Many of us 'knew' all along , but here's the proof from the US largest intelligence agency, the NSA. Also another interesting snippet of North Vietnamese trickery during the Vietnam war:-

"Vietnamese tricked US into attacks

WASHINGTON: North Vietnamese made hoax calls to get the United States military to bomb its own units during the Vietnam War, according to declassified information, that also confirmed US officials faked an incident to escalate the war.

The report was released by the National Security Agency, responsible for much of the codebreaking by the US and eavesdropping work, in response to a "mandatory declassification" request, the Federation of American Scientists said yesterday.

The 500-page report retold Vietnam War history from the perspective of "signals intelligence", the group said.

North Vietnamese intelligence units sometimes succeeded in penetrating US communications systems, said the report, Spartans in Darkness.
On several occasions "the communists were able, by communicating on Allied radio nets, to call in Allied artillery or air strikes on American units," it said. "That's something I have never heard before," said Steven Aftergood, the director of the federation's project on government secrecy. But he said that probably the "most historically significant feature" of report was the retelling of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that helped lead to President Lyndon Johnson's sharp escalation of American forces in Vietnam.

The author of the report "demonstrates that not only is it not
true, as [then US] secretary of defence Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was 'unimpeachable', but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that 'no attack happened that night'," the federation of scientists said."

Agence France-Presse

Now I'd be interested to hear Folks views on this. We now know the justification given to sell the declaration of the vietnamese war to the US people and Congress was in fact a bare faced, outright lie.

Do you think it is acceptable, and justified, to lie to your government and people for the purpose of declaring War?

Vietnamese tricked US into attacks - World - smh.com.au