Lying and Dying Redux

There's only one story that's important today, and it's not President Bush's latest pick for the Supreme Court. It's this one:

Washington -- The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that NSA officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence during the Tonkin Gulf episode that helped precipitate the Vietnam War, according to two people familiar with the historian's work…The research by Robert Hanyok, the NSA historian, was detailed four years ago in an in-house article that remains classified, 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 familiar with some internal discussions of the matter.  (Full Story)

Unfortunately, it took over 40 years to learn about this pertinent little fact. But only because Lyndon Johnson didn't have a Joe Wilson shooting off his mouth. So the evidence -- that the Vietnam War began on a lie -- stayed buried. Did Johnson know the alleged North Vietnamese attack on two of our destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf was pure fiction? Sure he did. In a candid moment, Johnson told then under-secretary of state George W. Ball, "Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!"

"Rather than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United States into a bloody war that would last for 10 years," said Matthew M. Aid, an independent expert on the events leading up to the Vietnam War.

Did George W. Bush know the Niger documents were fakes? I don't know. But Dick Cheney sure as hell did, which is why he sent Scooter Libby out to smear Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie. Wilson was exposing the Bush administration's Tonkin Gulf lie -- that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger.

So here we are again, fighting an undeclared war thousands of miles from home. Another generation of American kids are dying and being maimed for life because someone in high office lied and then covered it up -- or, in this case, tried to cover it up.

Individuals in both administrations lied to begin a war, and then were comfortable with keeping their mouths shut about it while other people's kids died. Whether you are for this administration or against it, ask yourself: what kind of people do something like that?

I lived through the Johnson administration, and that first war - barely. Over 60,000 of my generation didn't. A lot of us suspected at the time that the war had been cooked up, but couldn't prove it. There was a draft back then, so we had little choice in the matter anyway. A lot of guys -- like me -- who opposed the war still ended up in the military, unless you had the right connections.

Forty years later, all America has to show for that war is a slab of polished black granite on the Mall in DC. All the families who lost loves ones in Vietnam have left is a name chiseled there to show they ever existed -- all for a lie.

Here we are again with a foreign war raging, kids and parents dying, again for a lie.

Considering it was way back in the 1960s when the NSA reports were doctored and then hidden, I don't find it surprising that they got away with it. Those were different times. Whistle blowers within government were a rarity.

When Nixon shouldered the war from Johnson he was determined not to let the lie destroy him as it had his predessor. He got elected by promising he had "a secret plan to end the war," which was of course another lie. That's why Nixon pulled out all the stops in to destroy former Pentagon analyst, Daniel EIlsberg when he leaked the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg did not have a wife working for the CIA, but he was seeing a shrink. So the Nixon gang broke into his shrink's office and stole his file, hoping they could prove he was crazy.