Korean Job Discussion Forums

[riverboy]

This is common knowledge among conspiricay buffs. It only too a few decades for the truth to be confirmed.
I wonder how the hawks spin this as being necessary to protect American interests....

Does this kind of information give creedence to the more current conspiracy theories in the sense that the government will lie(resort to almost anything) to create a war when it suits them.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - North Vietnamese made hoax calls to get the US military to bomb its own units during the Vietnam War, according to declassified information that also confirmed US officials faked an incident to escalate the war.

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The report was released by the National Security Agency, responsible for much of the United States' codebreaking and eavesdropping work, in response to a "mandatory declassification" request, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said Monday.

From the first intercepted cable -- a 1945 message from Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh to his Russian counterpart Joseph Stalin -- to the final evacuation of US spies from Saigon, the 500-page report retold Vietnam War history from the perspective of "signals intelligence," the group said in a statement.

During the war, North Vietnamese intelligence units sometimes succeeded in penetrating US communications systems, and they could monitor American message traffic from within, according to the report "Spartans in Darkness."

On several occasions "the communists were able, by communicating on Allied radio nets, to call in Allied artillery or air strikes on American units," it said.

"That's something I have never heard before," Steven Aftergood, director of the FAS project on government secrecy, told AFP.

But he said that probably the "most historically significant feature" of the declassified report was the retelling of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that helped lead to president Lyndon Johnson's sharp escalation of American forces in Vietnam.

The author of the report "demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was 'unimpeachable,' but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that 'no attack happened that night,'" FAS said in a statement.

"What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence shows that there was no attack. It's a dramatic reversal of the historical record," Aftergood said.

"There were previous indications of this but this is the first time we have seen the complete study," he said.





http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080108/pl_afp/usvietnamintelligence512

[cbclark4]

Current article, old news.

[riverboy]

I agree CBC, but it is not 'Mainstream News" It is also information used by the conspiracy fringe to supprt other theories about government coverups.

[mistermasan]

the maine, pearl harbor, gulf of tonkin, no weapons of mass destruction...strangely, each of these were the domain of conspiracy nuts that have been legitimized over time.

yet people believe the govt.

[Beeyee]

[mistermasan]

i dunno. the jury is out on that one. if anything, it'll be released in dribs and drabs long after most the folks who matter are dead ala JFK. he's dead, his wife is dead, his son is dead, his mom is dead. why are there still sealed secrets on his death. who is hiding what?

darn conspiracy kooks! why are they so often proven right in the long run?

[Ya-ta Boy]

[bacasper]

[igotthisguitar]

Iran Airs Own Video Of US Ship Incident

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran on Thursday aired its own video of an incident in the Strait of Hormuz with US warships, in a bid to counter Pentagon accusations that the Iranians warned they could blow up the American vessels.

The four-minute video broadcast by Iran's English-language channel Press-TV showed an Iranian commander in a speedboat contacting an American sailor via radio, asking him to identify the US vessels and state their purpose.

"Coalition warship number 73, this is an Iranian patrol," the Iranian commander is heard to say in English, asking for the vessel to confirm its number.

"This is coalition warship number 73. I am operating in international waters," replied the American voice.

State-run Press-TV said the footage had been released by the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological force involved in the incident.

The Pentagon released a video and audio tape on Tuesday that it said confirmed US charges that Iranian speedboats swarmed around US warships in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday and radioed a threat to blow them up.

The alleged confrontation has further inflamed tensions between Iran and the United States which are locked in a standoff over Tehran's controversial nuclear drive.

The tape showed "warship number 73" -- the USS Port Royal -- looming in the foreground and also showed the two other US vessels in the incident, the USS Hopper and the USS Ingraham.

A helicopter was also shown hovering above the US ships.

"Request your present course and speed!" added the Iranian commander, who was wearing a yellow lifejacket and the kefiyeh scarf often sported by Iranian revolutionary forces.

The dialogue in the video was repetitive and sometimes technical, with the sides agreeing to switch from channel 16 to channel 11 on their radios.

However Iran clearly sees the release of the footage as buttressing its claims that the incident was purely a routine matter of identification that ended without any disturbance.

"Iran clearly just wanted to identify the vessels and find out what they were doing," concluded the Press-TV anchor.

The Revolutionary Guards had said the day earlier that the film released by the Pentagon was a "clumsy fake" where the sound and image were not properly synchronized.

The US video, which the Pentagon said was taken from the bridge of the USS Hopper, showed Iranian boats approaching the warships at high speeds and racing around its hull.

A man's voice is heard in an audio recording speaking in English, amid a sailor's urgent warnings to stay clear of the ship.

"I am coming to you ... You will explode in a few minutes," the voice is heard to say.

CONT'D ...

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/080110/world/iran_us_military

[regicide]

[igotthisguitar]

[catman]

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a hoax?

[mindmetoo]

Wow! Governments lie and distort events to advance their own agenda! Gun control, the need for school in prayer, the need for guns in school. Blah blah.