The U.S. entered World War II in 1941. Yet American planes couldn’t dent a roof in Japan until 1945. The 1942 Doolittle raid, with its 16 bombers that took off from carriers, showed great ingenuity and bravery. But it had zero impact on Japan’s ability to make war.
The raid was designed to boost morale after Pearl Harbor. When the U.S. didn’t follow up with more attacks, the Japanese believed their homeland was invulnerable to enemy bombs because of the emperor’s divine presence. That hubris ended 75 years ago Monday with an event that set in motion the eventual U.S. victory.
First, a little more history: The U.S. could reach Japan only after the Marines took the Mariana Islands at great cost in 1944. The largest airports in the world were built within months and filled with new, modern B-29 bombers. The B-29 was a marvel and the greatest expense of the war at $3 billion, compared with $2.4 billion for the Manhattan Project. Each plane was three times the size of the next-largest bomber, the B-17. The B-29 could fly 3,700 miles and cruise at an altitude high enough to elude antiaircraft fire.
Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay smokes a cigar at the Pentagon in Washington, July 1945.
Photo: Mondadori via Getty Images
But the B-29 ran into a problem during its first mission over Japan—huge winds up to 200 miles an hour. The jet stream rendered it impossible for bombs to hit targets.
Hap Arnold, head of the Army Air Force, turned to his youngest general, 38-year-old Curtis LeMay, who didn’t fit the profile of the glamorous flyboy. LeMay was slightly overweight, surly and taciturn. Most people found him frightening. He was a lieutenant in 1940 but rose out of obscurity to become the most innovative problem solver in bomber command. LeMay also insisted on flying the lead bomber on every dangerous mission. He was also the only U.S. general in the war who fought in front of his troops—a case study in military leadership.
LeMay approached the jet-stream dilemma like the engineer he was. On the night of March 9, 1945, he sent 346 B-29s to Tokyo. In a radical departure from normal operations, he ordered the planes to fly low—5,000 feet—and not in formation, but in a single-file line. The planes would drop incendiaries instead of impact bombs. The crews protested, assuming they would be destroyed by the flak. But LeMay believed the crews could survive because the Japanese wouldn’t see this coming.
He was right. With minimum loss to the U.S., the incendiaries started a firestorm that burned down more than 16 square miles of Tokyo. The firestorm left more than a million homeless and killed an estimated 100,000 men, women and children. The Japanese were as surprised as they were devastated. More people died during that 24-hour period than perished five months later in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
If this sounds shocking to contemporary ears, consider the context. An estimated 15 million to 17 million Asian civilians were killed—Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and those from every other country Japan conquered. Like their German allies, the Japanese adopted a sense of triumphal racial superiority. Many of their victims were killed in the most brutal, medieval ways. An average of 250,000 people were dying throughout Asia every month in the first half of 1945.
As Americans approached the mainland, the Japanese fought even more ferociously on Iwo Jima and later Okinawa. The war in the Pacific was turning into an out-of-control bloodbath. The only way to stop this mass death—and prevent a prolonged guerrilla war following the largest invasion in history—was to force the empire to surrender by destruction from the air.
The U.S. would have to firebomb 64 Japanese cities, capped off by the two atomic bombs in August 1945, to end World War II. In the tragic calculus of war, it took the deaths of untold numbers of human beings to save the lives of even more. These are brutal realities few people today can imagine, let alone confront.
Sept. 2 will mark the 75th anniversary of the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri. That happened without an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Imagine Iwo Jima times 100 or even 1,000. At least a million American servicemen and many more millions of Japanese lived full lives thanks to the terrible and tragic—but necessary—events that began on March 9, 1945.
Mr. Kozak is author of “LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay.”
McCabe … Is the fix in?…this entire situation is beginning to look like a partisan mockery of justice.
Paul Sperry published a report about the circumstances behind a dropped criminal case against Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Molly Gaston, the asst US Attorney who signed letter to McCabe’s lawyer informing McCabe she was closing criminal case against him,” Sperry reported, “is Democrat who’s given thousands to Dems including Obama & who once worked for Dem side of House Oversight & whose mother worked for [The Washington Post].”
McCabe, who allegedly lied to investigators, was told that no charges would be brought against him thanks to “underlying” facts in a related DOJ inspector general’s report.
EricHolder is more connected to McCabe’s case than the public realizes.
“The father of the Obama Democrat-donating prosecutor who let admitted perjurer Andrew McCabe off the hook happens to be partners with Eric Holder at the DC law firm of Covington & Burling,” Sperry wrote. “Did the former AG have something to do with McCabe getting off?”
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DOJ's Refusal To Charge McCabe Vindicates Trump Weighing in on Stone Case
Randy DeSoto
At the same time President Donald Trump is getting chastised by Attorney General William Barr for weighing in on the Roger Stone case, the Justice Department announced on Friday it will not bring criminal charges against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
It sure feels like the DOJ is taking care of its own, while people like Stone, who had any relationship to the Trump campaign, face or have done jail time.
Remember, it wasn’t just Stone. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors dredged up years-old tax issues for former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and placed him in solitary confinement to try to make him sing against the president regarding the Russia hoax.
Then there was former Trump campaign consultant and national security adviser Michael Flynn, whom prosecutors bankrupted and ultimately forced a guilty plea out of for allegedly making a false statement to FBI agents.
And of course, there’s George Papadopoulos, from whom Mueller’s henchmen wrung another guilty plea, claiming he made a false statement.
Mind you, none of these crimes had anything to do with the underlying reason the Mueller probe was launched: to determine whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
That collusion narrative was shown to be make-believe.
Enter Andrew McCabe
DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz concluded in a report released publicly in April 2018 that McCabe lied repeatedly when questioned about leaking information to the media regarding the DOJ’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
McCabe “lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to [The Wall Street Journal]” in violation of FBI policy, and that his “disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct,” the report read.
In March 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe two days before he was slated to retire based on the OIG’s findings that he had not been honest with investigators.
But McCabe will face no criminal prosecution.
“We learned this morning through a phone call from the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office that was followed by a letter that the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of Andrew McCabe has been closed,” attorneys Michael Bromwich and David Schertler said in the statement, CNBC reported.
“This means that no charges will be brought against him based on the facts underlying the Office of the Inspector General’s April 2018 report.”
So much for equal justice under the law.
You will recall that McCabe first came under scrutiny following the release by the inspector general in December 2017 of text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
In the texts, Strzok described Trump during the 2016 campaign as a “loathsome human” and an “idiot,” and found the prospect of him being president “terrifying.”
Page, who was having an affair with Strzok, texted him, “There is no way [Trump] gets elected.”
Strzok then replied, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office … that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.
“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
“Andy” referred to McCabe.
The “insurance policy” was the FBI’s Russia investigation, Page “essentially confirmed” while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2018, according to Fox News.
Trump insisted on Friday that he has every right to weigh in on Stone’s case or other matters before the DOJ.
The chief executive tweeted a quote from an interview Barr gave to ABC News on Thursday.
“’The president has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.’ AG Barr,” Trump wrote.
“This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as president, the legal right to do so, I do, but I have so far chosen not to!” he added.
Trump rightly believes Stone is getting a raw deal.
On Wednesday, the president told reporters he had not communicated directly with Barr regarding the case but felt Stone “was treated horribly,” adding the original nine-year sentence recommendation by the DOJ prosecutors was a “disgrace.”
The Mueller investigation was a “scam” Trump said. “What’s happening to McCabe? What’s happening to Lisa [Page] and Peter Strzok?”
Stone was convicted in November of lying to Congress and witness tampering in a criminal case stemming from the Mueller probe.
Following the verdict, Trump tweeted, “So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come. Well, what about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Shifty Schiff, Ohr & Nellie, Steele & all of the others, including even Mueller himself? Didn’t they lie?”
“A double standard like never seen before in the history of our Country?” he added.
The DOJ pulled the nine-year sentencing recommendation following Trump’s public comments, leaving the matter completely in the judge’s hands.
Barr insisted during his ABC News interview that Trump’s views had nothing to do with his department’s decision to withdraw the prosecutors’ proposed sentencing.
“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody … whether it’s Congress, a newspaper editorial board, or the president,” Barr said.
That is the right answer; however, Trump should not have to sit by and watch an injustice being perpetrated.
While Trump associates have been prosecuted by the DOJ largely for process or unrelated crimes, all on the so-called “deep state” side, like McCabe and Strzok, continue to get a free pass.
Subject:Joseph Maguire was betrayed, but not by Donald Trump he was betrayed by his own staff.
Joe Maguire is an outstanding human being. He deserves every word of endorsement as to his dedication to the United States of America.
However, Joseph Maguire was betrayed, but not by Donald Trump he was betrayed by his own staff.
The Soviets and now the Russians want to create confusion and discontent in the United States. So does George Soros. Adam Schiff is a willing tool of the Russians. Adam Schiff’s every word and every action implements the Russian campaign to undermine the United States and to create domestic discord.
Many elements within the intelligence community understand [and have reported on ] the continued efforts of the Russians. They certainly would like to kill fracking and destroy the US capability for energy independence. They certainly would like to tank the US economy by spreading doubt and uncertainty.
I read the Washington Post and I am dismayed at the constant harassment of the Trump administration. Further, I read the comments and am dismayed by the extent of Trump derangement syndrome.
Again, members of McGuire staff should have alerted him that his words would be cherry picked and leaked by the intelligence committee Democratic Party staff to the detriment of Donald Trump. Members of McGuire staff should have worked within the established chain of command and should have first given the briefing to the White House.
The following is an unclassified version of a US intelligence report from October 29, 2016 in which US intelligence reported that Putin favored the election Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. This report was sidelined by John Brennan [who appointed an ad hoc committee whose work' was never vetted] which claimed to have" highly sensitive" sources within Putin’s intimate inner circle. http://ltgjcmilopsg3.blogspot.com/2016/10/appears-that-favors-hillary-clinton-in.html
There evidence to believe that Soros has used his vast wealth to promote policies that undermine and weaken democracy, the West and the State of Israel.
The law professor Alan Dershowitz has thrown a legal hand-grenade into America’s political civil war by claiming to have evidence that former President Barack Obama “personally asked” the FBI to investigate someone “on behalf” of Obama’s “close ally,” billionaire financier George Soros.
He made his cryptic remark in an interview defending U.S. President Donald Trump against claims he interfered in the prosecution of his former adviser, Roger Stone.
Dershowitz, a confirmed liberal, drew the ire of the left by joining Trump’s impeachment defense team—not because he’s a Trump fan, but because he cares about upholding the rule of law and the U.S. constitution, which he believes (with good evidence) are being trashed in the anti-Trump witch-hunt.
Now, though, Dershowitz has crossed yet another line. For to criticize Soros, the principal funder of treasured activist causes, means automatically turning into a bogeyman of the left.
Predictably, therefore, Dershowitz has been painted as a wild conspiracy theorist. Other critics of Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, find themselves labelled anti-Semites.
Last December, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani suggested that Soros was involved in the Ukraine-Trump imbroglio, controlled various ambassadors and had employed FBI agents who the Trump camp believe were involved in a criminal conspiracy to bring down the president.
“Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him,” he told New York magazine. “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. … He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel.”
Cue outrage among American Jewish groups. Anti-Defamation League national director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said: “For decades, George Soros’s philanthropy has been used as fodder for outsized anti-Semitic conspiracy theories insisting there exists Jewish control and manipulation of countries and global events.”
It’s undeniable that Soros has been targeted by anti-Semites who depict him as a caricature Jew trying to manipulate the world.
Focusing on his Jewishnesss is gratuitous and irrelevant. But just because he’s a magnet for anti-Semites does not mean there aren’t well-founded grounds for complaint against his behavior.
In the last few years, Soros has been trying to control local U.S. law-enforcement agencies by pumping massive amounts of money into backing radical candidates in key district attorney races.
In December, radicals who ran on a platform of not prosecuting certain crimes and reducing other state felonies to misdemeanors were elected as top prosecutors for three suburbs of Washington, D.C.
In Virginia’s Fairfax County a defeated prosecutor, Jonathan Fahey, said: “We have a world right now where the president picks the U.S. attorneys and George Soros picks the top state prosecutors. And that’s a scary world to live in.”
Jews are falsely and maliciously accused of manipulating countries and global events. But as Soros has himself acknowledged, that’s precisely what he has set out to do.
Quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s remark that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends towards justice,” he told the U.K.’s Guardian: “I don’t believe that’s true. I think you need to bend the arc.”
In his book Soros on Soros, the financier wrote: “I do not accept the rules imposed by others. … I recognize that there are regimes that need to be opposed rather than accepted. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don’t apply.”
What that means is that he has tried to re-order the world according to how he thinks it should be run. And that means opposing the U.S. and its values.
He has called America “the main obstacle to a stable and just world order,” and said E.U.-style socialism “is exactly what we need.”
Through his Open Society Foundations, which started out genuinely aiding freedom behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, his billions have been used to institutionalize policies such as the legalization of drugs, the promotion of illegal immigration or backing for anti-white groups such as Antifa—initiatives which attack Western values, undermine the nation-state, and damage cultural resilience and cohesion.
He has funded a plethora of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist groups. According to leaked documents, the OSF has financed NGOs in the United States, Europe and the Middle East to pressurize and delegitimize Israel. He has given millions to groups which support BDS and accuse Israel falsely of war crimes and ethnic cleansing.
He has also lent credence to the anti-Semitic claim that the “Israel lobby” has exercised undue influence over American foreign policy and in silencing criticism of Israel.
Now he appears to be stepping up yet further his attempts to delegitimize America and destroy the nation-state. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, he declared that the United States, China and Russia all remained “in the hands of would-be or actual dictators.”
In that speech, he announced a new $1 billion Open Society University Network to fund education programs around the world—described by the Financial Times as a plan to “educate against nationalism.”
Soros is entitled to hate Trump, despise the nation-state and support the idea of a transnational utopia. But when one single individual spends billions of dollars buying up and thus transforming public debate and global politics outside the normal democratic process, people are entitled to express significant concern.
Yet those doing so run a gauntlet of abuse. The left routinely employs smear by association against anyone who shares a platform with someone deemed to be (however falsely) a racist, fascist or some other kind of thought-criminal.
This happened recently over a conference in Rome discussing “national conservatism,” organized by the Israeli scholar (and Orthodox Jew) Yoram Hazony, whose book The Virtue of Nationalism seeks to restore support for the nation to conservative thought.
Although this conference featured solid conservative thinkers such as Chris DeMuth and Ofir Haivry of the Edmund Burke Foundation and John O’Sullivan of National Review, it also included figures such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party is supported by members of Mussolini’s family, and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s niece Marion Marechal.
All these are demonized as “far-right” by the liberal establishment, which in turn demonizes anyone who shares their platform.
Appallingly, British Jewish leaders rushed to stoke the flames of this auto-da-fe of political heretics.
The Board of Deputies attacked the Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski for attending the conference, claiming the Conservative party ran the “serious risk of the public assuming that they share his views” unless it disciplined him. Which it duly did, issuing Kawczynski with a formal warning and forcing him to apologize for his attendance.
Thus the Board of Deputies has also implicitly and absurdly smeared Hazony, one of the most impressive Jewish thinkers of current times.
In a mirror image of this tactic, anyone who criticizes George Soros is accused of being an anti-Semite—because anti-Semites have attacked him.
The point about anti-Semitism is that it is based on paranoid and deranged lies. There is, however, good evidence to believe that Soros has used his vast wealth to promote policies that undermine and weaken democracy, the West and the State of Israel.
By defending him in such a Pavlovian fashion and using character assassination to silence his critics, Jews and others engaged in such witch-hunts do no favors to the Jewish people or the causes of fighting anti-Semitism and defending freedom, which they thus trivialize and undermine.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy,” in 2018. Her work can be found at: www.melaniephillips.com.
The rise of the internet and the advent of social media have fundamentally changed the information ecosystem, giving the public direct access to more information than ever before. But it's often nearly impossible to distinguish accurate information from low-quality or false content. This means that disinformation—false or intentionally misleading information that aims to achieve an economic or political goal—can become rampant, spreading further and faster online than it ever could in another format.
As part of its Countering Truth Decay initiative, and with support from the Hewlett Foundation, RAND is responding to this urgent problem. Our researchers identified and characterized the universe of online tools developed by nonprofits and civil society organizations to target online disinformation. These tools were created to help information consumers, researchers, and journalists navigate today's challenging information environment.
Goals of the Project
The purpose of this project is three-fold. We seek to
Identify and collect in one place a set of resources that can help users combat the challenge of disinformation, gain greater awareness of the media ecosystem, and become more-savvy information media consumers
Inform funders and developers about the set of tools currently under development, those tools in need of funding, and areas where additional development would be beneficial
Provide a map of ongoing projects and developed tools that could serve as an input to efforts to build a field around the study of disinformation and its remedies.
Tools that work against disinformation take on many forms—from websites powered by human fact-checkers to apps that use artificial intelligence to detect bots. We've grouped the tools in this database into several categories, with some belonging to multiple categories.
This site focuses on the U.S. market and includes only tools created by civil society organizations and nonprofits. Know about a tool that you don't see below? Read more about our methodology, criteria for inclusion, and category definitions, or tell us about the tool you know.
This applies to all tools that establish new norms, principles, or best practices to govern a set of processes or to guide conduct and behavior. In the majority of the tools presented here, codes and standards aim to guard against disinformation or misinformation, to increase the quality of journalism, or to commit individuals or companies to a set of principles.
Credibility scoring tools attach a rating or grade to individual sources based on their accuracy, transparency, quality, and other measures of trustworthiness.
Whitelisting tools create trusted lists of IP addresses or websites to distinguish between trusted users or trusted sites and ones that may be fake or malicious.
Learn More About Truth Decay
Fueled in part by the spread of disinformation, Truth Decay is the term RAND is using to refer to the diminishing role of facts, data, and analysis in political and civil discourse and the policymaking process. Truth Decay is characterized by four trends: increasing disagreement about facts and data, blurring of the line between opinion and fact, increasing relative volume of opinion compared to fact, and declining trust in institutions that used to be looked to as authoritative sources of factual information. Truth Decay poses a threat to democracy, to policymaking, and to the very notion of civic discourse.
If you would like to help improve the information in this database, you can recommend a new tool or suggest a revision to an existing tool. Our team will review your submission and follow up as appropriate.
This project has brought together “an assembly of independent voices who uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values.” The writers of these essays, most of them black and all of them serious thinkers, come from ideologically diverse backgrounds. They are liberals, conservatives, academics, journalists, and activists. What they share in common is an aversion to the increasing infantilization of black America or the denial of blacks’ agency throughout their history. These writers share with one another a distaste for attempts at pseudo-scholarship that would reduce all of U.S. history to a history of racism and all of black America to the permanent status of helpless victim.
The name they chose, “1776,” consciously echoes that of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, as it is intended to be an alternative. The flawed premise of that other enterprise was that slavery is not just the original sin that the U.S. has worked to overcome but actually makes up the nation’s foundational character and explains all of the social maladies in black America today.
There are many problems with this concept, as the 1776 authors note. For example, slavery cannot become an explanation for social maladies that didn’t even exist as recently as the civil rights era.
The evil of slavery in the early U.S. and its modern legacy must not be ignored. Slavery was an abomination and, for the founders of this nation, a daily reality. It had existed not since 1619 but from time immemorial. Some of the Founding Fathers embraced and defended this vile institution as it slithered its way into modernity as a form of permanent, race-based subjugation; others tolerated it, some very reluctantly, in the interest of forming what they hoped would become a more perfect union.
This nation has since become just that: more perfect. It was not an easy journey from ownership of blacks to the election of a black president, but the progress is real, as strangely loath as some are to admit it. The journey included the most destructive war in U.S. history in terms of both economic and human costs. It included the vicious lie of “separate but equal,” which abrogated the rule of law for a century. It included terrorism, intimidation, lynchings, and violent resistance to civil rights by the very authorities that were supposed to be protecting the rights of all.
But this story also has its heroes and its triumphs. It includes black and white abolitionists who stood and spoke out tirelessly on principles of freedom. It includes black families who were forced to build their own schools and community institutions. Blacks built up entrepreneurial enterprises and fortunes, and, sometimes, they rebuilt them after racist terrorism destroyed them. They built their own colleges and universities of the sort that produced key figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. And, finally, after overcoming so many obstacles, they laid claim to the full set of rights that no one can deny them today, taking up their rightful place as first-class citizens.
The U.S. is now a more perfect union than it was. It is still not perfect, but it is a highly functional, dynamic, and successful nation and the most diverse nation in history.
Immigrants from every part of the world aspire to come to the U.S., not because they want to share in ill-gotten wealth from slavery but because people all over the world tacitly understand and acknowledge that no one outdoes Americans in their welcoming attitude toward foreigners and their commitment to fairness and the rule of law.
We hope you will enjoy these essays, beginning with the introduction to the series by Robert Woodson. He holds up the oft-forgotten achievements of blacks even against the grain of Jim Crow as “a powerful refutation of the claim that the destiny of black Americans is determined by what whites do or what they have done in the past.”
We are also proud to host the "1776" essay by Clarence Page, the famed liberal columnist for the Chicago Tribune,whose work has now appeared in print in seven different decades. Page, distressed by “the long-held stereotypes of black people as helpless bystanders in their own history,” urges readers to “desegregate our poverty discussion.” The causes of black and white poverty, he notes, are often strikingly similar.
We have published 10 other essays, as well, which all appear on our "1776" landing page, and we will be adding more as we continue our celebration of Black History Month. Each of the essays at the above link contains valuable arguments, new perspectives, and nuggets of forgotten black history. They are well worth your attention.
When the US State Department released the budget request for 2021 missing from the requests was funding for the Palestinian Security Services.
Why? Go no farther than the investigations conducted by the Center for Near East Policy Research of the Palestinian Security Services in 2011 and 2013, which document the fact that the PSF is a terror infested entity not worthy of support.
Here are those reports, which the US government now takes quite seriously.
