55 Years Ago Today, Gov’t and Media Created & Spread ‘Fake News’ to Start the Vietnam War

[Origanalist]

Government and media lies were responsible for one of the deadliest wars in US history and it all started 55 years ago today in the Gulf of Tonkin.



If you are to believe the official story, one of America’s deadliest wars in history, Vietnam, was started after the United States had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin in the South China Sea. However, over the past 55 years, a deluge of information and government officials have come forward showing that most everything the government and the media told Americans about the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie.

Often, the American mainstream media becomes a de facto government employee, taking the claims of U.S. officials and reporting them as proven fact — and nothing exemplifies this penchant better than reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin incident — perhaps one of most flagrant lies ever dreamed up as a justification for war.

According to the widely discredited official story, on August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, was pursued by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron. The North Vietnamese torpedo boats then attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire.

Two days later, according to the official story, on August 4, 1962, the NSA reported that a second Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred and US ships were attacked once again.

The next day, without question, on August 5, 1964, the New York Times reported “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.” Additional outlets, such as the Washington Post, echoed this claim.

The outcome of these two incidents was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted then-President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by “communist aggression.” The resolution served as Johnson’s legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.

As a result, 58,177 Americans would lose their lives. Additionally, over one million North and South Vietnamese, including 627,000 civilians would be slaughtered.

But it wasn’t true. At all. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as it became known, turned out to be a fictitious creation courtesy of the government to escalate war in Vietnam — leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of U.S. troops and millions of Vietnamese, fomenting the largest anti-war movement in American history, and tarnishing the reputation of a nation once considered at least somewhat noble in the eyes of the world.

continued..https://thefreethoughtproject.com/55...stream-tonkin/

[mt4rp]

Watched a documentary several years ago titled: The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, that covers this topic in great detail. Can't recommend it enough. Elisburg goes from helping promote the lie to regretting it and becoming a whistle blower looking at being charged with treason for doing so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mo...Man_in_America

[Firestarter]

That the Gulf of Tonkin attack on 4 August by the North Vietnamese never happened wasn’t confirmed officially for decades. The NSA was "fearful that [declassification] might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq”.

The US government reported attacks by the North Vietnamese “communist” army on the USS Maddox warship (destroyer) in the Gulf of Tonkin on 2 and 4 August 1964.
It has been admitted by the US government that on 2 August, Maddox fired first at 3 Vietnamese torpedo boats.
It has also been admitted that on August 4, Maddox for a duration of 2 hours attacked ghost radar targets, seen by paranoid radar operators, when they fired 249 5-inch shells, 123 3-inch shells, and 4 or 5 depth charges into the void ocean.

In reality on 2 August, the US destroyer Maddox was gathering intelligence (Desoto patrol) close to the North Vietnamese coast. At that time, attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force were carried out.
The North Vietnamese thought that Maddox was involved in these attacks. The Vietnamese boats were also attacked from planes from the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga.

As a result of this incident (on 2 August) 2 (of the 3) North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged (one couldn’t make it back), while one US plane got some wing damage and the Maddox received a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun.
The attacks from the planes damaged the torpedo boats.
Four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, 6 wounded. There were no US casualties.

The US Naval task group commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, immediately ordered a review of the “incident” on 4 August. On 13:27 EDT on 4 August (Washington time) Herrick contacted Washington, to correct his earlier report and said that no North Vietnamese patrol boats had been sighted.
Herrick mentioned “freak weather effects”, “almost total darkness” and an “overeager sonarman” who “was hearing ship’s own propeller beat”.
Herrick’s information was not well received. The Pentagon had already released details of the “attack”, and had already promised strong action.

A mere 4 hours after the attack on 4 August was reported to Washington (14:00 EDT on 4 August), President Johnson decided to retaliate against Vietnam. After Herrick had already informed Washington that there had been no boats in the area of Maddox...
The retaliatory strikes against North Vietnamese naval bases were carried out as planned on 19:00 EDT on 4 August (06:00 on 5 August local time in Vietnam).

The 4 August 1964 “incident”, was used as an argument for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which was quickly passed through Congress and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on 10 August 1964. The resolution granted LBJ the “authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by ‘communist aggression’".
Senator Wayne Morse fought against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution by raising awareness about faulty intelligence involving Maddox. Morse had received a call from an anonymous informant, who urged Morse to investigate official logbooks of Maddox.

Intercepted communications from the Vietnamese were translated wrong to confirm that the North Vietnamese attacked Maddox. American SIGINT analysts assessed North Vietnamese reports as preparations for military operations against the Desoto patrol: http://www.historynet.com/case-close...n-incident.htm


Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Johnson were in command.
In the 2003 documentary "The Fog of War" McNamara admitted that the 4 August Gulf of Tonkin attack never happened.


Some claim that McNamara intentionally misled President Johnson.
In 2001, theLBJ presidential tapes were released, and prove that Lyndon B. Johnson knew that the 4 August “attack” by the North Vietnamese didn’t occur.
In the following recording Johnson instructs McNamara to lie about what happened (1:42-1:52) “You say they fired at us and we responded immediately”.


In 1965, President Johnson commented in private: "For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there".
In 1967, former naval officer John White, wrote a letter to the editor of the “New Haven (CT) Register”: "I maintain that President Johnson, Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave false information to Congress in their report about US destroyers being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin”.
White repeated this in the 1968 documentary “In the Year of the Pig”.

In 2005 National Security Agency Documents were released that show SIGINT analysts "fit the claim" of the North Vietnamese Attack.
The NSA states: “James Stockdale, then a navy pilot at the scene, who had ‘the best seat in the house from which to detect boats’, saw nothing. No boats, no boat wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat impacts, no torpedo wakes – nothing but black sea and American fire-power”.

The plans to increase military pressure against the North Vietnamese had already been drawn up before August 1964.
Escalation of the war on Vietnam, led to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.
Daniel Hallin wrote that journalists had “a great deal of information available which contradicted the official account [of Tonkin Gulf events]; it simply wasn’t used. The day before the first incident, Hanoi had protested the attacks on its territory by Laotian aircraft and South Vietnamese gunboats”: http://fair.org/media-beat-column/30...d-vietnam-war/