Thanks to David Preston for his story about Mike Sweeney and the Turner Joy. It's good to see the old-timer in fine fettle.

But the story omits mention of Turner Joy's central role in one of naval warfare's most significant engagements ever.

Turner Joy and Maddox were the destroyers at the center of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. President Johnson, on the basis of claims of an attack on Turner Joy later proven to be unfounded, ordered retaliation against North Vietnam and began open U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. (In 1965, he commented: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.")

From a 2004 summary by a National Security Archive staff member:

"On this 40th anniversary of the Tonkin Gulf incident it is appropriate to recall an affair that has much history wound around it, a watershed in the U.S. move toward full-scale war in Vietnam. At the time, in August 1964, the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson used the incident as a pretext to seek from Congress a joint resolution approving the use of force in Southeast Asia, which it then relied upon as legal justification for all-out war. The episode opened the way for an American military commitment that ultimately peaked in March 1969 with 548,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam plus additional supporting forces in Thailand. Some 59,000 Americans and several million Vietnamese died in the conflict.

"More recently, the Tonkin Gulf incident has regularly been invoked in connection with the lead-up to the war in Iraq, where the administration of President George W. Bush also cited threats to the United States to obtain congressional approval for the use of force. Those claims, too, proved to be based largely on seriously flawed intelligence and possibly, according to some critics, manipulated..."

Once again thousands of our troops are coming home dead or facing lifetimes of suffering with inadequate help, their families under stress, facing joblessness. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are dead or are losing family members, farms, cities, homesteads, many struck down by American military action. And our own constitutional government is under attack - in case anyone hasn't noticed, habeas corpus is no more...

And members of Congress cannot entertain the idea of impeaching a president who has repeatedly violated his oath of office - and is well on the way to qualifying for trial as a war criminal - and I have read that there are Democrats who want to keep the war going so they can run against it in 2008.

It is past time we reclaimed our heritage. The founders of our country wrested from the superpower of the age the right to establish us as a home of free people. They wrote the Constitution so we could work together for the common good with protection of the rights of the individual.

They explicitly condemned imperial ambitions and military intervention in foreign lands. Such have been, too often, prominent in our foreign policy. We need to put an end to this. And we need to focus on the common good - health care, poverty, education, clean air and water. We need public funding of elections.

And especially we need to restore the rights of the individual.

A good place to start would be to pass the "Restoring the Constitution Act," Senate bill 576, which would restore habeas corpus and legislate against torture.

Samuel Scharff

Alaska Junction