War rationale was faked

The war escalated over a lie.

No, not Iraq.

A National Security Agency analysis released yesterday contends that an alleged 1964 attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, which the Johnson administration cited as justification for greater U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, never happened, casting further doubt on the rationale for escalation of the conflict.

The material posted on the Internet at midnight Wednesday included one of the largest collections of secret intercepted communications ever made available for study.

The most provocative document is a 2001 article in which an NSA historian argued that the agency's intelligence officers "deliberately skewed" the evidence passed on to policymakers on the crucial question of whether North Vietnamese ships attacked U.S. destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964.

Based on the mistaken belief that such an attack had occurred, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered airstrikes on North Vietnam, and Congress passed a broad resolution authorizing military action.

Fifty thousand Americans died in that war.