Washblog

• February 22, 1965 - General Westmoreland requests two battalions of U.S. Marines to protect the American air base at Da Nang from 6000 Viet Cong massed in the vicinity. The President approves his request, despite the "grave reservations" of Ambassador Taylor in Vietnam who warns that America may be about to repeat the same mistakes made by the French in sending ever-increasing numbers of soldiers into the Asian forests and jungles of a "hostile foreign country" where friend and foe are indistinguishable.
• April 20, 1965 - In Honolulu, Johnson's top aides, including McNamara, Gen. Westmoreland, Gen. Wheeler, William Bundy, and Ambassador Taylor, meet and agree to recommend to the President sending another 40,000 combat soldiers to Vietnam.
• July 28, 1965 - During a noontime press conference, President Johnson announces he will send 44 combat battalions to Vietnam increasing the U.S. military presence to 125,000 men. Monthly draft calls are doubled to 35,000. "I have asked the commanding general, General Westmoreland, what more he needs to meet this mounting aggression. He has told me. And we will meet his needs. We cannot be defeated by force of arms. We will stand in Vietnam."
• July 1967 - General Westmoreland requests an additional 200,000 reinforcements on top of the 475,000 soldiers already scheduled to be sent to Vietnam, which would bring the U.S. total in Vietnam to 675,000. President Johnson agrees only to an extra 45,000.
• February 28, 1968 - Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Wheeler, at the behest of Gen. Westmoreland, asks President Johnson for an additional 206,000 soldiers and mobilization of reserve units in the U.S.
• March 23, 1968 - During a secret meeting in the Philippines, Gen Wheeler informs Gen. Westmoreland that President Johnson will approve only 13,500 additional soldiers out of the original 206,000 requested. Gen. Wheeler also instructs Westmoreland to urge the South Vietnamese to expand their own war effort.

For your reference, the Tet Offensive began on January 30, 1968.

You're only young once, but you can be immature forever -- Larry Andersen
Blogging at Peace Tree Farm

The Epoch Times International article entitled, U.S. General Sees No Iraq Troop Cut Before Mid-2007 is at http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-9-19/46147.html contains the quote you reference.  It reports the following exchange: "Asked if U.S. forces were winning, Abizaid said, "Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we're winning the war."

I had to search for a while to find this.  A United States version of the article does come up -- including part of this quote showing on the google search page.  But the quote itself is missing.

My google search results screen says:

US general sees no Iraq troop cut before mid-2007 - Yahoo! News - 11:09pm
Abizaid and Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, and others had ... Asked if US forces were winning, Abizaid said, "Given unlimited time and ...

news.yahoo.com/s/nm/iraq_usa_troops_dc - 35k - Sep 19, 2006 - Cached - Similar pages

When I click on the google  link to go into this article, which is mostly identical with the one in Epoch International, the quote is not there.  The word, unlimited, is nowhere in the article.  Weird.  It's even gone from the cached version.  Isn't that search results screen automatically  produced from the contents of the article itself?  Didn't someone have to manually go in and remove that phrase about unlimited time and unlimited support -- from both the article and the cache in order to have it no longer appear there?  

Back in 1990 or so I was given a flyer by an organization sponsoring a General Electric boycott.  The flyer detailed how the US government sponsored experiments in which prisoners and nursing home residents were immersed in radioactive tritium and otherwise exposed to radioactive materials.  The experiments started after WWII and the last one was conducted in the early 70s.  And General Electric had conducted some of them.  The flyer cited a current New York Times article to back up its claim.

In those days you had to go to microfilm sources to see archived articles.  I took the trouble to do that.  I went to the library, pulled the appropriate roll out of the drawer, fiddled with the controls and lights on the reader, wound the film round the spindles, and scrolled through till I found the referenced article.  Then I paid my 5 cents to photocopy it.

The article fell into the printer bin and I pulled it out and read it -- and there was nothing about General Electric -- nothing at all.  So I called the organization that had produced the flyer, outraged that they had lied.  They snail-mailed me their copy of the article.  It was identical to the one on the microfilm -- except that 5 words were missing at the very end of the article: "and conducted by General Electric."  

It turns out that the NYTimes has an "edition of record" -- the one they send to all the libraries for microfilming, etc..  The edition that referenced General Electric was an earlier one.

I wrote the NY Times for an explanation and an editor wrote back that the reference had been removed for space considerations.  But I could see that was not the case.  The 5 removed words would still have fit fine in there.  

The removal of this phrase looks pretty suspicious to me.  Censorship?  What's happening to our democracy?