- Ray McGinnis is an author and investigative reporter
- Book: Unanswered Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9/11 Commission Ignored
by Ray McGinnis: Paperback, Kindle - Article: The Vietnam War: Riding The Tiger – the problem with Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary by Ray McGinnis
- FREE Borrowable Ebook: JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters by James Douglass
- The Gulf of Tonkin resolution
- McNamara admitted that nothing happened on August 4, 1964 (Gulf of Tonkin incident)
- Video: Gulf of Tonkin: McNamara admits it didn’t happen
- General Maxwell Taylor said that John F. Kennedy was the “one man”
who was “strongly against…sending ground troops to Vietnam” - One of the talking heads in the Burns-Novick documentary is Leslie Gelb
- Gelb was director of the project that produced the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War
- Kennedy wanted to withdraw ALL American personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1965
- Kennedy stood up to Khrushchev in Berlin
- General Maxwell Taylor was a hawk who wanted American troops in Vietnam
- Kennedy reminded Taylor “In your assessment you should bear in mind that the initial responsibility for the
effective maintenance of the independence of South Vietnam rests with the people and government of that country.” - The narrator says “Kennedy also authorized the use of napalm” and “agent orange”
- Dow Chemical Company manufactured napalm B for the American armed forces from 1965-69
- The use of napalm in Vietnam began in March 1965 i.e. almost a year and a half after Kennedy was killed
- American bombing operations of the Vietnam War all took place after President Kennedy was assassinated
- Kennedy and McNamara had authorized only training and specifically forbade combat of US personnel
- Kennedy and McNamara were not informed that US personnel were leading air strikes with South Vietnamese pilots
- A character assassination of President Kennedy has been going on in the media ever since he was killed
- Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam
- Strategic Hamlets were being built in areas where there were no Viet Cong
- Another talking head is Rufus Phillips who is identified as “USAID”
- Phillips was a CIA officer and protege of Edward Lansdale
- Lansdale was a CIA operative working under the cover of the US Air Force
- Who does the CIA really work for?
- American volunteer Pete Hunting died in Nov 1965
- But his death is shown in the 1961-63 episode (i.e. when Kennedy was President)
- Lansdale sabotaged Kennedy’s initiatives in Vietnam in 1961
- FREE Borrowable Ebook: Censhorship in Vietnam: Brave New World by Thomas Bass
- CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam targeted civilians and not soldiers
- By the CIA’s own estimates at least 41,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed under the Phoenix Program
- Why Statistics Matter and Order of Battle estimates omitted in episode
- The Order of Battle study estimated the number of Viet Cong fighters was in the range of 40,000 to 50,000
- Colonel James Winterbottom ordered the team to bring down the figure to 20,000
- Finally in the printed version it was pushed down further to 16,500
- General Harkins ordered the estimates of the casualty figures for the Viet Cong be inflated by 30%
and the casualty figures for the South Vietnamese Government be artificially reduced by 30% - Senator Mike Mansfield’s report to the president in 1962 recommending American withdrawal from Vietnam
- Kennedy told Mansfield he wanted to proceed with a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam
- But he told Mansfield he couldn’t do a complete withdrawal until he was re-elected in 1964
- Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume IV, Vietnam, August–December 1963
Download this Ebook in EPUB or MOBI format - President Kennedy informed General Taylor in the fall of 1963 of the plan
to withdraw 1000 US personnel in December 1963 - Three days before Kennedy was killed, Taylor secretly gutted the 1000-man withdrawal plan
- “I don’t recall anyone who was strongly against, except one man, and that was the President.
The President just didn’t want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do…. It was
really the President’s personal conviction that US ground troops shouldn’t go in” – General Taylor - FREE Borrowable Ebook: Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
- General Taylor set in motion by September 9-11, 1963, for covert operations against North Vietnam
- These operations led to the Tonkin Gulf incidents in August 1964
- “There was a plan to withdraw US forces from Vietnam, beginning with the first thousand by December 1963,
and almost all of the rest by the end of 1965… President Kennedy had approved that plan. It was the actual
policy of the United States on the day Kennedy died”
– Francis Bator, the former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Lyndon Johnson - Vietnam Withdrawal? by Francis M. Bator
- JFK and the Diem coup
- Michael Forrestal’s key role in getting Kennedy to sign the cable (Diem coup)
- “…anti-colonialist fighters arrayed against colonialist sympathizers do not constitute a civil war. No one refers to
the First Indochina War as a civil war. It was an anti-colonial struggle that shaded into a repeat performance,
except that by this time Lansdale and Diem had created the facsimile of a nation state.” – Thomas Bass - Daniel Ellsberg is not one of the people interviewed in this documentary series
- “The Burns-Novick Vietnam documentary promotes misleading history. It can be
understood as a sophisticated exercise in empire denial” – Jeremy Kuzmarov - “What if the film had reminded us that US special forces are currently operating
in 137 of the planet’s 194 countries, or 70 per cent of the world?” – Thomas Bass - June 10 1963, JFK’s American University commencement address titled ‘A Strategy of Peace’: Audio, Video, Text
- Video: Revealed: U.K. SABOTAGED Russia/Ukraine Peace Deal In April! (The Jimmy Dore Show)
- “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking
about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we” – George W. Bush - Video: War-Pig Rachel Maddow SMEARS Peace Rallygoers (The Jimmy Dore Show)
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