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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcos who wrote (11145)	11/22/2001 2:49:22 AM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Respond to of 281500

Oh, come now, you're not even trying to see a conspiracy...

To: marcos who wrote (11145)	11/22/2001 2:52:08 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

marcos, As you may be aware, Hitler had many friends in the Anglo-Saxon world. A fair smattering of the British aristocracy liked his approach to law and order, and weren't too put out by the anti-semitism of the National Socialists. In the U.S. Henry Ford and Father Coughlin were famously sympathetic to the Nazis. We've even had intimations on this thread the that American Red Cross turned a blind eye to the humanitarian horrors of the Holocaust. Re: Was the information being suppressed or was there a failure to coordinate it, understand its full meaning, and communicate it efficiently to Pearl Harbour? I've been trying to recall the book I read about 18 months ago that laid out the secret U.S. policy toward Japan in the months that led up to Pearl. Unfortunately, my records are incomplete and I can't retrieve the title immediately. The gist of the secret U.S. policy from early 1940 on (if the book is not fabricating the policy directive out of whole cloth) indicated that there was to be a multi-commodity blockade of the Japanese trade. Thus, scrap metal shipments from the U.S. West Coast were embargoed, oil from Maylaysia (British Protectorate) and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) were to be ended, shipments of foodstuffs from S.E. Asia curtailed and several other steps, including the ending of all sales of manufactured goods from the U.S. This had the effect of creating a vast paranoia among the Japanese military and political elite who correctly reasoned that we were trying to cut off the essential materiel of Japan's war machine, and as they saw it, the nation's existence. This had the expected effect. Which was to create within the Japanese hieracrchy the will to strike at the U.S. and at our assets in the Phillipines in order to break the stranglehold that our embargo was starting to place on Imperial Japan. It was a calculated risk to take out the American fleet at Pearl and in Subic in order to free up the opportunities for the Japanese to regain access to the oil of Maylaysia and Indonesia. Then, as now, it was about the oil. -R.

To: marcos who wrote (11145)	11/22/2001 5:26:30 AM
From: axial	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi, marcos - You know, stuff happens. Everybody's so damned ready to string out a conspiracy theory based on a retroactive examination of unconnected events. One of the least examined facts about intelligence agencies, and the countries that they supposedly protect, is how often they've failed to see what's coming. And there's always some opportunistic writer, somewhere, who spends a little time weaving together a web of inconclusive, elusive and unprovable "facts" which make a "case" for proving some elaborate, cockamamie "conspiracy". Look at Israel, and the Yom Kippur war. Sandbagged, they were. How could Israel, with one of the leading and most widely-respected intelligence agencies in the world, have missed that one, from an obvious enemy? Well, they did. Stalin's Russia, which had penetrated nations all over the world, with agents under deep, deep cover - and which had enormous reason to be suspicious of Germany - got totally mugged by Operation Barbarossa. Pear Harbour: everybody (especially authors who want to make a quick buck off a gullible public) has a theory. And yes, the conspiracy theories about 911 are multiplying like rabbits. Al-Qaida would have you believe that the whole thing is just an Israeli conspiracy to make them look bad. If you believe that, them Pssst! I've got a perpetual motion machine to sell you. "Intelligence" agencies do some dumb things. Even when they do a good job, sometimes the people in government just don't believe what they're being told. Intelligence bureaucracies are created, and instead of pooling their data, they "hog" it, to advance their department at the other's expense. Budgets get cut, and key threats are ignored, or missed. Analysts are fired, and there's no one to make sense of the masses of data. And on, and on... It took years before America realized that the "Missile Gap" of the 50's and 60's, trumpeted by many, never existed. Talk about an intelligence failure... We had a guy on trial up here in Canada, who claimed that the deaths of millions of Jews in Nazi death camps was a total fiction: an invention of conspirators. I have actually met people who believe that. Yeah, and Armstrong never landed on the moon, it was all a fake. Everybody wants to believe the big, dark conspiracy theory. Good grief, some people think the National Enquirer is a "source". Just because some dimwit, and his hungry publisher have put something into print means nothing. The reality is much simpler; pick the obvious, inescapable, non-conspiratorial answer: people screw up. Regards, Jim