Yeah, this is so secret that Robert McNamara himself revealed it several years ago in his book On Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam and in the Errol Morris documentary The Fog Of War. :rolleyes:
We recovered pieces of shell from the deck of Maddox from the August 2 attack. The August 4 “attack” clearly started as a response by overeager sonar operators seeing ghosts on screen, and quickly became dogma, even though there was no solid evidence of attack and no damage whatsoever. (There’s a couple of interesting excerpts in The Fog Of War where the Captain Herrick, skipper of the Maddox is assuring another officer (presumably the captain of the Joy) that while the number of reported torpedos was certainly exaggerated, there was definitely an attack, “we’re pretty sure”. By the time the data was thouroughly deconstructed and determined to be misleading, it was already fixed in the minds of officials that US warships had been subject to repeat and deliberate attacks, and “reciprocity” began in earnest.
There’s no doubt that Johnson was looking for a reason to go in and (in his own words), “Kill some people,” in order to justify existing deployment; indeed, the escalation of the Vietnam War, from Johnson through Nixon was an exercise in justifying expansion in terms of past failures; in a business sense throwing good money after bad, or in this case, good lives after bad policy. The parallels to the current situation are apropos, but it’s scarcely cricket to claim that this is a conspiracy to conceal the truth for decades. The NSA may have not released complete analysis (though I’m surprised that this wouldn’t be the perview of the CIA and Defense Intelligence…the NSA is mostly a signals processing and decrypting clearinghouse, Hollywood fantasy aside) but this doesn’t equate to “wool over eyes.”
Again, one can see the same issue with Iraq and those Weapons of Much Discussion that have apparently disappeared into the sand along with anyone who might have been doing serious work on them, but heck, this is a long tradition stemming at least as far back as the Spanish-American War and the Maine. Even today there is no definitive evidence that the Maine, whose destruction led to a war that killed more soldiers killed by yellow fever and malaria than of battle wounds.
The lesson here: confusion and ambiguity are a politician’s best friend, espeically when he can paint the picture to support his agenda. Consider your dog well wagged. “Tuttle, Buttle…It’s been confusion from the word go!”
Stranger