Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Hiding the Gulf of Tonkin Lie

It should come as no surprise the NSC "has kept secret a 2001 finding by its own historian that its officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence during the Tonkin Gulf episode that helped precipitate the Vietnam War," according to the New York Times. "Most historians have concluded in recent years there was no second attack [against US destroyers on August 4, 1964], but they have assumed the agency’s intercepts were unintentionally misread, not purposely altered. The research by Robert Hanyok, the agency's historian, was detailed four years ago in an in-house article that remains secret, in part because agency officials feared its release might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, according to an intelligence official."

Of course, it makes perfect sense for the NSC to hide the findings, especially now as the American people are beginning to realize Bush and crew "deliberately distorted critical intelligence" (in other words, they lied) in regard to the fantasy Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. "This material is relevant to debates we as Americans are having about the war in Iraq and intelligence reform," Matthew Aid, an independent historian, told the Times.

Lies are employed invariably to sell wars. Recall "Nayirah," supposedly a normal fifteen year old Kuwaiti girl, who claimed to witness "Iraqi soldiers come into the [al-Addan hospital] with guns, and go into the room where ... [32] babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die." As it turns out, "Nayirah" was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. "Her father, in fact, was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s Ambassador to the US, who sat listening in the hearing room during her testimony," according to John R. MacArthur (Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf WarBerkeley; see How PR Sold the War in the Persian Gulf). Nayirah's tearful story was a lie fabricated by Hill & Knowlton, then the world’s largest PR firm, in collusion with California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter.