| Author | Message | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 9:44 pm Post subject: More USS Liberty articles Apologists need not post |
| CONFLICTING COMMENTS REKINDLE LIBERTY DISPUTE
KEY INVESTIGATORS EXPRESS BELIEF THAT ISRAEL
DELIBERATELY ATTACKED U.S. SHIP
By Bryant Jordan
Navy Times staff writer
Thirty-five years after Israeli air and naval forces attacked a
lightly armed U.S. Navy spy ship during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day
War, the CIA director at the time and the legal counsel to the
Navy’s court of inquiry say the attack was deliberate.
"It was no accident," former CIA director Richard Helms said May
29, bucking that agency’s June 13, 1967, report that indicated the
incident could have been a mistake.
Retired Navy legal counsel Capt. Ward Boston says he and the
court’s president, the late Rear Adm. Isaac "Ike" Kidd, always
believed Israeli forces knowingly attacked the Liberty.
"I feel the Israelis knew what they were doing. They knew they
were shooting at a U.S. Navy ship," said Boston, who lives in
Coronado, Calif. "That’s the bottom line. I don’t care how they
tried to get out of it."
The attack killed 34 men and wounded 172 others, and sparked a
long-running controversy: Did Israel knowingly try to sink the
American ship or did it believe the ship was an Egyptian vessel?
Officially, the Navy exonerated Israel on June 18, 1967 — 10 days
after the attack — when the Navy court of inquiry found that
available evidence indicated the attack was a case of mistaken
identity.
THE COURT OF INQUIRY
Boston said Kidd told him he believed the attack was deliberate
and that the Israelis knew the ship was American.
That flies in the face of the findings of Kidd’s court, and also
what the author of a new book on the Liberty says Kidd told him in
interviews in the early 1990s.
A. Jay Cristol, a federal judge in Florida and retired Navy
aviator who also served in the service’s Judge Advocate General’s
Corps, is the author of the upcoming "The Liberty Incident."
"Kidd told me an entirely different story," said Cristol, whose
new book is dedicated to Kidd, who died in 1999.
Cristol said that during one interview with Kidd in December 1990,
Kidd related that when he brought the court’s report to then-Chief
of Naval Operations Adm. David Lamar McDonald, the CNO asked him,
"Ike, was it intentional?"
"Ike said, ‘No, Admiral,'" Cristol recalled.
But Boston remembers that when Kidd returned from Washington, he
said officials were not interested in hearing the truth.
"In military life, you accept the fact that if you’re told to shut
up, you shut up. We did what we were told," Boston said.
He explained that he is willing to talk now because "everyone else
is shooting their mouth off."
Boston said he does not know whether his beliefs were shared by
the other members of the court, Capts. Bert M. Atkinson Jr. and
Bernard J. Lauff.
Lauff could not be located for comment. Atkinson died in 1999.
But Boston’s statements do put him now in the camp of retired Adm.
Merlin Staring, who as a captain and staff legal officer in London
was initially told to review the court’s report.
Staring said June 3 that the report was taken from him before he
finished his review, but based on what he had seen, the evidence
did not support the contention that the attack was an accident.
Staring concedes he still has not read the entire report.
Staring, who went on to become the Navy’s top JAG officer, is now
part of a newly formed Liberty Alliance, which includes former CNO
and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Thomas Moorer and two Marine
Medal of Honor recipients, Gen. Ray Davis and Col. Mitchell Paige.
The group wants a full congressional investigation into the attack
and is lobbying military organizations, including the Veterans of
Foreign Wars and the American Legion, hoping to garner support
among their members, said Tito Howard, the group’s executive
director.
SURVIVORS ALLEGE CONSPIRACY
Many Liberty survivors and their supporters long have maintained
that the attack was deliberate and that the Kidd report excluded
testimony from crew members that would have shown that.
Boston recalled that testimony was taken from crew members who
said the Israelis fired on life rafts when they were put into the
water.
The court’s report includes testimony indicating the shooting of
the life rafts was incidental, occurring when the ship was strafed
by Israeli jets.
Some allege Israel wanted the spy ship sunk to ensure it did not
pick up communications showing Israel was planning to seize the
Golan Heights from Syria. Others say it was to prevent Liberty
from intercepting communications dealing with an alleged Israeli
massacre of Egyptian POWs in the Sinai.
Some Liberty survivors and supporters claim the U.S. government
covered up the incident to avoid a conflict with Israel that could
have cost the Johnson administration support among Jewish voters
and supporters. Subsequent administrations and Congresses have
avoided a thorough airing of the incident for the same reasons,
they say.
But Cristol says there have been 10 U.S. investigations, ranging
from the court of inquiry and the CIA’s report to several
conducted by House and Senate committees.
Five drew no conclusions regarding Israel, according to a list
compiled by Cristol, while others accepted that it was an
accident.
The most recent official look at the incident was in 1991, when
the House Armed Services subcommittee on investigations found no
evidence to support the Liberty survivors’ claim that Israel
attacked the ship deliberately.
REPORTS AND RECOLLECTIONS
The CIA’s report, the earliest of those assembled, held open the
possibility that the attack was a case of mistaken identity — the
finding that the Kidd court went on to make five days later —
though it did not present that as a conclusion.
In the June 13, 1967, report, the CIA stated that "an overzealous
pilot" could have mistaken the Liberty for an Egyptian ship, the
El Quesir. Helms, the former CIA director, declined to discuss the
incident at length.
"I’ve done all I can. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in
court" testifying about the incident, he said.
Mike Weeks, a naval aviation writer and amateur historian who
studied the official Navy communications that occurred during and
after the attack and believes it was an accident, said there is
more information on the Liberty still classified and believes the
government should release all of it.
"Just put it out there and see how it flows," he said. "The bottom
line, all this stuff ought to be let loose, for heaven’s sake."
------------------
Bryant Jordan is a staff writer for Marine Corps Times.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rockets, Napalm, Torpedoes & Lies
Israel's Attack on the Liberty, Revisited
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
[This is an excerpt from CounterPunch's hot new book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism, just released by AK Press.]
In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel's attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.
Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.
A few hours later more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.
A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship's top officers.
The Liberty's radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called "a buzzsaw sound." Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet's large aircraft carrier.
Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty's aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. "Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately," he barked. McNamara's injunction was reiterated in saltier terms by Admiral David L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations: "You get those fucking airplanes back on deck, and you get them back down." The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.
After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.
As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. No body was going to get out alive that way.
After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: "Do you need any help?"
The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: "Fuck you."
The Israeli boat turned and left.
A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty's conning officer refused.
Finally, 16 hours after the attack two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.
The following morning Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.
Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. "These errors do occur," McNamara concluded.
***
In Assault on the Liberty, a harrowing first-hand account by James Ennes Jr., McNamara's version of events is proven to be as big a sham as his concurrent lies about Vietnam. Ennes's book created a media storm when it was first published by Random House in 1980, including (predictably) charges that Ennes was a liar and an anti-Semite. Still, the book sold more than 40,000 copies, but was eventually allowed to go out of print. Now Ennes has published an updated version, which incorporates much new evidence that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the US government went to extraordinary lengths to disguise the truth.
It's a story of Israel aggression, Pentagon incompetence, official lies, and a cover-up that persists to this day. The book gains much of its power from the immediacy of Ennes's first-hand account of the attack and the lies that followed.
Now, 35 years later, Ennes warns that the bloodbath on board the Liberty and its aftermath should serve as a tragic cautionary tale about the continuing ties between the US government and the government of Israel.
The Attack on the Liberty is the kind of book that makes your blood seethe. Ennes skillfully documents the life of the average sailor on one of the more peculiar vessels in the US Navy, with an attention for detail that reminds one of Dana or O'Brien. After all, the year was 1967 and most of the men on the Liberty were certainly glad to be on a non-combat ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, rather than in the Gulf of Tonkin or Mekong Delta.
But this isn't Two Years Before the Mast. In fact, Ennes's tour on the Liberty last only a few short weeks. He had scarcely settled into a routine before his new ship was shattered before his eyes.
Ennes joined the Liberty in May of 1967, as an Electronics Material Officer. Serving on a "spook ship", as the Liberty was known to Navy wives, was supposed to be a sure path to career enhancement. The Liberty's normal routine was to ply the African coast, tuning in its eavesdropping equipment on the electronic traffic in the region.
The Liberty had barely reached Africa when it received a flash message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sail from the Ivory Coast to the Mediterranean, where it was to re-deploy off the coast of the Sinai to monitor the Israeli attack on Egypt and the allied Arab nations.
As the war intensified, the Liberty sent a request to the fleet headquarters requesting an escort. It was denied by Admiral William Martin. The Liberty moved alone to a position in international waters about 13 miles from the shore at El Arish, then under furious siege by the IDF.
On June 6, the Joint Chiefs sent Admiral McCain, father of the senator from Arizona, an urgent message instructing him to move the Liberty out of the war zone to a position at least 100 miles off the Gaza Coast. McCain never forwarded the message to the ship.
A little after seven in the morning on June 8, Ennes entered the bridge of the Liberty to take the morning watch. Ennes was told that an hour earlier a "flying boxcar" (later identified as a twin-engine Nord 2501 Noratlas) had flown over the ship at a low level.
Ennes says he noticed that the ship's American flag had become stained with soot and ordered a new flag run up the mast. The morning was clear and calm, with a light breeze.
At 9 am, Ennes spotted another reconnaissance plane, which circled the Liberty. An hour later two Israeli fighter jets buzzed the ship. Over the next four hours, Israeli planes flew over the Liberty five more times.
When the first fighter jet struck, a little before two in the afternoon, Ennes was scanning the skies from the starboard side of the bridge, binoculars in his hands. A rocket hit the ship just below where Ennes was standing, the fragments shredded the men closest to him.
After the explosion, Ennes noticed that he was the only man left standing. But he also had been hit by more than 20 shards of shrapnel and the force of the blast had shattered his left leg. As he crawled into the pilothouse, a second fighter jet streaked above them and unleashed its payload on the hobbled Liberty.
At that point, Ennes says the crew of the Liberty had no idea who was attacking them or why. For a few moments, they suspected it might be the Soviets, after an officer mistakenly identified the fighters as MIG-15s. They knew that the Egyptian air force already had been decimated by the Israelis. The idea that the Israelis might be attacking them didn't occur to them until one of the crew spotted a Star of David on the wing of one of the French-built Mystere jets.
Ennes was finally taken below deck to a makeshift dressing station, with other wounded men. It was hardly a safe harbor. As Ennes worried that his fractured leg might slice through his femoral artery leaving him to bleed to death, the Liberty was pummeled by rockets, machine-gun fire and an Italian-made torpedo packed with 1,000-pounds of explosive.
After the attack ended, Ennes was approached by his friend Pat O'Malley, a junior officer, who had just sent a list of killed and wounded to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He got an immediate message back. "They said, 'Wounded in what action? Killed in what action?'," O'Malley told Ennes. "They said it wasn't an 'action,' it was an accident. I'd like for them to come out here and see the difference between an action and an accident. Stupid bastards."
The cover-up had begun.
***
The Pentagon lied to the public about the attack on the Liberty from the very beginning. In a decision personally approved by the loathsome McNamara, the Pentagon denied to the press that the Liberty was an intelligence ship, referring to it instead as a Technical Research ship, as if it were little more than a military version of Jacques Cousteau's Calypso.
The military press corps on the USS America, where most of the wounded sailors had been taken, were placed under extreme restrictions. All of the stories filed from the carrier were first routed through the Pentagon for security clearance, objectionable material was removed with barely a bleat of protest from the reporters or their publications.
Predictably, Israel's first response was to blame the victim, a tactic that has served them so well in the Palestinian situation. First, the IDF alleged that it had asked the State Department and the Pentagon to identify any US ships in the area and was told that there were none. Then the Israeli government charged that the Liberty failed to fly its flag and didn't respond to calls for it to identify itself. The Israelis contended that they assumed the Liberty was an Egyptian supply ship called El Quseir, which, even though it was a rusting transport ship then docked in Alexandria, the IDF said it suspected of shelling Israeli troops from the sea. Under these circumstances, the Israeli's said they were justified in opening fire on the Liberty. The Israelis said that they halted the attack almost immediately, when they realized their mistake.
"The Liberty contributed decisively toward its identification as an enemy ship," the IDF report concluded. This was a blatant falsehood, since the Israelis had identified the Liberty at least six hours prior to the attack on the ship.
Even though the Pentagon knew better, it gave credence to the Israeli account by saying that perhaps the Liberty's flag had lain limp on the flagpole in a windless sea. The Pentagon also suggested that the attack might have lasted less than 20 minutes.
After the initial battery of misinformation, the Pentagon imposed a news blackout on the Liberty disaster until after the completion of a Court of Inquiry investigation.
The inquiry was headed by Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd. Kidd didn't have a free hand. He'd been instructed by Vice-Admiral McCain to limit the damage to the Pentagon and to protect the reputation of Israel.
The Kidd interviewed the crew on June 14 and 15. The questioning was extremely circumscribed. According to Ennes, the investigators "asked nothing that might be embarrassing to Israeland testimony that tended to embarrass Israel was covered with a 'Top Secret' label, if it was accepted at all."
Ennes notes that even testimony by the Liberty's communications officers about the jamming of the ship's radios was classified as "Top Secret." The reason? It proved that Israel knew it was attacking an American ship. "Here was strong evidence that the attack was planned in advance and that our ship's identity was known to the attackers (for it its practically impossible to jam the radio of a stranger), but this information was hushed up and no conclusions were drawn from it," Ennes writes.
Similarly, the Court of Inquiry deep-sixed testimony and affidavits regarding the flag-Ennes had ordered a crisp new one deployed early on the morning of the attack. The investigators buried intercepts of conversations between IDF pilots identifying the ship as flying an American flag.
It also refused to accept evidence about the IDF's use of napalm during the attacks and choose not to hear testimony regarding the duration of the attacks and the fact that the US Navy failed to send planes to defend the ship.
"No one came to help us," said Dr. Richard F. Kiepfer, the Liberty's physician. "We were promised help, but no help came. The Russians arrived before our own ships did. We asked for an escort before we ever came to the war zone and we were turned down."
None of this made its way into the 700-page Court of Inquiry report, which was completed within a couple of weeks and sent to Admiral McCain in London for review.
McCain approved the report over the objections of Captain Merlin Staring, the Navy legal officer assigned to the inquiry, who found the report to be flawed, incomplete and contrary to the evidence.
Staring sent a letter to the Judge Advocate General of the Navy disavowing himself from the report. The JAG seemed to take Staring's objections to heart. It prepared a summary for the Chief of Naval Operations that almost completely ignored the Kidd/McCain report. Instead, it concluded:
* that the Liberty was easily recognizable as an American naval vessel;
* that it's flag was fully deployed and flying in a moderate breeze;
* that Israeli planes made at least eight reconnaissance flights at close range;
* the ship came under a prolonged attack from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats.
This succinct and largely accurate report was stamped Top Secret by Navy brass and stayed locked up for many years. But it was seen by many in the Pentagon and some in the Oval Office. But here was enough grumbling about the way the Liberty incident had been handled that LBJ summoned that old Washington fixer Clark Clifford to do damage control. It didn't take Clifford long to come up with the official line: the Israelis simply had made a tragic mistake.
It turns out that the Admiral Kidd and Captain Ward Boston, the two investigating officers who prepared the original report for Admiral McCain, both believed that the Israeli attack was intentional and sustained. In other words, the IDF knew that they were striking an American spy ship and they wanted to sink it and kill as many sailors as possible. Why then did the Navy investigators produce a sham report that concluded it was an accident?
Twenty-five years later we've finally found out. In June of 2002, Captain Boston told the Navy Times: "Officers follow orders."
It gets worse. There's plenty of evidence that US intelligence agencies learned on June 7 that Israel intended to attack the Liberty on the following day and that the strike had been personally ordered by Moshe Dayan.
As the attacks were going on, conversations between Israeli pilots were overheard by US Air Force officers in an EC121 surveillance plane overhead. The spy plane was spotted by Israeli jets, which were given orders to shoot it down. The American plane narrowly avoided the IDF missiles.
Initial reports on the incident prepared by the CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency all reached similar conclusions.
A particularly damning report compiled by a CIA informant suggests that Israeli Defense minister Moshe Dayan personally ordered the attack and wanted it to proceed until the Liberty was sunk and all on board killed. A heavily redacted version of the report was released in 1977. It reads in part:
"[The source] said that Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship and that one of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, 'This is pure murder.' One of the admirals who was present also disapproved of the action, and it was he who ordered it stopped and not Dayan."
This amazing document generated little attention from the press and Dayan was never publicly questioned about his role in the attack.
The analyses by the intelligence agencies are collected in a 1967 investigation by the Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations. Two and half decades later that report remains classified. Why? A former committee staffer said: "So as not to embarrass Israel."
More proof has recently come to light from the Israeli side. A few years after Attack on the Liberty was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an Israeli pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book and wanted to tell him his story. Toni said that he was the pilot in the first Israeli Mirage fighter to reach the Liberty. He immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy vessel. He radioed Israeli air command with this information and asked for instructions. Toni said he was ordered to "attack." He refused and flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily arrested for disobeying orders.
***
How tightly does the Israeli lobby control the Hill? For the first time in history, an attack on an America ship was not subjected to a public investigation by Congress. In 1980, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater planned to open a senate hearing into the Liberty affair. Then Jimmy Carter intervened by brokering a deal with Menachem Begin, where Israel agreed to pony up $6 million to pay for damages to the ship. A State Department press release announced the payment said, "The book is now closed on the USS Liberty."
It certainly was the last chapter for Adlai Stevenson. He ran for governor of Illinois the following year, where his less than perfect record on Israel, and his unsettling questions about the Liberty affair, became an issue in the campaign. Big money flowed into the coffers of his Republican opponent, Big Jim Thompson, and Stevenson went down to a narrow defeat.
But the book wasn't closed for the sailors either, of course. After a Newsweek story exposed the gist of what really happened on that day in the Mediterranean, an enraged Admiral McCain placed all the sailors under a gag order. When one sailor told an officer that he was having problems living with the cover-up, he was told: "Forget about it, that's an order."
The Navy went to bizarre lengths to keep the crew of the Liberty from telling what they knew. When gag orders didn't work, they threatened sanctions. Ennes tells of the confinement and interrogation of two Liberty sailors that sounds like something right out of the CIA's MK-Ultra program.
"In an incredible abuse of authority, military officers held two young Liberty sailors against their will in a locked and heavily guarded psychiatric ward of the base hospital," Ennes writes. "For days these men were drugged and questioned about their recollections of the attack by a 'therapist' who admitted to being untrained in either psychiatry or psychology. At one point, they avoided electroshock only by bolting from the room and demanding to see the commanding officer."
Since coming home, the veterans who have tried to tell of their ordeal have been harassed relentlessly. They've been branded as drunks, bigots, liars and frauds. Often, it turns out, these slurs have been leaked by the Pentagon. And, oh yeah, they've also been painted as anti-Semites.
In a recent column, Charley Reese describes just how mean-spirited and petty this campaign became. "When a small town in Wisconsin decided to name its library in honor of the USS Liberty crewmen, a campaign claiming it was anti-Semitic was launched," writes Reese. "And when the town went ahead, the U.S. government ordered no Navy personnel to attend, and sent no messages. This little library was the first, and at the time the only, memorial to the men who died on the Liberty."
***
So why then did the Israelis attack the Liberty?
A few days before the Six Days War, Israel's Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited Washington to inform LBJ about the forthcoming invasion. Johnson cautioned Eban that the US could not support such an attack.
It's possible, then, that the IDF assumed that the Liberty was spying on the Israeli war plans. Possible, but not likely. Despite the official denials, as Andrew and Leslie Cockburn demonstrate in Dangerous Liaison, at the time of the Six Days War the US and Israel had developed a warm covert relationship. So closely were the two sides working that US intelligence aid certainly helped secure Israel's devastating and swift victory. In fact, it's possible that the Liberty had been sent to the region to spy for the IDF.
A somewhat more likely scenario holds that Moshe Dayan wanted to keep the lid on Israel's plan to breach the new cease-fire and invade into Syria to seize the Golan.
It has also been suggested that Dayan ordered the attack on the Liberty with the intent of pinning the blame on the Egyptians and thus swinging public and political opinion in the United States solidly behind the Israelis. Of course, for this plan to work, the Liberty had to be destroyed and its crew killed.
There's another factor. The Liberty was positioned just off the coast from the town of El Arish. In fact, Ennes and others had used town's mosque tower to fix the location of the ship along the otherwise featureless desert shoreline. The IDF had seized El Arish and had used the airport there as a prisoner of war camp. On the very day the Liberty was attacked, the IDF was in the process of executing as many as 1,000 Palestinian and Egyptian POWs, a war crime that they surely wanted to conceal from prying eyes. According to Gabriel Bron, now an Israeli reporter, who witnessed part of the massacre as a soldier: "The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death."
The bigger question is why the US government would participate so enthusiastically in the cover-up of a war crime against its own sailors. Well, the Pentagon has never been slow to hide its own incompetence. And there's plenty of that in the Liberty affair: bungled communications, refusal to provide an escort, situating the defenseless Liberty too close to a raging battle, the inability to intervene in the attack and the inexcusably long time it took to reach the battered ship and its wounded.
That's but par for the course. But something else was going on that would only come to light later. Through most of the 1960s, the US congress had imposed a ban on the sale of arms to both Israel and Jordan. But at the time of the Liberty attack, the Pentagon (and its allies in the White House and on the Hill) was seeking to have this proscription overturned. The top brass certainly knew that any evidence of a deliberate attack on a US Navy ship by the IDF would scuttle their plans. So they hushed it up.
In January 1968, the arms embargo on Israel was lifted and the sale of American weapons began to flow. By 1971, Israel was buying $600 million of American-made weapons a year. Two years later the purchases topped $3 billion. Almost overnight, Israel had become the largest buyer of US-made arms and aircraft.
Perversely, then, the IDF's strike on the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel together, in a kind of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF attacks defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and Apache helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody assaults as a joint operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden partner.
Thus, does the legacy of Liberty live on, one raid after another. | |  | | Cowboy | | | | Philadelphian | | Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 1:58 pm Post subject: The Kennedy's and the Liberty too. |
| Here is a little hint for you.LBJ,enemy and traitor to the american people.
The author gave very few details about her first-born son Jimmy and none about what happened to him, yet she somehow ended up raising two grandchildren who apparently are Jimmy's children.
What she claimed to have known about the Kennedy assassination is stated below, in order to give you an idea of how little she revealed, although these claims certainly spiced up her story:
She was introduced to Jack Ruby by LBJ's attorney Jerome T. Ragsdale, when she bumped into them while shopping at Neiman-Marcus during her afternoon break from work.
She often saw Ruby and Ragsdale talking, occasionally spotted them with H.L. Hunt.
She saw Jack Ruby "in deep conversation" with Lee Harvey Oswald.
Ruby waved a map of President Kennedy's motorcade route and had "specific knowledge of the President's entire Texas trip," which he talked with her and others about, as they were drinking in Ruby's club, before the assassination.
The night before Kennedy was assassinated, she was told by LBJ, "After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again -- that's no threat -- that's a promise," at a party at Clint Murchison's home honoring J. Edgar Hoover, after LBJ had a meeting in a closed room with others at the party. And LBJ repeated his promise in a phone call to her the following morning, "That son-of-a-bitch crazy Yarborough and that goddamn fucking Irish mafia bastard, Kennedy, will never embarrass me again!"
LBJ, in response to her questions about his involvement in the JFK assassination, angrily told her that "it was Texas oil and those fucking renegade intelligence bastards in Washington" who killed JFK. | | | | Philadelphian | | Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 2:00 pm Post subject: |
| | Google the author,her name is Madeleine Brown.LBJ's mistress. | | | | Philadelphian | | Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 2:15 pm Post subject: |
| JFK Murder Plot "Deathbed Confession" Aired On National Radio
Former CIA agent, Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt names the men who killed Kennedy
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, April 30, 2007
The "deathbed confession" audio tape in which former CIA agent and Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt admits he was approached to be part of a CIA assassination team to kill JFK was aired this weekend - an astounding development that has gone completely ignored by the establishment media.
Saint John Hunt, son of E. Howard Hunt, appeared on the nationally syndicated Coast to Coast Live radio show on Saturday night to discuss the revelations contained in the tape.
Hunt said that his father had mailed cassette the tape to him alone in January 2004 and asked that it be released after his death. The tape was originally 20 minutes long but was edited down to four and a half minutes for the Coast to Coast broadcast. Hunt promises that the whole tape will be uploaded soon at his website.
Click here to listen to a clip of the tape.
E. Howard Hunt names numerous individuals with both direct and indirect CIA connections as having played a role in the assassination of Kennedy, while describing himself as a "bench warmer" in the plot. Saint John Hunt agreed that the use of this term indicates that Hunt was willing to play a larger role in the murder conspiracy had he been required.
Hunt alleges on the tape that then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was involved in the planning of the assassination and in the cover-up, stating that LBJ, "Had an almost maniacal urge to become president, he regarded JFK as an obstacle to achieving that."
Asked if his father followed the conspiracy theories into the Kennedy assassination, Saint John said the elder Hunt did follow the work of AJ Weberman, a New York freelance writer, who in the early 70's first accused Hunt of being one of three bums who were arrested in Dealy Plaza. The so-called bums (pictured above) were interrogated and later released by authorities shortly after the assassination. Weberman, one of the founders of the Youth International Party, the Vippies, published photographs of the tramps and found that two of them bore striking similarities to Hunt and Frank Sturgis, also named by Hunt in the tape as having been played a role in the assassination conspiracy.
Asked for his opinion as to whether his father was indeed one of the Dealy Plaza tramps, Saint John, in a stunning revelation, said one of the tramps indeed looked much like his father did in 1963 (see comparison above).
CIA operative Frank Stugis' striking resemblance to one of the "tramps".
Other researchers believe the "Hunt tramp" to really be Chauncey Holt, who apparently later confessed to the fact. Charles Harrelson was allegedly identified as the third tramp.
Saint John Hunt said that shortly before his death, his father had felt "deeply conflicted and deeply remorseful" that he didn't blow the whistle on the plot at the time and prevent the assassination, but that everyone in the government hated Kennedy and wanted him gone in one way or another. Kennedy's promise to "shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter the remnants to the wind" was being carried out and this infuriated almost everyone at the agency.
Hunt also said that his mother's death in a December 8, 1972 plane crash in Chicago was suspicious and that there was evidence of a White House cover-up surrounding the circumstances of the alleged accident.
Investigators discovered $10,000 dollars in her luggage and Hunt alleged that his mother traveled around the country using Nixon campaign money to payoff the families of the Watergate burglars to keep them quiet about the involvement of the Nixon White House in the Watergate break-in and cover-up.
Hunt cited numerous coincidences surrounding the aftermath of the crash, including Nixon's appointment of his henchman, Egil Krough, to the National Transportation Safety Board which investigates plane crashes, the very day after the incident.
Eyewitnesses reported that the plane exploded above treetop level before it had even hit the runway.
Hunt said that "at least 20-25 FBI members," as well as numerous DIA agents were at the scene of the crash within minutes before rescue personnel had even arrived, and that this fact was attested to in a letter sent by the head of the Chicago FBI to investigator Sherman Skolnick.
Hunt said that his safety was guaranteed by the dissemination of the tape and that he had several copies and had mailed others to addresses both abroad and in the U.S.
"Once this information is out there's really no point in anyone trying to do me in or do me wrong - someone may try to discredit me but I have no skeletons in my closet," said Hunt.
As we have previously reported, the night before the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Baines Johnson met with Dallas tycoons, FBI moguls and organized crime kingpins - emerging from the conference to tell his mistress Madeleine Duncan Brown that "those SOB's" would never embarrass him again.
Though Brown first went public on her 21-year relationship with Johnson in the early 80's, to this day her shocking revelations about how he had told her the Kennedy's "would never embarrass me again" the night before the assassination are often ignored by the media who prefer to keep the debate focused on issues which can't definitively be proven either way (or at least can be spun and whitewashed).
George Herbert Walker Bush was also pictured at the scene of the crime in Dealy Plaza.
In addition, Barr McClellan, father of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan and a partner in the Austin law firm that represented Johnson, wrote in his 2003 book that LBJ was a key player in the organization of the assassination and its cover-up. McClellan's revelations were the subject of a subsequent History Channel documentary called The Guilty Men.
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[/img]http://www.prisonplanet.com/images/april2007/300407sturgis.jpg[img][/img] | | | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 4:07 am Post subject: |
|  | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 4:45 am Post subject: |
| | Still waiting for you to provide a motive for Israel to knowingly attack a US Navy ship. | | | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 5:26 am Post subject: |
| | Cowboywitz wrote: | | Still waiting for you to provide a motive for Israel to knowingly attack a US Navy ship. |
Why not have a Congressional investigation that the crew has been asking for 40 years and find out? The 1967 Liberty COI never covered the subject. They provided no evidence that it was an "accident" but just assumed.
Yes or No?
Keep diverting and avoiding the real issues Cowboy. | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 5:32 am Post subject: |
| Still waiting for you to provide a motive for Israel to knowingly attack a US Navy ship.
| Quote: | | The 1967 Liberty COI never covered the subject. |
Quite false.
| Quote: | | They provided no evidence that it was an "accident" but just assumed. |
Again quite false.
You must be like your other pretend defenders of the crew, assuming that they may have lied under oath. The crewmembers' testimony is quite clear.
Then too is that other little matter...
Still waiting for you to provide a motive for Israel to knowingly attack a US Navy ship. | | | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 6:10 am Post subject: |
| Still waiting for you to provide a motive for Israel to knowingly attack a US Navy ship.
When did victims have to provide motive for their own injuries and deaths? Is this Jewish Talmudic law?
The NCOI didn't provide it. You of course offer no proof.
Keep diverting and avoiding the real issue Cowboywitz.
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2007 will be the 40th anniversary of injustice and murder and coverup.
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