Today is the 49th
anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, where then US President
Lyndon Johnson completely lied to the American people about a US Navy
ship being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, to justify initiating a
genocide in Vietnam. Here's Alex Jones to explain:1
The following is a
section from John Pilger's book 'Heroes' and describes the Gulf of
Tonkin incident as well as other distortions the CIA and wider
Military Industrial Complex used to goad the American people into
consenting to this slaughter.
"During
the spring and summer of 1964 the United States organised commando
raids from the South against the North, using South Vietnamese and
landing them from the sea. Hence, Washington was already engaged in
unprovoked hostilities against Vietnam. An American spy ship, the USS
Maddox, took part in this action. On August 2 the Maddox fired on two
torpedo boats off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. The boats had neither attacked the Maddox nor returned its fire. Two
days later Captain John J. Herrick, on the bridge of the Maddox,
noticed two 'mysterious dots' on his radar screen and concluded they
were torpedo boats. It was a blustering, stormy night and visibility
was nil. Again, no attack materialised. However, Herrick had sent an
emergency call to his headquarters in Honolulu and this was passed
quickly to President Johnson, who was 'furious' and wanted to order
the bombing of North Vietnam immediately. A few hours later a cable
arrived from Captain Herrick. It read:
Freak
weather effects on radar and over eager sonar men . . . No actual
visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any
further action taken.
President
Johnson asked his Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, for urgent
'clarification' while he prepared to address the nation. Captain
Herrick cabled back that there was 'a confusing picture', although he
was now certain that the report of an attack was 'bona fide'. What he
did not say, until 1985, was that this confirmation of a 'bona fide'
attack was based on 'intercepted North Vietnamese communications'
which he had not seen. Johnson's television speech was now written;
America was going to war. But a third cable now arrived from the
Maddox in which Captain Herrick reverted to his original doubts. Half
an hour after this was received, and ignored, the President was on
networked television telling his fellow Americans, 'Renewed hostile
actions against United States ships on the high seas have today
required me to order the military forces of the United States to take
action in reply.'
This
became known as the 'Gulf of Tonkin Incident' and as a direct result,
a resolution was sent by the White House to Congress seeking
authority for the United States to invade Vietnam. Seven years were
to pass before the Pentagon Papers, the official 'secret history' of
the war, would reveal that administration officials had drafted the
'Gulf of Tonkin Resolution' two months before the alleged attack on
the Maddox. On August 7,1964 Congress authorised President Johnson to
take 'all measures' to protect US forces from 'any armed attack'. American-planned sabotage attacks increased against the North. Six
months later the State Department published a White Paper whose
centrepiece was the 'provocation' of the 'Gulf of Tonkin Incident',
together with seven pages of 'conclusive proof' of Hanoi's
preparations to invade the South. This 'proof' stemmed from the
discovery of a cache of weapons found floating in a junk off the
coast of central Vietnam. The White Paper, which would provide the
legal justification for the American invasion, was, in the words of
Ralph McGehee, a 'master illusion'. McGehee told me:
Black
propaganda was when the US Government spoke in the voice of the
enemy, and there is a very famous example. In 1965 the CIA loaded up
a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons ... the
Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around
the world. They floated this junk off the coast of Central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken
place. Then they brought in the American press and the international
press and said, 'Here's evidence that the North Vietnamese are
invading South Vietnam. 'Based on this evidence two Marine battalion
landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air
force began regular bombing of North Vietnam.
The
bombing was code-named 'Operation Rolling Thunder' and was the
longest campaign in the history of aerial bombardment. Few outsiders
saw its effects on the civilian population of the North. I was one
who did. Against straw and flesh was sent an entirely new range of
bombs, from white phosphorus (1966) to 'anti-personnel' devices which
discharged thousands of small needles (1971). North Vietnam then had
no air force with which to defend itself. The scale of the American
bombing in the mid-1960s, both in the North and South, together with
the American-directed terror of the South, eventually persuaded Ho
Chi Minh to send regular army units south in support of those South
Vietnamese opposing the American invasion.
This
was not how propaganda in the United States explained the origins of
the war. Neither is it how many people remember the war today. In the
opinion poll quoted at the beginning of this chapter, in which more
than a third of those questioned expressed confusion as to who were
'our allies', almost two-thirds said they were aware that the United
States had 'sided with South Vietnam'. As Noam Chomsky has pointed
out, this is the equivalent of being aware that Nazi Germany sided
with France in 1940 and the Soviet Union now sides with Afghanistan.
The
accredited version of events has not changed. It is that noncommunist
South Vietnam was invaded by communist North Vietnam and that the
United States came to the aid of the 'democratic' regime in the
South. This of course is untrue, as documentation I have touched upon
makes clear. That Ho Chi Minh waited so long before sending a regular
force to resist the American attacks seems, in retrospect,
extraordinary; or perhaps it was a testament to the strength and
morale of those South Vietnamese who had taken up arms in defence of
their villages and their homeland. In 1965 the American
counter-insurgency adviser, John Paul Vann, wrote in a memorandum
addressed to his superiors in Washington that 'a popular political
base for Government of South Vietnam does not now exist' and the
majority of the people in South Vietnam 'primarily identified' with
the National Liberation Front.
When
the US marines finally 'stormed ashore' at Danang in central Vietnam
on March 6, 1965 they were bemused to find that there were no
'Vietcong' defending the beaches, dug in like the Japanese in all
those Second World War movies. Instead, there were incredulous
fishermen and curious children and beautiful girls with flowing black
hair, wearing silk dresses, split at the waist, and offering posies
of flowers. Men in white shirts had supplied the flowers and they
watched from a distance as the press photographers and the film crews
recorded this moving illusion of welcome, while the jungles and
highlands beyond cast a blood-red shadow no one saw. Ten years, one
month and eighteen days were to pass before the last marine left,
pursued by an embittered mob up the stairwell in his country's
fortress embassy.
During
those years the United States dispatched its greatest ever land army
to Vietnam, and dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history
of warfare, and pursued a military strategy deliberately designed to
force millions of people to abandon their homes, and used chemicals
in a manner which profoundly changed the environmental and genetic
order, leaving a once bountiful land petrified. At least 1,300,000
people were killed and many more were maimed and otherwise ruined;
58,022 of these were Americans and the rest were Vietnamese. President Reagan has called this a 'noble cause'."2
1. The above clip is taken from Alex Jones' excellent documentary 'Terrorstorm - A History of Governmnet Sponsered Terror'. The full film can be watched at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrXgLhkv21Y
2. John Pilger covered the Vietnam Genocide from inside the country and made several documentaries of its horrors, which can be found here: http://johnpilger.com/filmography
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