Today’s NYT Times is reporting that the National Security Agency historian (What? They got one?) Has published an article in an in-house magazine saying what we know about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident is a fabrication.
Mistakes were made in translation, others were made in constructing the timeline. OK, we all make mistakes. Then of course there was the coverup.
Fine, lots of bad stuff happened in the past.
BUT … here is the infuriating part. The government is trying to delay the release of the non classified part of this story. Why? To protect itself from embarrassment of course. Can’t trust the people with information about mistakes made by the government.
So for Pete’s sake, don’t read about this. It would be Bad. Trust us. Really.
Yeah, its not really anything new. I had heard about this before, though not ‘officially’. More along the lines of implication and inuendo, with some of the facts also given. I hadn’t heard that it was quite THIS bad as the article makes it out though.
It makes you wonder about other things though…Iraq springs to mind. The general wisdom seems to be a variant on ‘Bush lied’ (and I’ll say…I think he did too, or at least cherry picked his data and made more of it than was there). But one wonders how much the various intelligence organs had to do with it all and what exactly was its role in this mess. Was Bush driving them to give him the answers he and the administration wanted…or were they in the thick of things on their own? Or was their data given to the government set at higher levels of confidence than they warrented, and was this because of a similar series of screwups and cover ups?
No idea myself…just something that makes you go ‘hmmmm’…
I don’t understand this. I find it appalling that an inteligence operative would doctor evidence to cover up mistakes when the doctored evidence may well lead the executive to make life and death decisions based on faulty information. I think they should have been willing to lose their jobs and reputations rather than write knowingly false intelligence reports. I think the culture of the NSA and their management seriously failed here if it put pressure on them to cover up their mistakes instead of own up to them in the name of accuracy. If the choice is between employees that screw up and employees that cover up, I’d much rather have the screw ups. Then I at least know where I stand instead of building my house on sand and thinking it’s on a rock.
The thing is, everybody deduced that thanks to the contradictory statements and open doubts from people like McNamara, IOW we knew it was a fabrication, but much later; we know why and when it was done, but how they did it was not very clear.
Because we are talking about the unelected masters that actually run the government from behind the scenes here…the mighty buercrats with all the institutional baggage/memory of their little fiefdoms behind them. Also, there are probably security classification issues tangled in the mix, and once something is classified the security types are pretty loath to release their grasp, reguardless of what the information actually is. They just HATE doing that…
Who are they protecting? Themselves of course (themselves in the wider sense of their Agency).
Like **xtisme ** said, but I will have to go also for the symbolical reason: to me is clear that they think they are risking a parallel to appear in the minds of the people.
Many will compare how government was manipulated with false information then to go to war, to how government was manipulated today. It is information that is not good for the current powers that be to be left out in the open just right now.
An interesting historical parallel between a) using the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a justification for extended hostilities in Vietnam, and b) using flawed and overhyped evidence of Iraqi terror/WMD links to justify extended hostilities in Iraq:
In both cases Congress, acting in bipartisan docility, gave the President open-ended authority to do whatever he wanted, rather than having the guts to issue a declaration of war, accompanied by the debate and soul-searching such a course should have encouraged.
Executive privilege has its price.
IIRC ten years ago my highschool history book mentioned that it was very likely a fabrication and my teacher talked for about 10 mins on how it was a set up. I have to join the others in asking ‘this is news?’
I suppose that could be one way of looking at it. Myself, I’m more inclined to look at it as the unelected b’crats who actually run things in the government and who don’t give a shit if there is a Democrat or Republican in the shinny white house at any given time as being (potentially) behind one or both wars ultimately…either intentionally or unintentionally through screwups and coverups of said screwups (as well as institutional stubornness, cat fighting/turf wars rivalries with other Agencies and ‘not made here’ thinking) Oh, it might not be true and it could be that Bush/Johnson were dictating to the intelligence Agencies what they would say and the nature of the intelligence information they used to justify war. But…
I generally see the bureaurocrats as a stabilizing force. No matter which party is in power, they are still there and still professional. It doesn’t do them good to suck up too much to one party or they get kicked out when the next party comes in. I do see the bureaurocracy as being stiff-necked and risk-averse. Similar to middle management in a corporate setting. The best examle I can think of is the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The engineers were screaming about the o-ring problems and the management, instead of getting behind their guys, went ahead with the launch. The bureaurocratic management was more concerned with the flight schedules and costs than the dangers the engineers were trying to communicate. If the management had to try to delay the launch again it would have reflected poorly on them so they downplayed the engineer’s concerns.
What we need, and this goes for both the bureaurocratic government and corporations, is for middle management to be able to stand up to executives without repercussions if their push-back is supported by the facts. Some sort of task force the executives could rapidly deploy to assess the accuracy of middle-management’s statements by drilling down into the deeper layers. I’m not sure how to do this effectively, but there needs to be some sort of checks and balances.
This stuff just kills me. Its exactly this kind of thing that goes on all the time but if you dare speak about it and you get the “tinfoil hat” lecture. In 200 or 300 years when technology is so powerful that one man can control millions with the push of a button all the tinfoil hat crap is going to come on so hard people will sing songs of the era when none of it was possible. Unless of course they ban that too.
I bet they are also trying to protect their supporters who helped push for the Iraq war, who should be embarrassed to not have remembered that their goverment is not to be trusted when it comes to justifying wars.
GWB and his administration already remind me of the worst aspects of Johnson’s. I doubt they’d want to do anything to encourage more comparisons, even if Johnson was a Democrat.
Perhaps there’s some info in the reports that would reveal the identities of people who - or whose surviving families - would be in danger? Or some technique used that TPTB would rather be kept secret?
The only problem is that this implies the Administration would play fast and loose with classified information in order to buttress their political position, and I for one can’t believe they’d ever do such a thing.
