Iraq's prestory: Historical records on Tonkin, suppressed

More evidence that historians work is relevant to modern society -- A New York Times article reports on the four-year-old conclusions that an NSA historian made, after examining the U.S. government's handling of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident ("Doubts Cast on Vietnam Incident, but Secret Study Stays Classified", Scott Shane, Oct. 21, 2005):

... The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.

Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.

Mr. Hanyok's findings were published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and starting in 2002 he and other government historians argued that it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal discussions of the matter.

What if the government had not lied or exaggerated Tonkin? What if this historian's report had been released in 2001, as our current government made a case for invading Iraq? This is not merely a counterfactual exercise -- people live and die by coverups and faulty reports!