Darn it! The only reason I clicked on this thread was to ping him!
Posted on 07/08/2003 4:33:17 PM PDT by Courier
U.S. agency confirms sinking of USS Liberty was accident
By Nathan Guttman, Haaretz Correspondent
WASHINGTON - New documents released this week by America's National Security Agency support Israel's version of a long-festering controversy between the two countries: Israel's sinking of an American spy ship, the USS Liberty, off the coast of Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Israel has always said it had no idea the ship was American, but conspiracy theorists and anti-Israel propagandists still claim Israel sank the ship in the full knowledge that it was American.
The documents, originally defined as top secret, were made public by Florida Judge Jay Cristol, who
has been investigating the Liberty incident for years and published a book on the subject last year. On Monday, the NSA gave him a transcript of conversations held by two Israeli Air Force helicopter pilots who were hovering over the Liberty as it was sinking, and these tapes confirm Israel's claim that the sinking of the ship, which killed 34 American servicemen and wounded 171, was a tragic error.
After the Liberty was bombed by both the Israel Air Force and the Israel Navy, the two helicopter pilots were summoned from their base to assess the damage and evaluate the possibility of rescuing the surviving crew members. An American spy plane, which had been sent to the area as soon as the NSA learned of the attack, recorded their conversations, which took place between 2:30 and 3:37 P.M. on June 8, the third day of the war.
The spy plane also recorded the orders radioed to the pilots by their supervisor at Hatzor Base, which instructed them to search for Egyptian survivors from the "Egyptian warship" that had just been bombed - thus supporting Israel's claim that it had believed the ship was Egyptian when it ordered it attacked. "Pay attention. The ship is now identified as Egyptian," the pilots were told.
Nine minutes later, Hatzor informed the pilots that it was not an Egyptian warship, but an Egyptian cargo ship. Only at 3:07 were the pilots first informed that the ship might not have been Egyptian at all: Hatzor told them that if they found Arabic-speaking survivors, they should be taken to El-Arish, but if they found English-speaking survivors, they should be taken to Lod. "Clarify by the first man that you bring up, what nationality he is, and report to me immediately," the supervisor instructed, according to the transcript. "It's important to know."
Then, at 3:12, one of the pilots informed Hatzor that he saw an American flag flying over the wounded ship. He was asked to investigate and determine whether it was really an American ship.
This is not the first time such transcripts have been made public: Israel gave its own recordings of the pilots' conversations to the British television station Thames in 1987. But conspiracy theorists charged that Israel had doctored the tapes before handing them over to the station in order to hide the fact that it sank the Liberty intentionally. No such imputation can be made about these new transcripts, as they were never in Israeli hands.
Israel has always said it attacked the Liberty, which America sent to the region to gather intelligence on the progress of the war, because it believed it was an Egyptian supply ship ferrying supplies to the Egyptian troops that Israel was then fighting. When it discovered the error, it immediately informed the Americans, apologized and paid compensation to the victims' families.
The incident was investigated by inquiry commissions in both Israel and the United States, and both concluded that it had, indeed, been a tragic error. Nevertheless, the controversy never died. In 1979, one of the survivors, James Ennes, published a book accusing Israel of bombing the American ship deliberately. Ennes claimed an Israeli spy plane had hovered over the ship all morning and had surely identified it as American, since the American flag was clearly visible.
A later book, written by James Bamford, charged that Israel sank the ship in order to keep America from learning of its plans to attack Syria, and further claimed that the NSA had tapes of conversations among Israeli pilots that not only confirmed this, but also proved that the tapes released by Israel had been doctored.
Another claim that appears frequently on the dozens of Internet sites devoted to the affair is that Israel sank the ship to conceal a mass murder of Egyptian soldiers on the Sinai peninsula.
In its letter to Cristol, the NSA stressed that, contrary to the claims that often appear in such books and Web sites - that the agency has tapes from both the Liberty and from a nearby American submarine that confirm Israel's guilt - the only tapes that exist were those made by the spy plane and given to Cristol this week.
"It's the last piece of intelligence that remained classified, and every rational person that will read it will understand that there is no truth in these conspiracy theories against Israel," Cristol said Tuesday. But he added: "Those who hate Israel, who hate Jews, and those who believe in conspiracy will not be convinced by anything."
Cristol, a former U.S. navy pilot and legal officer, began investigating the Liberty incident 14 years ago. Since publishing his book, which vindicates Israel, he has received threats and been accused of being an Israeli agent. "I take this lightly, but I am saddened to learn that there is this kind of hate toward Israel," he said.
Darn it! The only reason I clicked on this thread was to ping him!
Actually they will be convinced of something,
but not until they are dead.
I don't care if you are Jewish or not, the Liberty thing is one thing, impuning the survivors of the Liberty is another. I signed on Prodigy in 1988 and spent a lot of time on the "Sink The Liberty", BB, I was in the Fort Hamilton NCO Club when the Liberty was attacked, I was disgusted, I bought an Israel Bond the day before.
This is me, you sound like a shill for the ADL, no further comment, it was real cool trying to turn this into a personal attack.
The response is: Israel, and her military, are not populated by fools. To "assume" that Israel and the IDF didn't know, nor could determine at first sighting, that the USS Liberty was indeed an American warship is rediculous. We are talking about a country that had survived a war of "liberation" from the British, assorted Arab states and internal enemies. This is a nation that hunted down NAZI war criminals around the world and whose intelligence agencies had even infiltrated the intelligence agencies of the worlds superpowers. To think or believe that the IDF couldn't tell that a ship in open waters, flying an American flag and whose numbers were clearly visible was a "friendly" defies credulity.
Israel knew. What's more, the US government knew. No amount of 35 year old BS will change that. The USS Liberty was deliberately attacked. For what reason, we may never know for sure. Ha'aretz, notwithstanding.
How do you trust an article that leads off with such a fiction?
I think it means that whomever he's referring to is a closet anti-Semite, since that person used the term "...murdered by the Jews"
Saying "murdered by Israel" removes the target cliche' and removes the ability to assail the claimant of being "anti-Semitic".
An ex-Mossad agent told me.
Get real. The facts speak for themselves. The flag was flying, clearly visible. Brand new, in fact. That was testified to by a US Navy signalman who was there and who saw the flag flying. It was testified that the IDF was jamming radio frequencies. It was claimed by Israel that they mistook the USS Liberty for an Egyptian horse hauler. Side by side pictures show little similarity...other than both had hulls and floated on water. Numerous US Navy personnel testified that there was no way that the IDF could have "mistaken" the USS Liberty for anything other than a US navel ship.
A claim has been made that Israel thought the USS Liberty would find out about their impending invasion of Syria and "wreck" a ceasefire agreement in the works. See: http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair1126.html
In my opinion, the men who served on the USS Liberty have a more accurate recollection of the events, since they lived them and survived them. Why you believe the likes of McNamara, one can only imagine.
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