Vietnam Veterans sucked too

False reports about Gulf of Tonkin and Weapons of Mass Destruction start two unnecessary wars and the media acts complacent, thus American citizens do too.

Information from the New York Times News Service by Scott Shane, printed in the San Bernardino, CA Sun newspaper Friday December 2, 2005.

Washington: The National Security Agency has released hundreds of pages of long-secret documents on the 1964 gulf of Tonkin incident that played a critical role near the beginning of the Vietnam War.

The material posted on the Internet at midnight Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, included one of the largest collections of secret, intercepted communications ever made available for study. The most provocative document is a 2001 article in which an agency historian argued that the agency’s intelligence officers “deliberately skewed” the evidence passed on to policymakers on the crucial question of whether North Vietnamese ships attacked U.S. destroyers on August 4, 1964. Based on the mistaken belief that such an attack had occurred, President Johnson ordered air strikes on North Vietnam, and Congress passed a broad resolution authorizing military action.

The historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote the article in an internal publication and it was classified top secret despite the fact that it dealt with events in 1964. Word of Hanyok’s findings leaked to historians outside the agency, who requested the article under the Freedom of Information Act in 2003.

Some intelligence officials said they believed the article’s release was delayed because the agency was wary of comparisons between the roles of flawed intelligence in the Vietnam War and in the war in Iraq. Hanyok declined to comment on Wednesday. But Don Weber, and agency spokesman, denied that any political consideration was involved.

“There was never a decision not to release the history” written by Hanyok, Weber said. On the contrary, he said, the release was delayed because the agency wanted to make public the raw material Hanyok used for his research.

“The goal here is to allow people to wade through all that information and draw their own conclusion,” he said.

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, called the release of the document “terrific,” noting that the eavesdropping material know as signals intelligence, or sigint is the most secret information the government has.

“NSA may be the most closed mouthed of all U.S. government agencies,” said Blanton. “The release of such a large amount of sigint is unprecedented.”

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