FDR's perfidy over Pearl Harbor led to real infamy

It really isn't possible for a person to remain human once they enter the office of US president.


FDR Knew Pearl Harbor Was Coming
Written by Alexander Cockburn on June 14, 2001

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. Last Sunday the
British Observer reported on a tv series to be broadcast on Britain’s
Channel 4 this month, "containing disturbing and previously unseen footage
from the Second World War that had languished forgotten in archives for 57 years.
The images are so horrific senior television executives had to be consulted before
they were considered fit for broadcast."
There’s
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."

The
archival film is fresh evidence of the atrocities, but the atrocities themselves
are an old story, best told by John Dower in his 1986 book War Without Mercy.
Back in the February 1946 issue of The Atlantic the war correspondent Edgar
L. Jones wrote, "We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed
lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded,
tossed the dying in a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh
off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones
into letter openers."

By
the spring of 1945 the Japanese military had been demolished. The disparities
in the casualty figures between the Japanese and the Americans are striking. From
1937 to 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy suffered 1,740,955 military
deaths in combat. Dower estimates that another 300,000 died from disease and starvation.
In addition, another 395,000 Japanese civilians died as a result of Allied saturation
bombing that began in March 1945. The total dead: more than 2.7 million. In contrast,
American military deaths totaled 100,997. Even though Japan had announced on Aug.
10 its intentions to surrender, this didn’t deter the bloodthirsty Gen. "Hap"
Arnold. On Aug. 14, Arnold directed a 1014-plane air raid on Tokyo, blasting the
city to ruins and killing thousands. Not one American plane was lost and the unconditional
surrender was signed before the planes had returned to their bases.

This
raid, like the dropping of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was aimed at
Moscow as much as Japan, designed to impress Stalin with the implacable might
of the United States. The Cold War was under way, and as Beard prophesied in 1948,
democracy wilted amid the procedures of the national security state, whose secretive
malpractices are still being exhumed. A particularly macabre example was reported
in the same edition of The Observer, relating the new footage of atrocities
in the Pacific War.

Papers
released by the American Dept. of Energy showed that scientists from the UK Atomic
Energy Authority removed children’s bones and bodies to ship to the United
States for classified nuclear experiments. Among documents obtained by The
Observer is the transcript of a secret meeting in Washington of "Project
Sunshine," where Willard Libby, a scientist who later won the Nobel Prize
for his research into carbon dating techniques, told colleagues, "Human samples
are of prime importance, and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body-snatching,
they will really be serving their country."

British
scientists from Harwell and the Medical Research Council supplied not only American
researchers but their own labs with body parts, collecting about 6000 corpses
between 1955 and 1970. As The Observer reported, Jean Prichard, whose baby
died in 1957, said her child’s legs were removed by hospital doctors and
taken to Harwell without permission. To prevent her from finding out what had
happened, she says she was forbidden to dress her daughter for her funeral. "I
asked if I could put her christening robe on her, but I wasn’t allowed to,
and that upset me terribly because she wasn’t christened. No one asked me
about doing things like that, taking bits and pieces from her."

http://nypress.com/fdr-knew-pearl-harbor-was-coming/