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 ...
Apparently the IDF wasn't really up to the task if they couldn't sink the Liberty with 5 torpedos and all that cannon fire.Or should be believe the IDF airmen and sailors tried to minimize casualties by mostly firing high?
I have no way of learning the truth of this matter,but have believed for some time this was a deliberate attack on a vessel that was reporting Israeli movements to the Russians,who were passing the info along to the Arabs.
The whole attack seemed designed to end any further communications.
Ir reminds me of our “accidental” bombing of a Chinese communication facility during the Kosovo campaign.
They must have known the mariners on the US Ship were Democrats.
What they apparently did not anticipate was the capability of the NSA to listen in on their military frequencies and record every word that passed between the IAF pilots and their ground controllers.
It now makes perfect sense as to why NO ONE om the Johnson Administration believed the Israeli excuses for the attack, since NSA and senior U.S. government officials (like Rusk and Clifford) actually had the transcripts from the attack as it happened.
BTW, the USS Liberty was a converted World War II Liberty cargo ship, which might explain why is was so tough.
Someone ought to make a movie about the attack since it is a very compelling and disturbign story.
Just because the post portrays Isreal in a bad light doesn’t mean anyone is anti-semitic.
Hell I NEVER believed it was an accident, I also support the Jewish state.
2. Shame on our side for leaving them out of 20 minute air cover.
J.Q. "Tony" Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco that handled communications between Washington and the 6th Fleet, remembered listening as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis, commander of the America's carrier battle group, to bring the jets home.
When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors."
I despise McNamara.
Domestic politics.
I support Israel 100%, in its struggle with Hamas, Hezbolla, the PLO and Iran...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.
The fact that you have to make that statement should be evidence enough as to why LBJ and others felt that a cover-up was necessary.
You left off the sarcasm tag. "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.
The one thing everyone forgets is that this occured during a war of survival. The Israelis literally had their backs to the sea. Wrong decisions were made, that happens in every war, but the Israelis were threatened with extinction. Read some history, some newspapers of those days - nobody expected the Israelis to win.
What disturbs me about all this is that somehow this one terrible incident is always used to bash Israel over the head.
It is entirely conceivable that the initial attack by the IAF was accidental by trigger happy fighter jocks in the middle of a war. But then after they realized they were bombing, strafing, and napalming an American ship, the Israeli high-command then ordered them to finish the job so that the U.S. would never really know what happened.
When the Liberty proved too tough a nut to crack from the air, the Israelis then sent the torpedo boats out to do the job that the fighters couldn't. But the Liberty took the torpedo too (but five missed, which surely would have destroyed her if they had struck). By then, the USN had been alerted that someone was attacking the Liberty and was on the way (at least it was believed), so the Israelis had to back off, and then play stupid.
Sounds plausible to me.
You know, that sounds pretty plausible to me, and removes the conspiracy aspect of it, which was making me cringe, even as I posted it.
Using the Liberty incident against Israel is akin to using My Lai against the United States of America.
Or, in another sense, Kasserine Pass -- to prove the Ul.S. military is incompetent.
All were mistakes. Tragic ones. But mistakes, nonetheless.
No one is bashing Israel over the head, but this is a historical incident that really happened, and Israel has never really owned up to its responsbility for the attacks.
A+Bert must be about 90 now, if he's still kicking. He threw his own 83 birthday party on FR about 7 years ago. But the weird thing is, I caught up with him while reading Liberty Forum a few years ago and they had some real anti-semites. Bert wouldn't join them.
The answer is on this thread. Anybody who puts out any information that is embarrassing to Israel will be attacked. The officials just didn't want to pull the pin on a political hand grenade
Unless my rubber ducky makes me an expert on seaworthiness, I ain't, but I alwaays understood that the Liberty Ships were cheap, replacable hulls. They were built to last only their life expectancy which was only a couple of years. I read somewhere that they were prone to buckling in the middle.
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