Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Still fighting the Tonkin Gulf resolution

NY Times:

The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian's work say.

The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.

The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.

Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.

...

Both men said Mr. Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of detective work in N.S.A.'s archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials discovered the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so that they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.

"Rather than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United States into a bloody war that would last for 10 years," Mr. Aid said.

Aid is just flat wrong. While the events in the Tonkin Gulf became a pretext for the war, it was going to happen regardless of whether the events in the Gulf happened. It was going to happen because the communist north was determined to conquer the south and the US was determined to stop them. If the events in the Gulf had been accurately reported that would not have stopped a war that was already underway, and some other event would have then been used to formalize it, such as the attacks on US forces at air bases in South Vietnam.

Liberals have this fantasy that certain events are of critical importance in the decision to go to war. Then then focus their efforts on trying to discredit the event. They are doing the same thing now in a very dishonest way by focusing on the debate over what to do about Saddam's inability to account for his WMD and turning it into a childish liar, liar pants on fire diatribe. There are ususally many events that lead to war and it is a mistake to overanalyze any of them.