NSA and IRS Lying to Congress

Who is going to pay the price? Remenber the big Gulf of Tonkin lie, Lyndon Johnson (high on my all-time worst presidents list) and the Vietnam War debacle? Cato Institute’s Gene Healy helps set you straight.

Deep State also recounts how the NSA “covered up its role in mistakenly reporting that two U.S ships had been attacked” in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, helping to get us embroiled in what, until Afghanistan, was America’s longest war. President Lyndon Johnson authorized airstrikes in response to the false intelligence and exploited it to sell Congress on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing the Vietnam military commitment.

Though NSA officials discovered the mistake fairly quickly, the agency stuck to “a lie perpetrated by secrecy” for four decades. In 2005, Freedom of Information Act requests and pressure from the press finally forced the release of classified documents on the Tonkin incident.

The NSA resisted almost until the end, fearing, as one intelligence official told the New York Times, their release “might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq.”