A couple of weeks ago Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and self-appointed moral conscience for Holocaust survivors, praised the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes to make way for yet more illegal settlements in Jerusalem. His chilling statement ran in an ad placed in Ha’aretz. Here are Wiesel’s appalling words:

“As Sukkot begins, we are thrilled to bless the tens of new families joining us at this time in the Jewish settlement in the City of David. We salute the Zionist action in Jerusalem of those involved. Strengthening the Jewish presence in Jerusalem is a challenge that we all face and with this act of settlement you are raising our stature. Together with you we will receive the pilgrims, the holiday visitors. We value and cherish you.�

Though Wiesel offers himself as a paragon of moral virtue, the truth is somewhat seamier. As detailed in this myth-shattering piece by Alexander Cockburn from the February 2006 print edition of CounterPunch, Wiesel assiduously campaigned for the Nobel Prize and has for decades tried to pass off his short book “Night� as a true account–a “testimony� in his words– of his experiences at Auschwitz, even though key scenes in the book have been exposed as fiction.
–Jeffrey St. Clair

When in trouble, head for Auschwitz, preferably in the company of Elie Wiesel. It’s as foolproof a character reference as is available today, at least within the Judeo-Christian sphere of moral influence. One can easily see why Oprah Winfrey and her advisers saw an Auschwitz excursion in the company of Wiesel as a sure-fire antidote to salve the wounds sustained by Oprah’s Book Club when it turned out that James Frey had faked significant slabs of his own supposedly autobiographical saga of moral regeneration, A Million Little Pieces.

Published in 2003, Frey’s irksome book swiftly became a cult classic. (The present author was offered it in the summer of 2004 by a young relative, presumably to assist in his moral regeneration, but after glancing through a few pages returned it, on the grounds that it wasn’t his kind of thing.) Winfrey picked it for her Book Club in September 2005, and it rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists.

For Frey the sky fell in when, on January 7, 2006, the Smoking Gun website published documents showing that Frey had fabricated many facts about himself, including a criminal record. There were later charges of plagiarism. Frey ran through a benign gauntlet of trial-by-Larry King on January 11, and Oprah called in to stand by her Pick of the Month. She said that what mattered was not whether Frey’s book was true (the Fundamentalist claim for the Holy Bible) but its value as a therapeutic tool (the modern Anglican position on the Good Book).

But by now every columnist and books page editor in America was wrestling the truth-or-fiction issue to the ground. Oprah turned on Frey. On her show on January 26, he clung to the ropes, offering the excuse that the “demons� that had driven him to drink and drugs had also driven him into claiming that everything he wrote about himself was true. Publishers including Random House, which has made millions off him, had rejected the book when he’d initially offered it as a “fiction novel�. Oprah brushed this aside.

“Say it’s all true� is what demons often whisper in an author’s ear. Ask T.E. Lawrence. Did the Bey of Deraa really rape him? Lawrence suggests it in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom in paragraphs of fervent masochistic reminiscence. This and other adventures in Lawrence’s account of British scheming in Mesopotamia against the Ottomans met with the ecstatic admiration of the Oxford-based equivalent of Oprah’s Book Club back in the early 1920s, after Lawrence had the 350,000-word “memoir� privately printed and circulated. He’d written an earlier version in 1919 but claimed this had been stolen while he was changing trains in Reading, on the way to Oxford from London. (Reading has surely been the site of more supposed thefts and losses of “completed manuscripts� and PhD dissertations — “I didn’t make a copy!� — than any railway station in the world.)

Half a century later it occurred to Colin Simpson and Phillip Knightley of the London Sunday Times to ask the supposed rapist for his side of the story. They hurried off to Turkey and tracked down the town to which the Bey had retired, arriving at his home only to learn he’d died not long before. Relatives told the British reporters that the Bey would not have found Lawrence appetizing prey. The Turk was a noted womanizer, and when in Mesopotamia was always getting the clap from consorting with whores on his excursions to Damascus.

It’s fun to think of Oprah grilling Lawrence about his claims, freshly exposed on Smoking Gun, telling him she felt “really duped� but that, “more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of Orientalizing masochists who believed you�.

But hardly had Frey been cast down from the eminence of Amazon.com’s top bestseller before he was replaced at number one by the new pick of Oprah’s Book Club, Elie Wiesel’s Night, which had the good fortune to see republication at this fraught moment in Oprah’s literary affairs. Simultaneous with the Night selection came news that Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel would shortly be visiting Auschwitz together, from which vantage point Oprah, with the lugubrious Wiesel at her side, could emphasize for her ABC-TV audience that there is truth and there is fiction, that Auschwitz is historical truth at its bleakest and most terrifying, that Night is a truthful account and that Wiesel is the human embodiment of truthful witness.

The trouble here is that in its central, most crucial scene, Night isn’t historically true, and at least two other important episodes are almost certainly fiction. Below, I cite views, vigorously expressed to me in recent weeks by a concentration camp survivor, Eli Pfefferkorn, who worked with Wiesel for many years; also by Raul Hilberg. Hilberg is the world’s leading authority on the Nazi Holocaust. An expanded version of his classic three-volume study, The Destruction of the European Jews, was recently reissued by Yale University Press. Wiesel personally enlisted Hilberg to be the historical expert on the United States Holocaust Commission.

If absolute truth to history is the standard, Pfefferkorn says, then Nightdoesn’t make the grade. Wiesel made things up, in a way that his many subsequent detractors could identify as not untypical of his modus operandi: grasping with deft assurance what people important to his future would want to hear and, by the same token, would not want to hear.

What’s a riot without looting? We want it, they’ve got it! You’d think from the press that looting was alien to British tradition, imported by immigrants more recent than the Normans. Not so. Gavin Mortimer, author of The Blitz, had an amusing piece in the First Post about the conduct of Britons at the time of their Finest Hour:

“It didn’t take long for a hardcore of opportunists to realise there were rich pickings available in the immediate aftermath of a raid – and the looting wasn’t limited to civilians.

“In October 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the arrest and conviction of six London firemen caught looting from a burned-out shop to be hushed up by Herbert Morrison, his Home Secretary. The Prime Minister feared that if the story was made public it would further dishearten Londoners struggling to cope with the daily bombardments…

“The looting was often carried out by gangs of children organized by a Fagin figure; he would send them into bombed-out houses the morning after a raid with orders to target coins from gas meters and display cases containing First World War medals. In April 1941 Lambeth juvenile court dealt with 42 children in one day, from teenage girls caught stripping clothes from dead bodies to a seven-year-old boy who had stolen five shillings from the gas meter of a damaged house. In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 per cent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting.

“Joan Veazey, whose husband was a vicar in Kennington, south London, wrote in her diary after one raid in 1940: “The most sickening thing was to see people like vultures, picking up things and taking them away. I didn’t like to feel that English people would do this, but they did.�

“Perhaps the most shameful episode of the whole Blitz occurred on the evening of March 8 1941 when the Cafe de Paris in Piccadilly was hit by a German bomb. The cafe was one of the most glamorous night spots in London, the venue for off-duty officers to bring their wives and girlfriends, and within minutes of its destruction the looters moved in.

“Some of the looters in the Cafe de Paris cut off the people’s fingers to get the rings,� recalled Ballard Berkeley, a policeman during the Blitz who later found fame as the ‘Major’ in Fawlty Towers. Even the wounded in the Cafe de Paris were robbed of their jewellery amid the confusion and carnage.�

A revolution is not a tea party, sniffed Lenin, but he should have added that it often starts off with a big party. Perhaps he was acknowledging that when he said a revolution was “a festival of the oppressed.� After the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917 everyone was drunk for three days, conduct of which the prissy Vladimir Illich no doubt heartily disapproved.

The riots in London in August 2011 started in Tottenham in an area with the highest unemployment in London, in response to the police shooting a young black man, in a country where black people are 26 times more likely to stopped and searched by the cops than whites. Stop-and-searches are allowed under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, introduced to deal with football hooligans. It allows police to search anyone in a designated area without specific grounds for suspicion. Use of Section 60 has risen more than 300 per cent between 2005 and last year. In 1997/98 there were 7,970 stop-and-searches, increasing to 53,250 in 2007/08 and 149,955 in 2008/09. Between 2005/06 and 2008/09 the number of Section 60 searches of black people rose by more than 650 per cent.

The day after the heaviest night of rioting we saw Darcus Howe, originally from Trinidad and former editor of Race and Class, now a broadcaster and columnist, being questioned by a snotty BBC interviewer, Fiona Armstrong. We ran it last week as website of the day. Howe linked the riots to upsurges by the oppressed across the Middle East and then remarked that when he’d recently asked his son how many times he’d been stopped and searched by the police, his boy answered that it had happened too often for him to count. To which point Ms Armstrong, plainly irked by the trend in the conversation in which Howe was conspicuously failing in his assigned task – namely to denounce the rioters – said nastily, ““You are not a stranger to riots yourself I understand, are you? You have taken part in them yourself?�

“I have never taken part in a single riot. I’ve been on demonstrations that ended up in a conflict,� the 67-year old Howe answered indignantly. “Have some respect for an old West Indian negro and stop accusing me of being a rioter because you wanted for me to get abusive. You just sound idiotic — have some respect.� The BBC later apologized to those offended by what it agreed was “a poorly phrased question.�

Back in 1981, Cockburn interviewed Howe in his Race and Class office after the Brixton and Toxteth riots. Overweening police power and state racism were fuelling unofficial racism, with innumerable murderous attacks on blacks in a Britain ravaged by Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. At the start of April, 1981, the police launched Operation Swamp 81 to combat street crime. More than 1,000 people were stopped and questioned in the first four days. The uprising in Brixton began on April 9 and lasted through April 11. There were 4,000 police in the area and 286 people arrested. By the weekend of July 10-12 riots were taking place in 30 towns and cities – black and white youths together and in some case white youths alone. They were scenes, as Lord Scarman said of Brixton, “of violence and disorder… the like of which had not previously been seen in this century in Britain.

“The riots opened up an entirely new political ethos,� Howe said back then. “To understand the organizational stages that we are moving to, it is essential to know that in the late 1960s there were black-power organizations in almost every city in this country. A combination of repression – not as sharp as in the United States – but repression British style and Harold Wilson’s political cynicism undermined that movement. What he did was offer a lot of money to the black community, which set up all kinds of advice centers and projects for this and projects for that. So, in some black communities, if you have a headache somebody is onto you saying, ‘Well, look, I have a project with blacks with headaches.’ That paralysed the political initiative of blacks. It was done for you by the state and, as you know, Britain is saturated with the concept of welfare.The riots have broken through that completely, smashed it to smithereens, indicating that it has no palliative, no cure for the cancer.�

AC: “You’re looking toward a black/white mass organization?�

“Black/white mass movement. But one must always point to what we are heading for. What are we aiming for? Are we aiming for the vulgarity of a better standard of living. I think a passion has arisen in the breasts of millions of people in the world for a kind of democratic form and shape which would equal parliamentary democracy in its creativity and innovation.�

AC: “Let’s look at a likely future for Britain: enormous structural unemployment, the creation of a permanent underclass..�

The most compelling argument against the existence of a vast conspiracy orchestrating the assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy is that the brothers were never threats to ruling power. The Kennedys were card-carrying members of the global elites, ran in their circles, catered to their whims, administered their political and economic bidding. (Just ask Fidel Castro.) With MLK, it could be a different matter. And with the infinitely more radical Malcolm X it certainly was. Whatever King’s actual function–and the Reverend was given a hard time as something of an Uncle Tom by radicals in the later Sixties–the ruling power construed him as a threat.

King was assassinated almost forty-six years ago, at just after 6 in evening, as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A single rifle bullet hit him in the jaw, then severed his spinal cord. James Earl Ray, a white man, was convicted of the killing and sentenced to 99 years. Ray was certainly the gunman.

But there are credible theories of a conspiracy, possibly involving US Army intelligence, whose role in the life and death of Martin Luther King was explored by Stephens Tompkins in the Memphis Commercial Appeal in 1993.

The Army’s interest in the King family stretched back to 1917 when the War Department opened a file on King’s maternal grandfather, first president of Atlanta’s branch of the NAACP. King’s father, Martin Sr., also entered Army intelligence files as a potential troublemaker, as did Martin Jr. in 1947 when he was 18. He was attending Dorothy Lilley’s Intercollegiate School in Atlanta and 111th Military Intelligence Group in Fort McPherson in Atlanta suspected Ms Lilley of having Communist ties.

King’s famous denunciation of America’s war in Vietnam came exactly a year before his murder, before a crowd of 3,000 in the Riverside Church in Manhattan. He described Vietnam’s destruction at the hands of �deadly Western arrogance,� insisting that �we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.�

US Army spies secretly recorded black radical Stokely Carmichael warning King, “The Man don’t care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble.� Carmichael was right.

After the 1967 Detroit riots 496 black men under arrest were interviewed by agents of the Army’s Psychological Operations Group, dressed as civilians. It turned out King was by far the most popular leader. That same year, watching the great antiwar march on Washington in October 1967 from the roof of the Pentagon Major General William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for Army intelligence, concluded that “the empire was coming apart at the seams�. He thought there were too few reliable troops to fight the war in Vietnam and hold the line at home.

The Army increased surveillance on King. Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying sniper sites in major American cities. The Ku Klux Klan was recruited by the 20th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Alabama, as a subsidiary intelligence network. The Army began offering 30.06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis. King was dogged by spy units through early ’67. A Green Beret unit was operating in Memphis the day he was shot. The bullet that killed him came from a 30.06 rifle purchased in a Memphis store. Army intelligence chiefs became increasingly hysterical over the threat of King to national stability.

After his Vietnam speech the major US newspapers savaged King. Fifteen years later the New York Times was still bitter when the notion of a national holiday honoring the civil rights leader was being pressed–with ultimate success–by labor unions and black groups. “Why not a Martin Luther King Day?� an NYT editorial asked primly. “Dr King, a humble man, would have objected to giving that much importance to any individual. Nor should he be given singular tribute if that demeans other historical black figures.� Give one of them a holiday and they’ll all be wanting one.

Within hours of King’s murder rioting broke out in 80 cities across the country. Dozens of people, mostly black were killed. On April 6 the Oakland cornered the Black Panther leadership and when one of the young leaders, Bobby Hutton, emerged with his shirt off and his hands up, shot him dead. Further police executions of Panthers followed, most notoriously the killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, as they slept, by the Chicago police, with FBI complicity, in December, 1969.

In contrast to Hutton, the Panthers and above all Malcolm X, slain in 1965, white liberal opinion, resentments at the disloyalty of the Riverside Church speech conveniently forgotten, has hailed King as a man who chose to work within the system and who furthermore failed to make any significant dent on business as usual.

In his last years King was haunted by a sense of failure. Amid a failed organizing campaign in Chicago he was booed at a mass meting there and, as he lay sleepless that night he wrote later that he knew why: “I had urged them [his fellow blacks ] to have faith in America and in white society They were now booing because they felt were unable to deliver on our promises They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.�

As the radical journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote shortly after King’s assassination, “That he failed to change the system that brutalizes his race is a profound relief to the white majority. As a reward they have now elevated his minor successes into major triumphs.�

Forty years on, America is still disfigured by racial injustice. Militant black leadership has all but disappeared. To black radicals Obama’s sedate homilies and respectful paeans to America’s ladders of advancement available to the industrious are to the fierce demands for justice of Malcolm X and of King in his more radical moments, as Muzak is to Charlie Parker.

Obama is caught, even as King was. The moment whites fear he is raising the political volume, he’s savaged with every bludgeon of convenience, starting with the robust sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sin is to have reminded whites that there are black Americans who are really angry. “Damn America,� roared the Rev Wright. King was just as rough at Riverside Church in the speech that so terrified the white elites: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.�

Honesty of this sort from a black politician in America extorts due retribution.

This article is adapted and expanded from a piece which originally appeared in the January 2009 print edition of CounterPunch.

Note: On the eve of the fateful Israeli elections in 2001, Alex and I wrote a long profile of the vicious, sinister career of Ariel Sharon. In the wake of Sharon’s death, I revamped the essay as a corrective to the drooling eulogies which have gone so far as to label him an “Israeli Moses.� — JSC

Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel on February 
6, 2001. Some incorrigible optimists then suggested that only a right-wing extremist
 of Sharon’s notoriety would boast the credentials to broker lasting peace
 with the Palestinians.

Maybe so. History 
is not devoid of such examples. But Sharon’s record was not encouraging.
 His crucial role in provoking Palestinian uprisings by his excursions 
under heavy military protection to holy sites in Jerusalem is well known. A 
little more faintly perhaps people recall the verdict of an Israeli commission
of inquiry finding that Sharon bore some responsibility for the dreadful Phalangist 
massacres in Palestinian refugee camps outside Beirut.

But in fact 
Sharon’s history as a terrorist, with documented participation in what 
can be fairly stigmatized as war crimes, goes back to the early 1950s. Here 
is a brief resume, culled in part from a two-part series on Sharon in
 the well-respected Hebrew-language Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

Sharon was 
born in 1928 and as a young man joined the Haganah, the underground military 
organization of Israel in its pre-state days. In 1953 he was given command of
 Unit 101, whose mission is often described as that of retaliation against Arab 
attacks on Jewish villages. In fact, as can be seen from two terrible onslaughts, 
one of them very well known, Unit 101’s purpose was that of instilling 
terror by the infliction of discriminate, murderous violence not only on able-bodied 
fighters but on the young, the old, the helpless.

Sharon’s
 first documented sortie as a terrorist was in August of 1953 on the refugee
 camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the unit records 50 
refugees as having been killed; other sources allege 15 or 20. Major-General
 Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that “bombs were thrown�
 by Sharon’s men “through the windows of huts in which the refugees 
were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic 
weapons.�

In October
 of 1953 came the attack by Sharon’s Unit 101 on the Jordanian village of
 Qibya, whose “stain� Israel’s foreign minister at the time, Moshe
 Sharett, confided to his diary, “would stick to us and not be washed away 
for many years.�

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, cited in a petition demanding 
retribution against Sharon for war crimes, describes the massacre thus:

“Sharon’s 
order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on
its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations.
 The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was revealed only during
 the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five
 houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women
 and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed
 that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone
 was hiding inside the houses.

“The UN 
observer who inspected the scene reached a different conclusion: ‘One story 
was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled
 across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy 
fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them.’ The slaughter 
in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the
 United Nations Security Council dated October 16, 1953…from the Envoy Extraordinary 
and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 
at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack
 on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the
 West Bank was annexed to Jordan).

“According 
to the diplomat’s account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically
 murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries.
On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more 
bodies had been still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and
a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel
 army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to 
cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the neighboring
 villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel. The U.S. Department
 of State issued a statement on 18 October 1953, expressing its ‘deepest
 sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives’ in the Qibya attack
as well as the conviction that those responsible ‘should be brought to
 account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents 
in the future.’�

Let us move
 next to Sharon’s conduct when he was head of the Southern Command of Israel’s
 Defense Forces in the early 1970s. The Gaza “clearances� were vividly 
described by Phil Reeves in a piece in The London Independent on January
 21, 2001:

“Thirty
 years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon was the head of the Israel Defence Forces’ southern command, 
charged with the task of ‘pacifying’ the recalcitrant Gaza Strip after 
the 1967 war. But the old men still remember it well. Especially the old men
 on Wreckage Street. Until late 1970, Wreckage, or Had’d, Street wasn’t 
a street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza
 City’s Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, 
built with UN aid for refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting 
for the international community to settle their future. The street acquired
 its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr Sharon’s soldiers. 
Their orders were to bulldoze hundreds of homes to carve a wide, straight street.
 This would allow Israeli troops and their heavy armoured vehicles to move easily
 through the camp, to exert control and hunt down men from the Palestinian Liberation
 Army.

“‘They
 came at night and began marking the houses they wanted to demolish with red 
paint,’ said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired labourer. ‘In the morning 
they came back, and ordered everyone to leave. I remember all the soldiers shouting 
at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla! They threw everyone’s belongings 
into the street. Then Sharon brought in bulldozers and started flattening the
street. He did the whole lot, almost in one day. And the soldiers would beat 
people, can you imagine? Soldiers with guns, beating little kids?’

“By the
 time the Israeli army’s work was done, hundreds of homes were destroyed,
 not only in Wreckage Street but through the camp, as Sharon ploughed out a grid
of wide security roads. Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed
 into the already badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families, usually 
those with a Palestinian political activist, were loaded into trucks and taken 
to exile in a town in the heart of the Sinai Desert, then controlled by Israel.�

The devastation of Beach Camp was far from the exception. As Reeves reported:

Each Pearl Harbor day offers a fresh opportunity for those who correctly believe 
that Franklin Roosevelt knew of an impending attack by the Japanese and welcomed it as
 a way of snookering the isolationists and getting America into the war. And year by year the evidence continues to mount. The Naval 
Institute’s website featured a detailed article by Daryl Borgquist to
 the effect that high Red Cross officials with close contacts to Roosevelt quietly 
ordered large quantities of medical supplies and experienced medical personnel
 shipped to Hawaii well before Dec. 7, 1941.

In 1995, Helen Hamman, the daughter
of one of these officials, wrote to Bill Clinton a letter disclosing that her 
father had told her in the 1970s that shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack Roosevelt 
had told her father of the impending raid and told him to send Red Cross workers
 and supplies to the West Coast to be deployed in Hawaii. Roosevelt, Ms. Hamman 
wrote, told her father “the American people would never agree to enter the
 war in Europe unless they were attack [sic] within their own borders.� Borgquist’s 
research, now published in Naval History magazine, shows 
that the Red Cross was indeed staffed up and on a war footing in Hawaii by November 
1941.

Foreknowledge 
by FDR of the “surprise attack� on Pearl Harbor has been demonstrated
 about every five years, ever since the Republicans made a huge issue of it after
 World War II. Each time there’s a brief furor, and then we slide back into
 vaguer language about “unproven assertions� and “rumors.�
 It’s one of the unsayables of 20th-century history, as Charles Beard discovered 
in 1948 when he published his great book President Roosevelt and the Coming 
of the War (1941), subtitled “A Study in Appearances and Realities.� 
Beard effectively disposed of the “surprise attack� proposition after 
researching official government documents and public hearings. For example, the 
State Dept.’s own record showed that FDR’s Secretary of State Cordell
 Hull conferred with the British ambassador on Nov. 29, 1941, and imparted the 
news that “the diplomatic part of our relations with Japan was virtually 
over and the matter will now go to the officials of the Army and Navy.� As 
Beard and others pointed out, the U.S. had already not only undertaken the blockade 
and embargoes that forced Japan into the war, but also knew that Japan was about 
to attack and waited for it to do so, so the isolationists could be outmaneuvered 
and the U.S. could enter the war on a tide of popular feeling.

At
dawn on Dec. 7, 1941, the first wave of Japanese planes flew in from the east
over the Waianae Mountains, leaving about 4000 American casualties with 2400 dead. 
Beard’s scholarly but passionate investigation into secret presidential diplomacy 
incurred venomous abuse, as did his judgment that the ends (getting the U.S. into 
the war) did not justify the deceptive means.

Back 
in the early 1980s John Toland published his excellent book Infamy, which
 mustered all the evidence extant at that time about U.S. foreknowledge. He advanced 
the thesis that though FDR and his closest associates, including Gen. Marshall, 
knew the Japanese naval force was deployed with carriers in the North Pacific, 
they were so convinced of the impregnability of the base that they didn’t 
believe the attack would have much serious effect. They thought a surprise Japanese
 raid would do little damage, leave a few casualties but supply the essential trigger 
for entering the war. Toland quoted from Labor Secretary Frances Perkins’
 diary an eerie description of Roosevelt’s ravaged appearance at a White House 
meeting the night of Dec. 7. He looked, Perkins wrote with extraordinary perception,
�not only as though a tragedy had occurred but as though he felt some more 
intimate, secret sense of responsibility.�

The 
U.S. military commanders on Honolulu, Husband Kimmel and Walter Short, were pilloried,
 destroyed, set up to bear the major responsibility. For many years they fought 
to vindicate themselves, only to face hidden or destroyed evidence and outright 
perjury from their superiors.

In 
May of 1983 an officer from the Naval Security Group interviewed one of Toland’s 
sources who had previously insisted on remaining anonymous. The person in question
was Robert Ogg, who had been an enlisted man in Naval Intelligence during the 
war, and was one of those who detected the presence, through radio intercepts,
of a Japanese task force working its way toward Pearl Harbor in the first week
 of December 1941. This force had been under radio silence, but the “silence�
 had been broken on a number of occasions.

Both 
Ogg and his immediate superior, Lt. Hosner, reported their intercepts and conclusion 
to the chief of intelligence of the 12th Naval District in San Francisco, Capt.
Richard T. McCullough. McCullough was not only a personal friend of Roosevelt’s 
but enjoyed assured access to him through Harry Hopkins’ phone at the White
 House. Ogg confirmed in 1983 that McCullough had said at the time that the information 
about the Japanese task force had been passed to the White House. British code-breakers 
at Bletchley had also passed the news to Winston Churchill that Pearl Harbor was 
to be attacked.

The 
lesson here is that there is no construction too “bad� or too “outrageous� 
but that it cannot be placed upon the actions of powers great or small, though 
usually great. When Toland’s book was published there were many who scoffed 
at the “inherently implausible argument,� the “fine-spun conspiracy 
theory.� Gazing up the newly emerging national security state and the dawn 
of the Cold War, Beard argued that the ends did not justify the means, and concluded 
thus:

“In short, with the Government of the United States committed under 
a so-called bipartisan foreign policy to supporting by money and other forms of
 power for an indefinite time an indefinite number of other governments around 
the globe, the domestic affairs of the American people became appendages to an 
aleatory expedition in the management of the world… At this point in its history 
the American Republic has arrived under the theory that the President of the United
States possesses limitless authority publicly to misrepresent and secretly to 
control foreign policy, foreign affairs and the war power.�

Truer words were 
never written.

The 
�Good War�

Just as FDR’s foreknowledge of the attack is rediscovered every few years, so, too, is the fact that the Pacific war was a very nasty affair. Every so often new accounts and photographs emerge documenting the cruelties of that war. In 2001, the BBC aired
 combat film of American soldiers shooting wounded Japanese and using bayonets
 to hack at Japanese corpses while looting them. “Former servicemen interviewed 
by researchers spoke of the widespread practice of looting gold teeth from the
 dead–and sometimes from the living.�