It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
My own failure to act, in time, to that effect in 1964 was pointed out to me by Wayne Morse thirty-five years ago. Morse had been one of only two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution on August 7, 1964. He had believed, correctly, that President Lyndon Johnson would treat the resolution as a congressional declaration of war. His colleagues, however, accepted White House assurances that the president sought “no wider war” and had no intention of expanding hostilities without further consulting them. They believed that they were simply expressing bipartisan support for U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam three days earlier, which the president and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had told them were in “retaliation” for the “unequivocal,” “unprovoked” attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. destroyers “on routine patrol” in “international waters.”
Each of the assurances above had been false, a conscious lie. That they were lies, though, had only been revealed to the public seven years later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, several thousand pages of top-secret documents on U.S. decision-making in Vietnam that I had released to the press. The very first installment, published by the New York Times on June 13, 1971, had proven the official account of the Tonkin Gulf episode to be a deliberate deception.
The other aspect, of course, is the parlous state of the US media, which is basically an uncritical mouthpiece for the administration on so many issues.
Originally posted by magicmushroom
Rich, the problem is not one of leaking out the info, or the media printing the story, the problem is the attitude of the American people, just from comments on ATS there seem to be those who are blindly patriotic that they would follow Bush to hell if he told them to do so and those who seem so apathetic and indifferent to world affairs. Couple that to the fact that most Americans dont travel outside of the USA, education is not the best in the world and for many the view of the world and current affairs is from a Fox news perspective.
All in all, I narrow it down to the political parties not having enough competition. The two party system the US has seriously needs to be re-shapen. And the only way that would happen, is if the citizens dropped their undying loyalty to the two parties, and started taking the independant parties seriously.