History repeats itself;
First as tragedy, second as farce…
Washington hid damaging Vietnam finding
By Scott Shane in Washington
10/31/05 “SMH” The US National Security Agency 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.
The historian’s conclusion was the first serious accusation that the agency’s intercepts were falsified to support the belief North Vietnamese ships attacked US destroyers on August 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash.
Most historians have concluded in recent years there was no second attack, 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</i>.
Faked intel leading to war? Sound familar?
