Pearl Harbor attack

About
The attack on Pearl Harbor on 1941-12-07, was the incident which brought the 🇺🇸 into World War II.

Theory
Despite the official story that the attack came as a complete surprise, there appears to be a strong historical case that top US officials:
 * knew of the impending attack
 * had antagonized the Japanese with the idea of encouraging them to attack
 * ordered the fleet at Pearl Harbor into a configuration which would be the most heavily damaged by an air attack
 * kept officers at Pearl Harbor in the dark about the latest intelligence, and generally out of the loop

If true, the attack was an engineered provocation sought deliberately by the highest levels of the US government in order to inflame public sentiment and gain the necessary political support for entering the war.

Counter
Cujo359 said, on 2009-12-08, that this is: ...a whacky conspiracy theory. Pearl Harbor was one of the most well-defended bases we had. If the base had been as alert as it should have been, the Japanese attack would have been blunted, if not repelled.

The people who ran the base, and some of the people who supervised them, screwed up.

Sorry to give such a short answer, but I get impatient with nonsense like this. The dictum that you should never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence applies here in spades.

Related

 * The 2001-09-11 attacks have been compared to the Pearl Harbor attack.
 * The Project for the New American Century implicitly called for a "new Pearl Harbor" to help crystallize American sentiment in directions considered appropriate by the authors

Links

 * : no article as of 2007-12-25
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