Hard to believe that the Israeli military, who is just as advanced as ours and probably smarter, would do this without knowing who they were bombing.
Because American pilots have never attacked friendly surface units.
Okay, it's time to play the devil's advocate. Does anyone here remember the extreme tension preceding and during the Six Day War? Israel stood virtually alone against Nasser et.al. and their screaming "We will kill the Jews!" and the drum beats went on for weeks and weeks. As a school child I can remember a science teacher saying that Israel was going to be destroyed. All of Israel prepared for the worst, just read the newspapers of those times.
What happened to our ship, our men, would be inexcusable if you don't consider that the Israelis were looking at another mass murdering 22 years after WWII.
Read about the times, the tensions, the speeches made in the U.N. when it was made obvious that Israel could expect no help, and the Egyptians, the Syrians, and finally the Jordanians, were expecting to move right in after massacring the Israeli Jews. The Arabs worked themselves into such a fury of propaganda that it was enough to scare anyone.
They were bombing LBJ, who was on the same side as Carter and Obama. It was a message and the intended recipient got the message.
Maybe, but those French built, or at least designed, Mirage jets that the Israelis had in 1967 were not exactly state of the art, even then.
In the fog of war, all sorts of inexplicable things happen.
Absent a true smoking gun, such as tapes of the Israel pilots being ordered to attack an American ship, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt.
A couple of examples come to mind. The attack on the USS Stark by an Iraqi Mirage (same sort of airplane) using two Exocet missiles, both of which hit the Stark. At that point during the Iran-Iraq war, we were cheering on the Iraqis, and aiding them with some intelligence information on Iranian troop dispositions. We were also escorting ships going up into the Northern Persian Gulf to pick up oil, from Kuwait and Iraq, clearing mines laid by the Iranians. Yet the Stark got hit anyway.
Fast forward a year or so, but not far in distance, and you have the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iranian airliner with much loss of civilian life. I don't believe the Iraqis were out to attack the Americans who were helping them, if only to a small degree. I also don't believe the crew of the Vincennes set off to, or were under orders to, shoot down any Iranian aircraft, excpect in self defense, let alone a civilian airliner.
Another example would be the "friendly fire" that killed Pat Tilman.
In wars, "stuff" happens.