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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (258093)	11/2/2005 3:20:40 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574267

False intelligence prompted US escalation in Vietnam: historian Wed Nov 2, 1:44 AM ET Officials of the super-secret US National Security Agency knowingly reported erroneous intelligence to the White House about a clash between US and North Vietnamese ships in 1964 that led to the first major escalation of the Vietnam War, a historian says. Citing an internal NSA history that the agency has refused to release, independent historian Matthew Aid said NSA officials knew that their report about an alleged attack was false but covered up the error. Their report was used to justify the US Congress's historic Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave then-president Lyndon Johnson the authority to sharply increase US military operations in Vietnam while not declaring war. Aid said he believed the NSA's deputy director blocked release of the internal history in August because of a possibly embarassing parallel with the controversy over 'cooked' intelligence that was allegedly used to justify the US invasion of Iraq. "I am told that he rejected the request ... because of the sensitivity of the material for a political reason," Aid said in an interview Tuesday. The release would have come in the middle of a boiling political fight in Washington over whether the White House manipulated prewar intelligence to provide a rationale for going to war against Iraq in 2003. Aid, a respected historian of intelligence matters, said he learned of the NSA's 2001 internal history of the Tonkin incident from contacts who have seen the report. The history covers two alleged clashes in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam at the beginning of August, 1964. In the first clash, on August 2, 1964, a US destroyer inside North Vietnamese waters was attacked by three patrol boats, though there were no injuries or significant damage to the US vessel. Two days later, during a dark and foggy night, US vessels reported they may have been fired at by North Vietnamese boats but were not certain, since no damage was sustained and the boats weren't spotted. Nevertheless, the NSA claimed that the second attack did happen based on its monitoring of North Vietnamese communications. "The (communications) intercepts from NSA were the ultimate proof that an attack had taken place on August 4", said Aid. After their report was sent to the Pentagon and White House, Johnson immediately ordered retaliatory air strikes on North Vietnam on the basis that two attacks proved Hanoi's conscious aggression. Three days later, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which turned the conflict into an all-out war. That the key second attack never took place has long been accepted by Vietnam war historians, Aid said. However, he said, the unreleased NSA history shows an extremely rare incidence of the sources of intelligence reports -- in this case mid-level NSA officials -- knowingly passing bad information on to political leaders, and then covering up the error. "Usually you can point the finger at the consumers of intel ... the political and military leaders" for distorting intelligence, Aid said. According to Vietnam war historian Robert Schulzinger, the new information raises the question of what Johnson and his defense secretary Robert MacNamara themselves knew when they pushed for war. "What (the NSA history) changes is that, who knew that the second attack had not occurred?" said Schulzinger, a history professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "It shows people do try to cover up when they make mistakes," said James Bamford, author of books on the NSA who has studied the Tonkin case. "But to go to war over that is outrageous," Bamford said. Despite the frequent joke that the NSA's initials stand for "Never Say Anything", Aid said he was surprised that the agency prevented the Tonkin history's release. "In this case it was a successful coverup that lasted 41 years," he said. But after Aid complained to the media Monday about the report, the NSA issued a statement saying it would be released in mid-to-late November. The delay of release, the agency said, was "in an effort to be consistent with our preferred practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective."