False flag operations are a staple in U.S. foreign policy. James Bamford, author of bestselling books "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies" and, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America," explains the secret false-flag U.S. government plan from 1962 called Operation Northwoods in this short 3 minute video.
The need for transparency and accountability in government is getting mainstream attention due to revelations about recent, and past government deceptions. New declassified Senate transcripts reveal that U.S. senators in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1968 had doubts about the Gulf of Tonkin story that led to the escalation of the Vietnam War.Records Show Doubts on ’64 Vietnam Crisis
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: July 14, 2010WASHINGTON — In an echo of the debates over the discredited intelligence that helped make the case for the war in Iraq, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday released more than 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts that show senators of the time sharply questioning 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 are Volume 20 in a regular series of releases of historical transcripts from the committee, which conducted most of its business in executive session during the 1960s, before the Senate required committee meetings to be public. The documents were edited by Donald Ritchie, the Senate historian, and cover 1968, when members of the committee were anguished over Vietnam and in a deteriorating relationship with the Johnson White House over the war.
Historians said the transcripts, which are filled with venting by the senators about the Johnson administration and frustrations over their own ineffectiveness, added little new to the historical record. Even at the time, there was widespread skepticism about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the North Vietnamese were said to have attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after an earlier clash.
President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the attacks to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but historians in recent years have concluded that the Aug. 4 attack 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.
Senators Gore and Church did not act on their doubts, partly because they did not want to plunge the nation into a massive political crisis during a time of an unpopular war, and also because they weren’t confident enough to go against the "big forces" that control the U.S. media. Their lack of faith in the American people, and in America’s institutions to correct themselves produced greater weaknesses in American society, and America’s political life. Had they took the President and the Pentagon to task for their deception about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Bush Administration would’ve never been able to deceive the public a generation later on 9/11, and charge the country into two deadly and illegal wars in the Middle East. Steve Watson of Infowars.com writes; "Sadly, modern day elected representatives have failed the American people in exactly the same way over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." By abandoning the truth, U.S. Senators and Congressmen abandon the American people, the troops, and ultimately, themselves. A country that lives on lies can’t last for long. The day of reckoning for America is not far away.
