Day of Deceit

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Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor is a book written by Robert Stinnett. First released in December 1999, the book interprets Freedom of Information Act material as a refutation to the official story that the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise.

Richard Bernstein wrote in the New York Times in December 1999 that, "it is difficult, after reading this copiously documented book, not to wonder about previously unchallenged assumptions about Pearl Harbor" though concluded that one is led to read the book with a "strong dose of skepticism".^[1] Tom Roeser, conservative broadcaster and former fellow of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times described the book as "perhaps the most revelatory document of our time".^[2]

1 Secret memo
2 Morimura intercepts
3 Stinnett's allegations
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Secret memo

The book goes through McCollum's secret memo dated October 7, 1940, recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, a proposal that called for eight provocations aimed at Japan.

It also speaks of foreknowledge of the attack by President Roosevelt and U.S. military officials. One of the issues is whether Admiral Kimmel and General Short were denied crucial U.S. military intelligence that tracked Japanese forces advancing on Hawaii. This question was answered in October 2000 during the presidency of Bill Clinton who signed into law, with the support of a bipartisan Congress, the National Defense Authorization Act that, among other provisions, reversed the findings of nine previous Pearl Harbor investigations and found that both Kimmel and Short were denied the crucial intelligence.

[edit] Morimura intercepts

During the lead up to the attack, the commander of the Japanese task force, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, received bulletins from Vice Consul Tadashi Morimura in Hawaii. Morimura's real name was Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese naval officer who had been assigned to Hawaii on espionage duty in April 1941. In his book, Stinnett demonstrates Yoshikawa's bulletins were intercepted, decrypted, and translated by the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the intercepts were also sent to Washington, but Admiral Kimmel did not receive this information.^[1] He omits mentioning that many of these were not decrypted or translated before the Japanese attack.

[edit] Stinnett's allegations

Stinnett wrote:

Opinion polls in the summer of 1940 indicated that a majority of Americans did not want the country involved in Europe's war. Yet FDR's military and State Department leaders agreed that a victorious Nazi Germany would threaten the national security of the United States. They felt that Americans needed a call to action […] Roosevelt believed that his countrymen would rally only to oppose an overt act of war on the United States. The decision he made, in concert with his advisors, was to provoke Japan through a series of actions into an overt act: the Pearl Harbor attack.

Himself a Navy veteran of the Pacific war drawn in by Pearl Harbor, Stinnett's overarching message was that engineering the attack was, at least arguably, a grim necessity. The American public was complacent in the face of Nazi aggression in Europe, but Roosevelt saw the bigger picture and felt that the United States had to get involved to save Britain and the world from Nazi aggression. The provocation policy Roosevelt adopted was based on an October 1940 memo written up by Arthur McCollum at the Office of Naval Intelligence that promoted eight actions to elicit a Japanese "mistake". One of these, point "F" recommended: "keep the main strength of the US Fleet […] in the vicinity of the Hawaiian islands". Stinnett was assisted greatly in his research by the Freedom of Information Act (explicitly thanking the act's author, Rep. John Moss, D-CA) and by Oliver Stone's film, JFK, which had put public pressure on President Clinton to declassify sheaves of secret files in the mid-1990s. McCollum's memo was apparently among those files.