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Gulf of Tonkin Hoax
With jews in many positions of power and authority in our "intelligence" agencies, like
jew Donnovan who ordered the assassination of General
Patton, or
the jew who was second in command of the FBI who claimed to be "deep throat",
could there be any doubt that it was a jew in our intelligence services who
"accidentally" started the Vietnam War?
Gulf of Tonkin
confirmed as False Flag (For anyone still harboring doubts about the status of
the Gulf of Tonkin incident as an example of a False Flag event, a report made
public by the NSA clears it up. The existence of the report was revealed a
couple of years ago, but the actual report has now been made public, and you can
view it via the Federation of American Scientists blog, "Secrecy News". Just in
time to coincide with the latest Strait of Hormuz incident, aimed at Iran.
-rep.)
Report reveals Vietnam War hoaxes, faked attacks
AFP, Tue Jan 8, 9:45 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - North Vietnamese made hoax calls to get the US military to
bomb its own units during the Vietnam War, according to declassified information
that also confirmed US officials faked an incident to escalate the war....
...The author of the report "demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then
US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an
attack was 'unimpeachable,' but that to the contrary, a review of the
classified signals intelligence proves that 'no attack happened that night,'"
FAS said in a statement.
"What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence shows that
there was no attack. It's a dramatic reversal of the historical record,"
Aftergood said.
"There were previous indications of this but this is the first time we have seen
the complete study," he said...
Continued...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080108/pl_afp/usvietnamintelligence512
Daniel Ellsberg was aware that the Tonkin incident was a lie very early on;
"The messages were vivid. Herrick must have been dictating them from the bridge
in between giving orders, as his two ships swerved to avoid torpedoes picked up
on the sonar of the Maddox and fired in the darkness at targets shown on the
radar of the Turner Joy: "Torpedoes missed. Another fired at us. Four torpedoes
in water. And five torpedoes in water.... Have ... successfully avoided at least
six torpedoes."
Nine torpedoes had been fired at his ships, fourteen, twenty-six. More attacking
boats had been hit; at least one sunk. This action wasn't ending after forty
minutes or an hour. It was going on, ships dodging and firing in choppy seas,
planes overhead firing rockets at locations given them by the Turner Joy's
radar, for an incredible two hours before the stream of continuous combat
updates finally ended. Then, suddenly, an hour later, full stop. A message
arrived that took back not quite all of it, but enough to put everything earlier
in question.
The courier came in with another single cable, running again, after an hour of
relative quiet in which he had walked in intermittently at a normal pace with
batches of cables from CINCPAC and the Seventh Fleet and analyses from the State
Department and the CIA and other parts of the Pentagon. I was sitting at my desk
- I remember the moment - trying to put this patchwork of information in some
order for McNaughton on his return, when the courier handed me the following
flash cable from Herrick: "Review of action makes many reported contacts and
torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager
sonarmen may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by
Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken."
It was a little after 2:00 P.M. The message had been sent at 1:27 P.M.
Washington time. Half an hour later another message from Herrick, summarizing
positive and negative evidence for an attack, concluded: "Entire action leaves
many doubts except for apparent attempted ambush at beginning. Suggest thorough
reconnaissance in daylight by aircraft." ...
...The president's announcement and McNamara's press conference late in the
evening of August 4 informed the American public that the North Vietnamese, for
the second time in two days, had attacked U.S. warships on "routine patrol in
international waters"; that this was clearly a "deliberate" pattern of "naked
aggression"; that the evidence for the second attack, like the first, was
"unequivocal"; that the attack had been "unprovoked"; and that the
United States, by responding in order to deter any repetition, intended no wider
war.
By midnight on the fourth, or within a day or two, I knew that each one of these
assurances was false."
- Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets, pp. 9-12
Subject: NYT: Vietnam Study, Casting Doubts, Remains Secret / N.S.A. has kept secret
since 2001
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2005 13:35:31 EST
From: RePorterNoteBook@aol.com
Published on Monday, October 31, 2005 by the New York Times
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1031-03.htm
Vietnam Study, Casting Doubts, Remains Secret
by Scott Shane
WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency (N.S.A.) has kept secret since 2001
a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which
helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted
critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the
historian's work say.
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.
Rather than come clean about their mistake, [midlevel National Security
Agency officers] helped launch the United States into a bloody war that would last
for 10 years.
ndent historian
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.
Mr. Hanyok's findings were published nearly five years ago in a classified
in-house journal, and starting in 2002 he and other government historians argued
that it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level
agency policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it might prompt
uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war
in Iraq, according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal
discussions of the matter.
Matthew M. Aid, an independent historian who has discussed Mr. Hanyok's
Tonkin Gulf research with current and former N.S.A. and C.I.A. officials who have
read it, said he had decided to speak publicly about the findings because he
believed they should have been released long ago.
"This material is relevant to debates we as Americans are having about the
war in Iraq and intelligence reform," said Mr. Aid, who is writing a history of
the N.S.A. "To keep it classified simply because it might embarrass the agency
is wrong."
Mr. Aid's description of Mr. Hanyok's findings was confirmed by the
intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research has not
been made public.
Both men said Mr. Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North
Vietnamese intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of
detective work in N.S.A.'s archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials
discovered the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so
that they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.
"Rather than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United
States into a bloody war that would last for 10 years," Mr. Aid said.
Asked about Mr. Hanyok's research, an N.S.A. spokesman said the agency
intended to release his 2001 article in late November. The spokesman, Don Weber,
said the release had been "delayed in an effort to be consistent with our
preferred practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective."
Mr. Weber said the agency was working to declassify not only Mr. Hanyok's
article, but also the original intercepts and other raw material for his work, so
the public could better assess his conclusions.
The intelligence official gave a different account. He said N.S.A. historians
began pushing for public release in 2002, after Mr. Hanyok included his
Tonkin Gulf findings in a 400-page, in-house history of the agency and Vietnam
called "Spartans in Darkness." Though superiors initially expressed support for
releasing it, the idea lost momentum as Iraq intelligence was being called into
question, the official said.
Mr. Aid said he had heard from other intelligence officials the same
explanation for the delay in releasing the report, though neither he nor the
intelligence official knew how high up in the agency the issue was discussed. A
spokesman for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was the agency's. director until last
summer and is now the principal deputy director of national intelligence, referred
questions to Mr. Weber, the N.S.A. spokesman, who said he had no further
information.
Many historians believe that even without the Tonkin Gulf episode, Johnson
might have found a reason to escalate military action against North Vietnam.
They note that Johnson apparently had his own doubts about the Aug. 4 attack and
that a few days later told George W. Ball, the under secretary of state,
"Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!"
But Robert S. McNamara, who as defense secretary played a central role in the
Tonkin Gulf affair, said in an interview last week that he believed the
intelligence reports had played a decisive role in the war's expansion.
"I think it's wrong to believe that Johnson wanted war," Mr. McNamara said.
"But we thought we had evidence that North Vietnam was escalating."
Mr. McNamara, 89, said he had never been told that the intelligence might
have been altered to shore up the scant evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.
"That really is surprising to me," said Mr. McNamara, who Mr. Hanyok found
had unknowingly used the altered intercepts in 1964 and 1968 in testimony before
Congress. "I think they ought to make all the material public, period."
The supposed second North Vietnamese attack, on the American destroyers
Maddox and C. Turner Joy, played an outsize role in history. Johnson responded by
ordering retaliatory air strikes on North Vietnamese targets and used the event
to persuade Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution on Aug. 7, 1964.
It authorized the president "to take all necessary steps, including the use
of armed force," to defend South Vietnam and its neighbors and was used both by
Johnson and President Richard M. Nixon to justify escalating the war, in
which 58,226 Americans and more than 1 million Vietnamese died.
Not all the details of Mr. Hanyok's analysis, published in N.S.A.'s
Cryptologic Quarterly in early 2001, could be learned. But they involved discrepancies
between the official N.S.A. version of the events of Aug. 4, 1964, and
intercepts from N.S.A. listening posts at Phu Bai in South Vietnam and San Miguel in
the Philippines that are in the agency archives.
One issue, for example, was the translation of a phrase in an Aug. 4 North
Vietnamese transmission. In some documents the phrase, "we sacrificed two
comrades" - an apparent reference to casualties during the clash with American ships
on Aug. 2 - was incorrectly translated as "we sacrificed two ships." That
phrase was used to suggest that the North Vietnamese were reporting the loss of
ships in a new battle Aug. 4, the intelligence official said.
The original Vietnamese version of that intercept, unlike many other
intercepts from the same period, is missing from the agency's archives, the official
said.
The intelligence official said the evidence for deliberate falsification is
"about as certain as it can be without a smoking gun - you can come to no other
conclusion."
Despite its well-deserved reputation for secrecy, the N.S.A. in recent years
has made public dozens of studies by its Center for Cryptologic History. A
study by Mr. Hanyok on signals intelligence and the Holocaust, titled "
Eavesdropping on Hell," was published last year.
Two historians who have written extensively on the Tonkin Gulf episode, Edwin
E. Moise of Clemson University and John Prados of the National Security
Archive in Washington, said they were unaware of Mr. Hanyok's work but found his
reported findings intriguing.
"I'm surprised at the notion of deliberate deception at N.S.A.," Dr. Moise
said. "But I get surprised a lot."
Dr. Prados said, "If Mr. Hanyok's conclusion is correct, it adds to the
tragic aspect of the Vietnam War." In addition, he said, "it's new evidence that
intelligence, so often treated as the Holy Grail, turns out to be not that at
all, just as in Iraq."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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