Jesse the Fruitcake on Fox

Typical Ventura; he blows his very first point by claiming that the Gulf of Tonkin was staged. As I have gotten tired of pointing out, the Gulf of Tonkin incident is actually two separate incidents, one of which happened and one of which appears to have just been confusion.

On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox (DD-731) engaged three North Vietnamese P-4 torpedo boats, resulting in damage to the three boats. Two days later the Maddox (having been joined by the destroyer USS Turner Joy (DD-951) reported a second engagement with North Vietnamese vessels. This second report was later claimed to be in error.

And why was the second report in error? Was it a lie to get us into war (like Johnson didn't have a mandate to do whatever he wanted after his landslide election), or was it CYA by some bureaucrats at the NSA?

In October, 2005 the New York Times reported that Robert J. Hanyok, a historian for the U.S. National Security Agency, had concluded that the NSA deliberately distorted the intelligence reports that it had passed on to policy-makers regarding the August 4 incident. He concluded that the motive was not political but was probably to cover up honest intelligence errors.

Hanyok's conclusions were initially published within the NSA in the Winter 2000/Spring 2001 Edition of Cryptologic Quarterly, about five years before they were revealed in the Times article. According to intelligence officials, the view of government historians that the report should become public was rebuffed by policymakers concerned that comparisons might be made to intelligence used to justify the Iraq War that commenced in 2003. Reviewing the NSA's archives, Mr. Hanyok concluded that the NSA had initially misinterpreted North Vietnamese intercepts, believing there was an attack on August 4. Midlevel NSA officials almost immediately discovered the error, he concluded, but covered it up by altering documents, so as to make it appear the second attack had happened.

Jesse "the Researcher" Ventura.