Posted on 10/23/2003 1:35:15 PM PDT by hanuman
Cover-Up Alleged in Probe of USS Liberty Wed Oct 22, 8:47 PM ET
By JENNIFER C. KERR, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 American servicemen says former President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry conclude the incident was an accident.
In a signed affidavit released at a Capitol Hill news conference, retired Capt. Ward Boston said Johnson and McNamara told those heading the Navy's inquiry to "conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."
Boston was senior legal counsel to the Navy's original 1967 review of the attack. He said in the sworn statement that he stayed silent for years because he's a military man, and "when orders come ... I follow them."
He said he felt compelled to "share the truth" following the publication of a recent book, "The Liberty Incident," which concluded the attack was unintentional.
The USS Liberty was an electronic intelligence-gathering ship that was cruising international waters off the Egyptian coast on June 8, 1967. Israeli planes and torpedo boats opened fire on the Liberty at what became known as the outbreak of the Israeli-Egyptian Six-Day War.
In addition to the 34 Americans killed, more than 170 were wounded.
Israel has long maintained that the attack was a case of mistaken identity, an explanation that the Johnson administration did not formally challenge. Israel claimed its forces thought the ship was an Egyptian vessel and apologized to the United States.
After the attack, a Navy court of inquiry concluded there was insufficient information to make a judgment about why Israel attacked the ship, stopping short of assigning blame or determining whether it was an accident.
It was "one of the classic all-American cover-ups," said Ret. Adm. Thomas Moorer, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who spent a year investigating the attack as part of an independent panel he formed with other former military officials. The panel also included a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins.
"Why would our government put Israel's interests ahead of our own?" Moorer asked from his wheelchair at the news conference. He was chief of naval operations at the time of the attack.
Moorer, who has long held that the attack was a deliberate act, wants Congress to investigate.
Israeli Embassy spokesman Mark Regev disputed any notion that Israel knowingly went after American sailors.
"I can say unequivocally that the Liberty tragedy was a terrible accident, that the Israeli pilots involved believed they were attacking an enemy ship," Regev said. "This was in the middle of a war. This is something that we are not proud of."
Calls to the Navy seeking comment were not immediately returned.
In Boston's statement, he does not say why Johnson would have ordered a cover-up. Attempts were made to reach Boston at his home in Coronado, Calif., but he did not return calls seeking comment.
Moorer's panel suggested several possible reasons Israel might have wanted to attack a U.S. ship. Among them: Israel intended to sink the ship and blame Egypt because it might have brought the United States into the 1967 war.
That's a good point. Arabs have repeatedly used ambulances to smuggle arms; they have shot our boys in Iraq after pretending to surrender -- why would they not use a ruse like that? And why would Israelis not be suspicious if we have assured them there were NO ships of ours there?
Since you are pilot, tell me also about this. The Israeli pilot who was shooting our boys gave an interview just recently, where he said it was luck that he did not have appropriate missiles because he was returning from an air-to-air mission. If that were a deliberate attack, what moron would send a fighter equipped with air-to-air missiles to sink a ship? Israelis are human like anybody else and can make mistakes in warfare, but I doubt they would commit such as blunder. If they had PLANNED to sink it, they would have.
My take on this is that our commanders are to blame: they sent the ship into the harm's way, having assured Israelis to the contrary.
Yup.... censorship among the neocons is almost as prevalent as among the lefties.
He is a foller of Buchanan and Sobran, using "neocon" as a substitute for the Joooos.
Besides that makes him feel superior, like a real "con." Certainly beats reading a book.
I an not an expert on the matter, but as far as I remember, there were no less than three here and three in Israel. Should we investigate --- impartially this time -- the death of Lincoln?
David E. Lewis - 06:17pm Jul 15, 2003 EST (#74 of 167)
If Judge Cristol believes what he says, why has he refused to talk to me in all these years? I was Research Officer in USS Liberty. I was the one RADM Geis told that McNamara and Johnson has personally recalled the Aircraft with the comment that he would not embarass his ally. I have posted several times on his web-site asking him to explain many of his inaccuracies and errors. He accuses everyone else of using hearsay but his information on me is 3rd hand. He claims that we could not hear tactical communications but we were at the peak of the sunspot cycle which made VHF or line of sight behave like HF or long haul. He claims that there was no secure communications link from Washington so I must have been hallucinating. He fails to mention that there was uinsecure comms or that a CT on Pt. Lyauty patched McNamara through.
With his thesis riddled with lies and errors I find it hard for anyone who examines his book thoroughly to accept his conclusion.
David E. Lewis CDR USN Ret
Research Officer USS Liberty
And given all of that White House testimony, I'd say it's at least as likely as not that the attack was deliberate, though my opinion's no better than anyone else's. Was it justified? I expect that for the IDF anything would have been justified by necessity at the time, but such reasoning won't be shared by everyone. The arguments made in justification of the attack and those made to clear the IDF seem to work at cross purposes. For if the attack was regarded by the Israelis as justified, there's every reason to assume that they wouldn't have held back. Unfortunately, until we get more information about motives on both sides, this is going to remain a mystery and subject of heated debate.
If it was a deliberate, preplanned attack with intent to sink the ship, the Israelis would NOT have used napalm; it is singularly ineffective against ships.
Sorry, but this is garbage.
If the discussion is indeed legitimate, one has to apply the same standards in all similar cases. GIVEN, however, that none of people like you have ever been adamant about any of other such incidents, you do not apply the same standard at all. Applying a double standard is prejudice (or, more broadly, bias).
Not a word of discussion about our own wiping out the Brits, the Canadians, the friendly Afghans, and our own. We were not attacked in Afghanistan a few months ago -- in contrast the situation with Liberty. Our troops were not spread thin on multiple fronts --- in contrast to Israelis at the time, warfare in Afghanistan was over. There was plenty of time AND NO DANGER whatever to verify the targets. And yet we went out and wiped out a wedding party of 70 people! One could also ask, how could that happen under the most favorable circumstances.
None of you has ever raised a single question nor called for any kind of "impartial" investigation.
Which is why I made my claim, verifiably: you are only concerned here because of the Joooos.
I'll believe you when I see you and yuor ilk being impartial. ; we were in the midst Please just go away if you don't have anything informative to add to this discussion.
The blame for the 34 killed and nearly 200 wounded DOES fall squarely on Johnson and MacNamara, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.
Unless, of course, they were trying to kill the stretcher bearers and wounded who had been laid out flat on the deck, burning the wounded alive after the torpedo boats had machinegunned the Liberty's life rafts.
If in fact the Israelis thought they were attacking an Egyptian ship, they would have been committing a war crime by murdering wounded casualties. But they had identified the ship not only as American, but specifically as the U.S.S. Liberty.
Guess again. The napalm was dropped BEFORE the torpedo-boat attack.
If you want to sink the ship, you drop HE bombs with delayed-action fuses, not napalm.
Well, you know, for some reading a book is difficult. At some point, their lips start aching.
By the way: that's Rear AdmiralAhron Jay Cristol, U.S. Navy Reserve....
Nearly every former senior government and military official who has examined Israel's 1967 attack on the USS Liberty agrees it was deliberate. Now, thanks to the publication of Judge A. Jay Cristol's book, The Liberty Incident: the 1967 Attack on a U.S. Navy Spy Ship, they are going public. Cristol's book tour included a December 2002 presentation at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, DC, where he touted his version of the attack which, based primarily on Israeli sources, he says was unintentional. Ironically, it looks like what actually was unintentional is that Cristol's efforts to quell the debate have had exactly the opposite effect.
Source: http://www.wrmea.com/archives/july_aug2003/0307042.html
Reading reports of Cristol's whitewash of the devastating attack, which killed 34 American crewmen and wounded 172 others, was the last straw for Captain Ward Boston, senior legal counsel for the Navy's Court of Inquiry. Commander-in-Chief Naval Forces Europe, Boston and the late Rear Admiral Isaac "Ike" Kidd were given just one week by Admiral John McCain (father of Sen. John McCain) to investigate the attack and gather testimony from survivors still on board the crippled ship. Captain Boston asked each witness to tell his story for a court stenographer.
"There is no question in my mind that those goddamned bastards tried to kill everyone on board," Boston told the Washington Report. "I was the counsel. I put witnesses on. I talked to kids never exposed to combat who'd seen their friend's head blown off. Kids who were crying as they told me what they'd gone through. Those boys who had their heads blown away were not out fighting [the Israelis]. They were sunbathing. They weren't even given a chance to get to their machine guns."
Boston also watched the bodies of the dead carried out of the hold, and saw boys throw up as they retrieved body parts and mopped up after the shelling and torpedo attack. He recalled seeing the shot-up U.S. flags that had clearly marked the ship as an American vessel. Boston flatly dismisses the claims of Cristol and Israel that Israeli fighter pilots mistook the electronically advanced spy ship, complete with an 18-foot-wide satellite dish, a microwave dish, and antennae, for the El Quseir, a 1920s-era Egyptian horse transport ship.
The Navy captain heard survivors' testimonies that the Israelis even shot up the Liberty's lifeboats after they were lowered into the waters to save the crew. That testimony was excised from the official record at some point after it left Boston's hands. (The tattered rafts now are proudly displayed in an Israeli museum.) Boston recalls shaking hands with Liberty skipper Commander William McGonagle, who had a big hole in his leg. "He thanked me later for that handshake," Boston recalled, "because it made some shrapnel pop out of his hand."
"Those boys who had their heads blown away weren't even given a chance to get to their machine guns."
When Boston suggested going to Tel Aviv to have the Israelis tell their side of the story, he was told, "You can't do it. Come on home and present the evidence you have."
Armed with a gun to protect the evidence, which he had attached to himself with handcuffs, Admiral Kidd, along with Captain Boston took the records to London. As the week allotted for gathering testimony came to an end, the team gathered 20 people to type up the report, which ended up being three inches thick. After all the evidence painstakingly collected was turned over to the U.S. Embassy there, the report may have been altered. "I made lots of corrections which are no longer in the report," Captain Boston told the Washington Report. "There are even pages missing."
A U.S. Embassy official in London told Kidd that he and his men must keep quiet. Ten days after the attack, the Navy's Court of Inquiry, despite all the evidence to the contrary, somehow exonerated Israel and ruled the attack was a case of mistaken identity. Following the Court proceedings in London, Admiral Kidd returned to Washington, DC and called Boston, with whom he was very close. "We have to be quiet," he said. "We can't talk to the media."
"LBJ [President Lyndon B. Johnson] had ordered us to put the lid on it. Don't talk about it," Boston told the Washington Report. "And after 35 years of active duty, when I get an order, even from a yellow-bellied superior, I follow those orders. All this time I've kept quiet until this [explicative deleted, Cristol] book came out." After years of obeying those orders, Captain Boston broke his silence on June 26, 2002, when he told Marine Corps Times reporter Bryant Jordan the attack was deliberate (see "Israel Attack on USS Liberty No Accident' Says Helms" published in the Navy Times July 2, 2002).
Boston said he just had to speak out after reading Cristol's claim that Kidd, in interviews conducted in the early 1990s, had said Israel's attack was not intentional. The captain told the Washington Report that he finds it hard to believe Cristol's version of interviews with the now deceased Admiral Kidd, a man Boston greatly admired. "Admiral Kidd called me two hours after an interview with Cristol," Boston related, "and said, I think Cristol's an Israeli agent.'"
According to Boston, both he and Admiral Kidd always believed that, despite the Court's official conclusion, the Israelis knew the ship was American. "I have strong patriotic feelings," he explained. "I believe the CIA slogan, the truth will out,' and hate the Israeli Mossad's motto: Win By Deception.'"
"Madder Than Hell"
"Cristol now says I recanted my interview with the Navy Times. That makes me madder than hell," Boston said. "I have not recanted one thing. If anything, now I'm going to speak out louder than before and tell people what Admiral Kidd told me. He and I were very close. He said, those sons of bitches knew what they were doing when they killed innocent sunbathing kids. They tried to sink that ship.'" Cristol may now be kicking himself for waxing so eloquently about Boston's qualifications and skills, and calling him a "man of integrity" on pg. 149 of his book.
Liberty survivor James Ennes, author of the groundbreaking book Assault on the Liberty, also had numerous conversations with Admiral Kidd over the years. Kidd never characterized the attack as an accident. In fact, Ennes says Kidd told him many times, "You are on the right track, Jim. Just keep on probing. Keep on doing what you're doing."
When asked why he thought the U.S. government has covered up the attack for 36 years, Captain Boston replied: "Iraq, Vietnam, the Liberty—it's the same old story. When people are in power they don't want to upset people who may help them get reelected. Maybe people didn't want the world to see that Israelis were slaughtering Egyptian prisoners of war. Maybe Johnson was afraid of upsetting potential voters."
As a captain and staff legal officer in London, retired Admiral Merlin Staring reviewed the Court of Inquiry's report in 1967. Before he could finish, however, the report was taken away. Based on what he read, however, Staring, who later became the Navy's top JAG officer, has said the evidence did not support the "accidental" attack contention.
Last year Richard Helms, CIA director at the time of the attack, agreed that "it was no accident." Helms also told Marine Corps Times correspondent Jordan on May 29, 2002, "I've done all I can. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in court testifying about the incident."
Helms' book, A Look Over My Shoulder, written in collaboration with William Hood, describes the Liberty attack as "one of the most disturbing incidents in the six days [war]…Israeli authorities subsequently apologized for the accident, but few in Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified as an American naval vessel."
Admiral Rufus Taylor, Helms' deputy, told his boss, "To me, the picture thus far presents the distinct possibility that the Israelis knew that Liberty might be their target and attacked anyway..."
A fine article by David Walsh was released in the Naval Institute Proceedings on June 3, 2003, (available on the USNI Web site at ). Walsh's well-documented article notes that even Clark Clifford, chairman of President Johnson's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a great supporter of Israel, called Israeli claims that the attack was accidental "unbelievable." Clifford told the president, "Something had gone terribly wrong and then it had been covered up. I never felt the Israelis had made adequate restitution or explanation for their…unprovoked actions."
Finally, Walsh notes, former NSA and CIA director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, based on his talks with NSA seniors at the time,"flatly rejected" the Cristol/Israel thesis.
Former Chief of Naval Operations and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer has been on the record for some time as saying the attack on the Liberty was deliberate. Among those agreeing with him are then-NSA Director Marshall Carter, Carter's deputy, Louis Tordella, NSA "Liberty Incident" analyst Walter Deeley, and Hayden Peake, professor of intelligence history at the Joint Military Intelligence College and a retired CIA officer.
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence John Stenbit told an audience at a conference on "Transforming National Security and Protecting the Homeland," held April 15 to 17 in Vienna, VA, that the Israelis had warned the U.S. to move the USS Liberty or they would sink it. His comments appeared in the Israeli daily Jerusalem Post and elicited a letter to the editor in the online section of the magazine. Both the letter and the article have mysteriously vanished from the Web site.
In addition to the many Americans noted above, Israelis and even Russians are adding to the public record on the attack. Nikolay Cherkashin, who has spent years investigating the Liberty tragedy, quoted a recently published Russian translation of Joseph Daichman's History of the Mossad, which states that it was perfectly clear to Israelis that the Liberty was an American ship and that the attack was committed to deprive the U.S. "of its eyes and ears."
Daichman also argues that Israel had every right to attack the American ship. If the Liberty had reported that Israeli troops had moved from the Egyptian borders to the Syrian front, the Soviets, if they were eavesdropping on the U.S., could have warned the Arabs. Eliminating any eyes and ears, Israel was able to attack Syria and capture the Golan Heights.
Daichman also speculates that Israel may have tried to sink the ship and blame Egypt, and thus provoke a lethal U.S. response. That theory is the theme of the documentary "Dead in the Water," nominated for Best Documentary at the Vancouver Film Festival, and the new Operation Cyanide book by Peter Hounam.
Despite overwhelming new testimony, however, Cristol's version of the attack on the Liberty is gaining notoriety. Michael Oren's Six Days of War won an award for best history book at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. According to Ennes, Oren's chapter on the treacherous attack echoes Cristol's version, which Ennes describes as "pure Israeli spin and truth distortion."
That's not surprising, of course, since in his book's acknowledgements Oren thanks the Shalem Center, where he is a senior fellow and "under whose auspices this book was researched and written." The center describes its senior fellows program as "promoting the research and writing of agenda-shaping work." Its journal, Azure, with editorial offices in Jerusalem and Washington, DC, "champions…a strong, free and Jewish State of Israel for the future of the Jewish people."
"Cristol, though discredited at every turn, continues to hawk his book," Ennes says, "arguing endlessly that the attack was a tragic accident and that we who say otherwise are simply either anti-Semites or blinded by blood and what he calls the fog of war.' Cristol will be promoting his book in August and speaking at a large veterans' forum in Pigeon Forge, TN," Ennes told the Washington Report. He added, "Knowing the views of most veterans who know about the Liberty, I cannot imagine that Cristol will be well received."
"Will the Liberty remain a sort of Flying Dutchman,' sailing forever around her poor men's souls?" Walsh concludes his Liberty article by asking. Until a congressional investigation gives survivors the opportunity to tell their stories before they die, and Americans can examine top-secret reports still shrouded in secrecy, the Liberty's ghost will not rest.
Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
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The commander of the Israeli Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron was the son of an Israeli admiral, so there not only was no punishment of the sort you suggest, but the remains of the lifeboat fished out of the water by the Israeli gunboat crew have been placed in honored display in the Israeli naval museum as a reminder of their success that day.
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