We weren't being threatened by anyone when we went to war in Vietnam. Our government lied to us and said that we had been attacked when we had not. We weren't there to liberate the Vietnamese. We were there to force the people of Vietnam to accept colonialization. Ho Chi Minh came to the US for help shaking off colonialization before he went to the communists, and we rejected his request for help.

Ellsberg was not talking about World War II. He was talking about a pattern of deception that has emerged in the US since the time of Truman in which the government of the US has taken this country to war for bad reasons, by deceiving the people of this country, and gutting the Constitution in the process.