Posted on 06/07/2008 2:49:49 PM PDT by Jonah Johansen
Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert, recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister, is shouting into the phone.
"I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething with anger!"
Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would become known as the Six-Day War..........
.....Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel, including some quoted in this article for the first time, which strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's position that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
I posted it because it contained a report on recently declassified information I had not seen before and recent interviews with witnesses, I had not seen before, either.
I myself went from strongly believing the attack was deliberate and the Israelis’ knew it was an American ship, to believing it plausibly could have been the result of the ‘fog’ of war. After reading this article it seems pretty hard to maintain that the Israelies did not know it was an American ship.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=5076
June 8, 1967
“Israel attacks USS Liberty”
ARTICLE SNIPPET: “ In all, 34 Americans were killed and 171 were wounded in the two-hour attack. In the attack’s aftermath, the Liberty managed to limp to a safe port.”
ARTICLE SNIPPET: “Israel later apologized for the attack and offered $6.9 million in compensation, claiming that it had mistaken the Liberty for an Egyptian ship. However, Liberty survivors, and some former U.S. officials, believe that the attack was deliberate, staged to conceal Israel’s pending seizure of Syria’s Golan Heights, which occurred the next day. The ship’s listening devices would likely have overheard Israeli military communications planning this controversial operation. Captain McGonagle was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic command of the Liberty during and after the attack.”
I can't wait until we get another RAT administration. /UltraMegaGigaDrippingSarc
And damn the both of them to hell.
I am a big supporter of Israel, but anybody who doubts this was a deliberate attack by the IDF is sadly uninformed or simple minded.
Ditto.
A short term anti-semitic bump
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.
Ping
I sincerely hope that you are not calling me anti-semitic Doctor Don, because I am a tireless supporter of Israel and the Jewish people’s right to exist.
Because American pilots have never attacked friendly surface units.
However, since naval history is in my line of work, I've done a LOT of primary research on the attack and I have no doubt that the Israeli defense forces knew exactly what they were doing, especially when their patrol boats swarmed the Liberty and torpedoed her. Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk thought so too at the time, but were very much afraid of encouraging the Soviets to enter the war by condemning and abandoning Israel.
they couldn’t sink it or is it thought that they were not really trying to sink it? 4 attacking aircraft for 2 hours bombing and strafing one defenseless ship and it still managed to limp into port? any Ideas Cindy?
Has anyone ever come up with a VERIFIABLE explanation as to why the Israelis would deliberately attack a USA ship?
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.
Following their torpedo attack, the torpedo boats moved up and down the length of the ship (both the port and starboard sides), continuing their attack, raking the ship with cannon and machine gun fire.[21] In Malta, crewmen were later assigned the task of counting all of the holes in the ship that were the size of a man’s hand or larger. They found a total of 861 such holes, in addition to "thousands" of .50 caliber machine gun holes.
Survivors report that the torpedo boat crews swept the decks of USS Liberty with continuous machine gun fire, targeting communications equipment and any crewmembers who ventured above decks.[22]
Damage control firefighters, who had already risked their lives merely by appearing on deck, had to abandon their efforts because their fire hoses had been shredded by machine gun fire.[23]
Survivors also report that the torpedo boat crews fired on the inflated life boats launched by the crew after the captain gave the order "prepare to abandon ship."[24] This order had to be rescinded because the crew was unable to stand on the main deck without being fired upon and the life rafts were destroyed as they were launched.
No, there isn't an excuse for Israel killing American sailors. They did it because they knew they could get away with it.
"The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it," Forslund recalled. "The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.
"The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors."
********************************************************* Sounds completely plausible to me, and I doubt that the missing NSA recordins were actually destroyed. But, they are probably locked up in a vault somewhere, probably at NARA or at Fort Meade. The interviews cited in this story seem authoritative to me, and might finally be the break that Ennes and the Liberty crew have been looking for all this time. I hope so.
2. The supposed gain for Israel in these speculations is never sufficient to the risk. In both 1967 and 1973 Israel was dependent on the US President not just ‘helping’ but the US President virtually emptying our warehouses of ammunition and equipment to replace Israeli battle losses. The level of help received by Israel was not analogous to Roosevelt supplying Churchill prior to WWII, it was analogous
to Roosevelt supplying Eisenhower prior to D-Day.
No reason I have ever seen advanced, was sufficient to run the risk of US material support hesitating for even a single day.
The second question.
It is clear why the cover up on the Israeli side; but, Why the extraordinary cover up on our side. Even at this late date, 41 years after the fact, the false story, the cover up continues. Where is the gain for the United States, why do the Navy, the CIA and the NSA persist in maintaining what is such an obvious transparent lie.
I support Israel 100%, in its struggle with Hamas, Hezbolla, the PLO and Iran. If in a moment of crisis when the survival of an entire country was on the line, an Israeli Commander made a horrible stupid inexcusable decision, and the Israeli Government lied about it and tried to cover it up to save its tail;that does not in any way effect my support for Israel. I am angry that they still do not take full responsibility, but one terrible mistake does not undo decades of courageous action.
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