MICHAEL E. KRECA RIP

 

May 12, 2006

Murder-by-Cop?

Posted by Lew Rockwell at May 12, 2006 09:41 AM
 

Former LRC writer Michael E. Kreca was shot dead by San Diego police last February. Thanks to A.W. who sent this horrific story, and who believes, like all his friends, that his killing was highly suspicious. May he rest in peace.
As to justice, that is in short supply in police state USA.

 

Selection Of Articles Written By Michael E. Kreca
And Blogs About Him:

How the US Government Created
the "Drug Problem" in the USA

Who Really Won World War II?

The needless US Pacific War with Japan
 Courtesy of Stalin and FDR

Clinton a cult leader?

Gun Control, Fiat Money - National Security?

Kreca on International Intelligence Organizations
and State-Sponsored Terrorism

THE MILITIA QUESTION, RESOLVED
SECOND AMENDMENT 101

Letter to Wendy McElroy

Man killed by police is fondly remembered
Neighbors call him generous, friendly

Various Blogs About Kreca's Murder

 

 

How the US Government Created
the "Drug Problem" in the USA

by Michael E. Kreca

"The bottom line on this whole business has not yet been written."

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb
CIA Technical Services Staff director for the MK-ULTRA program

Eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other things, what he called the principle of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately creates a situation ("thesis,") devises a "solution," to solve the "problems" created by that situation ("antithesis,") with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and control ("synthesis.") It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini s terms, "inside the state" and thus controllable by the same.

In September 1942, OSS director and Army Maj. Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan began his search for an effective "truth serum" to be used on POWs and captured spies. Beginning with a budget of $5,000 and the blessing of President Franklin Roosevelt, he enlisted the aid of a few prominent physicians and psychiatrists like George Estabrooks and Harry Murray as well as former Prohibition agent and notorious Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) director Harry Anslinger.

The OSS/FBN team first tested a potent marijuana extract, tetrahydrocannabinol acetate (THCA), a colorless, odorless substance, lacing cigarettes or food items with it, and administering them to volunteer US Army and OSS personnel, all who eventually acquired the nickname "Donovan’s Dreamers." Testing was also conducted under the guise of treatment for shell shock.

Donovan’s team found that THCA, which they termed "TD," for "truth drug," induced "a great loquacity and hilarity," and even, in cases where the subject didn’t feel physically threatened, some useable "reefer madness." Peyote, morphine and scopolamine were judged too powerful to be used in effective interrogation. In light of all this, Donovan concluded, "The drug defies all but the most expert and search analysis, and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS did not, however, end the program. By that time, faced with the terrifying ship losses the USA was suffering from German U-boats, Donovan pressed on, hoping to find some effective chemical means to help interrogate captured U-boat sailors.

In May 1943, George Hunter White, an Army captain, OSS officer and former FBN agent, gave standard cigarettes laced with THCA to an unwitting August "Augie Dallas" Del Grazio, an influential New York City gangster. Del Grazio, who had by then had done prison stretches for assault and murder, had been one of the Mafia’s most notorious enforcers and narcotics smugglers. He operated an opium alkaloid factory in Turkey and was a key participant in the long-running Istanbul/Marsellies/NYC heroin pipeline commonly known as the "French Connection." Influenced by the THC, Del Grazio (who was also helping to smuggle spies and Mafiosi into German-occupied Italy) revealed volumes of vital information about underworld operations, including the names of several high ranking city and state officials who took bribes from the Mob. Donovan was encouraged by the results of White’s tests when he wrote, "Cigarette experiments indicated that we had a mechanism offering promise in relaxing prisoners to be interrogated."

Unsurprisingly, the extensive wartime German experiments with various hallucinogenic drugs at the Dachau concentration camp, directed by one Dr. Hubertus Strughold, later honored as "the father of aviation medicine," aroused great interest in the USA especially after an October 1945 Navy technical mission to Dachau reported in detail on Strughold’s work. So great, in fact, that when the OSS and its successor, the CIA, imported 800 German scientists of various specialties under the auspices of the infamous "Project Paperclip" during 1945-55, it made sure to include Dr. Strughold.

Dr. Strughold’s barbaric "medical experiments," for which his subordinates were tried and convicted as war criminals at Nuremburg, were nothing more than a series of bizarre and unspeakably brutal tortures. Even so, he learned a lot about human behavior and mescaline, a natural alkaloid present in the peyote cactus. Mescaline, long central to many Native American religious rituals and first chemically isolated in 1896, is a phenethylamine whose ergoline skeleton is also contained in lysergic acid (a tryptamine.)

Sandoz Labs chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann also discovered a lysergic acid derivative called ergonovine, a medication used to retard excessive postpartum uterine bleeding. Based on his work with ergonovine, Dr. Hofmann first derived d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-25 (LSD, a refined alkaloidal liquid byproduct of a rye fungus, ergot) in a series of experiments in Zurich in 1938. He used the naturally occurring lysergic acid radical, the common item in all ergot alkaloids, as the major component of the substance. Further experiments in this vein yielded psilocybin, derived from the Mexican Psilocybe cubensis mushroom, hydergine, essential today in the improvement of cerebral circulation in geriatric patients, and dihydroergotamine, an important ingredient in blood pressure medication.

The well-read and broadly educated Dr. Hofmann knew ergot had a long natural and cultural history as both medicine and poison. Ancient Greek midwives used to give an ergot-based, gruel-like drink, called kykeon, to their patients about to give birth. Kykeon was also consumed during the autumn Eleusinia, the ancient Greek agricultural festival celebrated in honor of the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. Across the Atlantic, sacramental Maya morning glories, beautifully depicted at the ancient Mayan temple-palace complex at Teotihuacán, Mexico, dating to about 1450, also contain ergot-based alkaloids.

However, the mindset the CIA had in its drug research work was far different from that of Dr. Hofmann’s. To our Cold War spymasters, ex-Nazis like Dr. Strughold were definitely evil, but they were definitely useful as well. This pervasive amoral pragmatism led, of course, to the extensive and notorious MK-ULTRA experiments in which, for nearly 25 years, thousands of everyday Americans, both military and civilian, were heavily dosed with numerous very potent artificial psychoactive drugs, often without their knowledge or consent.

This phenomenon of the obsessive "interests of national security" expediency combined with our celebrity-obsessed pop culture that gleefully raises and shamelessly promotes snake oil hustlers as well as the pharmaceutical industry’s pricey "pill for every ill" philosophy, was a form of incompetence and arrogance far more hazardous than any synthetic alkaloid ever developed and came as no surprise to those like Dr. Hofmann. LSD, invaluable in psychiatric treatment – actor Cary Grant was cured of alcoholism by carefully administered doses of the drug under close medical supervision – is thousands of times more potent than the traditional herbal mixtures. In fact, it is thousands of times more potent than the milder of the entheogenic alkaloids. It is effective at doses of as little as a ten-millionth of a gram, which makes it 5,000 times more potent than mescaline. It should not be taken without training or supervision.

The Navy tested mescaline as part of its 1947-53 Project CHATTER. MK-ULTRA was first organized in 1949 by Richard Helms under the direction of Allen Dulles as Project BLUEBIRD. Two years later, it was renamed ARTICHOKE (after one of Dulles’s favorite foods) then termed MK-ULTRA in 1953, finally becoming MK-SEARCH in 1965 until the program's "official termination" eight years later. MK-ULTRA was directly responsible for the wide underground availability of LSD, phencyclidine (PCP – also called "angel dust"), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (STP) and other powerful synthetic psychoactive drugs in the 1960s. In the early 1950s, the CIA and the Army had contacted Sandoz requesting several kilograms of LSD for use in the test program. Dr. Hofmann and Sandoz refused this request, so Director Dulles persuaded the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical luminary Eli Lilly (later the pioneers of and chief cheerleaders for the widely prescribed antidepressant Prozac) to synthesize the drug contrary to existing international patent accords--making the US government and Lilly the first illegal domestic manufacturers and distributors of LSD.

These were distributed via the agency’s sometime allies in organized crime and through the FBI’s counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) directed against various activist groups of the period. The actual definition of the term MK-ULTRA remains unclear but a former Army Special Forces captain, John McCarthy, who ran the CIA’s Saigon-based Operation Cherry which targeted the Cambodian ruler Prince Sihanouk for assassination, claimed that MK-ULTRA stood for "Manufacturing Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring Assassination."

On April 10, 1953, in a speech at Princeton University, CIA director Allen Dulles (further feeding the already widespread but misguided fear about the high effectiveness of the alleged Chinese "brainwashing" of US POWs in the Korean conflict) warned that the human mind was a "malleable tool," and that the "brain perversion techniques" of the Reds were "so subtle and so abhorrent" that "the brain&becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control."

Propaganda, in its simplest form, is condemning one’s opponent publicly for doing what one is already doing privately. Dulles, of course, was that very "outside genius." Three days after warning assembled Princetonians of the disturbing ramifications of these techniques, he had directed MK-ULTRA researchers to perfect them. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s expert on lethal poisons, (who reputedly was the inspiration for director Stanley Kubrick’s bizarre "Dr. Strangelove" character played by Peter Sellers in the 1964 film of the same title) headed up the operation as director of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff and, via a front organization called "The Society For Human Ecology," distributed $25 million in drug research grants to Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and other institutions.

Meanwhile, George Hunter White, of THCA-laced "Lucky Strikes" fame, had returned to the FBN (now the DEA) at war’s end and continued to research behavior modifying drugs. In 1955, when MK-ULTRA was running full throttle, he was a high ranking FBN administrator who helped the Agency develop and implement a similar operation called Midnight Climax. In this infamous scheme, "safehouses" staffed with prostitutes were established in San Francisco. The hookers lured men from local taverns back to these safehouses after their drinks had been previously spiked with LSD. White’s team secretly filmed the subsequent events in each house. The purpose of these so-called "national security brothels" was to enable the CIA to experiment with the use of sex and mind altering drugs to extract information from test subjects, and it was planned, from spies, POWs, defectors and saboteurs.

Midnight Climax was terminated after eight years when CIA Inspector General John Earman charged that "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical." He stated that "the rights and interest of U.S. citizens were placed in jeopardy." Earman further noted LSD "had been tested on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign." Richard Helms, MK-ULTRA’s bureaucratic godfather, summarily rebuffed Earman’s charges, claiming that "positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing. Tests," Helms continued, "were necessary to keep up with the Soviets." However, Helms reversed himself a year later when testifying before the Warren Commission investigating the JFK assassination, claiming that "Soviet research has consistently lagged five years behind Western research."

Upon retirement from civil service in 1966, White wrote a startling farewell letter to Dr. Gottlieb. He reminisced about his Midnight Climax work. His comments were frightening:

"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"

Where else indeed, but as a member of what would later become the hypocritical War on (Some) Drugs?

By the end of the 1950s the CIA was funding just about every qualified LSD researcher and psychologist it could find, through such contractors as the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and the Geschichter Fund for Medical Research. Author John Marks, in his 1975 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, identified the CIA’s LSD research pioneers as:

• Dr. Robert Hyde at Boston Psychopathic Hospital
• Dr. Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York City
• Dr. Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois Medical School, Champaign-Urbana
• Dr. Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky.
• Dr. Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, Stillwater
• Dr. Harold Hodge at the University of Rochester (N.Y.)

However, there were prominent critics of the US government’s activities, the earliest among them being Aldous Huxley, the famed author of the chillingly prescient 1932 novel Brave New World (which described a totalitarian society whose population was completely controlled by forcible administration of a government-mandated "happiness drug" called "soma.") While taking mescaline supplied by famed English surgeon Dr. Humphrey Osmond (who discovered the close similarities between the molecular structures of adrenaline and mescaline), Huxley completed another novel entitled The Doors of Perception in 1954. In that book, the novelist described his intensely personal vision of the world around him:

"I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing – but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’ came to my mind&Those idiots (MK-ULTRAns) want to be Pavlovians; Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The ‘scientific’ LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics."

Obviously, this isn’t a typical CIA spook writing, and, given Huxley’s incredible mind, creative vision and compassion, we’re not talking about a moron or a mental case either. Which means that giving someone mescaline while they’re being tortured or lobotomized or electrocuted at Dachau will only tell you a lot about torture, lobotomies and electrocution, not about mescaline.

As author Marks noted:

It would become supreme irony that the CIA’s enormous search for weapons among drugs – fueled by the hope that spies could control life with genius and machines – would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture."

Admiral’s son and musician Jim Morrison led The Doors, [of Perception] a quartet of Liverpudlians sang of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," while the Rolling Stones dropped transparent hints about "Mother’s Little Helper." To take a lesson from Orwell, what is more important about the 1960s, indeed, about any period in history, is not so much what really happened as how that period is remembered publicly decades later.

The public memories of that particular era were carefully manipulated in great part by the deliberate creation and promotion (via television and the recording industry) of the phony and in reality quite small "drug/rock/hippie subculture." The first underground LSD labs were actually set up by the FBI in 1963 in both New York City and San Francisco. Many began to incorrectly confuse the ancient medical art of herbalism with the shenanigans of amateur basement "flower-power" and "biker" chemists. Overenthusiastic pitchmen like social psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg sadly failed to sufficiently stress that key difference, although the technically competent Leary clearly understood the artificially high potency of LSD.

Leary (and his longtime associate, psychologist Richard Alpert) matured professionally in a CIA-funded research world. In 1948, Leary, then a UC Berkeley graduate student, attended the yearly convention of the left-wing American Veterans’ Council in Milwaukee. There he met CIA officer Cord Meyer. Meyer’s professional specialty was infiltrating and discrediting various organizations deemed "un-American" or "disloyal." Meyer persuaded Leary to help him. Leary acknowledged Meyer’s influence, crediting him with "helping me understand my political-cultural role more clearly."

During 1954-59 Leary was the director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, Calif. The personality test that made him famous, "The Leary," was actually used by the CIA to test prospective employees. A grad school classmate of Leary’s, CIA contractor Frank Barron, worked with the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which was funded and staffed by CIA psychologists. In 1960 Barron, with government funding, founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Leary followed Barron to Harvard, becoming a lecturer in psychology where he remained for three years. Leary’s Harvard associates included former chief OSS psychologist Harry Murray, who had monitored the early OSS "truth serum" experiments, and numerous other knowing CIA contractors. One of Dr. Murray’s many test subjects was a Harvard undergraduate math major named Theodore Kaczynski.

In the spring of 1963, Leary and Alpert left Harvard and founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) – later renamed the Castalia Foundation – on a 2,500-acre estate in the small upstate New York community of Millbrook. There, the pair of psychologists continued their hallucinogenic drug research and soon became the chief investigative target of an ambitious Dutchess County district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy. Multimillionaire William Mellon Hitchcock generously bankrolled the founding and operation of IFIF/Castalia and later financed a huge black-market LSD manufacturing operation.

Even so, Leary carefully stressed proper mindset, setting and dosages in a book he coauthored with Alpert and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience. It was based on an ancient Tibetan shamanic manual, The Book of the Dead. The latter work referred to an herbal tea similar in content to but far less powerful than LSD, and insisted on mental discipline as an inherent part of the process. The Incans of Andean South America, for instance, were an invaluable source of medical knowledge, and used whole herbs like ayahuasca and the coca leaf, not their artificially refined alkaloids, and spiritual technique was also taught as an key part of the process.

However, much like the crusading "drys" before and during Prohibition, the MK-ULTRA inquisitors with their police state mentality in concert with misinformed and emotionally distressed LSD users, had found their "devil drug," (the term used by the Harrison Tax Act advocates in the 1910s and Marijuana Tax Act backers in the 1930s) replete with tragic tales of already emotionally distressed and lonely young people quite unprepared for such an artificially powerful entheogen. It was also well within CIA policy to randomly distribute LSD laced with the lethal poison strychnine so as to create "horror stories" useful as propaganda. Dr. Hofmann himself chemically confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in several random street samples of LSD.

Consistent with its policy of deliberately confusing the beneficial ancient herbs with extremely dangerous synthetic alkaloid derivatives, the CIA surreptitiously distributed of these synthetic compounds, termed "psychedelics," to the public. One of them was STP, originally developed as an incapacitating agent for the Army in 1964 at Dow Chemical. Dow even made the STP formula public information three years later. This potent synthetic put many unsuspecting people on a three-day trip, and sent many, hysterical with anxiety, to the emergency room. That, of course, was the purpose of its distribution.

During 1955-75, the Army tested LSD (termed EA-1729) and PCP on several of its enlisted men at what was then the headquarters of its Chemical Corps, Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, something described in detail by Bill Kurtis in a televised 1995 A&E Investigative Reports segment titled "Bad Trip to Edgewood." The CIA also tested PCP (in conjunction with electroshock "therapy" and sleep deprivation) at Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal under the direction of the notorious Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. The Chemical Corps (whose commander in the 1950s, Lt. General William Creasy, advocated a new military strategy of LSD-based "nonkill warfare") then stockpiled PCP for use as a "nonlethal incapacitant." Excess doses of PCP, reported the CIA, could "lead to convulsions and death." Soon, PCP was flooding the streets.

Edgewood also received an average of 400 product "rejects" a month from major US pharmaceutical firms. These "rejects" were actually drugs found to be commercially useless because of their demonstrated hazards and numerous undesirable side effects. In 1958, Edgewood obtained its first sample of a "reject" called phenylbenzeneacetic acid (BZ) developed by pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-LaRoche, later known by its street nickname as "brown acid."

BZ (some 10,000 times as powerful as LSD) inhibits the production of hormones which aid the brain’s transfer of messages and instructions across nerve endings (synapses), thereby severely disrupting normal human perceptual, behavioral and sensory patterns. Its effects generally last about three days, although symptoms-migraine headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and erratic if not maniacal behavior – could persist for as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an Army physician, "the person is completely out of touch with his environment." The Army also developed artillery shells and rockets with warheads able to deliver large dosages of BZ to selected targets.

In the summer of 1964, Beat novelist Ken Kesey (the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and who had been an MK-ULTRA test subject at Stanford along with Allen Ginsberg and Grateful Dead musician Bob Hunter) launched a yearlong cross-country trip in a Day-Glo painted school bus filled with friends called "Merry Pranksters." The Merry Pranksters distributed thousands of doses of LSD along the way (a phenomenon colorfully described in author Tom Wolfe’s 1969 novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) supplied by one Ronald Hadley Stark. Stark (who died in 1984) was a CIA operative fluent in five languages with access to unlimited public funds and numerous high-level contacts in business and government throughout the world.

For instance, when the underground manufacture and distribution of LSD was suddenly derailed in 1969 due to the scarcity of its key ingredient, ergotamine tartrate, and increasing federal law enforcement pressure, Stark, via the Laguna Beach, Calif.-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a small group of local surfers led by chemist Nicholas Sand, got it quickly back on track. For five years, Stark, aided by the Castle Bank of the Bahamas (which pioneered the art of money laundering for the Mob) and his contacts in a French pharmaceutical firm, facilitated the mass production and distribution (via the Brotherhood and other groups) an even more powerful strain of LSD nicknamed "orange sunshine." This firm also manufactured BZ. Stark (who operated LSD labs in Brussels and Paris as well) claimed he was going to supply orange sunshine as an offensive weapon to CIA-backed Tibetan rebels fighting the Chinese occupation.

Stark also was a close friend of the Los Angeles founders of a small breakaway Scientology sect called "The Process Church of the Final Judgement," English expatriates Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean.

Regular attendees of the Process Church included members of the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and other prominent pop performers as well as an ex-convict and wannabe rock musician named Charles Manson. Manson and his followers became heavy users of orange sunshine – the trademark "bad acid" of the day – which they were all on when, on Manson’s orders, they carried out the brutal August 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. When Stark (who is believed to have distributed an estimated 50 million doses of LSD during his Agency career) was arrested for drug trafficking in Bologna in 1975, Italian magistrate Giorgio Floridia ordered his release on the grounds that he had been a CIA agent since 1960. Judge Floridia documented and justified this using a list of Stark’s numerous intelligence contacts.

These were and are all classic government COINTELPRO-style tricks – this is how natural herbs and their mild, pharmaceutical-grade derivatives were quickly and easily made lethal and consequently demonized. How was this done? First, foolish claims were made that there was no difference between safe whole herbs and their potentially deadly ultra-refined alkaloids, next, the best of the traditional herbs and the milder of the pharmaceutical-grade alkaloid derivatives were made unavailable, and finally, the streets were flooded with potentially deadly synthetics. Deliberate perversions of science like angel dust continue to be a great propaganda tool for our diehard drug warriors, and the worn catchall excuse of "the interest of national security" is used to justify appalling covert drug capers ranging from CIA-sponsored heroin production and trafficking in Southeast Asia in the 1960s to the Bush/Clinton/Mena/Nicaragua cocaine-for-arms smuggling schemes in the 1980s.

These Constitution-shredding police state methods were adapted from the Nazis and the Soviets by and large and were applied by the CIA, NSA, DEA, BATF, IRS and FBI against us. Scores of groups, ranging from the American Indian Movement and Black Panthers to militias and religious organizations like the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas (in which the government first falsely charged as illegal methamphetamine dealers in order to get a Posse Comitatus Act waiver to use military force against them) were either disrupted by agents provocateur-style riots, bombings and armed standoffs, smeared in the mainstream news media through the "Reichstag Fire" approach, or, in the case of the Davidians, physically exterminated. The War on Some Drugs is merely a horrible extension and intensification of these tried-and-true Hegelian methods, a "war" in which we all lose.

Short Bibliography

• Bowart, Walter; Operation Mind Control, Dell Publishing, 1978.
• Delgado, Jose, Physical Control of the Mind, Harper, NYC, 1969.
• Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception, Harper, NYC, 1954.
• Lee, Martin; Shalin, Bruce, Acid Dreams, 1986.
• Marchetti, Victor, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, New York, 1974.
• Marks, John, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, New York, 1975.
• Masters, Robert & Houston, Jean, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche, 2000.
• McCoy, Alfred, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Lawrence Hill, 1972, rev. 1991.
• Meerloo, Joost, The Rape of the Mind, Crowell, NYC, 1956.
• Skinner, B.F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity," Knopf, NYC, 1971
• Smith, Harris R. OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency, Berkeley, 1972.
• Stevens, Jay, Storming Heaven – LSD and the American Dream, 1998.

 

April 19, 2001

Michael E. Kreca lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London.

Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com

The red highlighting in the article was done by Gnostic Liberation Front.

 

Who Really Won World War II?

"The winner of W.W. II, tragically, was in reality not

 

the Allies but instead the theory and practice of the

 

large-scale coercive collectivist state..."

 

 

 

By Michael E. Kreca

 

© 2001 LewRockwell.com

 

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/kreca2.html

 

6-27-1
 

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason." ~ Sir John Harrington (1561-1612)

 

"War is the health of the State." ~ Randolph Bourne (1886-1918)

 

Q: Why did the USA intervene in what became World War II?

 

A.: Because if we didn't, we'd now all speak German or Japanese.

 

Q. Who benefited the most from the defeat of Germany and Japan in WWII?

 

A. The USA.

 

This, with variations, has been the standard Q&A about the history of and the events surrounding our entry into that war and usually ends further discussion. But the standard answers, on closer examination, are just plain wrong.

 

Why?

 

The first question first, since it takes a bit of detailed explanation.

 

The German General Staff, which had codenamed contingency invasion/occupation plans for dozens of nations (even one for the never-tried conquest of Switzerland called "Operation Christmas") had none for the USA. Neither did the Japanese High Command.

 

Neither nation's economy was ever fully-mobilized for total war to the extent the USA's and Great Britain's had been. An invasion of North America would have required a major and early commitment by Berlin and Tokyo of financial, human and material resources to two forms of warfare, the first being large, long-range strategic bomber, transport and fighter escort aircraft, something neither Germany nor Japan had done. Both nations had superb short and medium range fighter/interceptors and medium bombers, but no bombers like the four-engine US B-17 or, later, the British Lancaster.

 

The second major and early commitment would have to have been to a sizable "blue water" naval "long-range power projection" force. Germany (unlike Japan) didn't have this and did not seriously plan on acquiring it---something requiring numerous aircraft carriers, auxiliary and amphibious ships, carrier-based combat and reconnaissance aircraft, plus a sizable force of marines. There were minor proposals made early in the war to build an aircraft carrier to be christened "Frederick the Great" along with two large cruisers, all of which "land animal" Hitler soon nixed.

 

The German submarine threat, although still quite dire in W.W. II (thanks in great part to FDR's long and controversial delay in ordering the Navy to conduct aggressive antisubmarine warfare operations off the U.S. East Coast), was not nearly as potent as it was in W.W. I. This was in large part due to defensive seagoing escort and convoy tactics developed in 1917-18 and improved submarine detection techniques, like active sonar, created in the interwar years. Submarines alone could not effectively project broad-based, large-scale offensive naval power great distances (something demonstrated brilliantly by Admirals Nimitz, Mitscher and Halsey and the aircraft carrier-based "task force" concept in the Pacific war against Japan).

 

The goal of the German U-boat campaign remained much the same as that in W.W.I, chiefly defensive "commerce raiding;" attempts to cut off the flow of needed supplies to Great Britain and, this time, to the USSR as well. Its surface navy, consisting mainly of smaller sized "pocket" battleships as well as cruisers and some destroyers and patrol boats, operated in much the same commerce raider fashion - voyaging about individually attacking and sinking tankers and freighters in the North and South Atlantic.

 

Germany's navy had not fought a major set-piece surface battle since Jutland in 1916, in which it was tactically victorious against but strategically defeated by the British. The Royal Navy forced the scuttling of the war's most successful German surface commerce raider, the pocket battleship "Graf Spee," off the Uruguayan coast at the end of 1939. The German Navy was thrashed by the British in the smaller 1940 naval battle at Narvik, Norway, the former losing several destroyers and patrol craft in that engagement. By the time the battleship "Bismarck" was sent to the bottom in the fall of 1941, the German surface fleet threat was all but eliminated.

 

This was the illustrious naval record of a nation supposedly planning to and capable of invading and conquering the USA?

 

Hitler failed to subdue Great Britain in 1940 (in good part due to the moral strength of the Brits, a great deal of US aid, and because conquering Britain was not part of the Fuehrer's eastern living space plan), so he would have had little chance of succeeding against the much more distant, much larger, more populous, and better-armed USA. Even Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (the chief planner of the Pearl Harbor attack) spoke warningly of "a rifle behind every blade of grass" when discussions of invading the USA came up.

 

A successful invasion of North America by both Nazi Germany and Japan would have also required a high degree of interservice and binational coordination and cooperation, something that even in the best of forces and times is difficult to achieve and maintain. The Germans and Japanese, despite appearances, were notorious for the utter lack of that, and given their respective highly xenophobic beliefs in their own complete racial superiority to any other group, there would have been little basis for any significant long-term cooperation between them. Both Hitler and Tojo would have also needed reliable and broad-based intelligence gathering and interpretation assets, and a sizable "fifth-column" of active native sympathizers here, something neither had in sufficient quality or quantity. German military intelligence, the Abwehr, was already long compromised by British spies ñ its longtime director, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was an active British sympathizer since the 1930s, while Japan's military and diplomatic ciphers were quickly and easily broken.

 

Both nations' forces featured the glaring absence of sophisticated and secure large-scale supply support and sizable long-range air, sea, and ground transport capable of logistically sustaining a long offensive war which was vital to any attacking force operating over long distances in hostile territory. This major weakness of the Wehrmacht was first confirmed on the Eastern Front in the fall of 1941 and by Japan early on in its war of attrition in China and later in the Pacific campaigns against the Americans. Authors Meirion and Sue Harries disclosed in their 1992 book "Soldiers of The Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army" that for each US GI there was an average of four tons of material produced, for the Japanese counterpart, an average of two pounds.

 

Furthermore, Germany (given the Fuehrer's erratic nature, disdain for the daily tasks of governing and administration, and fixation on short-term solutions for every problem) never pursued an advanced weapons project (assault rifles, cruise and ballistic missiles, jet warplanes, atomic bombs) for any sufficient length of time to make a real difference in combat. The German "Atomic Association" was a quite pale and poorly funded and staffed version of our Manhattan Project (due in large part to the previous "brain drain" of numerous talented physicists out of Germany and into the USA and Great Britain throughout the 1930s), and even that was directed more toward development of a workable nuclear reactor for submarine propulsion, not an atomic bomb. Japanese advanced weapons research was practically nonexistent. Japan, whose government and military was long riddled with fierce, often-bloody factional political intrigue, was at first glance better prepared to mount an invasion of the USA given its large long-range carrier-based navy. However, Tokyo would have been badly hampered in such an attempt by its key strategic focus on a quickly completed regional land/island war and its unwillingness or inability to exploit large-scale submarine warfare.

 

Like Germany in the East, resource-poor Japan, via its "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," was only interested in securing and consolidating economic and territorial gains in a certain area of its own region (the Asian mainland and the far Western Pacific islands), a politico-economic relationship that Premier Tojo Hideki pointedly referred to as similar to that of the USA's in regard to Latin America. There was the lack of sufficient training, resources, and tactics to wage a long, decisive, large-scale continental ground war that an invasion of North America would have required---a lack reflected in Japan's costly and ultimately fatal 1937-45 stalemate in China. There was also Japan's stunning and bloody defeat by the Red Army's large combined force of tanks, motorized infantry, and long-range artillery at the pivotal but little-known Battle of Nomonhan (on the Soviet-Manchurian border) in the summer of 1939. This battle exposed several glaring, never-to-be-resolved weaknesses in the quality of Japanese artillery, ground transport, tactics, and logistics and eventually led to a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact that lasted until the final days of the war.

 

Even Japan's raid on Pearl Harbor ended up more a fatally botched propaganda stunt than a decisive strategic blow to mortally wound the US Pacific Fleet and keep the USA from presumably getting in the way of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It just got Japan in a war with an angry United States that many in Tokyo knew couldn't be won; Admiral Yamamoto predicting at the time Japan would exhaust its existing petroleum and fuel reserves by 1944. For instance, despite the terrible images of death and destruction, many of the ships sunk at their piers in the attack on Oahu were raised and refitted. Most piers, drydocks, repair facilities, fuel bunkers and supply depots were untouched or only slightly damaged by Japanese bombs.

 

And lastly, both Germany and Japan were notorious for consistently and severely underestimating their adversaries and for quickly alienating and then oppressing the vast majorities of the native populations of any country they invaded, even ones that may have been initially sympathetic to the invaders.

 

Worst of all, much of the above was already well known by the Roosevelt administration before Pearl Harbor.

 

Neither Germany nor Japan planned for or could have launched a successful invasion and occupation of the USA. It's that simple. Even the legions of King George III nearly 200 years before, quite benign in contrast to those of Berlin and Tokyo, were eventually worn down and booted out of what soon became the USA.

 

But, again, why did we really intervene in what became World War II and who benefited the most from the defeat of Germany and Japan?

 

By 1937-38, FDR's New Deal welfare state was an expensive, widely unpopular and abject failure and was in serious danger of being all but thoroughly dismantled by a hostile public and Supreme Court (which FDR openly and foolishly tried to "pack" at the time, alienating many of his staunchest supporters) and an increasingly combative Congress, many of its bitterest critics being among Roosevelt's own ruling Democrats. So Franklin tried another form of domestic socialism, a "warfare state" inaugurated under the auspices of a pricey pork-barrel caper called "Lend-Lease," and he and his successors had hit the jackpot for decades to come. Germany and Japan were the perfect and convenient excuses for both FDR and Stalin to flex their muscles on a global scale in a way that Marx and Lenin would have envied (and, as Winston Churchill desired, to keep both of those nations from emerging as major world players in their own right).

 

The conduct of the war all but guaranteed that. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, as expected, quickly flattened a strong and influential US noninterventionist movement that the Roosevelt administration (which probably knew of Tokyo's plans well in advance and did everything it could, legally and illegally, to provoke Tokyo into that "sneak attack") was already viciously and unfairly trying to destroy, smear and discredit. Our enemy was then presumably Japan, a nation to whom we had long sold large subsidized amounts of our iron ore, scrap metal, and petroleum, all under the provisions of a 1911 trade treaty that FDR had personally and suddenly abrogated two years before.

 

While our GIs fought fiercely and died en masse in the Philippines and on Guam and Wake Island in the face of the invading Japanese, FDR blatantly wrote them off and pursued a "Europe First" policy. A key feature of this policy included the immediate transfer of huge amounts of financial and material aid to the recently-former German ally, Stalin's USSR, a nation whose leaders, like those of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, openly cared little for the supposed "democratic spirit" of the Atlantic Charter, and to which FDR (with the traitorous Alger Hiss in tow) made an all but open invitation at Yalta in February 1945 for it to occupy Eastern Europe.

 

Despite FDR's "Europe First," no US troops set foot in the subjugated portions of the continent in any strategically significant numbers until Operation Overlord in June 1944, by which time the Soviets were midway through their massive broad-front push westward toward conquest of most of Eastern Europe and a sizable portion of eastern Germany. The latter was literally handed to the Soviets while our GIs were ordered to pull back and let the Red Army grab Berlin and the surrounding areas, actions which publicly infuriated Gen. George S. Patton and others. The notorious "Operation Keelhaul," which forcibly sent millions of by then fiercely anti-Communist Soviet POWs back to certain death in the USSR, was next put into play.

 

In July 1945, at Potsdam, FDR/Churchill successors Harry Truman and Clement Attlee respectively certified Stalin's hold on Eastern Europe as originally proposed at Yalta. They also permitted him to break his 1941 nonaggression pact with Tokyo and sweep into Manchuria, northern Korea, and Sakhalin Island in the final days of the war against an all-but-beaten Japan. This final act ensured Moscow an easily obtained, major role in the carving up of the Far East into various spheres of influence. Japan's eventual self-defeat in China (predicted by then-President Herbert Hoover in 1931 as part of his refusal to ask Congress for US troops to aid the Chinese against Japanese encroachment) and its collapse in the western Pacific opened up a large power vacuum in Asia. In less than five years, this vacuum was quickly filled in large part by Stalin's brutal trio of Asian Communist proteges ñ Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il-Sung, and Ho Chi Minh ñ all with the prior blessings of FDR and his Red-riddled "brain trust."

 

The winner of W.W. II, tragically, was in reality not the Allies but instead the theory and practice of the large-scale coercive collectivist state, be it in the form of Communism or the large-scale welfare/warfare states of various types and the consequent rise of a violent, unstable, impoverished Third World addicted to the benefits of the same as cavalierly dispensed by the meddlesome mandarins of the First World. True, since 1945 we've been speaking a different language, and it's not German, Japanese, or even Russian or Chinese. Rather, it's the language of socialism couched in perpetual, petulant demands for ever-more forced, taxpayer-supported "fairness and social justice" on a global scale (commonly called "humanitarian intervention") at the heavy expense of true peace, prosperity, and individual liberty. And the price, as usual in the imposition and maintenance of socialism, was and still is the untold millions of dead, impoverished, miserable, and imprisoned. ___

 

Michael E. Kreca [send him mail] lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London.

The needless US Pacific War with Japan -- Courtesy of Stalin and FDR http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/1000pacificwar.htm By Michael E. Kreca web posted October 9, 2000 "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet…" -- Rudyard Kipling   When Kipling penned those immortal words during the height of Pax Britannia in the 19th century, he believed East and West were so different in their respective civilizations and outlook that there would be no basis for any real understanding between the two hemispheres. True or untrue, at the times they each have met, it has often sadly been in the cauldron of warfare, and at least in the case of the United States, has consequently been expensive and largely fruitless. Officially, the reason an expansionist, resource-poor Japan attacked the headquarters of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii without warning on Sunday, Dec. 7th, 1941, was to quickly forestall any US potential interference in Tokyo's drive to seize and retain the resource rich possessions of the USA, Britain, Holland and France in the south Pacific Ocean. On surface, this is true. But to paraphrase famed British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, what lay "behind the scenes?" Since the 1920s, the Soviets planned and hoped for a USA-Japan war because they believed such a conflict (one that they knew the USA would likely win) would help create a large Asian power vacuum which could then be quickly filled by Communism. The elimination of significant Japanese military, diplomatic and economic influence in the region, which dated back to the 1880s and was expanded by Japan's humiliating and conclusive military defeat of Russia in 1905, would give the Reds the opportunity they wanted. And thanks to FDR and Stalin, they got it. Benjamin Gitlow was a founding and prominent member of the US Communist Party but was permanently expelled from the organization in 1933 for daring to openly criticize the crimes of Josef Stalin. He soon became a staunch anti-Communist and died at age 74 in 1965. Gitlow wrote in his revealing 1940 book entitled "I Confess: The Truth About American Communism:" "As far back as 1927 when I was in Moscow, the attitude toward the United States in the event of war was discussed. Privately, it was the opinion of all the Soviet leaders to whom I spoke that the rivalry between the United States and Japan must actually break out into war between these two. The Russians were hopeful that the war would break out soon, because that would greatly secure the safety of Russian-Siberian borders and would so weaken Japan that Russia would no longer have to fear an attack from her in the East. Stalin's hopes, through the activities of the US Communist Party, to create a public opinion in the United States that would favor a war, presumably in defense of democracy against the encroachment of fascism, but actually one against Japan. Stalin is perfectly willing to let Americans die in defense of the Soviet Union even if they are not members of the Communist Party..." Hoover Roosevelt's predecessor Herbert Hoover had successfully resisted pressure to send US troops and military aid to China (other than maintaining the small contingent of US Navy river gunboats present there off and on since the mid-1850s to guard US economic assets) when the Japanese first occupied Manchuria in 1931. His reason was that the Chinese would eventually wear down Japan, just as they had eventually worn down every other invader throughout their history. The Japanese premier during most of the crucial 1940-41 period was a member of the royal family, Prince Konoye Fuminaro. Konoye--whose power base lay with big business that was suffering under the burdensome costs of the inconclusive land war in China and US economic sanctions--proposed a meeting with FDR in Honolulu in August 1941 (breaking centuries of Japanese tradition and rigid protocol by meeting with a foreigner outside of Japan) in order to get the US to lift its embargo on longtime petroleum, iron ore and scrap metal exports to Japan. In exchange, Konoye was willing to withdraw Japanese troops from Indochina and sharply reduce its military presence in China. The US and British ambassadors to Japan, Joseph C. Grew (a Herbert Hoover appointee) and Sir Robert Craigie,  respectively both urged FDR to confer with Konoye and to agree to his terms. Grew especially was trying to avoid war with Japan and did everything he could to do so. Grew wrote: "It seems to me highly unlikely that this chance will come again or that any Japanese statesman other than Prince Konoye could succeed in controlling the military extremists in carrying through a policy which they, in their ignorance of international affairs and economic laws, resent and oppose. The alternative to reaching a settlement now would be the greatly increased probability of war and while we would undoubtedly win in the end, I question whether it is in our own interest to see an impoverished Japan reduced to the position of a third-rate power." Craigie agreed with Grew, stating tersely in a dispatch to London, "Time suitable for real peace with Japan. Hope this time American cynicism will not be allowed to interfere with realistic statesmanship." Churchill (whose own Foreign Office was riddled with Soviet spies, among them the notorious "Kim" Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess) was incensed with Craigie's conciliatory stance toward Tokyo. He told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden: He (Craigie) should surely be told forthwith that the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent. Moreover, there were four close Roosevelt advisers who, according to the US Army's 1940-48 communications surveillance of the Soviet Embassy in Washington (a operation commonly known as "Venona"), were Soviet spies or sympathizers. These four spearheaded the ultimately successful attempt to frustrate Grew's and Craigie's negotiating efforts. They were top White House aide and Canadian-born economist Lauchlin Currie, Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White (who essentially was Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s puppetmaster) New Deal tax-and-spend fanatic Harry Hopkins and the notorious State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss had tapped Johns Hopkins University Asia specialist and "adviser" to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang-Kai-shek, Owen Lattimore, as FDR's "China expert"--one whom Mao Tse-tung's sidekick Chou En-lai warmly regarded as "quite sympathetic to the Chinese Communists." Roosevelt All of these men, White and Currie especially, actively pressured FDR into waging a war with Japan. They eloquently masked their staunch Soviet sympathies behind facile appeals to the territorial integrity of China under Chiang (a weak, greedy and corrupt leader who was uneasily allied with Mao and would later be overwhelmed by him) and in the interests of a "united front against fascism." FDR thus flatly disregarded the advice of Grew and Craigie and refused any meeting with Konoye. Meanwhile, German Communist Richard Sorge's high-level Soviet spy ring in Tokyo, which had substantial influence on ranking Japanese military officers and numerous cabinet officials as well as close contacts with several German diplomats, helped steer Japanese strategy toward its existing Navy-based "Strike South" approach--conquest of the fruitful Pacific possessions of the West and away from the Army-based "Strike North" approach which targeted Siberia and Soviet Central Asia. The "Strike North" strategy had already largely fallen from favor after Japan's massive defeat by the Red Army at Nomonhan, Mongolia in August 1939. This defeat led to a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact which ensured the security of the Soviet-Chinese border until the final days of W.W.II and enabled the Kremlin to later immediately transfer some 250,000 seasoned troops from the Far East westward to battle the invading Germans. Soon, Konoye, the victim of a near-fatal assassination attempt, was forced out as premier in the early fall of 1941 and replaced by the pro-German, openly aggressive General Tojo Hideki. The Japanese militarists were now fully in control of events  and cared little about negotiating with the USA or anyone else. The stage was being set in Washington, Moscow and Tokyo for the US-Japan war that Moscow had wanted since the 1920s. All that remained was to drag the USA into World War II, which FDR, Churchill and friends failed to do with Germany after numerous provocations but successfully did with Japan at Pearl Harbor. On Nov. 18, 1941, Secretary Morgenthau sent to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a long memorandum drafted by Assistant Secretary White describing US terms for peace with Japan. These terms were so severe that White and Currie knew Japan would never accept them. Japanese Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, one of the most moderate members of the Japanese government, recalled after receiving the Morgenthau-White-Hull memo, "I was utterly disheartened, and felt like one groping in darkness. The uncompromising tone was no more than I had looked for; but I was greatly astonished at the extreme nature of the contents." An aide to Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Vice Admiral Francis Beatty, revealed in 1954: "Prior to December 7th, it was evident even to me... that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they thought the Allies could not win without us and our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed. The conditions we imposed upon Japan -- to get out of China, for example --were so severe that we knew that that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way -- and we knew their overall import – pointed that way." Exactly a week after this memo was issued, FDR's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, wrote in his diary some two weeks before Pearl Harbor, recalling a cabinet meeting discussing the problems with Japan. He wrote: "There the President...brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese. He brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked, perhaps [as soon as] next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning and the question was what should we do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves." Sir Oliver Lylleton, Churchill's war production minister, knew all of Churchill's and FDR's plans and decisions to force the USA into the war. In a June 20, 1944 speech to members of the American Chamber of Commerce in London, he stated: "America provoked Japan to such an extent that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history, even to say that America was forced into the war." Moreover, there was a persistent undercurrent of fear in the Kremlin that Great Britain would make a separate peace with Germany. These fears were intensified after Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess's mysterious May 1941 solo flight to Scotland supposedly to meet secretly with the Duke of Hamilton, (six weeks before the German invasion of the USSR) but Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor seven months after Hess's inexplicable odyssey, among other things, helped scuttle any chances of a separate Berlin-London peace treaty, another major benefit to Moscow. Even after Pearl Harbor, Joseph Grew, by then Undersecretary of State for Asian Affairs, still hoped for some kind of negotiated settlement: "At the same time I believe that it is important that we bear in mind that the defeat of Japanese aggression does not necessarily entail, as many Chinese think, our crushing Japan militarily. The complete elimination of Japan as a force in the Far East would not be conducive either to order or prosperity in this area." Well, we certainly crushed Japan militarily, finally finishing the job with two atomic bombs in August 1945. What did we get for it all? Scores of GIs killed from Oahu to Okinawa, billions of postwar taxpayer dollars spent rebuilding a completely wrecked and humiliated Japan, keeping it militarily weak in the face of an appallingly genocidal and increasingly assertive Red China with both nations eventually becoming the USA's fiercest foreign economic competitors. Barely eight years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the USA wound up with some 33,000 US dead in a still divided and tense Korea, and some two decades after that, 58,000 troops killed in a still Communist Indochina--the last courtesy of a fruitless eight-year conflict (which some have called the US version of the Boer War) that severely damaged US social, economic and political institutions. We then were treated to Pol Pot's notoriously barbaric Cambodian "Killing Fields," scads of desperate Vietnamese "boat people," thousands of US troops and a string of warships permanently deployed in the Far East, and, finally, Chinese Long March ICBMs aimed at the US West Coast. All to avenge the loathsome FDR and his pro-Soviet disciples' self-serving and cleverly premeditated "day of infamy" and to fulfill the bloodthirsty Josef Stalin's totalitarian fantasies. Well, hey, winning is everything, right, sports fans? But what did we win?  Michael E. Kreca lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for Business Week, Knight-Ridder and the Financial Times of London. He can be reached at mkreca@connectnet.com Buy Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbour from Amazon.com for

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