Skewed,' Secret Study Says

By Scott Shane
Republished from New York Times / Common Dreams
N.S.A. releases controversial study and hundreds of long-secret documents

WASHINGTON – The National Security Agency has released hundreds of pages of long-secret documents on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which played a critical role in significantly expanding the American commitment to the Vietnam War.
The material, posted on the Internet overnight Wednesday, included one of the largest collections of secret intercepted communications ever made available. The most provocative document is a 2001 article in which an agency historian argued that the agency’s intelligence officers “deliberately skewed” the evidence passed on to policy makers and the public to falsely suggest that North Vietnamese ships had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964.