Reply #31: Admiral Stockdale had an interesting comment about the... [View All]

[Media_Lies_Daily]

...so-called "Tonkin Gulf Incident":

"A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media...leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.

The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an 'unprovoked attack' against a U.S. destroyer on 'routine patrol' in the Tonkin Gulf on Aug. 2 -- and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a 'deliberate attack' on a pair of U.S. ships two days later.

The truth was very different.

Rather than being on a routine patrol Aug. 2, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers -- in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force.

'The day before, two attacks on North Vietnam...had taken place,' writes scholar Daniel C. Hallin. Those assaults were 'part of a campaign of increasing military pressure on the North that the United States had been pursuing since early 1964.'

On the night of Aug. 4, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf -- a report cited by President Johnson as he went on national TV that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war: air strikes against North Vietnam.

But Johnson ordered U.S. bombers to 'retaliate' for a North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened.

Prior to the U.S. air strikes, top officials in Washington had reason to doubt that any Aug. 4 attack by North Vietnam had occurred. Cables from the U.S. task force commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, referred to 'freak weather effects,' 'almost total darkness' and an 'overeager sonarman' who 'was hearing ship's own propeller beat.'

One of the Navy pilots flying overhead that night was squadron commander James Stockdale, who gained fame later as a POW and then Ross Perot's vice presidential candidate. 'I had the best seat in the house to watch that event,' recalled Stockdale a few years ago, 'and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets -- there were no PT boats there.... There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.'"


<http://www.fair.org/media-beat/940727.html>