History Revisited
Oct 31st, 2005 at 6:46 am by Susie
This is fascinating, especially since it was widely believed otherwise:
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode that helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, according to two people familiar with the historian’s work.
The historian’s conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.
The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.
Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.
We are about to enjoy another such incident, called the Strait of Hormuz incident, in which Iranian fishing vessels attack American warships off the coast, leaving us no choice but to drop nuclear bombs on the suburbs of Tehran and occupy Iran’s oil-rich Eastern provinces bordering Iraq.
Which will unfortunately require martial law here at home and a military draft and guess we gotta cancel the 2006 elections, tides of war and all that . . .