Deja Vu: Lies for the Sake of War

President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the first group of U.S. personnel to Vietnam on a peace-keeping mission in 1955. By the following year U.S. troops were training the South Vietnamese to fight the communist insurgents from the North. Four years later the first U.S. troops were killed.

It wouldn't be until the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy were allegedly attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 that Congress, at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson, passed a resolution which granted the president the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression".

This war wouldn't end until 1975 -- outlasting four presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson. It ended during Gerald Ford's first and only term.

Because of a lie, a "Cold War military conflict" became a hot all-out war, lasting 20 years from the time Eisenhower sent in the first "peace-keeping" troops until 1975. Because of a lie, 58,209 American troops died and 200,000 were wounded; a total of 1.5 millian Vietnamese were killed or wounded.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has just released previously classified transcripts from the Vietnam War era which document senators who questioned whether "they had been deceived by the White House and the Pentagon over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident."

“If this country has been misled, if this committee, this Congress, has been misled by pretext into a war in which thousands of young men have died, and many more thousands have been crippled for life, and out of which their country has lost prestige, moral position in the world, the consequences are very great,” Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, the father of the future vice president, said in March 1968 in a closed session of the Foreign Relations Committee.

The documents cover 1968 when committee members were becoming increasingly distressed about the war and were worried about their deteriorating relationship with the Johnson White House. Historians claim the transcript provides nothing new to the record. There was already widespread skepticism as to whether or not the North Vietnamese attacked the American destroyers on Aug. 2 and 4.

President Johnson cited the attacks to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but historians in recent years have concluded that the attacks never happened.

Still, the transcripts show the outrage the senators were expressing behind closed doors. “In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them,” Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, said in an executive session in February 1968.

But the senators also worried that releasing a committee staff investigation that raised doubts about the Tonkin incident would only inflame the country more. As Senator Mike Mansfield, Democrat of Montana, put it, “You will give people who are not interested in facts a chance to exploit them and to magnify them out of all proportion.”

At another point, the committee’s chairman, Senator William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, raised concerns that if the senators did not take a stand on the war, “We are just a useless appendix on the governmental structure.”

The current chairman of the committee, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said Wednesday in an interview that the transcripts were especially revealing to him. In February 1968, when some of the most intense debates of the committee were occurring, Mr. Kerry was on a ship headed for Vietnam.

The release of documents, he said, “shows these guys wrestling with the complexity of it when our generation was living it out in a very personal way.”

...snip...

In the end, however, the senators did not further pursue their doubts. As Mr. Church said in one session that was focused on the staff report into the episode, if the committee came up with proof that an attack never occurred, “we have a case that will discredit the military in the United States, and discredit and quite possibly destroy the president.”

He added that unless the committee had the evidence to substantiate the charges, “The big forces in this country that have most of the influence and run most of the newspapers and are oriented toward the presidency will lose no opportunity to thoroughly discredit this committee.”

8:45 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001: the nation watched horrified as a "hijacked passenger jet, American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, Massachusetts, crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Center . . ."

9:03 a.m.: A second hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston, crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center and explodes. Both buildings are burning.

9:43 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, sending up a huge plume of smoke. Evacuation begins immediately.

10:10 a.m.: United Airlines Flight 93, also hijacked, crashes in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh.

Fatalities: 2,976.

September 12, 2001: President George W. Bush declares war on terror.

October 7, 2001: U.S. launches airstrikes against the Taleban.

March 19,2003: Bush shifts gears and declares war on Iraq.

The triumvirate - George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld - deliberately lie to the American people to scare them into supporting a war that the country has no business fighting, just like the war in Vietnam. There were no weapons of mass destruction and Sadam Hussein had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Length - so far: nine years
Casualties - so far:
     Afghanistan: 1,946 coalition troops
     Iraq: 4,412 (184 since Obama's inauguration)
     Total: 6,358
Iraqi death toll: 1,366,350

Lies for the sake of war.