, which was not even marked “priority” or “urgent.” After it was encoded it went to the Washington office of Western Union. From there it was relayed to San Francisco. From San Francisco it was transmitted via RCA commercial radio to Honolulu. General Short received it six hours after the attack. Two hours later it reached Kimmel. One can imagine their exasperation on reading it.

Marshall

Despite all the evidence accrued through Magic and other sources during the previous months, Marshall had never warned Hawaii. To historians – ignorant of that classified evidence – it would appear the general had tried to save Pearl Harbor, “but alas, too late.” Similarly, FDR sent a last-minute plea for peace to Emperor Hirohito. Although written a week earlier, he did not send it until the evening of December 6th.37 It was to be delivered by Ambassador Grew, who would be unable to receive an audience with the emperor before December 8th. Thus the message could not conceivably have forestalled the attack – but posterity would think that FDR, too, had made “a valiant, last effort.”

Pope book

Marshall BUSTED

As for Marshall’s notorious “horseback ride” which allegedly prevented him from warning Pearl Harbor in time, that cover story was unintentionally blown by Arthur Upham Pope, in his 1943 biography of Maxim Litvinoff, the Soviet ambassador to the United States. Litvinoff arrived in Washington on the morning of December 7th, 1941 – a highly opportune day to seek additional aid for the Soviets – and, according to Pope, was met at the airport that morning by General Marshall.

The Coverup

Pearl Harbor’s secrets had been successfully preserved before the fact – but what about after? Many people around the nation, including some vocal congressmen, demanded to know why America had been caught off guard.

President Roosevelt said he would appoint an investigatory commission. Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts – a pro-British internationalist friendly with FDR – was selected to head it. Also appointed to the group: Major General Frank McCoy, General George Marshall’s close friend for 30 years; Brigadier General Joseph McNarney, who was on Marshall’s staff and chosen on his recommendation; retired Rear Admiral Joseph Reeves, whom FDR had given a job in Lend-Lease; and Admiral William Standley, a former fleet commander. Only the last seemed to have no obvious fraternity with the Washington set.

Roberts Commission

The Roberts Commission. L-R: McNarney, Standley, Roberts, Reeves, McCoy

The commission conducted only two to three days of hearings in Washington. Admiral Standley, arriving late, was startled by the inquiry’s chummy atmosphere. Admiral Harold Stark and General Marshall were asked no difficult or embarrassing questions. Furthermore, all testimony was taken unsworn and unrecorded – an irregularity that, at Standley’s urging, was corrected.

The commission then flew to Hawaii, where it remained 19 days. When Admiral Kimmel was summoned, he brought a fellow officer to act as counsel. Justice Roberts disallowed this on grounds that the investigation was not a trial, and the admiral not a defendant. Because Kimmel and General Walter Short were not formally “on trial,” they were also denied all traditional rights of defendants: to ask questions and cross-examine witnesses. Kimmel was also shocked that the proceeding’s stenographers – one a teenager, the other with almost no court experience – omitted much of his testimony and left other parts badly garbled. Permission to correct the errors – other than adding footnotes to the end of the commission’s report – was refused.38

The Roberts Commission laid all blame for Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian commanders: they had underestimated the import of the November 27th warning; they had not taken sufficient defensive or surveillance actions; they were guilty of “dereliction of duty.” On the other hand, it said, Stark and Marshall had discharged their duties in exemplary fashion. Remarkably, the report’s section declaring this was first submitted to Stark and Marshall for revisions and approval. Admiral Standley dissented with the findings but did not write a minority opinion after being told that doing so might jeopardize the war effort by lowering the nation’s confidence in its leaders. Standley later called Roberts’s handling of the investigation “as crooked as a snake.”39 Admiral Richardson, Kimmel’s predecessor as Pacific Fleet commander, said of the report: “It is the most unfair, unjust, and deceptively dishonest document ever printed by the Government Printing Office.”40

Roberts brought a final copy of the report to FDR. The President read it and delightedly tossed it to a secretary, saying, “Give that in full to the papers for their Sunday editions.”41 The words “dereliction of duty” were emblazoned in headlines across the country. America’s outrage fell on Kimmel and Short. They were traitors, it was said; they should be shot! The two were inundated with hate mail and death threats. The press, with its ageless capacity to manufacture villains, stretched the commission’s slurs. Even the wives of the commanders were subjected to vicious canards.

There was great outcry for courts-martial – which was exactly what the two officers sought: to resolve the issue of Pearl Harbor in a bona fide courtroom, using established rules of evidence, instead of Owen Roberts’s personal methods. The Roosevelt administration, of course, did not desire that – in an orthodox courtroom, a sharp defense attorney might start digging into Washington’s secrets. So the issue was sidestepped by again invoking security concerns due to the war effort. It was announced that courts-martial would be held – but postponed “until such time as the public interest and safety would permit.”

Sufficient delay would also cause the three-year statute of limitations that applied in such cases to elapse. But that was the last thing Kimmel and Short wanted; court-martial was their only means of clearing themselves. Thus they voluntarily waived the statute of limitations.

Their Day in Court

By 1944, the Allies were clearly winning the war, and national security would no longer wash as a barrier to courts-martial. A joint Congressional resolution mandated trials. At last, the former Hawaiian commanders would have their day in court.

In August, the Naval Court of Inquiry opened. A source inside the Navy Department had already tipped Kimmel and his attorneys about the scores of Magic intercepts kept from the admiral in 1941. One of the attorneys, a former Navy captain, managed to get at the Department’s files, and authenticated the existence of many. Obtaining their release was another matter. Obstruction after obstruction appeared – until Kimmel tried a ploy. Walking out of the courtroom, he bellowed to his lawyer that they would have to tell the press that important evidence was being withheld.

By the next day, the requested intercepts had been delivered – 43 in all. The admirals on the Court listened to them being read with looks of horror and disbelief. Two of the admirals flung their pencils down. More than 2,000 died at Pearl Harbor because those messages had been withheld. Navy Department officers gave additional testimony. After nearly three months, the inquiry finished. The verdict of the Roberts Commission was overturned. Admiral Kimmel was exonerated on all charges. Admiral Stark — who had rejected pleas of juniors to notify Hawaii on the morning of the attack – was severely censured.

Naval Court of Inquiry

The Naval Court of Inquiry

News of the intercepts leaked to the Army Pearl Harbor Board, convening at the same time. The Board secured copies of Magic from War Department files. The Board’s conclusions still expressed modest criticism of General Short, but found overwhelming guilt in General Marshall and his Chief of War Plans, General Gerow. Its report bluntly concluded: “Up to the morning of December 7, 1941, everything that the Japanese were planning to do was known to the United States.”42

Direct criticism of the President was forbidden to these proceedings as beyond their jurisdiction. But FDR held ultimate responsibility for Pearl Harbor, and the warnings he had received – some of which only later came to light – far exceeded anything they might have dreamed.

The verdicts wrought dismay in the Roosevelt administration. But a solution was swiftly concocted. It was announced that, in the interest of national security, the findings would not become public until the war’s end. (This would give Washington time to conduct “new” investigations.) Navy Secretary Knox told the press that the Naval Court of Inquiry had marked its conclusions “secret,” and therefore nothing could be published. A stunned Admiral Orin Murfin, who had presided over the Court, protested to the Secretary. It was true that the breaking of Japan’s diplomatic code was not for public knowledge – but, he pointed out, the Court had only marked part of its determinations secret. Charles Rugg, Kimmel’s attorney, telegrammed Knox demanding to know how the “innocent” verdict granted the admiral could be deemed classified. Nevertheless, the reports were suppressed.

Damage Control

Washington now explained that it would conduct additional investigations supplementing the courts of inquiry. Henry Stimson picked Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Henry Clausen – known to disagree with the Army Board findings – to carry out the War Department’s investigation. The Navy Secretary appointed Admiral W. Kent Hewitt. Hewitt’s role, however, was largely titular; most of the operation was carried out by Lieutenant Commander John F. Sonnett.

The ventures were without precedent: a major was to investigate (and overturn) a verdict rendered by generals; a lieutenant commander was to challenge a verdict of admirals.

The game rules were reminiscent of those of the Roberts Commission. Kimmel and his attorneys were refused permission to attend the Hewitt Inquiry, which operated under this directive: “Except that the testimony you take should be taken under oath so as to be on equal status in this respect with the testimony previously taken, you will conduct your examination in an informal manner and without regard to legal or formal requirements.”43

Not surprisingly, witnesses who had testified against Washington now reversed themselves. Colonel Rufus Bratton had informed the Army Pearl Harbor Board that on December 6, 1941, he had delivered the first 13 parts of Japan’s terminative message to General Marshall via his secretary, and to General Gerow, Chief of the War Plans Division. Now in Germany, Bratton was flagged down on the Autobahn by Clausen, who handed him affidavits from Marshall’s secretary and Gerow denying the deliveries were ever made. Confronted with denials from the Army’s highest levels, Bratton recanted, signing a new affidavit.44

Other officers, their memories similarly “refreshed,” retracted their statements about seeing the “Winds” message; now, it seemed, the message never existed. These individuals faced a dilemma. They were career military men. They knew telling the truth would pit them against the Army Chief of Staff and end all hope of promotion.

But one man wouldn’t bend – Captain Laurance Safford, father of naval cryptography. Safford had overseen that branch of naval intelligence for many years. He personally invented some 20 cryptographic devices, including the most advanced used by our armed forces. For his work, he was ultimately awarded the Legion of Merit.

Safford

Safford, who had testified before the Naval Inquiry that he had seen the “Winds” message, was confronted by Sonnett. Safford wrote of this meeting: “His purpose seemed to be to refute testimony (before earlier investigations) that was unfavorable to anyone in Washington, to beguile ‘hostile’ witnesses into changing their stories. . . .” In a memorandum written immediately after the encounter, Safford recorded some of Sonnett’s verbal prods, such as: “It is very doubtful that there ever was a Winds Execute [message]”; “It is no reflection on your veracity to change your testimony”; and, “It is no reflection on your mentality to have your memory play you tricks – after such a long period.”45 Safford realized a colossal coverup was underway, but was not surprised. He had already discovered that all copies of the “Winds” message in Navy files, along with other important Pearl Harbor memos, had been destroyed. Just four days after Pearl Harbor, Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, director of naval communications, told his subordinates: “Destroy all notes or anything in writing.”46 This was an illegal order – naval memoranda belong to the American people and cannot be destroyed except by Congressional authority. Stories circulated of a similar information purge in the War Department. Some files, however, escaped destruction.

The Clausen and Hewitt inquiries pleased Washington. Equipped with fresh sophistries, the administration produced highly revamped versions of the Army and Navy inquiry findings. The dual Army/Navy announcement came on August 29, 1945 – the very day American troops arrived in Japan, when a rejoicing public was unlikely to care about Pearl Harbor’s origins. The War Secretary’s report shifted the blame back to Short, while saying of General Marshall that “throughout this matter I believe that he acted with his usual great skill, energy, and efficiency.”47 It admitted the Army Board had criticized Marshall, but said this was completely unjustified. The Navy Secretary’s statement again imputed guilt to Kimmel, while asserting that Washington had not been negligent in keeping him informed. It did acknowledge that Admiral Stark should not be given a future position requiring “superior judgement.”

Consequently, Americans didn’t learn what the original inquiries had determined. Of course, anyone wanting to find out for himself could do so when the government released the official record of the hearings connected with Pearl Harbor – if he didn’t mind wading through 40 volumes.

Congress Enters the Act

Only one obstacle remained to burying Pearl Harbor. Congress had long made noises about conducting its own investigation; with the war over, it was sure to do so.

To nip any threat in the bud, the administration sent a bill to both the House and Senate forbidding disclosure of coded materials. It was promptly passed by the Senate, whose members had never heard of Magic and had no idea that the bill would hamstring their forthcoming investigation.

Admiral Kimmel read about the bill in the papers. He and his attorneys notified the press and congressmen about the measure’s implications. As a result, the House voted it down and the Senate rescinded it.

Capitol Hill’s Pearl Harbor probe began in November 1945, when the Joint Congressional Committee assembled. It comprised six Democrats and four Republicans. A split along party lines quickly emerged. The Democrats knew that, even though Roosevelt had recently died, a Pearl Harbor scandal could devastate them at the ballot box. But so long as all six Democrats maintained unswerving party loyalty, a majority decision favoring the administration was inevitable.

Richardson

Admiral Richardson testifies before Joint Congressional Committee

The Democrats used their edge to jockey things their way. The counsel chosen for the committee was a Democrat who previously served with Henry Stimson; his assistant was a former New Dealer working for the law firm of Dean Acheson, the Under Secretary of State. A majority vote determined what evidence the committee would review. Several witnesses Kimmel wanted introduced were never called.

Coercion prevented others from testifying. Major Warren J. Clear, who had warned the War Department in early 1941 that the Japanese were planning to attack a series of islands including Hawaii, was ordered not to appear before the committee.48 So was Chief Warrant Officer Ralph T. Briggs, the man who had originally intercepted the “Winds” message at a United States monitoring station. He was summoned before his commanding officer, who forbade him to testify. “Perhaps someday you’ll understand the reason for this,” he was told. Briggs had a blind wife to support. He did not come forward as a witness.49

The treatment of Lieutenant Commander Alwin Kramer was cruder. Kramer, who had been in charge of the Navy Department’s Translation Section at the time of Pearl Harbor, and had once testified to having seen the “Winds” message, was confined to a psychiatric ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Representative Frank Keefe, a committee Republican, learned of this and vigorously protested.50 Kramer was told that his testimony had better change or he’d be in the ward for the rest of his life. The officer went before the committee, but gave a confusing narrative that essentially denied existence of the “Winds” message.

Captain Laurance Safford, however, remained fearless in his revelations. A campaign to “nail” him was soon evidenced among committee Democrats. Congressman John Murphy, a former assistant DA, put him through a wringer of cross-examination. Safford’s personal mail was read aloud before the committee in an effort to humiliate him. Artful polemics made the captain – naval cryptography’s most eminent man – look forgetful on one hand, vindictive toward superiors on the other.

Safford was accused of being the only one to believe in the “Winds” message. In fact, no less than seven officers had acknowledged seeing it before having their memories “helped.” Perhaps the browbeating of Safford helped inspire Colonel Otis Sadtler of the Signal Corps. During the Clausen investigation, Sadtler had recanted his testimony about the message. Now he came forward and corroborated Safford. (Any doubts about the “Winds” affair have since been dispelled. As historian John Toland reported, both Japanese assistant naval attachés posted at the Washington embassy in 1941, Yuzuru Sanematsu and Yoshimori Terai, have verified that the message was transmitted on December 4th, exactly as Safford said.)51

Sadtler

Sadtler

The Congressional investigation battled on for over six months. In the end, all six Democrats held to the party. One Republican (Congressman Bertrand Gearhart) signed the majority report, reportedly for political reasons,52 and a second, Representative Frank Keefe, signed in exchange for modifications in the findings. An 8-2 majority decision was handed down on Pearl Harbor assigning most of the blame to the Hawaiian commanders, some blame to the War and Navy departments, and none at all to Roosevelt and his civilian administration.

That was the last major official inquiry into Japan’s attack. The lie of Kimmel and Short’s guilt was perpetuated and Washington’s secrets sealed. Congress did conduct a “mini-probe” in 1995, at the urging of the families of General Short (died 1949) and Admiral Kimmel (died 1968). The families hoped to restore the ranks of their libeled, demoted fathers. The 1995 probe requested that the Pentagon reinvestigate Pearl Harbor in light of new information. However, on December 1, 1995, Undersecretary of Defense Edwin Dorn concluded his own investigation with these comments: “I cannot conclude that Admiral Kimmel and General Short were victims of unfair official actions and thus I cannot conclude that the official remedy of advancement on the retired list is in order.”53

Collaboration Pays

Those who cooperated with the Pearl Harbor coverup were generously rewarded. As to the men who served with Owen Roberts on the Roberts Commission:

  • Though he had been retired since 1936, five months after signing the commission’s report Rear Admiral Reeves was advanced to full admiral for “eminent and conspicuous service in the Spanish-American war,” his gallantry discovered by Roosevelt 44 years after the fact.54
  • In January 1942, the same month that he signed the commission’s report, Brigadier General McNarney was promoted to major general, and subsequently lieutenant general, full general, and after the war commanding general of American occupation forces in Germany.
  • After signing the report, Admiral Standley received the Distinguished Service Medal, and the following month (April 1942) was appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union.
  • Retired General Frank McCoy became chairman of the Far Eastern Commission.

As to other major figures in the coverup:

  • General Marshall was made America’s first five-star general (no such designation had previously existed). Subsequently he enjoyed stints as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.
  • Brigadier General Gerow was made a lieutenant general and commander of the 15th U.S. Army.
  • Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clausen, who oversaw the inquiry that revamped the findings of the Army Pearl Harbor Board, went on to spend 16 years as the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite in the Southern Jurisdiction, same position Albert Pike held. In other words, he became the highest-ranking Freemason in America. (Given that President Roosevelt was a 33rd degree Freemason, and that Marshall was a Freemason as well, it is perhaps not surprising that Clausen’s report absolved Roosevelt and Marshall of any wrongdoing. One would not be unjustified in wondering if Masonic handshakes and countersigns preceded the launching of the Clausen investigation.)
  • Secretary of State Cordell Hull received the 1945 Nobel Peace Prize.

As to men who sought to tell the truth about Pearl Harbor, such as Captain Laurance Safford, Colonel Otis Sadtler, and Colonel Rufus Bratton, their careers did not advance.

Some postscripts

On May 25, 1999, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution that Kimmel and Short had performed their duties “competently and professionally” and that our losses at Pearl Harbor were “not a result of dereliction of duty.” “They were denied vital intelligence that was available in Washington,” said Senator William V. Roth, Jr.  Senator Strom Thurmond called Kimmel and Short “the last victims of Pearl Harbor.”55

Former Justice Dept. official Daryl Borgquist discovered from examination of the drafts of Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech that work on it was begun on December 6, the day before the actual attack. And from Helen E. Hamman, daughter of Don Smith, who directed the Red Cross’s War Service before World War II, we have the following quote which appeared in the June 2, 2001 Washington Times:

Shortly before the attack in 1941, President Roosevelt called him [my father] to the White House for a meeting concerning a top‑secret matter. At this meeting, the president advised my father that his intelligence staff had informed him of a pending attack on Pearl Harbor, by the Japanese. He anticipated many casualties and much loss; he instructed my father to send workers and supplies to a holding area. When he protested to the president, President Roosevelt told him that the American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe unless they were attacked within their own borders. . . . He followed the orders of his president and spent many years contemplating this action, which he considered ethically and morally wrong. I do not know the Kimmel family, therefore would gain nothing by fabricating this situation, however, I do feel the time has come for this conspiracy to be exposed and Admiral Kimmel vindicated of all charges. In this manner perhaps both he and my father may rest in peace.

Pearl Harbor and 9/11

Pearl Harbor begs comparison to 9/11:

  • Both events were carefully orchestrated false flags (although Pearl Harbor differed in that the attack itself was genuinely undertaken by a provoked foreign power);
  • Both involved massive death and violent destruction;
  • Both resulted in war and transformed American society;
  • Both were followed by official commissions that concealed the truth;
  • Both inspired “truthers” who were ridiculed by mainstream media because, “after all, our own government would never do that to us.”

Pearl Harbor attack 9-11

 

Not forget Pearl Harbor never forget 9-11

 

avenge pearl harbor Never forgive 9-11

 

Colors don't run Pearl Harbor Colors don't run 9-11

 

Remember Pearl Harbor Remember 9-11

History is largely a continuum. This is because most of the world’s wealth is concentrated in a few hands: a satanic oligarchy that has progressively gained control over banking, industry, media and governments. This consolidation of power has enabled the oligarchy to generate geopolitical events which have served its agenda over many decades. For a comprehensive picture of the continuum that Pearl Harbor and 9/11 fit into, see my new book Truth Is a Lonely Warrior.

Recommended Reading on Pearl Harbor

George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (1947).

Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Contribution to the Japanese Attack (1954).

Husband E. Kimmel, Admiral Kimmel’s Story (1955).

John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (1982). (my personal favorite)

Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (2000).

George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (2007).

Percy L. Greaves, Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy (2010). (Despite the recent publication date, this 937-page book concentrates on earlier revelations; Greaves served on the staff of the joint Congressional Committee that investigated Pearl Harbor during 1945-46.)

Recommended viewing:

BBC, Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor (1989). Watch it on YouTube:

See also the Pearl Harbor Archive.

James Perloff is he author of Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, The Shadows of Power, and Tornado in a Junkyard.

Notes

  1. Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s Sixty Families (New York: Citadel Press, 1937), 190-201.
  2. Robert Dalleck, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 250.
  3. Winston Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 23.
  4. William Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 157.
  5. George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (New York: Devin-Adair, 1947), 94.
  6. John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 318.
  7. Deanna Spingola, The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power (Trafford, 2012), 337.
  8. Anthony Kubek, How the Far East Was Lost: American Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941-1949 (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963), 3, 25.
  9. Ibid., xiv.
  10. Benjamin Gitlow, I Confess (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 485-86, as quoted in Kubek, 24.
  11. Harold Ickes to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 23 June 1941, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/methbk/ickes.pdf.
  12. Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 8-9, 275.
  13. Toland, 262.
  14. George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007), 257.
  15. Russell Grenfell, Main Fleet to Singapore (New York: MacMillan, 1952), 107.
  16. Morgenstern, 116.
  17. Ibid., 58.
  18. Stinnett, 18.
  19. Morgenstern, 63-64.
  20. Ibid., 261.
  21. For a summary of transcripts of these and many other relevant intercepts, see Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Contribution to the Japanese Attack (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair, 1954) 42-74.
  22. Theobald, 43.
  23. Victor, 48; Toland, 281-82; 290-91; interview with Thorpe, Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor, produced by Roy Davies (London: BBC, 1989); 41:48-42:56.
  24. Toland, 317.
  25. Victor, 35-36, 50-51.
  26. Toland, 261; see especially the paperback edition (New York: Berkley Books, 1982), which contains an additional postscript, pp. 349-50.
  27. Martin Dies, “Assassination and Its Aftermath,” American Opinion (April 1964): 33.
  28. Stinnett, 46.
  29. Husband E. Kimmel, Admiral Kimmel’s Story (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), 65.
  30. Morgenstern, 77.
  31. Edwin T. Layton, with Roger Pineau and John Costello, “And I Was There “: Pearl Harbor and Midway – Breaking the Secrets (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 217.
  32. Morgenstern, 71.
  33. Percy L. Greaves; Bettina Greaves, ed., Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2010), 174.
  34. Kimmel, 51.
  35. Toland, 282-83, 298.
  36. Theobald, 26.
  37. Stinnett, 179.
  38. Kimmel, 147-48; Toland 33-35.
  39. Toland, 321.
  40. Stinnett, 255.
  41. Toland, 37.
  42. “Top Secret Report, Army Pearl Harbor Board,” Hearings before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office), 230. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/pha/army/tsreport.html.
  43. Kimmel, 165.
  44. Toland, 141-42.
  45. Ibid., 135-36.
  46. Stinnett, 255.
  47. Greaves, 609.
  48. Toland, 261.
  49. Ibid., 197-98.
  50. Greaves, 764; Toland, 153.
  51. Toland, Infamy, postscript to paperbound edition, 346-47.
  52. Toland, 241.
  53. Edwin Dorn, “Memorandum for the Deputy Secretary of Defense,” stamped Dec. 15, 1995, http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/pha/dorn/dornmemo.html.
  54. Morgenstern, 399.
  55. “Walter Short,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Short; Philip Shenon, “Senate Clears Two Pearl Harbor ‘Scapegoats,’” New York Times, May 26, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/26/us/senate-clears-2-pearl-harbor-scapegoats.html.
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