True, the allies had been expecting an attack, but most people thought it would be at Wake or the Phillipines. Who knows what the Advertiser story said, or where they got their information. Because the United States was intercepting and reading the Japanese diplomatic ciphers, they knew something was coming. Should Kimmel have kept his eyes open? Should Short have expected an attack? Certainly ... but they didn't. They seem to have been moderately incompetent. If they had any idea that the attack was going to happen that day, they wouldn't have been on their way to a golf game when the attack happened.
This is just plain silly. Yes, the Japanese consider December 8, 1941 the day of the attack -- it was that day in Japan. But the Japanese navy *planned* on attacking on Sunday morning -- when the fleet's guard was down. And the planes took off from carriers a hundred miles or so away from Hawaii, not from Japan! If you want to read more about this, try the aforementioned book, Nakamoto's biography, or even the movie Tora Tora Tora.
As far as the Kuwait attack, the State Department did not set it up -- unless you assume that they intentionally stationed a stupid diplomatic officer in Iraq. When questioned about how the United States felt about "border skirmishes among the Arabs," she reportedly told them that the United States didn't care about border skirmishes. The Iraqis considered it a border skirmish -- for whatever reason. Obviously, the rest of the world didn't.
People are going to see idiotic conspiracies anyway -- but most of the things that are cited are the result of a mix of stupidity and carelessness.
Daryl