Welcome to Call to Decision 

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR

THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE PENTAGON PAPERS      [comments in brackets – mine]

“Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the Government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, The York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the founders hoped and trusted they would do.”

-From Justice Hugo L. Black’s concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s historic decision in favor of The New York Times.

The following are excerpts from the Introduction by  Neil Sheehan  July 2, 1971  New York City:

            The historians were led to many broad conclusions and specific findings, including the following: …That these four succeeding administrations built up the American political, military and psychological stakes in Indochina, often more deeply that they realized at the time, with large-scale shipment of military equipment to the French in 1950; with acts of sabotage and terror warfare against North Vietnam beginning in 1954; with moves that encouraged and abetted he overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in 1963; with plans, pledges and threats of further action that sprang to life in the Tonkin Gulf clashes in August, 1964;…

[Note that the Gulf of Tonkin attack on American vessels has been proven untrue]

            Clandestine warfare, as this collection of the New York Times articles on the Pentagon papers will illustrate, naturally has an important effect on public events. Covert operations also occasionally violate treaties and contradict open policy pronouncements. No matter what vintage, therefore, documents related to clandestine war are, in the bureaucratic phrase, “excluded from downgrading” under the classification regulations, in order to avoid embarrassing he Executive Branch and the men responsible.

            To read the Pentagon papers in their vast detail is to step through the looking glass into a new and different world. This world has a set of values, a dynamic, a language and a perspective quite distinct from the public world of the ordinary citizen and of he other two branches of the Republic-Congress and the judiciary.

            The guarded world of he government insider and the public world are like two intersecting circles. Only a small portion of the government circle is perceived from the public domain, however.

            The segments of the public world—Congress, the news media, the citizenry, even international opinion as a whole—are regarded from within the world of the government insider as elements to be influenced. The policy memorandums repeatedly discuss ways to move these outside “audiences” in the desired direction, through such techniques as the controlled release of information and appeals to patriotic stereotypes. The Pentagon papers are replete with examples of the power the Executive Branch has acquired to make its influence felt in the public domain.

            Such sharp and fresh detail in the Pentagon papers on the hitherto gray workings of the Executive Branch poses broad questions, for all spectrums of American political opinion, about the process of governing.

            The restraints, the limits of action perceived, are what the body politic at home will tolerate and the fear of clashing with another major power—the Soviet Union or China. There is an absence of emotional anguish or moral questioning of action in the memorandums and cablegrams and records of the high-level policy discussions.

 The following are excerpts from the Forward by  Hedrick Smith:

            The Pentagon account and its accompanying documents reveal that once the basic objective of polity was set, the internal debate on Vietnam from 1950 until mid-1976 dealt almost entirely with how to reach those objectives rather than with the basic direction of policy.

            As some top policy-makers came to question the effectiveness of the American effort in mid-1967, the report shows, their policy papers began not only to seek to limit the military strategies on the ground and in the air but also to worry about the impact of the war on American society.

[Always remember that the Illuminati’s Modus Operendi is “Order out of Chaos”]

            “A feeling is widely and strongly held that ‘the Establishment’ is our of its mind,” wrote John T. McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense, in a note to Secretary McNamara in early May, 1967. Mr. McNaughton, who three years earlier has been one of the principal planners of the air war against North Vietnam, went on to say:

            “The feeling is that we are trying to impose some U.S. image on distant peoples we cannot understand (any more than we can the younger generation at home), and that we are carrying the thing to absurd lengths. Related to this feeling is the increased polarization that is taking place in the United States with seeds of the worst split in our people in more than a century.”