whoa.

[totient]

I don't usually repost news articles from my friends. But this one from imvfd is mind-blowing: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident never actually happened.

Comments

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

Um. Wow. ::boggles::

J and I are wondering who exactly it was that perpetrated the hoax. Was it the US military Or was it a different branch of the government, like the CIA, trying to manipulate another branch?

Just wow.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

UNIMPEACHABLE EVIDENCE THAT MEANS WE HAVE TO ATTACK!

more proof that vietnam and iraq are pretty similar.

[doctordidj.livejournal.com]

holy crap.

History repeats itself ... the glaring contradictions in the official version of the 9/11 attacks have still not been addressed. And when I try to tell anybody about them, they tell me to shut up and I must be crazy.

The first casualty of war is the truth.

[cos]

I am very very skeptical of this article, and I know AFP has a recent history of publishing hyperbole, taking grains of truth and misleading people. For example, AFP was the main reason activist Russell Means' stunt a year ago got temporarily blown out of proportion into a news story that the Sioux nations were withdrawing from their treaties with the US, a story I debunked on dailykos.

The Gulf of Tonkin "incident" actually involved two engagements. A couple of days after the first engagement, Americans returned and some more shooting happened. An NSA report declassified a few years ago suggests that the North Vietnamese boats in the area on that day were merely there to salvage the damaged vessels from the earlier incident, not to fight the Americans again.

This AFP article may be a trumped up retelling of the release of that NSA report.

We've always known that the Tonkin incident was trumped up to justify a war that it totally didn't justify. And we've known for a few years what was long suspected, that on the second date, the north Vietnamese were probably not attacking. But to claim that it "never happened" seems false, and I wouldn't take this AFP article as proof of such a claim.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

Your NSA report link is broken, in that it points to the same page as the dailykos link.

I'll provide one of my own (http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/spartans/chapter5.pdf), which I ganked from Wikipedia and which I think is to the particular document whose release prompted this article. It's not evidence of a conspiracy, but it's pretty credible evidence that (as has been suspected for 40 years now) Robert McNamara was incorrect when he testified that there was an attack on date of the supposed second engagement.

The problem with spoiling for a fight is that it only takes a few minutes of something looking like a reason to start shooting before there's a war on and it doesn't matter any more. The particular incident hardly matters. Likewise, Bush's crime isn't lying about WMD; he may even have believed they existed. The problem is the background condition of wanting to go to war.

[cos]

*nod* Yes, what the AFP article is talking about is neither new nor shocking. It doesn't mean the Gulf of Tonkin incident "never happened", it just means, as had been suspected for a long time and well established for a few years, that on the second day, the North Vietnamese were not engaging the Americans. We've known all along that this whole thing was a minor incident whose main importance is the way it was hyped to Congress, and that remains the case.

[dda.livejournal.com]

I don't trust much that I read on the web unless I can verify it; the level of verification is directly proportional to the level "shocking" claimed. So I'm skeptical until I see what said NSA report really says.

[roozle.livejournal.com]

I read that.

I am skeptical, until I see some more detailed coverage. Cos's info above makes more sense to me. Oddly, though, the crazy trumped-up beginning of our current embroilment in Iraq makes it seem all the more likely -- in an odd inversion of normal cause and effect.

Also, this (http://xkcd.com/258/).