Lies the government told you (34 page)

On October 8th 1940, President Roosevelt called Admiral James O. Richardson, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet, to the White House to discuss the provocation plan. Richardson objected to the plan, and Roosevelt subsequently fired him. In his place, Roosevelt installed Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel as commander of the fleet in Hawaii on February 1st 1941. Major General William Short was promoted to lieutenant general, and Roosevelt gave him command of the U.S. Army troops in Hawaii. These were two promotions that each of these selfless military men would live to regret. They became pawns in FDR’s murderous scheme to provoke the Japanese Navy
to slaughter American sailors
.

For most of 1941, the United States implemented its eight-point plan and gauged Japan’s reaction by intercepting and decoding its naval communications. In response, Japan’s militarists rose to power and coordinated the military for war against Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. The United States got word of the Pearl Harbor attack in
January
1941, eleven months prior to the actual event. The United States continued to monitor Japanese communications, but did not actively attempt to prevent the attack.

In fact, Roosevelt and the military implemented the so-called “Vacant Sea” policy in late November 1941 to goad a Japanese attack. Navy officials declared the North Pacific off-limits to all American and allied shipping, military and commercial, forcing ships to use the Torres Strait route in the South Pacific between Australia and New Guinea. The strategy was simple: Leave the North Pacific free for Japan’s attack fleet to approach Hawaiian waters. As explained by Rear Admiral Richmond K. Turner, the War Plans officer for the Navy at the time, “We were prepared to divert traffic when we believed that war was imminent. We sent the traffic down via the Torres Strait, so that the track of the Japanese task force would be clear of any traffic.”
⁶
The order was sent to Admiral Kimmel and San Francisco’s 12th Naval District on November 25th 1941, one hour after the Japanese fleet set sail for Pearl Harbor. Following orders, Kimmel pulled his Pacific Fleet back to Pearl Harbor, opening up the entire Pacific Ocean for the Japanese, and leaving Pearl Harbor as the biggest sitting duck in history.

Even more egregious were the orders from naval headquarters when Kimmel attempted to conduct an exercise with his forces to the north of Hawaii in the very same location the Japanese used in early December 1941 to start their attack. Kimmel had scheduled an exercise to prepare for a possible Hawaiian attack
for November 21st 1941. Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll, Assistant Chief of Naval Operations, told Kimmel to expect a surprise aggressive movement from the Japanese, but not to place the fleet in a position that would precipitate Japanese action.
President Roosevelt would not allow Admiral Kimmel to stop Japan’s advance toward the United States
.

Even when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor became a certainty, FDR continued to order Kimmel to exercise restraint. On November 27th and 28th 1941, Roosevelt warned of possible hostile action by Japan, but did not mention Hawaii. He also instructed commanders to “execute appropriate defensive deployment” and “undertake reconnaissance,” but stressed that “United States policy calls for Japan to commit the first overt act.” President Roosevelt was not concerned with protecting American lives or property; he would and did largely sacrifice them as an excuse for a world war. These messages prevented Kimmel from taking any active precautions to try to preempt an attack. Furthermore, the government instructed General Short that he should mainly be on the lookout for sabotage and espionage, and that “protective measures should be confined to those essential to security, avoiding unnecessary publicity and alarm.”

President Roosevelt finally got his wish. In the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 2,403 American men, women, and children were killed, and 1,178 were wounded. Sunday, December 7th 1941, was “a date which will live in infamy,” on more than one level. In response to the attack, and continuing the lie, Roosevelt implored Congress to declare war on Japan, calling the massacre at Pearl Harbor an “unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan.” The attack on Pearl Harbor was secretly provoked, undoubtedly anticipated, and ardently hoped for by the privately lying President who publicly condemned it. The infamy was his.

The shameful and downright cowardly aspect of the Pearl Harbor story is that President Roosevelt did not have to resort to deception. By 1941, Roosevelt had been elected president not once, not twice, but
three
times. He was the boss. He also knew that Nazi Germany represented an incredibly serious threat to American and global freedom and safety; the Nazis were mass murderers who sought to take over the world. If Roosevelt found it prudent to enter World War II, he should have done so. He should have been honest with the American people, instead of lying and sacrificing 2,403 American lives. It is nice to be able to gain your country’s support, but we do not live in a true democracy. We elect our representatives, trusting them to make decisions to protect our freedom. The United States’ effort in War World II would not have been considered any less heroic if Roosevelt had leveled with us, instead of developing an elaborate, murderous scheme to deceive us. In the end, the United States spent about forty months fighting World War II, and 405,399 American service personnel were killed, 291,557 of whom died in combat.
⁷

Another serious problem with Roosevelt’s scheme is that he acted knowing that provoking an “overt act” could result in substantial American deaths. He was willing to trade American lives for a ticket to war with Germany. This is “dastardly.”
It is never, under any circumstances, necessary, moral, or lawful for the government intentionally to kill or permit the killing of known innocents
.

President Roosevelt was a lawyer, but he must have been absent during the first week of law school.
⁸
The famous English case of
The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens
(1884), which is typically taught during a law student’s first week of the first-year criminal law course, states that intentional killing of the innocent is never reasonable or lawful or morally justifiable, no matter the circumstances. Tom Dudley, Edwin Stephens, Edmund Brooks, and Richard Parker were in a boat, stranded on the high seas. After having gone seven days without food, and five days without water, Dudley and Stephens decided to kill Parker and feed on his carcass so that they would not starve to death while waiting for assistance. (Brooks was not involved in the decision, but Dudley and Stephens claimed he agreed.) As a result, instead of all four crewmembers succumbing to death, three lives were saved at the expense of just one. Dudley and Stephens, nevertheless, were prosecuted and convicted of murder. According to the English High Court of Justice, “To preserve one’s life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it.”

President Roosevelt did not personally kill 2,403 Americans at Pearl Harbor, but the same principle applies. He welcomed an attack he knew would certainly result in thousands of American casualties. In the long term, he undoubtedly preserved lives by entering World War II, but his murderous offense in starting the war is not morally, legally, or constitutionally justified.

“They Fired at Us First.”

For much of the twentieth century, the United States government used the threat of communism and the Cold War to justify armed conflict with numerous Asian nations, and pulled an FDR-like move to enter the Vietnam War in 1964.

Communist movements, supported by the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, were sweeping through Southeast Asia. This led to a clash between the national and communist powers in Vietnam and incited the First Indochina War (1946 to 1954), in which the French, supported by the United States, fought against the communist guerrillas. The communists defeated the French, signifying the rise of a revolutionary communist force.

The Geneva Accords (1954) ended the hostilities and stipulated that Indochina was to be independent from French colonial rule. Furthermore, foreign presence was to cease in the region, and Vietnam was temporarily partitioned into northern and southern zones until nationwide elections could be held in 1956. The United States refused to recognize the Accords, as the agreement would limit its involvement in a region infected with communism.

Late in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower advanced the Domino Theory, teaching that once one nation falls to communism, neighboring nations will also succumb to that horrid form of government, one by one. Based on this severely flawed theory, the United States installed a puppet regime in South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh’s communist government controlled North Vietnam, with support from China and the Soviet Union. In 1961, the United States provided direct military and financial support to South Vietnam under President John F. Kennedy. This also violated the Geneva Accords.

Furthermore, the United States initiated covert CIA operations that escalated and intensified American involvement in Vietnam before the outbreak of war. In 1961, the CIA began reconnaissance missions in the North and naval sabotage operations by sending destroyer boats to the northern coast. This program was later transferred in 1964 to the Defense Department and was under the direct control of the Pentagon. The United States military also used Agent Orange along the Ho Chi Minh trail, along which the Vietcong was transporting troops and weapons.

In addition, President Kennedy authorized the CIA to support a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, because Kennedy’s administration feared that Diem would be unable to defeat the Communists. In 1963, a local general in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) overthrew and executed Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. The United States, in noble fashion, denied any involvement in the assassination and primarily placed blame on the ARVN.

That brings us to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s best impression of FDR. In 1964, Johnson blatantly provoked a Vietnamese attack, but claimed that the United States was attacked first. On July 31st 1964, two American destroyers, the USS
Maddox
and
The Turner Joy
, began an electronic intelligence collection mission in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was a secret mission orchestrated by the Pentagon without any congressional authority. On August 2nd 1964, the
Maddox
reported that it was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The
Maddox
allegedly returned fire, sinking one of the boats and severely damaging the other.

In 2005, a declassified National Security Agency (NSA) report revealed that the
Maddox
actually fired first. There is evidence that the destroyers were, in fact, instructed to open fire to scare off any communist boats that came too close. According to the report, Captain John J. Herrick, the task force commander in the Gulf of Tonkin, ordered the destroyers to “open fire if the boats approached within ten thousand yards . . . The
Maddox
fired three rounds to warn off the communist boats. This initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first.”

Two days later, on August 4th 1964, the Pentagon claimed that North Vietnamese boats launched a second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. On that date, the U.S. destroyers believed they received radio and radar signals indicating that they were under attack by the North Vietnamese Navy, and opened fire for two hours. A 2005 NSA report revealed, however, that not only was there no North Vietnamese attack on August 4th, but there may not have even been any North Vietnamese boats in the area. Cables from Herrick showed that the signals came from “freak weather effects,” “almost total darkness,” and an “overeager sonarman” who “was hearing [his] ship’s own propeller beat.”

Nevertheless, on the night of August 4th, in the midst of a presidential election campaign against Senator Barry M. Goldwater, President Johnson proclaimed on national television that the United States would begin air strikes against North Vietnam to “retaliate” against the (phantom) torpedo attack. In his speech, Johnson announced that “[t]his new act of aggression, aimed directly at our own forces, again brings home to all of us in the United States the importance of the struggle for peace and security in southeast Asia . . . Yet our response, for the present, will be limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.”

Seeking to protect the United States against the North Vietnamese, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (H.J. RES 1145), a joint resolution giving Johnson the right to initiate military force in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war.
⁹
Until late in 1964, after Election Day, Johnson held himself out as the peace candidate and called Goldwater “a war monger.”

To say the consequences of starting war with Vietnam were devastating is to be guilty of an egregious understatement. In addition to costing better than $200 million, the Vietnam War resulted in more than 519,000 seriously injured Americans, more than 300,000 wounded Americans, and more than 50,000
dead
Americans. Furthermore, roughly 2,500 Americans are still missing in action and presumed dead.
Why
? Because Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson believed that communism, a form of government and political theory that exalts the state over individuals, could somehow be contained on the battlefield.

When in history have ideas been contained via the use of military force? Never! Not even the most powerful military in the world can “draw a line” stopping the expansion of ideas. President Johnson believed that the Vietnam War would be different, however, and he lied to us to get us involved. Johnson also knew that America’s major wartime presidents—Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR—were its most powerful and revered. He yearned to be among them. Twenty-five years after the Tonkin deception, Communism fell of its own weight, without a shot being fired. And LBJ’s presidency is all but forgotten, except for civil rights and the Medicare and Medicaid bills we are all still paying.