Re Pearl Harbor.

The Right in general- including my admiral Father in Law- were convinced that FDR prevented instructions from going out in time so that we would have a pretext to go to war in order to
"help the Jews". In fairness that was before the Holocaust as such had started altho well after
Crystalnacht.

In James Bamford's The Puzzle Palace(which I read 25 years ago)he wrote that we inferred from some behavior by the Japanese negotiating Team in Washington( the basis for the one time common phrase " a Jap trick") that some hostile action was impending(and maybe that Pearl Harbor might be involved-that's where my memory is inadequate). We sent a cable to the Admiral in charge in Pearl but it was mishandled by RCA so it arrived too late. If it had been properly delivered we would have been prepared.

Here's a link about Pearl Harbor:
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=408

Do Freedom of Information Act Files Prove FDR Had Foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor?

The theory that Roosevelt and/or Churchill knew about Pearl Harbor before it happened and hushed it up to pull the U.S. into the war has been kicking around for decades. It is certainly clear that the U.S. had cracked the Japanese diplomatic code and knew the Japanese were getting ready to go to war with us by late November, 1941. It is also undisputed that a day or two before the attack, U.S. codebreakers had figured out the Japanese were going to to attack us somewhere on December 7 at the hour of the attack.

Basically, Japan sent their diplomats in D.C. a message that said, you've got to decode this long statement and give it to the U.S. by x hour because after that "things are automatically going to happen." However, the message was considered so secret that the diplomats weren't allowed to use their staff to decode it and type it up. Ironically, the U.S. codebreakers had already cracked it and typed it, but it was a winter Saturday night in a city that was not yet on a war footing, everyone was out of town or attending parties and they had trouble pushing the warning up the chain of command. There were also technical problems and bureaucratic blunders that kept them from getting it into the hands of the commanders in the Pacific until after bombs were falling.

By the time the Japanese gave their statement to Cordell Hull, the bombs were already falling and Hull already knew what it said.

However, there is no real evidence, that we knew they were going to attack Pearl Harbor specifically, nor is there any evidence that people at the top deliberatly let it happen. And it makes no sense. We let them sink the entire Pacific Fleet, risked letting them destroy the base at Pearl Harbor itself, (if the Japanese had lauched one more strike and taken out the tank farm and the drydocks at Pearl we would have been forced all the way back to California) just so we could get into the war? An attack repulsed would have served just as well as a successful attack and, in any case, if the point was to get us into a war with Germany, there was no assurance that letting Japan attack us would achieve that result. The Axis alliance treaty did not require Hitler and Mussolini to declare war on us if Japan was the aggressor.

The theory seems to have been more of a general conspiracy mindedness that took hold in academic circles in the 1960s, particularly in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.

And you are correct.

That's an excellent point. By not informing the men that they had syphilis, the government intentionally let it spread to the black population. They wanted to see how it spread through a population. That is intentional, and to say that the government didn't intentionally infect the African-American population with syphilis would be completely bogus.

That's correct Jackiein

Those men infected their wives and children.

So, yes the government was responsible for infecting African Americans with syphilis by allowing the infectious disease remain untreated and those men to continue to infect others in the community was a travesty.

Excellent points. We have to remember that the "typical white person" thinks that God created AIDS to punish homosexuals (a la Reagan). With that in mind, how ridiculous the black community's explanation sounds! (snark)

NC Steve the problem is that there is no hard core evidence to refute the polio vaccine introducing HIV to Africans theory:

After nearly a decade of research, investigative journalist Edward Hooper, a former official of the United Nations, has written The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, a book that may provide some answers. Evidence uncovered through interviews and literary searches suggests that the AIDS virus was not the byproduct of a communist plot or a form of divine punishment, but that it may be the result of a contaminated experimental polio vaccine program conducted in Africa in the late 1950s.

The vaccine in question was developed by Hilary Koprowski and Stanley Plotkin, a pair of scientists from the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, the country's first independent medical research center. At the time, the institute was one of several organizations competing to develop an effective attenuated polio vaccine that could be dispensed quickly to protect people from catching the disease.

Exactly how many people were given the Wistar vaccine is not known. An article published in the journal BioScience puts the number of recipients at 325,000.1 Other sources place the number much higher. As many as a million people in what are now Rwanda, Burundi and Congo may have received the vaccine between 1957 and 1960.2,5

The earliest documented HIV infection of a human has been traced to a male victim who was living in Kinshasa, in what was than called the Belgian Congo in 1959. A study published in Nature in 1998 authenticated the victim and suggested that the virus "may have evolved from a single introduction into the African population in a time frame not long before 1959." Although the researchers could not find an explanation for the wide-scale spread of AIDS, they also suggested that "the role of large-scale vaccination campaigns ... should be carefully examined" as a possible cause.3

Kinshasa, the country's largest city, is considered one of the birthplaces of the AIDS epidemic, and was one of the first places the experimental polio vaccine was tested. Of 90 of the first reported cases of HIV and AIDS acquired in specific towns in Africa through 1981, 76 came from the same towns where the experimental vaccine was given or within 100 miles of them.2

At the heart of the debate is the argument over what type of monkey cells were used to produce the vaccine. In an interview with Reuters in November 1999, Koprowski, a former director at Wistar, insisted that neither chimpanzee nor African green monkey tissue (both of which are capable of supporting SIV) were used in the process. The vaccine, he asserts, was made with tissues from Asian rhesus monkeys, whose kidney cells do not support SIV.

"This book has only preconceptions," said Koprowski, now a professor at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. "There are no facts."4

"The idea is a house of cards built on circumstantial evidence," added Plotkin, who developed the modern rubella vaccine while employed at the institute.4

While there are no hard facts to dispute Koprowski and Plotkin's statements, there is also little evidence to back them up. An independent committee formed by the Wistar Institute in 1992 was unable to determine if chimpanzee tissue was used during the vaccine trials. Records kept during that time appear incomplete or spotty at best, omitting certain details or test results. Former workers interviewed by Hooper have given conflicting accounts about which types of monkey tissues were used.

Circumstantial evidence gleaned by Hooper also shows that chimpanzees may have been used in the vaccine's processing. A number of eyewitnesses have claimed that chimps were experimented upon by the Wistar group. It is known that a large colony of chimpanzees were caught and used for research at a station along the Lindi River in central Congo, one of the initial sites for the vaccination program. It is also known that 11 of the earliest reported cases of AIDS and HIV infection in the Congo occurred within 200 miles of the vaccination sites situated along the Lindi.

Because of their extremely close relation to human DNA, chimpanzee tissues have long been considered an ideal culture medium for growing viruses. If infected chimp tissues were used, the theory goes, it might have found its way into one or more batches of the experimental polio vaccine used in the Congo and the neighboring countries of Burundi and Rwanda. Since the vaccine was delivered orally, the virus could have passed through a sore, ulcer or bleeding gum in a patient's mouth and entered the bloodstream. From that point, the virus could be transmitted through sexual or blood-to-blood contact and later evolved into the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Bademus,
surely the history of what our government has done and is capable of as part of the health/medical system does not make Wright's words misguided as they are just as much rooted in prior acts as the Indian term 'forked tongue' is for 'palefaces', no?

As for the 'typical white person' snark. Are you fully informed as to what Obama described the 'typical white person' as being? These 3 words are thrown around a lot and folks seem to have missed the what prefaced that remark. Hopefully, you recall that he was answering the query of 'what is your grandmother like'? when he used those 3 words? The complete thought he expressed was

"she does not harbor racial animosity and was a typical white person."

He gave 'typical white people' an entire group of folks the benefit of the doubt on race!

Which means the 'typical white person' should have felt tremendous praise. Obama harbors no hostility towards whites thanks to his mother and grandmother being 'typical white people'.

What I believe needs to be understood is that it is his mother and grandmother who provide the reference point for what Obama defines as a 'typical white person' and more importantly this non-racist attribution on his part comes DESPITE hearing his own grandmother utter racial stereotypes words that made him cringe.

So, please let's not get it twisted. Obama was complimenting the vast majority of white people with his use of the phrase 'typical white people' to describe what he believes to be in the HEART ordinary white folks. Cause he does not see them as any different from his loving grandmother.

It is this biracial aspect of Obama that typical white people should focus on much more so than Wright's words because it is those typical white people who enabled him to sit in Wrights pews and not attribut malice or hostility to Wright's heart either.

Obama was raised by whites and he sees their hearts and intentions as being good true and honest even when they make clearlyracist statements. That was his overarching point.

Like he says...he is a hopemongerer.