Could there be another ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ style incident in regards to the dispute with Iraq ? Its very disturbing to think that in 1964, the Johnson Administration utilized a staged incident at the Gulf of Tonkin in order to justify escalation of the war against the North Vietnamese. An article about the incident can be read here](http://campus.northpark.edu/history/WebChron/USA/GulfTonkin.html)
Ellsberg draws parallels between Vietnam & Iraq](http://www.pressdemocrat.com/local/news/01ellsberg_b1empireb.html) THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
By MARY CALLAHAN 01 Feb 03
Defense Department analyst who leaked Pentagon Papers fears another Gulf of Tonkin
The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing deception in the White House during the Vietnam War, said Friday he believes similar revelations from inside the Bush administration might help forestall a war in Iraq. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst, called a unilateral invasion of Iraq “much more clearly illegal than Vietnam,” and said he wished some government employee would do as he did, only sooner, “which is to go to Congress with crucial documents.”
Ellsberg drew an overflow crowd at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma, with many people jammed behind and between book stacks, peeking around corners to see him. His impersonation of former President Richard Nixon drew guffaws, but his warnings about parallels between Vietnam and current preparations for war in Iraq silenced the audience of about 200 people. Recalling former President Lyndon Johnson’s covert provocation of a North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, Ellsberg noted that U.S. planes continue to bomb targets in Iraq.
He bemoaned the Iraqis’ decision to continue shooting at U.S. planes, playing, he said, into the hands of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. “I stand here and have not much doubt that they would welcome the downing of an American plane,” which would allow them to retaliate rather than just invade, he said.
Ellsberg, who is on tour promoting his recently published memoir, “Secrets,” said he feared that another Persian Gulf war would threaten national security by inflaming would-be terrorists and Muslim nations, reducing their willingness to share intelligence. He also said he feared that Bush would initiate the use of nuclear weapons if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used chemical agents to stave off an invasion, about which Ellsberg said there was little question.
He interspersed his observations on the countdown to war – drawn from his years as a U.S. Marine, nuclear weapon consultant, Defense Department official and analyst with the RAND Corp. – with discussion of his decision to give 7,000 pages of top-secret documents on Vietnam to members of Congress in 1969 and, two years later, to the New York Times. Giving dead-on impressions of Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, Ellsberg read from transcripts of Oval Office tapes about strategies in Vietnam – including a possible nuclear attack.
He also recalled working underground to provide the documents to successive newspapers as each of that 19 newspapers that published the papers was enjoined by federal judges from continuing to print them.Later charged with 12 felony counts of theft and conspiracy, Ellsberg at one point faced 115 years in federal prison. The charges were dropped mid-trial, he said, because of government misconduct against him.
The Harvard-educated Ellsberg got an insider view of war-time deception as special aide to an assistant secretary of defense under Johnson in 1964-65. He then spent two years in Vietnam as an observer for the State Department before moving on to RAND. He consulted for the Defense Department before working there. He rose to fame when the New York Times and then the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of decision-making on Vietnam from 1945 to 1968.
Though the history concluded the year before he took office, Nixon so feared what Ellsberg might reveal about him that he dispatched the White House “plumbers,” aides involved in political dirty tricks and later the Watergate burglary, who broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in search of blackmail materials.