Madrid hit by five ETA bombs

[Conal Rehill]

As I've just remarked on another thread, you can see that my name is Conal Rehill. So the formal address would be Mr. Rehill. Addressing me as Mr. Conal would be similar to addressing George Bush as Mr. George or Donald Rumsfeld as Mr. Donald. I'm sure you wouldn't do that. I'm Northern Irish, not Chinese.



The article does not suggest that all nations are driven entirely by the desire for economic domination. However, the evidence seems to suggest that throughout the 20th century the USA certainly has been, and this continues to be so in the 21st century. The quest for makets and profits is the driving force of US domestic and foreign policy, otherwise it would have protected its industries much more effectively. The notion that you are on a morally-driven quest to spread your way of life across the world is believed by virtually nobody outside of America, and those who pretend to believe it do so in order to court favour with what they believe will be a powerful new military-economic empire.



Do you wish to discuss the points of the article one-by-one or merely gloss over them?

[Conal Rehill]

On second thoughts, forget that. I've just had obscenities thrown at me by some stupid savage on another thread and your attitude to Galmin above, who is quite obviously considerably more intelligent than you, is extremely patronizing.



Do you realize that it is very difficult to look more foolish than one does when one patronizes someone whose education is far superior to one's own? It really is high tragi-comedy, very little is funnier.



I'll just go somewhere else.

[DreamTone7]

Neither...I just disagree with it, and you. All countries are concerned with economics to a certain degree...but you step around all of the evidence that suggests other reasons for America behaving as it has over the past 200 years. As I have said before, a one-sided view...and as a result, the conclusions drawn are erroneous.



BTW, how long has it taken Ireland to come to some sort of peaceful agreement? How long do you think it will last?

Melody and Instruments for the soul...

[Galmin]

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Oh...I see. And that is why the US risked it lives, ships and goods pushing a convoy across the Atlantic to keep Britain alive.

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Convoys from the US to the UK in between 1939 and December 1941? Name one.



Didn't all the convoying start with the UK convoys to the Soviet Union (the Arctic convoys) at the outset of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941?

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U-Boat Happy Time

In September 1939, Germany had 46 U-Boats. By the end of the War, 863 U-Boats were commissioned. At first, the U-Boats went out individually, but changed tactics in September 1940, to travel at night in "wolf packs" preying on merchant ships. This was their first "Happy Time."



Eventually, the British beefed up convoy escorts and air support, and losses decreased. As soon as Germany declared war on the United States (Dec. 12, 1941), U-Boats headed for the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. From January to May was "Happy Time" again.



For inexplicable reasons, the U.S. did not arm the ships, nor provide escorts or air cover, nor organize convoys along the Atlantic or Gulf Coasts or in the Caribbean.[/b] Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King was responsible for this inaction. The U.S. Government did not order a blackout of seacoast cities until June 1942, leaving ships silhouetted against the shoreline. Allied ships were "sitting ducks" for the well-armed U-Boats lurking in U.S. coastal waters. U.S. beaches soon became littered with bodies and burned-out ships.

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[DreamTone7]

Galmin - "Didn't all the convoying start with the UK convoys to the Soviet Union (the Arctic convoys) at the outset of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941?"



UK ships carried US goods...it was called the "Murmansk Convoy". But you are in serious need of a history lesson, Galmin. The US was keeping Britain alive long before it entered the war. And how do you expect British ships to carry US goods unless they somehow got to Britain from the US to begin with? Do a little research on the "Liberty Ship" for a start. It was designed and built with keeping Britain alive in mind. Taking those European blinders off once in awhile would help, too.

[Galmin]

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The first of the 2,751 Liberty ships was the SS Patrick Henry, launched on Sept. 27, 1941, and built to a standardized, mass produced design

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Link

[The Real Professor]

"But you are in serious need of a history lesson, Galmin."



Dreamtone7, you are a total and utter bible-thumping ignoramus with the mind of a small child. A ludicrous fool. You are in no position to patronize anyone, and watching you patronize people whose intelligence and education far exceeds your own is almost unbearable. You should be made to sit down over some real historiography and hit over the head with a stick until you show some signs of synaptic activity. At the moment, you are a dunce.



Mr. Galmin is perfectly correct about the timing of the Liberty Ships. By 1941 the Americans realized that a destructive war in Europe was in their long-term interests. In 1939 the American ambassador was attempting to persuade Britain to make a pact with the Germans, and America demonstrated no real reluctance to deal with a N-azi Europe. Only after the Battle of Britain did it change its plans, when it realized that resistance might hold and a destructive war could be exploited even more successfully.



Now, please shut your mouth, go away and educate yourself before you blab off in public.

[DreamTone7]

TRP - "By 1941 the Americans realized that a destructive war in Europe was in their long-term interests."







You know nothing of American history. You totally avoid the original issue that I was discussing with Galmin...being that America ran convoys to Britain long before America entered the war. You avoid it because you know I'm right, and he is wrong. Then you try to impose your own agenda by saying that America wanted war. How did it all of the sudden become in their best interests? What changed between 1939 and 1941? Let's hear it, man!

Melody and Instruments for the soul...

[DreamTone7]

Galmin, you really do need to read some history of that period in the war regarding what was referred to as Englands Lifeline. It comes down to fact...not wishful thinking on anyones part...yours or mine.

________________________________________________

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How did it all of the sudden become in their best interests? What changed between 1939 and 1941?







Galmin - "Pearl Harbor."



So you are saying, Galmin, that Pearl Harbor is what made a disaterous war IN EUROPE advantageous for the US? Again, you need to read more carefully...especially when answering questions directed at other people.

[Galmin]

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You totally avoid the original issue that I was discussing with Galmin...being that America ran convoys to Britain long before America entered the war.

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Please explain to me how the US, with all it's vast experience in running convoys past enemy subs all those years, failed to provide escorts or air cover or even arm the ships when the Liberty Ships started rolling?



Could it be because those convoys you claim the US ran to UK long before the US entered the war ("The US was keeping Britain alive long before it entered the war"...long before UK entered the war? Never mind) in fact were ships the UK had to lease to make up for all the merchant ships they had lost to subs?



Isn't it more probable that the US had little to none experience how to deal with subs until they learned the hard way and order a blackout of seacoast cities as late as June 1942?



Though if that is so, then in between 39 to 41, there were no risk for US lives, US ships and US goods because any pushing of any convoy across the Atlantic to keep Britain alive was carried out by Brits and the goods was merchandise and had to be payed for.

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You avoid it because you know I'm right, and he is wrong.

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The voice of wishful thinking.

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How did it all of the sudden become in their best interests? What changed between 1939 and 1941?

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Pearl Harbor.

Edited by: Galmin  at: 12/9/04 19:58

[The Real Professor]

Now, put down your bible, switch off the Disney channel, and read every point of this CAREFULLY.



How Washington got Japan to attack

Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor

By Robert Stinnett

Touchstone Books, 2001

416 pages, US$12.80 (pb)

Available from <Amazon.com>



REVIEW BY ASHLEY SMITH



You should never get your history lessons from Disney Corporation. Disney’s new blockbuster Pearl Harbor, at a cost of US$135 million, recycles every hackneyed myth about the US in the Second World War.



The movie is just what the Pentagon ordered. And that’s not an accident; the military brass had a hand in shaping the story as historical advisers. Disney cynically released it on Memorial Day weekend to entice parade-goers into the cinema to pad their profit margins and to bolster the image of the US military — using old lies to warm moviegoers to the idea of benign US military intervention.



In this morality tale, the evil Japanese bomb unsuspecting American soldiers, buzz American children playing baseball, and destroy the innocent love between young Americans—thrusting them reluctantly into war. The portrait of American soldiers is absurd. One veteran told my local newspaper: “The free-swinging, partying lifestyle it depicted was more for the officers than the enlisted men, especially the romance. There was very little chance as an enlisted man to have a girlfriend.”



In fact, the actors look more like models for Gap advertisements than real soldiers.



The Japanese are the “empire”, accompanied whenever they appear on the screen with the sound of menacing drums. They are treacherous liars who mislead US President Roosevelt during peace negotiations and surprise him and the rest of the USA with the attack on Pearl Harbor. This portrait justifies the string of racist epithets like “Jap bastards” that fill the movie’s dialogue. This is Mickey Mouse history at its worst.



Fortunately, there’s a book that goes a long way to setting the record straight — Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit.



Historians have long known that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his cabinet wanted to bring the US into the Second World War much earlier than they were able. A widespread sentiment of isolationism held them back; right before Pearl Harbor, 88% of US people opposed going to war.



Robert Stinnett and several other historians have pointed to US secretary of war Henry Stimson’s diary, where he recorded the FDR administration’s strategy to force the Japanese to attack first, so that the USA’s imperial ambitions could be cloaked in claims of self-defence.



Stimson wrote: “In spite of the risk involved... in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people, it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the one to do this, so that there should remain no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who were the aggressors.”



Stinnett’s book exposes the administration’s deliberate steps to ensure this outcome. The US government provoked the Japanese into attacking, knew their target was Pearl Harbor, withheld this knowledge from the military commanders at the Hawaiian base, used the devastating attack to convince Americans to support entry into the war, and then covered up their plot for the next 60 years.



Stinnett is no radical opponent of US imperialism. Having written a celebratory account of George Bush senior’s service in the Second World War, Stinnett is a loyal critic of the US. But his outrage at FDR’s sacrifice of nearly 3000 soldiers in Pearl Harbor drove him to uncover the bombing, not as a Japanese “day of infamy”, but as a US “day of deceit.”



The real background to the attack on Pearl Harbor is not a story of the personal qualities of Japan’s politicians — or those of the US — but of rivalry over which business class would dominate Asia and the Pacific.



For years, both Japan and the US had been jockeying to expand their influence in the region. A shooting war was likely sooner or later. The real question concerned the immediate circumstances in which the war would begin.



On that question, Stinnett is thorough. He compiled more than 200,000 documents and interviews over a 17-year investigation and obtained thousands of formerly classified documents through the Freedom of Information Act.



The lynchpin of his argument is a memo that he uncovered from the head of the Far East Office of Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum. In the memo, dated October 7, 1940, and addressed to two of Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers, McCollum laid out an eight-point plan for manipulating the Japanese into an attack on the US.



During the ensuing year, Roosevelt implemented all the recommendations. These included stationing US naval vessels at British and Dutch bases in Asia, increasing aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces (which were fighting Japanese occupation of Manchuria) and placing the bulk of the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.



Most importantly, FDR imposed an embargo on trade with Japan that included the resource most crucial to its economy: oil. These actions were all in keeping with the strategic interests of US rulers in blocking the expansion of Japanese influence in Asia, but the tactical aim of combining them in quick succession was to provoke Japan into a military counter-attack.



Once Japan attacked the US, then Germany and Italy would be bound by their Tripartite Treaty with Japan to declare war on the US. Roosevelt could then win public approval to enter the war in Europe — which was his main concern.



Contrary to US government claims, Stinnett shows that US intelligence had broken both the diplomatic Purple Code and the Japanese naval codes by January 1941, and was regularly supplying Roosevelt with decrypted Japanese statements about their preparations to attack. FDR then set up his so-called splendid arrangement with the British and Dutch to share all these decrypted messages with allied military bases throughout the Pacific.



But Roosevelt kept Pearl Harbor out of the loop. Stinnett demonstrates that Washington systematically denied decoded messages to Admiral Husband Kimmel, head of the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, and to Lieutenant General Walter Short, head of the US army forces in Pearl Harbor. After the attack, Roosevelt blamed them for dereliction of duty and demoted them. They were fall guys for FDR’s plan.



Thus Roosevelt left his commanders unprepared for the attack that he knew was coming.



US naval intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation monitored the Japanese spy code-named “Morimura”, who was sent to Hawaii in 1941 to supply the Japanese military with the locations and dispositions of US planes, ships and troops.



US intelligence officers intercepted Morimura's transmissions to the Japanese military, decoded them and forwarded them to the White House. Kimmel and Short never received word about Morimura’s messages, even though he sent maps and bomb plots — and twice named Pearl Harbor as Japan’s target.



Furthermore, as the Japanese fleet assembled for the attack, Roosevelt sent out a “Vacant Sea” order to clear the North Pacific of any commercial traffic. This meant that Japanese forces would not encounter ships that might tip off Pearl Harbor.



One of Roosevelt’s key military advisers, Rear Admiral Walter Anderson, prevented long-range reconnaissance flights in a Pearl Harbor exercise, which also might have discovered the Japanese fleet. However, the most modern ships were ordered to leave Pearl Harbor so that only First World War clunkers would remain as sitting ducks.



Once the Japanese attack force was underway, Roosevelt and his cabinet identified it and traced its passage toward Hawaii by intercepting radio messages between the ships in the convoy.



Stinnett demonstrates that, contrary to previous claims by both the Japanese and US governments, the Japanese broke radio silence 129 times between November 26 and December 8. What’s more, US intelligence intercepted the transmissions.



Even when the US did inform its commanders in the Pacific that war was likely — first vaguely on November 25 and then more concretely on November 28 — they told Kimmel and Short not to do anything that would appear as US aggression or would alarm civilians. The November 28 message even states that “Japan must commit the first act”.



Then, on December 5, two days before the attack, US intelligence intercepted a coded message revealing that the Japanese would declare war December 7. However, even this crucial information was not delivered promptly to Pearl Harbor; General George Marshall delayed the alert for an unexplained 15 hours.



Roosevelt’s plan, outlined more than a year before, came to fruition with the Japanese attack that killed nearly 3000 soldiers, damaged 16 ships and destroyed 182 planes. Almost immediately, FDR and US Congress went into action, declaring war on both Japan and Germany. At the same time, they organised a cover-up of the McCollum plan.



Terrified of investigations by Congress in 1941, 1945, 1946 and 1995, top military brass destroyed some documents, classified others, and pressured witnesses or withheld them from investigators — all in the name of protecting national security. They constructed the story of a Japanese surprise attack — beginning with FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech — that still shows up as the script for movies like Pearl Harbor.



Stinnett’s book is a powerful indictment of the Roosevelt administration’s strategy to trick the US public into the war. We can now list Pearl Harbor as a day of deceit along with the explosion of the USS Maine, which tricked the US people into supporting the Spanish American War, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which provided cover for the US to escalate its war in Vietnam.



In its pursuit of world dominance, the US will use similar plots again. If we’re going to stop them, we’ll need to learn the real history, not the Disney version.

[Conal Rehill]

Well, yes, I've read that book. He has his facts dead right, but my objection to it is that it portrays the USA in a bad light, not in an absolutist sense measured against some moral ideal, but in a relative sense compared to other imperialists.



The USA DID do all of that, but these events occurred in the twilight of the British Empire when the world was up for grabs. In fact, every imperial power has used those dirty tricks and deceits, not just the USA. What constantly amazes me is that most American citizens won't admit it because they would feel bad about it, it would destroy their childish illusion of being the good guys. Why should they feel bad about doing deceitful things that everyone else has done? Stupidity and naivety on the one hand, but isn't their saving grace the ironic fact that they WANT to be the good guys and would feel embarrassed if they ever admitted they weren't?



Forrest Gump lives!!

[DreamTone7]

TRP - If you had read this entire post (instead of only the portions that fuel your agenda), in addition to knowing what the Pumpkin Papers actually are, then you might really be a student of history instead of a manipulator of it...just maybe. In reading your post, you would think that the US forced Japan to attack...preposterous. Oh well...some people are very good at decieving themselves...I think most can observe that the US cannot force anybody to attack...it must be a concious decision on the attackers part. It is interesting how you have tried to turn around Hitlers attempt a world domination into a US attempt a world domination, though. Twisted, but interesting...and hopefully not typical for a European mindset.



Stinnet leaves out a lot (or you did from your post) that allows you to paint a "meaner" picture of the US. For example, we may have intercepted a lot of transmissions, but without having broken the code we could not know what was going on. The Japanese knew this, too...which is way they had no qualms about breaking radio silence when they did.



Omissions such as these are typical tricks of those intent on spreading propaganda...not discussing issues.



Back to the issue, you still haven't explained what changed between 1939 and 1941 that made war in Europe advantageous for the US...nor how the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made war in Europe advantageous for the US. (That should teach you to pick up somebody elses arguement before reading the entire post!) I think you don't have an answer at all, and that you were just fishing for fodder. Care to try and show me wrong?

[DreamTone7]

Mr Rehill - The US helped both Britain and Russia stay alive by sending supplies of all kinds...from apples to ammunition. I think most historians would admit that Britain would have fallen if not for "lifeline" extended from the US via the Atlantic Ocean. That makes us the good guys.

Melody and Instruments for the soul...

[The Real Professor]

OK, I give up.



I cannot do anything with an idiot who does not know that nations have been provoking each other into attacks since time immemorial and believes that a large flotilla of Japanese ships can cross the ocean and get within seaplane-range of the main US Pacific Fleet HQ without a single sighting.



It just beggars belief. I have an MA in Modern History and I have more important things to do than waste my time with a complete fool. You need to go back to 3rd grade and start again.