http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20061204-9999-1n4conspire.html

Prewar attacks fuel whispers of conspiracy

By Peter Rowe and Scott LaFee
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS

December 4, 2006

Historians agree that imperial Japan, hoping to cripple United States forces in the Pacific, scored a major – although fatally incomplete – victory 65 years ago this week at Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories were revived in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
But there's a version of the tale you won't find in textbooks. In this alternative history, Dec. 7, 1941, was also President Franklin Roosevelt's triumph. He had withheld information that would have warned the Pacific Fleet, willingly sacrificing a dozen ships and more than 2,400 Americans to achieve his goal.

FDR had dragged America into World War II.

That's the gist of the “backdoor to war” conspiracy theory, originally championed by Roosevelt's right-wing foes in the 1940s. This revisionist view of Pearl Harbor was dying when Sept. 11, 2001, cast it in a new light. The notion that an American president would welcome a surprise attack as a pretext for war was taken up anew. This time, though, the argument came from leftist commentators.

Underground, unofficial versions of history have flourished in most countries. In fact, some Japanese conservatives advance their own “backdoor to war” theory. In one Tokyo museum, photos, charts and texts “prove” that American actions in Asia and the Pacific had left Japan with no choice short of hostilities.

New York Times
John F. Kennedy's assassination has long been a favorite topic for conspiracy theorists. The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas is seen from the location where Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963.
If history was ever a static and universally accepted account of the past, that notion now is as outmoded as a stovepipe hat.

In the United States, it's increasingly a mainstream view that secret forces with mysterious aims shape our destiny. In 1998, CBS News found that three out of four Americans believe that the truth behind John F. Kennedy's assassination has been covered up. This summer, a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll found that more than one out of three Americans believe it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that federal officials planned 9/11 or at least did nothing to stop the attacks.

Why people embrace conspiracy theories is a complex topic, touching on ideology and psychology. In our time, two factors have made these tales more pervasive:

The Internet accelerates the pace at which isolated mutterings can become national phenomena, exposed to a potential audience of billions. Video clips and documents, real and manufactured, zip through the ether and buttress tales that might otherwise be dismissed as cockamamie speculation.

From the Pentagon Papers to Watergate, late 20th-century scandals proved that the official version of events can be a smoke screen hiding a more sinister and more accurate story.

“Americans tend to be particularly receptive to anti-government conspiracy theories,” said Kathryn Olmsted, a University of California Davis history professor who is writing a book on this subject.

In the early 20th century, though, government was not the most popular villain. Then, Olmsted noted, various plots were blamed on forces based outside the United States, including religions (the Catholic Church, Judaism) and industries. The first World War, one theory held, was caused by an unholy alliance of European arms dealers and international bankers.

But as Washington's power grew, conspiracy theorists “found” more masterminds – past and present – within the federal government. In 1937, a book titled “Why Was Lincoln Murdered?” gave a startling answer. The Great Emancipator, author Otto Eisenschiml argued, fell victim to a plot cooked up by his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton.

“That attracted a lot of attention at the time,” noted William Hanchett, history professor emeritus at San Diego State University and an authority on Lincoln's assassination. “But it's been completely discredited.”

Many conspiracy theories meet a similar fate – they rise on the hot air of controversy; wobble as experts poke holes in their fragile underpinnings; and then drop into oblivion.

Scarred cathedrals

The Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories, though, floated anew in the aftermath of 9/11.

There are undeniable parallels between the events. Gazing into the battleship Arizona's watery grave is not unlike peering through the fence surrounding ground zero. In each of these scarred, secular cathedrals, Americans died in a sneak attack and America changed course.

All according to a secret White House plan, some claim. In the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll, 36 percent of all Americans suspected that the federal government planned or allowed 9/11 because “they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.”

This echoes the arguments about Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor found in books such as John Toland's “Infamy” (1982) and Robert Stinnett's “Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor” (2000).

“In these two conspiracies,” said Emily Rosenberg, author of “A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory” and a history professor at the University of California Irvine, “the conspiracy is at the heart of the government. That buys into the anti-government rhetoric that is so prevalent.”

Unfortunately, there is reason for such rhetoric. In 1990, a New York Times/WCBS-TV poll found that black Americans most apt to embrace conspiracies were also most familiar with U.S. history. They knew that the FBI had infiltrated the civil-rights movement in the 1960s and that the U.S. Public Health Service had withheld effective treatment from black men in the Tuskegee syphilis study of 1932-72.

For Americans of all races and backgrounds, well-documented government scandals have diminished faith in “the official story.” At the same time, though, even the most elaborate conspiracy theory can offer an odd sort of comfort.

“There is a natural tendency when a tragedy or catastrophe happens to try to make it comprehensible,” Olmsted said. (Full disclosure: Olmsted is married to Bill Ainsworth, a Union-Tribune reporter.)

People often reduce complicated issues to a single cause – the bigger the issue, the bigger the cause, said Patrick Leman, a British psychologist who studies the origins of conspiracy theories.

Leman's research also indicates that people who are inclined to believe conspiracy theories are also inclined to discard facts that run counter to those theories.

“It's called confirmatory bias,” said Michael Shermer, author of “Why People Believe Weird Things” and executive director of the Skeptics Society. “People tend to look for or recognize evidence that supports their ideas and ignore everything else.”

Case in point: Olmsted notes that every war that the United States has fought since 1900 has spawned a conspiracy theory, often inspired by the conviction that Americans love peace.

“Opponents of war, at the time or often later, argue that this is basically a peaceful country,” she said. “If everyone had known all the facts, we wouldn't have gone to war.”

Conversely, more commonplace, non-conspiratorial explanations can shake our faith in order and reason. Rosenberg cites the “clutter and noise” view, that catastrophes sometimes happen because authorities are distracted or incompetent. This can be a difficult, if not intolerable, reminder of chance's role in life.

A 'war frenzy'

Reviewing World War II, the first prominent “backdoor to war” advocates were Sens. Owen Brewster and Homer Ferguson, two Republican opponents of Roosevelt. Sitting on the 1945-46 Senate committee on Pearl Harbor, they argued that the White House was covering up Roosevelt's role in the war's outbreak.

The committee – dominated by Democrats, 6-4 – concluded its review by placing the sole blame on Adm. Husband Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, the senior commanders at Pearl Harbor.

Kimmel and Short's long campaign for exoneration drew bipartisan support. In 1999, when the Senate voted 52-47 that Kimmel and Short had performed “competently and professionally,” the supporters included Democrats Joseph Biden and John Kerry. One of the “nays” came from John Warner, R-Va., and a former Navy secretary.

Still, Rosenberg said, this campaign played into the 1990s' culture wars, with some Republicans using the occasion to take potshots at Roosevelt, a venerated Democrat.

After 9/11, though, conservatives stopped hammering Roosevelt. Speculation about a U.S. president using a surprise attack as a pretext for sending troops into combat had politically uncomfortable echoes. “9/11 has so overshadowed Pearl Harbor,” Rosenberg said. “I don't think it is a right-wing Republican cause célèbre as it really had been for 50 years.”

Now the drumbeats are heard from the opposite direction, to “prove” another point.

Roosevelt's nefarious plot “is trotted out now by the 9/11 conspiracy theorists who want a historic precedent,” Olmsted said.

In a recent article in Australia's New Dawn magazine, “War on Terror: The Police State Agenda,” Richard K. Moore asserts that both Roosevelt and the Bush administration “intentionally set the stage for a 'surprise' attack” to whip the American people into a “war frenzy.”

“Unbelievable as this may seem,” Moore wrote, “this is a scenario that matches the modus operandi of U.S. ruling elites.”

Unbelievable or not, this backdoor has moved. Once a staple of the far right, it is now attached to the extreme left.