Truth and Other Casualties: "Ron Ray, U.S. Marine Corps colonel (ret.), and a former assistant secretary of defense, says he sees the latest retraction as part of a pattern of misinformation that started long before the hyped-up rescue of Jessica Lynch and the revelation that soldiers had never sent 11 identical upbeat letters home. A combat veteran of Vietnam, now a prominent constitutional lawyer, Mr. Ray warned last year, before the U.S.-led war began, of the need for 'hard evidence that war in Iraq is required to maintain the security of the United States.' As a young lieutenant, he had believed that North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. 'That's why Congress voted to go to war in 1965,' he says now. 'I survived that war and was studying law when the senior senator from Kentucky, Thruston Morton, told me there had been no attack -- 58,000 dead for a lie.'"
- posted by geoff @ #