[indcons]

kenavi:

Since you brought up this specific issue, I'll answer it.

The bombing of USS Liberty was no unfortunate accident. Here are some quotes from some very reliable US military and civilian officials re: the attack on the USS Liberty.

"I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. . . . Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous " -- US Secretary of State Dean Rusk

"...the board of inquiry (concluded) that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing in attacking the Liberty." -- CIA Director Richard Helms

"I can tell you for an absolute certainty (from intercepted communications) that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship." -- NSA Deputy Director Oliver Kirby

"That the Liberty could have been mistaken for the Egyptian supply ship El Quseir is unbelievable" -- Special Assistant to the President Clark Clifford, in his report to President Lyndon Johnson

"The highest officials of the [Johnson] administration, including the President, believed it 'inconceivable' that Israel's 'skilled' defense forces could have committed such a gross error." -- Lyndon Johnson's biographer Robert Dallek in Flawed Giant, Oxford

"Never before in the history of the United States Navy has a Navy Board of Inquiry ignored the testimony of American military eyewitnesses and taken, on faith, the word of their attackers. -- Captain Richard F. Kiepfer, Medical Corps, US Navy (retired), USS Liberty Survivor

"The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.... It was our shared belief. . .that the attack. . .could not possibly have been an accident.... I am certain that the Israeli pilots [and] their superiors. . .were well aware that the ship was American." -- Captain Ward Boston, JAGC, US Navy (retired), senior legal counsel to the US Navy Court of Inquiry

"To suggest that they [the IDF] couldn't identify the ship is ... ridiculous. ... Anybody who could not identify the Liberty could not tell the difference between the White House and the Washington Monument." -- Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations and later Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, quoted in The Washington Post, June 15, 1991, p. 14

[kenavi]

Since you brought up this specific issue(Israeli attack on USS Liberty, 1967)

You brought it up, then said all you wanted to do was to criticize Israeli arms sales to your archenemy China. Now you reveal what you truly believe.

Somehow, the U.S. Naval Commission of Inquiry determined it was a mistake. There is no plausible explanation for the Israeli interest in deliberately attacking a U.S. ship, and almost 30 years later, nothing has surfaced from the Israeli side to give evidence of deliberate targeting. No subsequent U.S. Administration has come up with charges that it was deliberate, and there have been 7 U.S. Presidents since that time, including previous and the present Republican administrations with high officials who are hard-headed and definitely not stooges for Israel, e.g. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pat Buchanan, Jim Baker, Alexander Haig.

So, Mr. Indcons, if you are sure enough to believe that the Israelis deliberately targeted the U.S.S. Liberty, sure enough to cast it out here in reference to some unrelated report that some anonymous Israeli is kvetching about losing military sales to the Americans, you either believe that there is a tremendous Jewish conspiracy that controls this country's gov't, or you are privy to perfect information.

More likely, you choose to believe it, because it suits your interests to do so. Are those interests those of a patriotic American solely, or those of an Indian nationalist who wants the U.S. to hate China as much as India does, and who has worked up in his mind an irrational rivalry between his Indian homeland and a small Jewish nation that is even more at risk than India to a hostile Moslem world?