http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Civil_Liberties/Pearl%20Harbor_Internment.html
Pearl Harbor, Internment, and Hiroshima: Historical Lessons
by Paul D'Amato
...
Maneuvering Japan to attack first
U.S. officials were in no doubt that the clash of interests between the U.S. and Japan in the Pacific would lead to war. It was only the timing that was in question. Wary of Japanese advances in China, the U.S. backed the Guomindang army of Chiang Kai-shek, a man described by state department officials as a "gangster"-a warlord among warlords who feared the aspirations of Chinese peasants and workers more than he did the Japanese invaders.
In the buildup to war, the U.S. engaged in a series of actions designed to draw Japan into attacking it. This was necessary, U.S. officials felt, because opinion polls in 1940 still showed that a majority of Americans were opposed to direct U.S. involvement in the European war. Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the man in charge of routing communications intelligence to Roosevelt between early 1940 and the Pearl Harbor attack, wrote a memorandum in October 1940, advocating eight actions designed to provoke a Japanese attack:
A. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore. B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia]. C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. D. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient Philippines, or Singapore. E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient. F. Keep the main strength of the U.S. Fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands. G. Insist that the Durch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil. H. Completely embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.
In the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, the United States implemented each of McCollum's points-always careful to ease the embargo on Japan enough to allow them to obtain fuel for their fleet operations. Referring to the deployment of U.S.
warships in or near Japanese territorial waters, Roosevelt remarked, "I just want them to keep popping up here and there and keep the Japs guessing." The day after McCollum's memo, Roosevelt was quoted as saying, "Sooner or later the Japanese would commit an overt act against the United States and the nation would be willing to enter the war."
Events unfolded as scripted, the U.S. tightening the screws by degrees on Japan. In July 1940, Roosevelt cut off the supply of oil, scrap iron, and aviation gasoline to Japan; however, it allowed Japan to purchase enough oil from U.S. suppliers to keep its military operations running. At the same time, the U.S. intervened to prevent Japan from purchasing oil from the Dutch East Indies. Roosevelt knew from intercepted diplomatic communications that Japan was now planning to seize the Dutch East Indies by force, using as a secret staging area land leased from the Dutch. Informed of the plans, the Dutch government refused to grant the lease.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson's diary records a November 25, 1941, meeting with Roosevelt, Admiral Harold Stark, and others to discuss "how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into a position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."'' After the war, he testified to a congressional committee:
In spite of the risk involved, however, 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 ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone's minds as to who were the aggressors.
British Minister of Production Oliver Littleton was more abrupt in his assessment: "Japan was provoked into attacking Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history even to say that America was forced into the war."
According to historian Robert B. Stinnett in his new book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor, U.S. officials not only maneuvered Japan to attack, but knew that the attack was coming at Pearl Harbor. McCollum, the intelligence officer who had devised the plan to provoke Japan into attacking the U.S., dismissed as "rumor" a January 1941 report from the third secretary of the U.S. embassy in Tokyo that he had received information from a reliable Peruvian minister that "Japanese military forces were planning, in the event of trouble with the United States, to attempt a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor using all their military resources."
More importantly, U.S. naval intelligence had not only broken Japan's "purple code" used to transmit diplomatic messages, but also had cracked the code used by the Japanese navy to transmit radio messages, according to Stinnett's research. Assistant Chief of Naval Operations Rear Admiral Robert Ingersoll wrote a letter on October 4, 1940, to the U.S. Navy's two Pacific commanders explaining, "Every major movement of the Orange (America's code name for Japan) Fleet has been predicted."
To this day, the original intercepts obtained by U.S. naval intelligence have not been turned over to the National Archives. Records of U.S. Naval Intelligence Station H indicate that the commander of the Japanese attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, dispatched 13 radio messages, none of which has been released to the National Archive, November 24-26, when Japan's fleet was heading toward Hawaii. Neither the Pacific Fleet's radio intercept traffic chief, Homer Kisner-the man who daily delivered decoded Japanese radio transmissions to Pearl Harbor from Station H-nor any of his operators was ever called before any of the nine Pearl Harbor investigations that happened after the war.
Despite claims by the U.S. government that the Japanese forces steaming toward Hawaii maintained radio silence, Kisner confirmed in interviews with Stinnett that his operators intercepted several Japanese naval transmissions prior to the December 7, 1941, attack. Admiral Husband Kimmel, in charge of the U.S. Pacific Fleet when Pearl Harbor was attacked, was never apprised of any of the intercepts. "I can't understand, may never understand, why I was deprived of information available in Washington," Kimmel wrote after the war.
