Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Today on the broadcast we’re joined by Robert B. Stinnett, a decorated World War II Navy vet who authored the book “Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor” detailing the long-suppressed documents and records showing that the US government not only deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking, but that they knew specifically about the Pearl Harbor attack well in advance and allowed it to happen.
Is “Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor” the best book on Pearl Harbor? Has Stinnet rebutted attacks made on his book as there seem to be many on Amazon? For example , according to Amazon review by Stephen P Budiansky, there appears to be a thorough rebuttal of Stinnet’s claims in the December 1999 (?) issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings.
Apparently Clement Finn’s review trashes Budiansky’s…
QUOTE
About 30 percent of the reviews have discounted the book’s revelations. The leaders of the dispute include Stephen Budiansky, Edward Drea, and David Kahn, all of whom have authored books or articles on code breaking. To bolster their pre-Pearl Harbor theories, the trio violated journalistic ethics and distorted the U.S. Navy’s pre-Pearl Harbor paper trail. Their efforts cannot be ignored. The trio has close ties to the National Security Agency, the overseer of U.S. naval communications files. Kahn has appeared before NSA seminars. The NSA has not honored my FOIA requests to disclose honorariums paid the seminar participants but has released records that confirm Kahn has been a participant.
Immediately after Day of Deceit appeared in bookstores in 1999, NSA began withdrawing pre-Pearl Harbor documents from the Crane Files housed in Archives II. This means the government decided to continue 60 years of Pearl Harbor censorship. As of January 2002, over two dozen NSA withdrawal notices have triggered the removal of Pearl Harbor documents from public inspection.
The number of pages in the withdrawn documents appears to be in the hundreds. Among the records withdrawn are those of Admiral Harold R. Stark, the 1941 Chief of Naval Operations, as well as crypto records authored by Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, the chief cryptographer for the Pacific Fleet at the time of Pearl Harbor. Under the Crane File transfer agreement with National Archives, NSA has the legal right to withdraw any document based on national defense concerns.
Concurrent with the NSA withdrawals, Budiansky, with the aid of Kahn and Drea, began a two-year media campaign to discredit the paper trail of the U.S. naval documents that form the backbone of Day of Deceit. One of the most egregious examples of ethical violations appeared in an article by Kahn published in the New York Review of Books on November 2, 2000. In that article, Kahn attempted to bolster his contention that Japanese admirals and warships observed radio silence while en route to attack American Pacific bases. Kahn broke basic journalism ethics and rewrote a U.S. Naval Communication Summary prepared by Commander Rochefort at his crypto center located in the Pearl Harbor Naval Yard.
UNQUOTE
Thanks for this, FrancisR. You’ll note I did raise the issue of the Budiansky/Stinnett debate during my FLNWO episode on Tora, Tora, Tora! with James Perloff:
https://www.corbettreport.com/tora-tora-tora-flnwo-21/