From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2004 8:54 AM To: 'David Theroux' Cc: 'marketliberal@yahoogroups.com'; 'Candidates2004@lpc.org'; 'rbstin@aol.com'; 'airpower@budiansky.com' Subject: RE: Pearl Harbor David Theroux wrote: > I am sorry that you accept so easily the > official views re the Pearl Harbor tragedy. I never said that I do. My comment was about the quote from the McCollum memo in your newsletter. Half of the four sentences in my note were about it, and I asked you directly if you'd read it, but you didn't mention it, and instead started asking me about the Spanish-American War: > Do you also do so for the claims of the White House > and federal officialdom re the claimed cause of the > Spanish-American War, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and > the run-up to the war in Iraq? > I hope that you do not accept so easily the claims of other > government agencies and the orthodox historical treatment such > programs have been given by court historians and other apologists for > the status quo? We Libertarians generally don't consider ourselves "apologists for the status quo". However, I do tend to accept -- not "easily", but provisionally -- the verifiable judgments rendered by the marketplace of ideas on the basis of the available evidence. > Before being so dismissive, you might actually read > Mr. Stinnett's pioneering and widely acclaimed book The first thing I read was the first article mentioned in your note. If you have a different article you'd rather lead with, feel free to refer me to it. It opens by asking "Did U.S. naval cryptographers crack the Japanese naval codes before the attack?" The answer to is indeed a highly-qualified "yes", but the facts do not support the implication that anyone in the U.S. chain of command had foreknowledge that Pearl Harbor would be attacked in early December of 1941. For the details about U.S. efforts against JN-25 (the Japanese naval code), see http://www.defensedaily.com/reports/PRObudiansky.htm. Or read the debate between Budiansky and Stinnett on your own site: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=445. The five-paragraph core of Budiansky's rebuttal is impressive, and Stinnett's reply on the crucial issue is just to make two statements that are easily diagnosed as misleading by anyone willing to track down Stinnett's sources. 1) Stinnett quotes one word in claiming that a document says that an American codebreaking team "was “current” in intercepting, decoding and translating" the Japanese naval code. In fact, the document says "We are reading enough current traffic to keep two translators very busy, i.e. with their code recovery efforts etc. included." Stinnett's interpretation seems to ignore the distinctions among recording traffic, recovering code groups obfuscated via additive code pages, and decoding the underlying code groups. The document's use of "enough" and "code recovery efforts" contradict Stinnett's implication that all Japanese naval traffic was being read in nearly real time. (The link on your site is broken, but the document can be read at http://web.archive.org/web/20040218182424/http://www.independent.org/tii/news/021201Stinnett.html.) 2) Stinnett says the codebreakers "obtained radio direction finder bearings on the Japanese forces en route to Pearl Harbor and identified the warships." Your site doesn't source this statement, but another site links it to a missing page on your site that I was again able to find in the Internet Archive (at http://web.archive.org/web/20031213104044/www.independent.org/tii/news/030204Stinnett.html.) The original document in fact does not mention Hawaii at all, and instead talks about naval movements toward Formosa. The only carrier named in the report was not one of those that attacked Pearl. The second question in your lead-off Stinnett article was "Did Japanese warships and their commanding admirals break radio silence at sea before the attack?" However, the only evidence Stinnett cites for the affirmative is from the day the Japanese strike force sortied from the Japanese mainland. Stinnett's article doesn't answer the obvious question of why the Japanese strike force wouldn't maintain radio silence while it was outside of Japan's home waters and en route to Hawaii. > if you have a disagreement with Mr. Stinnett's analysis, > I suggest that you ask him directly: rbstin@aol.com I've cc'd him, along with Mr. Budiansky, in case either wants to respond. I myself have little interest in pursuing the matter, as I'm satisfied that Stinnett's use of source materials is too misleading to make reading -- i.e. fact-checking -- him worth my time. > Unlike you, although I do not agree with your views > on this matter, I do not send notes to your CEO as > well as libertarian discussion > groups casting aspersions on the work of Yahoo! Yahoo, alas, is not in the business of directly promoting the message of free markets. However, both the LP-CA and the Independent Institute are in that business, and I for one have come to put the II in the same league as the Cato Institute or the Reason Foundation in terms of credibility. So when I see that credibility jeopardized even a little, my reaction is to raise an alarm. If I had known that replying to the newsletter was going to get the attention of the Institute's President, I wouldn't have cc'ed the candidates' list. (We Libertarians aren't used to people listening to us... :-) > In the future, if you have a point to make, > please do so. So far, you have failed to do so. My point about the McCollum memo stands unaddressed. Brian Holtz 2004 Libertarian candidate for Congress, CA14 (Silicon Valley) http://marketliberal.org P.S. For Messrs. Stinnett and Budiansky, the original newsletter is at http://www.independent.org/publications/the_lighthouse/detail.asp?id=52 and my response was: >From: "Brian Holtz" >To: "'David J. Theroux'" >Cc: , > >Subject: RE: THE LIGHTHOUSE: Rumsfeld l Medical Marijuana Case l Pearl >Harbor (12/6/04) >Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 22:17:50 -0800 > >The McCollum memo just can't carry the freight that your conspiracy >theorist Stinnett wants it to. Did you even read the original document? >I'm now going to have to take future analyses from the Independent >Institute with a few grains of salt. > >For a more balanced look at the Pearl Harbor controversy, see >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-knowledge_debate >http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mpearlharbor.html