[NYTr] Gulf of Hormuz and I.F. Stone on Tonkin Gulf

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by MichaelP

[Below is a current dispatch about "aggressive" contact between US and
Iranian naval vessels -- But first a reminder of what precipitated the
US attack on Vietnam. -MP]


National Public Radio
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5769537

Excerpt from "The Best of I.F. Stone"

by I.F. Stone

What Few Know About the Tonkin Bay Incidents

On August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson spoke on national television, 
asking Congress for authorization to use force in Vietnam in response to a 
claimed "unprovoked attack" against a U.S. destroyer on "routine patrol: 
in the Tonkin Gulf on August 2, followed by a "deliberate attack"  by 
North Vietnamese PT boats on a pair of U.S. ships two days later. Three 
days later, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed by Congress, 
unanimously by the House (4160), and by the Senate 882, with Senators 
Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska casting the only 
dissenting votes. That resolution was the slender reed on which the 
subsequent vast escalation of the war was built.  Here I. F. Stone offers 
one of the first investigative reports into the omissions and deceptions 
in mainstream reporting of the Tonkin Gulf incidents.

August 24, 1964

The American government and the American press have kept the full truth 
about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public. Let us begin with 
the retaliatory bombing raids on North Vietnam. When I went to New York to 
cover the UN Security Council debate on the affair, UN correspondents at 
lunch recalled cynically that four months earlier Adlai Stevenson told the 
Security Council the U.S. had "repeatedly expressed"  its emphatic 
disapproval "of retaliatory raids, wherever they occur and by whomever 
they are committed." But none mentioned this in their dispatches. On that 
occasion, last April, the complaint was brought by Yemen against Britain. 
The British, in retaliation for attacks from Yemen into the British 
protectorate of Aden, decided to strike at the "privileged sanctuary" from 
which the raids were coming. The debate then might have been a preview of 
the Vietnamese affair. The British argued that their reprisal raid was 
justified because the fort they attacked at Harib was "a center for 
subversive and aggressive activities across the border." The Yemeni 
Republicans in turn accused the British of supporting raids into Yemen by 
the Yemeni Royalists.  "Obviously,"  Stevenson said, "it is most difficult 
to determine precisely what has been happening on the remote frontiers of 
Southern Arabia."  But he thought all UN members could "join in expressing 
our disapproval of the use of force by either side as a means of solving 
disputes, a principle that is enshrined in the Charter," especially when 
such "attacks across borders" could "quickly escalate into full-scale 
wars."  The outcome was a resolution condemning "reprisals as incompatible 
with the purposes and principles of the United Nations." That resolution 
and Stevensons words are as applicable to Southeast Asia as to Southern 
Arabia. Though the Czech delegate cited them in his speech to the Council 
on August 7 about the Vietnamese affair, no word of this appeared in the 
papers next day.

In the August 7 debate, only Nationalist China and Britain supported the 
U.S.  reprisal raids.  The French privately recalled the international 
uproar over the raid they had made under similar circumstances in 
February, 1958, into the "privileged sanctuary" afforded the Algerian 
rebels by Tunisia.  They struck at the Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef camp just 
across the border. Senators Kennedy, Humphrey, Morse and Knowland 
denounced the raid and Eisenhower warned the French the U.S. would not be 
able to defend their action in the Security Council.  Reprisals in 
peacetime were supposed to have been outlawed by the League of Nations 
Covenant, the Kellogg Pact and the United Nations Charter.  All of them 
pledged peaceful settlement of disputes.  Between nations, as between men, 
reprisals are lynch law. Some White House ghost writer deserves a literary 
booby prize for the mindless jingle he turned out to defend ours in 
Vietnam. "The world remembers, the world must never forget," were the 
words he supplied for Johnson's speech at Syracuse, "that aggression 
unchallenged is aggression unleashed." This gem of prose is a pretty 
babble. What the world (and particularly the White House) needs to 
remember is that aggression is unleashed and escalated when one party to a 
dispute decides for itself who is guilty and how he is to be punished. 
This is what is happening in Cyprus, where we have been begging Greeks and 
Turks to desist from the murderous escalation of reprisal and counter 
reprisal.  Johnson practices in Southeast Asia what he deplores in the 
Mediterranean.

Public awareness of this is essential because the tide is running strongly 
toward more reprisal raids in the Far East. The first was the raid by U.S. 
Navy planes in June on Pathet Lao headquarters in Laos in retaliation for 
shooting down two reconnaissance planes. We would not hesitate to shoot 
down reconnaissance planes over our own territory; such overflights are a 
clear violation of international law. But the U.S.  now seems to operate 
on the principle that invasion of other people's skies is our right, and 
efforts to interfere with it (at least by weaker powers) punishable by 
reprisal. This is pure "might is right" doctrine.

The very day we took the Vietnamese affair to the Security Council, 
Cambodia illustrated a sardonic point to be found in Schwarzenberger's 
Manual of International Law -- "military reprisals are open only to the 
strong against the weak." The UN distributed to Security Council members 
the latest in a series of complaints from Cambodia that U.S. and South 
Vietnamese forces had been violating its borders. It alleged that at dawn 
on July 31 "elements of the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam, among 
them Americans in uniform,"  opened fire "with automatic weapons and 
mortars,"  seriously wounding a peasant and killing a bull. If Cambodia 
could only afford a fleet large enough, we suppose it would be justified 
by Johnsonian standards in lobbing a few shells into the U.S.A.

Even in wartime, reprisals are supposed to be kept within narrow limits. 
Hackworth's Digest, the State Department's huge Talmud of international 
law, quotes an old War Department manual, Rules of Land Warfare, as 
authoritative on the subject. This says reprisals are never to be taken 
"merely for revenge" but "only as an unavoidable last resort"  to "enforce 
the recognized rules of civilized warfare." Even then reprisals "should 
not be excessive or exceed the degree of violence committed by the enemy." 
These were the principles we applied at the Nuremberg trials. Our reprisal 
raids on North Vietnam hardly conformed to these standards. By our own 
account, in self-defense, we had already sunk three or four attacking 
torpedo boats in two incidents.  In neither were our ships damaged nor any 
of our men hurt; indeed, one bullet imbedded in one destroyer hull is the 
only proof we have been able to muster that the second of the attacks even 
took place.  To fly sixty-four bombing sorties in reprisal over four North 
Vietnamese bases and an oil depot, destroying or damaging twenty-five 
North Vietnamese PT boats, a major part of that tiny navy, was hardly 
punishment to fit the crime. What was our hurry? Why did we have to shoot 
from the hip and then go to the Security Council? Who was Johnson trying 
to impress? Ho Chi Minh? Or Barry Goldwater?

This is how it looks on the basis of our own public accounts. It looks 
worse if one probes behind them.

Here we come to the questions raised by Morse of Oregon on the Senate 
floor August 5 and 6 during debate on the resolution giving Johnson a 
pre-dated declaration of war in Southeast Asia.  Morse was speaking on the 
basis of information given in executive session by Secretaries Rusk and 
McNamara to a joint session of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 
and Armed Services.  Morse said he was not justifying the attacks on U.S. 
ships in the Bay of Tonkin but "as in domestic criminal law," he added, 
"crimes are sometimes committed under provocation" and this "is taken into 
account by a wise judge in imposing sentence."

Morse revealed that U.S. warships were on patrol in Tonkin Bay nearby 
during the shelling of two islands off the North Vietnamese coast on 
Friday, July 31, by South Vietnamese vessels. Morse said our warships were 
within three to eleven miles of North Vietnamese territory, at the time, 
although North Vietnam claims a twelve-mile limit. Morse declared that the 
U.S.  "knew that the bombing was going to take place."  He noted that 
General Khanh had been demanding escalation of the war to the North and 
said that with this shelling of the islands it was escalated.  Morse 
declared the attack was made "by South Vietnamese naval vessels -- not by 
junks but by armed vessels of the PT boat type"  given to South Vietnam as 
part of U.S. military aid. Morse said it was not just another attempt to 
infiltrate agents but "a well thought-out military operation." Morse 
charged that the presence of our warships in the proximity "where they 
could have given protection, if it became necessary" was "bound to be 
looked upon by our enemies as an act of provocation." The press, which 
dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the anti-war speeches of Morse and 
Gruening, ignored this one, too.

Yet a reading of the debate will show that Fulbright and Russell, the 
chairmen of the two committees Rusk and McNamara had briefed in secret 
session, did not deny Morse's facts in their defense of the Administration 
and did not meet the issue he raised. Fulbright's replies to questions 
were hardly a model of frankness. When Ellender of Louisiana asked him at 
whose request we were patrolling in the Bay of Tonkin, Fulbright replied:

These are international waters. Our assistance to South Vietnam is at the 
request of the South Vietnamese government.  The particular measures we 
may take in connection with that request is our own responsibility.

SENATOR NELSON of Wisconsin wanted to know how close to the shore our 
ships had been patrolling:

MR.  FULBRIGHT:  It was testified that they went in at least eleven miles 
in order to show that we do not recognize a twelve-mile limit, which I 
believe North Vietnam has asserted.

MR. NELSON: The patrolling was for the purpose of demonstrating to the 
North Vietnamese that we did not recognize a twelve-mile limit?

MR. FULBRIGHT: That was one reason given...

MR.  NELSON: It would be mighty risky if Cuban PT boats were firing on 
Florida, for Russian armed ships or destroyers to be patrolling between us 
and Cuba, eleven miles out.

When Ellender asked whether our warships were there to protect the South 
Vietnamese vessels shelling the islands, Fulbright replied:

The ships were not assigned to protect anyone. They were conducting patrol 
duty.  The question was asked specifically of the highest authority, the 
Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State. They stated without 
equivocation that these ships, the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy, were not 
on convoy duty. They had no connection whatever with any Vietnamese ships 
that might have been operating in the same general area.

Fulbright did not deny that both destroyers were in the area at the time 
of the July 31 shelling and inside the territorial limits claimed by North 
Vietnam.  He did not deny Morses charge that the U.S. knew about the 
shelling of the islands before it took place. He merely denied that the 
warships were there to cover the operation in any way. Our warships, 
according to the official account, just happened to be hanging around. 
Morse's point -- which neither Fulbright nor Russell challenged was that 
they had no business to be in an area where an attack was about to take 
place, that this was bound to appear provocative.  Indeed the only 
rational explanation for their presence at the time was that the Navy was 
looking for trouble, daring the North Vietnamese to do something about it.

Morse made another disclosure.  "I think I violate no privilege or 
secrecy,"  he declared, "if I say that subsequent to the bombing, and 
apparently because there was some concern about the intelligence that we 
were getting, our ships took out to sea." Was this intelligence that the 
ships were about to be attacked within the territorial waters claimed by 
North Vietnam? Morse said our warships went out to sea and "finally, on 
Sunday, the PT boats were close enough for the first engagement to take 
place."

This dovetails with a curious answer given by Senator Russell at another 
point in the debate to Senator Scott of Pennsylvania when the latter asked 
whether Communist China had not published a series of warnings (as 
required by international law) against violations of the twelve-mile 
limit. Russell confirmed this but said, "I might add that our vessels had 
turned away from the North Vietnamese shore and were making for the middle 
of the gulf, where there could be no question, at the time they were 
attacked."

The italics are ours and call attention to an evident uneasiness about our 
legal position.  The uneasiness is justified.  A great many questions of 
international law are raised by the presence of our warships within an 
area claimed by another country as its territorial waters while its shores 
were being shelled by ships we supplied to a satellite power.  There is, 
first of all, some doubt as to whether warships have a right of "innocent 
passage" through territorial waters even under peaceful circumstances. 
There is, secondly, the whole question of territorial limits.  The 
three-mile limit was set some centuries ago by the range of a cannon shot. 
It has long been obsolete but is favored by nations with large navies. We 
make the three-mile limit the norm when it suits our purposes but widen it 
when we need to.  We claim another 9 miles as "contiguous waters" in which 
we can enforce our laws on foreign ships. While our planes on 
reconnaissance operate three miles off other people's shores, we enforce 
an Air Defense Identification Zone on our own coasts, requiring all planes 
to identify themselves when two hours out. In any case, defense actions 
may be taken beyond territorial limits. The law as cited in the U. S. 
Naval Academy's handbook, International Law for Sea-Going Officers, is 
that "the right of a nation to protect itself from injury" is "not 
restrained to territorial limits. ... It may watch its coast and seize 
ships that are approaching it with an intention to violate its laws. It is 
not obliged to wait until the offense is consummated before it can act."

More important in this case is the doctrine of "hot pursuit." The North 
Vietnamese radio claims that in the first attack it chased the U.S. 
warships away from its shores. "The right of hot pursuit," says 
Schwarzenberger's Manual of International Law, "is the right to continue 
the pursuit of a ship from the territorial sea into the high sea."  The 
logic of this, our Naval Academy handbook explains, is that "the offender 
should not go free simply because of the proximity of the high seas." It 
is easy to imagine how fully these questions would be aired if we spotted 
Russian ships hanging around in our waters while Cuban PT boats shelled 
Key West.  Our actions hardly fit Johnson's description of himself to the 
American Bar Association as a champion of world law.

There are reasons to believe that the raids at the end of July marked a 
new step-up in the scale of South Vietnamese operations against the North. 
These have been going on for some time. In fact, a detailed account in Le 
Monde (August 7) says they began three years before the rebellion broke 
out in South Vietnam. Ever since January of this year the U.S. press has 
been full of reports that we were planning to move from infiltration and 
commando operations to overt attacks against the North.  Newsweek (March 
9) discussed a "Rostow Plan No. 6" for a naval blockade of Haiphong, North 
Vietnams main port, to be followed by PT boat raids on North Vietnamese 
coastal installations and then by strategic bombing raids.  In the middle 
of July the North Vietnamese radio reported that the U.S.  had given South 
Vietnam 500 "river landing ships" and four small warships from our mine 
sweeping fleet. A dispatch from Hong Kong in the New York Times (August 
14)  quoted an "informed source" as saying that the North Vietnamese had 
concealed the fact "that the shelling of the islands" on July 31 "had been 
directed at a sensitive radar installation." The shelling of radar 
installations would look from the other side like a prelude to a landing 
attempt.

These circumstances cast a very different light on the Maddox affair, but 
very few Americans are aware of them. The process of brain-washing the 
public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen in which all 
sorts of far-fetched theories are suggested to explain why the tiny North 
Vietnamese navy would be mad enough to venture an attack on the Seventh 
Fleet, one of the worlds most powerful. Everything is discussed except the 
possibility that the attack might have been provoked. In this case the 
"information agencies," i.e. the propaganda apparatus of the government, 
handed out two versions, one for domestic, the other for foreign 
consumption. The image created at home was that the U.S. had manfully hit 
back at an unprovoked attack -- no paper tiger we. On the other hand, 
friendly foreign diplomats were told that the South Vietnamese had pulled 
a raid on the coast and we had been forced to back them up. As some of the 
truth began to trickle out, the information agencies fell back on the 
theory that maybe the North Vietnamese had "miscalculated." That our 
warships may have been providing cover for an escalation in raiding 
activities never got through to public consciousness at all.

The two attacks themselves are still shrouded in mystery. The Maddox 
claims to have fired three warning shots across the bow of her pursuers; 
three warning shots are used to make a merchantman heave-to for 
inspection. A warship would take this as the opening of fire, not as a 
warning signal.  The North Vietnamese radio admitted the first encounter 
but claimed its patrol boats chased the Maddox out of territorial waters. 
The second alleged attack North Vietnam calls a fabrication.  It is 
strange that though we claim three boats sunk, we picked up no flotsam and 
jetsam as proof from the wreckage. Nor have any pictures been provided. 
Whatever the true story, the second incident seems to have triggered off a 
long planned attack of our own. There are some reasons to doubt that it 
was merely that "measured response"  against PT bases it was advertised to 
be. Bernard Fall, author of The Two Viet-Nams, who knows the area well, 
pointed out in the Washington Post August 9 that "none of the targets 
attacked" in the reprisal raids "was previously known as a regular port or 
base area.  Hon-Gay, for example, was one of the largest open-pit coal 
mining operations in Asia, if not the world." Was this one of the 
strategic industrial targets in Rostow's "Plan No. 6"?


[I.F. Stone was an icon of investigative reporting, covering subjects
from the New Deal to Hitler's Germany, the birth of Israel and the
Vietnam War. His newsletter reached tens of thousands of subscribers,
but his influence went far beyond those numbers.]

                               ***

Reuters via Yahoo Singapore - Jan 9, 2008
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080110/twl-uk-usa-iran-13abf6c.html

U.S. warns Iran over any new naval crisis

JERUSALEM  - U.S. President George W. Bush warned Iran on Wednesday of 
"serious  consequences" if it attacked U.S. ships in the Gulf and said all 
options were on the table.

Washington says Iranian boats at the weekend aggressively approached
three U.S.  Naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping
route off Iran's coast, and threatened the ships would explode.

"We have made it clear publicly and they know our position, and that is
there will be serious consequences if they attack our ships, pure and
simple,"  Bush told a news conference in Jerusalem. "My advice to them
is don't do it."

Bush's  National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters aboard the 
president's  plane the incident was a "very provocative act" that came 
close to causing an altercation.

"The national security adviser was making it abundantly clear
that all options are on the table to protect our assets," Bush said,
with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at his side.

Bush's warning came at the start of a Middle East visit aimed at 
bolstering Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and rallying Arab opposition 
to Iran, which is already at odds with Washington over its nuclear 
programme.

The United States released a video of the weekend encounter, including a 
recording of what it said was the exchange between the two sides.

Iran rejected the footage as fake and accused Washington of trying to stir 
up tension in the region. Iran's Revolutionary Guards said the images were 
archive pictures.

"America aims to implement this plan saying Iran has been and is the 
source of fear in the Middle East," Defence Minister Mostafa Mohammad 
Najjar was quoted by state television as saying.

'THAT WAS IT'

"Iranian craft always ask other ships to identify themselves and this is 
what they did to the American ships. American ships answered and that was 
it."

Responding to Iran's accusation that the footage was faked, U.S. State 
Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters: "Maybe they are 
confusing what they might have done given the circumstances."

The spokesman said the United States was considering making a formal 
complaint to Iran over the incident via the Swiss government, which 
protects U.S. interests in Tehran.

The United States broke diplomatic relations with Iran after the 1979 
Islamic revolution.

Bush reiterated in Jerusalem that Iran was a "threat to world peace" and 
called on the international community to prevent Tehran from developing a 
nuclear weapon.

Iran says its nuclear work is a peaceful project to produce electricity, 
but the West fears it could be a cover for efforts to build a nuclear 
bomb.

Olmert said after meeting Bush he was encouraged by the president's 
commitment to the security of Israel, which is widely believed to have the 
region's only nuclear arsenal and considers Iran its arch foe.

The Strait of Hormuz handles 17 million barrels per day of ship-borne 
crude oil, over a third of total global shipments.

In Paris, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Iran's behaviour 
was very dangerous and called on "both sides to show moderation".

The U.S.  video showed several images, including about three small 
launches moving near a U.S. ship. An audio recording included a voice from 
a U.S.  ship telling one craft it was "straying into danger and may be 
subject to defensive measures".

The small craft responded: "You will explode after a few minutes."