| Author | Message | | Shnozzle | | Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2007 9:29 pm Post subject: |
| | The 'transcripts' provided by the National Security Agency's "finalized review" look like a forgery, cobbled by dual-loyalists. | |  | | Shnozzle | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 11:10 am Post subject: |
| Here it is again in full in case the lobby gets its way again and pressures to have it removed from the Chicago Tribune's Web site:
www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/tuesday/chi-liberty_tuesoct02,0,1050179.story
chicagotribune.com
Special report
New revelations in attack on American spy ship
Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of deadly '67 incident
By John Crewdson
Tribune senior correspondent
October 2, 2007
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.
For Lockwood and many other survivors, the anger is mixed with incredulity: that Israel would attack an important ally, then attribute the attack to a case of mistaken identity by Israeli pilots who had confused the U.S. Navy's most distinctive ship with an Egyptian horse-cavalry transport that was half its size and had a dissimilar profile. And they're also incredulous that, for years, their own government would reject their calls for a thorough investigation.
"They tried to lie their way out of it!" Lockwood shouts. "I don't believe that for a minute! You just don't shoot at a ship at sea without identifying it, making sure of your target!"
Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack without shouting or weeping.
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.
The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel's reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation.
In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country's chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had "become the center of considerable controversy and debate." It was not the agency's intention, it said, "to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material," available athttp://www.nsa.gov/liberty .
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, called the attack on the Liberty "a tragic and terrible accident, a case of mistaken identity, for which Israel has officially apologized." Israel also paid reparations of $6.7 million to the injured survivors and the families of those killed in the attack, and another $6 million for the loss of the Liberty itself.
But for those who lost their sons and husbands, neither the Israelis' apology nor the passing of time has lessened their grief.
One is Pat Blue, who still remembers having her lunch in Washington's Farragut Square park on "a beautiful June afternoon" when she was a 22-year-old secretary for a law firm.
Blue heard somebody's portable radio saying a U.S. Navy ship had been torpedoed in the eastern Mediterranean. A few weeks before, Blue's husband of two years, an Arab-language expert with the NSA, had been hurriedly dispatched overseas.
As she listened to the news report, "it just all came together." Soon afterward, the NSA confirmed that Allen Blue was among the missing.
"I never felt young again," she said.
Aircraft on the horizon
Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared on the horizon and circled the Liberty.
The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first day of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. America was Israel's ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there. The ship's mission was to monitor the communications of Israel's Arab enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications. The Liberty felt safe.
Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore Arfsten, a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw the blue Star of David on the planes' fuselages. At first, crew members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their ship.
Thirty-four died that day, including Blue, the only civilian casualty. An additional 171 were wounded in the air and sea assault by Israel, which was about to celebrate an overwhelming victory over the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and several other Arab states.
For most of those who survived the attack, the Six-Day War has become the defining moment of their lives.
Some mustered out of the Navy as soon as their enlistments were up. Others stayed in long enough to retire. Several went on to successful business careers. One became a Secret Service agent, another a Baltimore policeman.
Several are being treated with therapy and drugs for what has since been recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. One has undergone more than 30 major operations. Another suffers seizures caused by a piece of shrapnel still lodged in his brain.
After Bryce Lockwood left the Marines, he worked construction, then tried selling insurance. "I'd get a job and get fired," he said. "I had a hell of a time getting my feet on the ground."
With his linguistic background, Lockwood could have had a career with the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI. But he was too angry at the U.S. government to work for it. "Don't talk to me about government!" he shouts.
U.S. Navy jets were called back
An Israeli military court of inquiry later acknowledged that their naval headquarters knew at least three hours before the attack that the odd-looking ship 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula, sprouting more than 40 antennas capable of receiving every kind of radio transmission, was "an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy," a floating electronic vacuum cleaner.
The Israeli inquiry later concluded that that information had simply gotten lost, never passed along to the ground controllers who directed the air attack nor to the crews of the three Israeli torpedo boats who picked up where the air force left off, strafing the Liberty's decks with their machine guns and launching a torpedo that blew a 39-foot hole in its starboard side.
To a man, the survivors interviewed by the Tribune rejected Israel's explanation.
Nor, the survivors said, did they understand why the American 6th Fleet, which included the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga, patrolling 400 miles west of the Liberty, launched and then recalled at least two squadrons of Navy fighter-bombers that might have arrived in time to prevent the torpedo attack -- and save 26 American lives.
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."
McNamara, who is now 91, told the Tribune he has "absolutely no recollection of what I did that day," except that "I have a memory that I didn't know at the time what was going on."
The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel's claim that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But internal White House documents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library show that the Israelis' explanation of how the mistake had occurred was not believed.
Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson's intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was "inconceivable" that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.
The attack "couldn't be anything else but deliberate," the NSA's director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.
"I don't think you'll find many people at NSA who believe it was accidental," Benson Buffham, a former deputy NSA director, said in an interview.
"I just always assumed that the Israeli pilots knew what they were doing," said Harold Saunders, then a member of the National Security Council staff and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs.
"So for me, the question really is who issued the order to do that and why? That's the really interesting thing."
The answer, if there is one, will probably never be known. Gen. Moshe Dayan, then the country's minister of defense; Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime minister; and Golda Meir, his successor, are all dead.
Many of those who believe the Liberty was purposely attacked have suggested that the Israelis feared the ship might intercept communications revealing its plans to widen the war, which the U.S. opposed. But no one has ever produced any solid evidence to support that theory, and the Israelis dismiss it. The NSA's deputy director, Louis Tordella, speculated in a recently declassified memo that the attack "might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the LIBERTY was monitoring his activities."
Was the U.S. flag visible?
Though the attack on the Liberty has faded from public memory, Michael Oren, a historian and senior fellow at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem, conceded that "the case of the assault on the Liberty has never been closed."
If anything, Oren said, "the accusations leveled against Israel have grown sharper with time." Oren said in an interview that he believed a formal investigation by the U.S., even 40 years later, would be useful if only because it would finally establish Israel's innocence.
Questions about what happened to the Liberty have been kept alive by survivors' groups and their Web sites, a half-dozen books, magazine articles and television documentaries, scholarly papers published in academic journals, and Internet chat groups where amateur sleuths debate arcane points of photo interpretation and torpedo running depth.
Meantime, the Liberty's survivors and their supporters, including a distinguished constellation of retired admirals and generals, have persisted in asking Congress for a full-scale formal investigation.
"We deserve to have the truth," Pat Blue said.
For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be reduced to a single question: Was the ship flying the American flag at the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?
The survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the Liberty was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the attack, except for a brief period in which one flag that had been shot down was replaced with another, larger flag -- the ship's "holiday colors" -- that measured 13 feet long.
Concludes one of the declassified NSA documents: "Every official interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag -- and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and identification."
The Israeli court of inquiry that examined the attack, and absolved the Israeli military of criminal culpability, came to precisely the opposite conclusion.
"Throughout the contact," it declared, "no American or any other flag appeared on the ship."
The attack, the court said, had been prompted by a report, which later proved erroneous, that a ship was shelling Israeli-held positions in the Sinai Peninsula. The Liberty had no guns capable of shelling the shore, but the court concluded that the U.S. ship had been mistakenly identified as the source of the shelling.
Yiftah Spector, the first Israeli pilot to attack the ship, told the Jerusalem Post in 2003 that when he first spotted the Liberty, "I circled it twice and it did not fire on me. My assumption was that it was likely to open fire at me and nevertheless I slowed down and I looked and there was positively no flag."
But the Liberty crewmen interviewed by the Tribune said the Israeli jets simply appeared and began shooting. They also said the Liberty did not open fire on the planes because it was armed only with four .50-caliber machine guns intended to repel boarders.
"I can't identify it, but in any case it's a military ship," Spector radioed his ground controller, according to a transcript of the Israeli air-to-ground communications published by the Jerusalem Post in 2004.
That transcript, made by a Post reporter who was allowed to listen to what the Israeli Air Force said were tapes of the attacking pilots' communications, contained only two references to "American" or "Americans," one at the beginning and the other at the end of the attack.
The first reference occurred at 1:54 p.m. local time, two minutes before the Israeli jets began their first strafing run.
In the Post transcript, a weapons system officer on the ground suddenly blurted out, "What is this? Americans?"
"Where are Americans?" replied one of the air controllers.
The question went unanswered, and it was not asked again.
Twenty minutes later, after the Liberty had been hit repeatedly by machine guns, 30 mm cannon and napalm from the Israelis' French-built Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers, the controller directing the attack asked his chief in Tel Aviv to which country the target vessel belonged.
"Apparently American," the chief controller replied.
Fourteen minutes later the Liberty was struck amidships by a torpedo from an Israeli boat, killing 26 of the 100 or so NSA technicians and specialists in Russian and Arabic who were working in restricted compartments below the ship's waterline.
Analyst: Israelis wanted it sunk
The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.
"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."
Forslund said he clearly recalled "the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely."
"He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was frustrated with the pilots' responses that it didn't sink."
Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read the transcripts. "Everybody saw these," said Forslund, now retired after 26 years in the military.
Forslund's recollections are supported by those of two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots' communications.
One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then serving with the Air Force Security Service's 6924th Security Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.
"It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty," Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. "Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to 'complete the job' and get out of there."
Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete, Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern communications.
The transcripts Block remembered seeing "were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack," Block said. "The pilots said, 'This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?'
"And ground control came back and said, 'Yes, follow orders.'"
Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.
"There is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as what I saw," Gotcher said. "More to the point, for anyone familiar with air-to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn't the way pilots and controllers communicate."
Block, now a child protection caseworker in Florida, observed that "the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly identified the ship as American and asked for further instructions from ground control appears to be a missing part of that Jerusalem Post article."
Arieh O'Sullivan, the Post reporter who made the newspaper's transcript, said the Israeli Air Force tapes he listened to contained blank spaces. He said he assumed those blank spaces occurred while Israeli pilots were conducting their strafing runs and had nothing to communicate.
'But sir, it's an American ship!'
Forslund, Gotcher and Block are not alone in claiming to have read transcripts of the attack that they said left no doubt the Israelis knew they were attempting to sink a U.S. Navy ship.
Many ears were tuned to the battles being fought in and around the Sinai during the Six-Day War, including those belonging to other Arab nations with a keen interest in the outcome.
"I had a Libyan naval captain who was listening in that day," said a retired CIA officer, who spoke on condition that he not be named discussing a clandestine informant.
"He thought history would change its course," the CIA officer recalled. "Israel attacking the U.S. He was certain, listening in to the Israeli and American comms [communications], that it was deliberate."
The late Dwight Porter, the American ambassador to Lebanon during the Six-Day War, told friends and family members that he had been shown English-language transcripts of Israeli pilots talking to their controllers.
A close friend, William Chandler, the former head of the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Co., said Porter recalled one of the pilots protesting, "But sir, it's an American ship -- I can see the flag!' To which the ground control responded, 'Never mind; hit it!'"
Porter, who asked that his recollections not be made public while he was alive because they involved classified information, also discussed the transcripts during a lunch in 2000 at the Cosmos Club in Washington with another retired American diplomat, Andrew Kilgore, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar.
Kilgore recalled Porter saying that he "saw the telex, read it, and passed it right back" to the embassy official who had shown it to him. He quoted Porter as recalling that the transcript showed "Israel was attacking, and they know it's an American ship."
Haviland Smith, a young CIA officer stationed in Beirut during the Six-Day War, said that although he never saw the transcript, he had "heard on a number of occasions exactly the story that you just told me about what that transcript contained."
He had later been told, Smith recalled, "that ultimately all of the transcripts were deep-sixed. I was told that they were deep-sixed because the administration did not wish to embarrass the Israelis."
Perhaps the most persuasive suggestion that such transcripts existed comes from the Israelis themselves, in a pair of diplomatic cables sent by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, to Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv.
Five days after the Liberty attack, Harman cabled Eban that a source the Israelis code-named "Hamlet" was reporting that the Americans had "clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway."
Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising Eban, who is now dead, that the White House was "very angry," and that "the reason for this is that the Americans probably have findings showing that our pilots indeed knew that the ship was American."
According to a memoir by then-CIA director Richard Helms, President Johnson's personal anger was manifest when he discovered the story of the Liberty attack on an inside page of the next day's New York Times. Johnson barked that "it should have been on the front page!"
Israeli historian Tom Segev, who mentioned the cables in his recent book "1967," said other cables showed that Harman's source for the second cable was Arthur Goldberg, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The cables, which have been declassified by the Israelis, were obtained from the Israeli State Archive and translated from Hebrew by the Tribune.
Oliver Kirby, the NSA's deputy director for operations at the time of the Liberty attack, confirmed the existence of NSA transcripts.
Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts, Kirby replied, "I sure did. I certainly did."
"They said, 'We've got him in the zero,'" Kirby recalled, "whatever that meant -- I guess the sights or something. And then one of them said, 'Can you see the flag?' They said 'Yes, it's U.S, it's U.S.' They said it several times, so there wasn't any doubt in anybody's mind that they knew it."
Kirby, now 86 and retired in Texas, said the transcripts were "something that's bothered me all my life. I'm willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew."
One set of transcripts apparently survived in the archives of the U.S. Army's intelligence school, then located at Ft. Holabird in Maryland.
W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel who spent eight years as chief of Middle East intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the transcripts were used as "course material" in an advanced class for intelligence officers on the clandestine interception of voice transmissions.
"The flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship in view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that it was clearly marked with the U.S. flag," Lang recalled in an e-mail.
"The flight commander was reluctant," Lang said in a subsequent interview. "That was very clear. He didn't want to do this. He asked them a couple of times, 'Do you really want me to do this?' I've remembered it ever since. It was very striking. I've been harboring this memory for all these years."
Key NSA tapes said missing
Asked whether the NSA had in fact intercepted the communications of the Israeli pilots who were attacking the Liberty, Kirby, the retired senior NSA official, replied, "We sure did."
On its Web site, the NSA has posted three recordings of Israeli communications made on June 8, 1967. But none of the recordings is of the attack itself.
Indeed, the declassified documents state that no recordings of the "actual attack" exist, raising questions about the source of the transcripts recalled by Forslund, Gotcher, Block, Porter, Lang and Kirby.
The three recordings reflect what the NSA describes as "the aftermath" of the attack -- Israeli communications with two Israeli helicopters dispatched to rescue any survivors who may have jumped into the water.
Two of the recordings were made by Michael Prostinak, a Hebrew linguist aboard a U.S. Navy EC-121, a lumbering propeller-driven aircraft specially equipped to gather electronic intelligence.
But Prostinak said he was certain that more than three recordings were made that day.
"I can tell you there were more tapes than just the three on the Internet," he said. "No doubt in my mind, more than three tapes."
At least one of the missing tapes, Prostinak said, captured Israeli communications "in which people were not just tranquil or taking care of business as normal. We knew that something was being attacked," Prostinak said. "Everyone we were listening to was excited. You know, it was an actual attack. And during the attack was when mention of the American flag was made."
Prostinak acknowledged that his Hebrew was not good enough to understand every word being said, but that after the mention of the American flag "the attack did continue. We copied [recorded] it until we got completely out of range. We got a great deal of it."
Charles Tiffany, the plane's navigator, remembers hearing Prostinak on the plane's intercom system, shouting, "I got something crazy on UHF," the radio frequency band used by the Israeli Air Force.
"I'll never forget it to this day," said Tiffany, now a retired Florida lawyer. He also remembers hearing the plane's pilot ordering the NSA linguists to "start taping everything."
Prostinak said he and the others aboard the plane had been unaware of the Liberty's presence 15,000 feet below, but had concluded that the Israelis' target must be an American ship. "We knew that something was being attacked," Prostinak said.
After listening to the three recordings released by the NSA, Prostinak said it was clear from the sequence in which they were numbered that at least two tapes that had once existed were not there.
One tape, designated A1104/A-02, begins at 2:29 p.m. local time, just after the Liberty was hit by the torpedo. Prostinak said there was a preceding tape, A1104/A-01.
That tape likely would have recorded much of the attack, which began with the air assault at 1:56 p.m. Prostinak said a second tape, which preceded one beginning at 3:07 p.m., made by another linguist aboard the same plane, also appeared to be missing.
As soon as the EC-121 landed at its base in Athens, Prostinak said, all the tapes were rushed to an NSA facility at the Athens airport where Hebrew translators were standing by.
"We told them what we had, and they immediately took the tapes and went to work," recalled Prostinak, who after leaving the Navy became chief of police and then town administrator for the village of Lake Waccamaw, N.C.
Another linguist aboard the EC-121, who spoke on condition that he not be named, said he believed there had been as many as "five or six" tapes recording the attack on the Liberty or its aftermath.
Andrea Martino, the NSA's senior media adviser, did not respond to a question about the apparent conflict between the agency's assertion that there were no recordings of the Israeli attack and the recollections of those interviewed for this article.
U.S. inquiry widely criticized
Rather than investigating how and why a U.S. Navy vessel had been attacked by an ally, the Navy seemed interested in asking as few questions as possible and answering them in record time.
Even while the Liberty was still limping toward a dry dock in Malta, the Navy convened a formal Court of Inquiry. Adm. John McCain Jr., the commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe and father of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chose Adm. Isaac Kidd Jr. to preside.
The court's charge was narrow: to determine whether any shortcomings on the part of the Liberty's crew had contributed to the injuries and deaths that resulted from the attack. McCain gave Kidd's investigators a week to complete the job.
"That was a shock," recalled retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, the inquiry's counsel, who said he and Kidd had estimated that a thorough inquiry would take six months.
"Everyone was kind of stunned that it was handled so quickly and without much hullabaloo," said G. Patrick March, then a member of McCain's staff in London.
Largely because of time constraints, Boston said, the investigators were unable to question many of the survivors, or to visit Israel and interview any Israelis involved in the attack.
Rear Adm. Merlin Staring, the Navy's former judge advocate general, was asked to assess the American inquiry's report before it was sent to Washington. But Staring said it was taken from him when he began to question some aspects of the report. He describes it now as "a hasty, superficial, incomplete and totally inadequate inquiry."
Staring, who is among those calling for a full congressional investigation on behalf of the Liberty's survivors, observed in an interview that the inquiry report contained several "findings of fact" unsupported by testimony or evidence.
One such finding ignored the testimony of several inquiry witnesses that the American flag was flying during the attack, and held that the "available evidence combines to indicate the attack on LIBERTY on 8 June was in fact a case of mistaken identity."
There are also apparent omissions in the inquiry's report. It does not include, for example, the testimony of a young lieutenant, Lloyd Painter, who was serving as officer of the deck when the attack began. Painter said he testified that an Israeli torpedo boat "methodically machine-gunned one of our life rafts" that had been put over the side by crewmen preparing to abandon ship.
Painter, who spent 32 years as a Secret Service agent after leaving the Navy, charged that his testimony about the life rafts was purposely omitted.
Ward Boston recalled that, after McCain's one-week deadline expired, Kidd took the record compiled by the inquiry "and flew back to Washington, and I went back to Naples," the headquarters of the 6th Fleet.
"Two weeks later, he comes back to Naples and calls me from his office," Boston recalled in an interview. "In that deep voice, he said, 'Ward, they aren't interested in the facts. It's a political issue and we have to put a lid on it. We've been ordered to shut up.'
"It's time for the truth to come out," declared Boston, who is now 84. "There have been so many cover-ups."
"Someday the truth of this will come out," said Dennis Eikleberry, a NSA technician aboard the Liberty. "Someday it will, but we'll all be gone."
James Ennes, now 74, who was officer of the deck just before the attack began, and later spent two months in a body cast, is one of the more vocal survivors. Like the others, Ennes is tired of waiting.
"We want both sides to stop lying," he said.
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jcrewdson@tribune.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 11:12 am Post subject: |
| October 6, 2007
So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?
by Ray McGovern
Who's afraid of the Israel Lobby? Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat – Conservative, Liberal. The fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and palpable. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated that time and again – and not only on Capitol Hill.
Seldom has the Lobby's power been as clearly demonstrated as in its ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967, during the Six Day War:
* Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did its best to sink it and leave no survivors;
* The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the attack upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to the scene; and
* By that time 34 of the Liberty's crew had been killed and over 170 wounded.
Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known this for years. That virtually all of them have kept a forty-year frightened silence is testament to the widespread fear of touching this live wire. Even more telling is the fact that the National Security Agency apparently has destroyed voice tapes and transcripts heard and seen by many intelligence analysts, material that shows beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.
The Ugly Truth
But the truth will come out – eventually. All it took in this case was for a courageous journalist (an endangered species) to listen to the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not shrinking from naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S. officials, from the president on down, off the hook for suppressing – even destroying – damning evidence from intercepted Israeli communications.
The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely on interviews with those most intimately involved. A lengthy article by Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter John Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Oct. 2 titled "New revelations in attack on American spy ship." To the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year: "Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of deadly 1967 incident."
Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have known of the incident and cover-up for a very long time and have tried to expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for today. It has proved far easier, though, to get a very pedestrian Dog-Bites-Man article published than an article with the importance and explosiveness of this sensitive story.
A Marine Stands Up
On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield, Missouri. A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The study had originally been commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly. When the draft arrived, however, shouts of "Leper!" were heard at the Atlantic. The monthly wasted no time in saying thanks-but-no-thanks, and the leper-study then wandered in search of a home, finding none among American publishers. Eventually the London Review of Books published it in March 2006.
I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of courage as well as scholarship. That's what I told the questioner, adding that I did have two problems with the study:
First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing virtually all the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the Israel Lobby and the so-called "neoconservatives" running our policy and armed forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed. But of equal importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what the Pentagon now calls the "enduring" military bases in Iraq, which the White House and Pentagon decided were needed for the U.S. to dominate that part of the Middle East.
Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt made no mention of what I believe to be, if not the most telling, then perhaps the most sensational proof of the power the Lobby knows it can exert over our government and Congress. In sum, in June 1967, after deliberately using fighter-bombers and torpedo boats to attack the USS Liberty for over two hours in an attempt to sink it and kill its entire crew, and then getting the U.S. government, the Navy, and the Congress to cover up what happened, the Israeli government learned that it could – literally – get away with murder.
I found myself looking out at 400 blank stares. The USS Liberty? And so I asked how many in the audience had heard of the attack on the Liberty on June 8, 1967. Three hands went up; I called on the gentleman nearest me.
Ramrod straight he stood:
"Sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired. I am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir."
Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell us what happened.
"Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has been almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening, Sir."
You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood gave us his personal account of what happened to him, his colleagues, and his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967. He was a linguist assigned to collect communications intelligence from the USS Liberty, which was among the ugliest – and most easily identifiable – ships in the fleet with antennae springing out in all directions.
Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with the six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the Israeli navy and air force on the morning of June 8. After the air attacks including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three sixty-ton torpedo boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing their torpedo tubes at the Liberty's starboard hull. Lockwood had been ordered to throw the extremely sensitive cryptological equipment overboard and had just walked beyond the bulwark separating the NSA intelligence unit from the rest of the ship when, he recalled, he sensed a large black object, a tremendous explosion, and sheet of flame. The torpedo had struck dead center in the NSA space.
The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness. Around him were 25 dead colleagues; but he heard moaning. Three were still alive; one of Lockwood's shipmates dragged one survivor up the hatch. Lockwood was able to lift the two others, one-by-one, onto his shoulder and carry them up through the hatch. This meant alternatively banging on the hatch for someone to open it and swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the water lest he float out to sea through the 39-foot hole made by the torpedo.
At that Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very hard – even after almost 40 years.
What Else We Know
John Crewdson's meticulously documented article, together with the 57 pages that James Bamford devotes to the incident in his book Body of Secretsand recent confessions by those who played a role in the cover-up, paint a picture that the surviving crew of the USS Liberty can only find infuriating. The evidence, from intercepted communications as well as testimony, of Israeli deliberate intent is unimpeachable, even though the Israelis continue to portray the incident as merely a terrible mistake.
Crewdson refers to U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who was the Navy lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, named by Admiral John S. McCain (Sen. John McCain's father) to "inquire into all the facts and circumstances." The fact that they were given only one week to gather evidence and were forbidden to contact the Israelis screams out "cover-up."
Captain Boston, now 84, signed a formal declaration on Jan. 8, 2004 in which he described himself as "outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity.'" Boston continued:
"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...Not only did the Israelis attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had been launched in an attempt by the crew to save the most seriously wounded – a war crime...I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."
Why the Israelis decided to take the draconian measure of sinking a ship of the U.S. Navy is open to speculation. One view is that the Israelis did not want the U.S. to find out they were massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, and wanted to deprive the U.S. of the opportunity to argue against such a move. Another theory: James Bamford, in Body of Secrets," adduces evidence, including reporting from an Israeli journalist eyewitness and an Israeli military historian, of wholesale killing of Egyptian prisoners of war at the coastal town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was patrolling directly opposite El Arish in international waters but within easy range to pick up intelligence on what was going on there. And the Israelis were well aware.
As for the why, well, someone could at least approach the Israelis involved and ask, no? The important thing here is not to confuse what is known (the deliberate nature of the Israeli attack) with the purpose behind it, which remains a matter of speculation.
Other Indignities
Bowing to intense pressure from the Navy, the White House agreed to award the Liberty's skipper, Captain William McGonagle, the Medal of Honor....but not at the White House, and not by the president (as is the custom). Rather, the Secretary of the Navy gave the award at the Washington Navy Yard on the banks of the acrid Anacostia River. A naval officer involved in the awards ceremony told one of the Liberty crew, "The government is pretty jumpy about Israel...the State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal."
Adding insult to injury, those of the Liberty crew who survived well enough to call for an independent investigation have been hit with charges of, you guessed it, anti-Semitism.
Now that some of the truth is emerging more and more, others are showing more courage in speaking out. In a recent email, an associate of mine who has followed Middle East affairs for almost 60 years, shared the following:
"The chief of the intelligence analysts studying the Arab/Israeli region at the time told me about the intercepted messages and said very flatly and firmly that the pilots reported seeing the American flag and repeated their requests for confirmation of the attack order. Whole platoons of Americans saw those intercepts. If NSA now says they do not exist, then someone ordered them destroyed."
Leaving the destruction of evidence without investigation is an open invitation to repetition in the future.
As for the larger picture, visiting Israel this past summer I was constantly told that Egypt forced Israel into war in June 1967. This does not square with the unguarded words of Menachem Begin in 1982, when he was Israel's prime minister. Rather he admitted publicly:
"In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
Israel had, in fact, prepared well militarily and mounted provocations against its neighbors, in order to provoke a response that could be used to justify an expansion of its borders. Israel's illegal 40-year control over and confiscation of land in the occupied territories and U.S. enabling support (particularly the one-sided support by the current U.S. administration) go a long way toward explaining why it is that 1.3 billion Muslims "hate us."
This article was first posted on Consortiumnews.com
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=11719 | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 7:16 pm Post subject: |
| Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2007 12:07:56 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: Fwd: Israel isn't America's best ally
To: BGJDAVID
Excellent reply to that propagandizing/truth distorting Israel firster, Jim.. Did you get a get a chance to listen to the question/comment about the USS Liberty which was made to neocon propagandist David Horowitz during his 'In Depth' interview on C-SPAN 2 yesterday? It came within the second half hour of the second hour of the three hour broadcast.
Then I finally got a chance to hit him as well (during the last half hour of the broadcast) in mentioning Kevin MacDonald's 'Thinking about Neoconservatism' article and calling Horowitz a neoconservative in the process. Horowitz replied with the usual mantra of calling Professor MacDonald an anti-Semite and denying that he was a neoconservative. I later did a search and found the following piece by an AEI associate:
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.7387,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
Forwarded:
Can access the 'In Depth' interview with Horowitz from yesterday (which is archived at www.booktv.org) as he got hammered about the USS Liberty and his passionate attachment for Israel in the second half hour of the second hour of the three hour broadcast.. Then he was exposed as the neoconservative (war for Israel) propagandist that he is in the last half hour of the broadcast... Kevin MacDonald's 'Thinking about Neoconservatism' article was mentioned as well:
Thinking about Neoconservatism:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/04/06/neoconservatism-as-a-jewish-movement.php
In Depth with David Horowitz:
http://www.booktv.org/programs_archive.aspx?SectionName=In%20Depth
That 'In Depth' interview with Horowitz should repeat this coming weekend as I was also able to mention the Mearsheimer and Walt book during the 'In Depth' interview with Christopher Hitchens last month as well.. Can access that one as well via www.booktv.org
General Jim David is mentioned on the cover of the third edition of former Republican Congressman Paul Findley's 'They Dare to Speak Out' book (the third edition) about the power/influence of the pro-Israel lobby (AIPAC and similar):
BGJDAVID wrote:
This column appeared in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It made my blood boil and even though I just had a Letter to the Editor published 3 days ago, I had to respond. My letter will follow.
Anti-Israel rhetoric? Americans can turn the page
By Jeffrey K. Salkin
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/08/07
Anyone who spends as much time in bookstores as I do can smell an emerging literary fad. About 10 years ago, it was books about angels. Not to be undone, the rationalists and atheists have launched their own cottage industry of "God doesn't exist" and "He's mean" books —- Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, among them.
We are witnessing the birth of another literary craze —- the "Do we really need Israel, anyway?" book.
It started with last year's "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid," by former president Jimmy Carter, and now it continues with "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. The authors, fresh from their devastating smear of Israel in "The London Review of Books," do more than simply expound upon the power and influence of Israel's lobbyists in Washington.
With their exaggerations and distortions, they do more than simply get it wrong. They have actually reversed the clock of American social and religious history. It's as if they are holding a seance and invoking the spirits of Henry Ford, Father Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh. As a modern Hebrew poet once put it: "The Middle Ages are approaching."
You don't need to visit one of those medieval fairs, complete with jousting pseudo-knights and bawdy maidens. Mearsheimer and Walt bring us back to the Middle Ages without even getting into costume. Their rhetoric is resplendent with suspicions about Jewish conspiracies and hidden Jewish cabals (the word itself is related to "cabbala," with its mystical, hidden and sinister overtones). It's nothing less than "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," 2007 version —- from Czarist Russia right to the front table at your local chain bookstore. It's actually worse than "The Protocols" —- everyone (sooner or later) knew that was a forgery. Mearsheimer and Walt, with their Judeophobic sniffing-out of the powerful Jews who control American foreign policy, have already bypassed nineteenth century Russia. They are taking us back on a magical mystery ride to allegations of Jews poisoning wells and kidnapping Christian children —- or was that Christian politicians, who are forced into doing the bidding of the Jews?
Mearsheimer and Walt are wrong. Yes, there is a very effective pro-Israel lobby in Washington. They do their job very well. So, by the way, do the people who work for AARP and the NRA. Lobbies are part of the price that we pay for a democratic system with numerous, often discordant voices.
But besides being wrong, Mearsheimer and Walt have allies in interesting places. At an anti-war rally, U.S. Rep. James P. Moran (D-Va.) suggested that it was nothing less than the massive support of the American Jewish community that kept the Iraq war going. Never mind the fact that all recent surveys show that American Jews are virtually univocal in their denunciation of the war, and never mind the fact that Israeli military experts counseled against the adventure. Leftists sniff about the neo-cons (read: Jewish intellectuals and policy wonks) who have been cheerleaders for current government policy in the Middle East. None of this is, as my grandmother would have said, good for the Jews.
And why should Americans care about what a few academics and their ilk are saying about Israel? In my numerous conversations about Israel and the Middle East with Atlantans of all walks of life, I have discovered that support for the state of Israel is long and deep. It pre-dates that historical moment when Eddie Jacobson, Harry Truman's former business partner, pleaded with the president to see Chaim Weitzman, who would become the nascent state's first president.
Americans respect Israel. They see Israel, even with its many imperfections, as a mirror of American values and struggles. A militarily and economically strong Israel may no longer be a David fighting the Arab Goliath. But Americans, especially in the six years since Sept. 11, wisely see another potential Goliath on the horizon of the Middle East —- and it's a potential nuclear Goliath armed not only with bombs, but also with a very nasty radical Islamist ideology. Welcome to the Middle Ages, indeed.
Luckily, most Americans are smarter than Mearsheimer and Walt. They see Israel as America's best and most dependable ally. They will not willingly retreat into anti-semitic images and mythologies that are more appropriate to 1407 than 2007.
When it comes to the Middle Ages —- been there, done that.
> Jeffrey K. Salkin of Atlanta is an ordained rabbi and director of Kol Echad, an adult Jewish learning center. He is the author of "A Dream of Zion: American Jews Reflect on Why Israel Matters to Them."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: BGJDAVID
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2007 14:15:06 EDT
Subject: Israel isn't America's best ally
To: letters@ajc.com
Israel isn't America's best ally
Jeffrey K. Salkin, in his defense of the Israeli lobby, tries to paint a picture of Israel as "a mirror of American values and struggles" ( "Anti-Israel rhetoric? Americans can turn the page," @issue, Oct.8).
Salkin attacks former president Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine:Peace not Apartheid" and John Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt's newly released book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy."
Too bad Mr. Salkin could not provide one piece of supporting evidence where Israel has benefited the American people. Instead, he speaks in general terms stating that the American people "see Israel as America's best and most dependable ally."
Tell that to the family members of the 34 American sailors killed and another 174 seriously injured when the Israelis intentionally and deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in International waters off the coast of Israel on June 8, 1967. Does that sound like America's best friend and ally?
James J. David
James J. David is a retired brigadier general who served in the Middle East in 1967. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2007 12:46 pm Post subject: |
| Phillip F. Tourney, USS Liberty Survivor, 'Treason on the High Seas'
By Phillip F. Tourney - Survivor of the USS Liberty
December 10, 2007
"The Israeli jet aircraft were ruthless and stubborn in their attempt to sink and murder all hands aboard."
As I sit in my office beginning to write my first article for American Free Press newspaper, I look out my window. I see snow covered peaks, nature at its best in Colorado. It calms me to see such beauty and thank God I’m alive with my family. As I start to write, my heart is beginning to race, my palms are sweating. I’m not as comfortable as I was just a few moments ago. I know all of you know the story of the attack on our ship, the USS LIBERTY, by the government of Israel, but it needs to be repeated.
June 8, 1967 I was a 20 year old 3rd class petty officer in damage control at the time of this sneak attack from our so-called ally, Israel. We were identified as American and friendly many hours before the slaughter began at 2:00 P.M.
The Israeli jet aircraft were ruthless and stubborn in their attempt to sink and murder all hands aboard. They hit every antennae on our ship, no accident for sure. The Israeli reconnaissance aircraft took pictures of our ship in the morning hours, nothing was missed. The attacking aircraft dropped napalm on the bridge of our ship to burn us alive.
Soon after the jets were done with us we see 3 motor torpedo boats approaching our ship at a high rate of speed. We then learned who our attackers were.
We saw 3 flags marked with the Star of David. We were in shock because the Israelis were supposed to be our allies! We had had no idea who was attacking us until then. The attacking jet aircraft were unmarked. The torpedo boats maneuvered themselves into a torpedo launch attitude, now come the 5 to 6 torpedoes. The captain was doing his best to maneuver the ship to avoid sudden death. The torpedoes whizzed by our ship, forward and aft with 1 hitting its mark, almost dead mid-ships, blowing to bits 25 American heroes who stood their ground below the water line and accepted their fate, doing their duty for the United States Government.
The torpedo gunboats were not even close to being done with us. The torpedo gunmen shot at our fire fighters and stretcher bearers, anything that moved. They were shooting at our water line to blow up the boilers inside and finish the job of sinking us.
The captain had given the order to abandon ship, as it appeared we were about to roll over. There were 3 life rafts left that were floatable. We put them over the side so we could put our most severely wounded in them to try to save their lives. The torpedo gunmen would have none of that and blew 2 of them out of the water. They took the 3rd raft aboard their boat, seeing it as an obvious trophy for all their hard work. The torpedo gunmen continued their assault until I guess they ran out of ammunition. They circled the ship and left.
Old Glory was still on her mast, 7’ x 13’ holiday colors. We thought the attack was over. Two Israeli helicopters approached our ship with armed gunmen at the ready to finish us off. They were there a short time and left in the same direction they came. We had no idea why they didn’t shoot at us. We wondered if they were finally done with their murderous carnage on a virtually unarmed ship which only had 4 50 caliber machine guns that had been taken out by the jets on the first pass when the attack began.
Little did the crew know that Terry Halbardier, an ET, got off an SOS from an antennae that was not hit by the Israeli heat seeking missiles because it was taken off line due to a malfunction before the attack. The SOS he sent stated we were under attack by unknown jet aircraft. This message was sent out within 15 minutes of the attack and was picked up by the USS SARATOGA and the USS AMERICA. Captain Tully of the USS SARATOGA sent ready aircraft to our aid only to have them recalled. The USS AMERICA also sent rescue aircraft to come to our aid. These life saving planes were recalled not once but twice. These orders came straight from the White House, first from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and then from President Johnson himself. Johnson said he was not about to attack our “ally”, Israel. How did he know who was attacking our ship when we didn’t even know? Help did not arrive until 18 hours later when the American rescue aircraft could have been there in 15 to 20 minutes driving off the torpedo boats and saving precious American lives.
What remained was a ship with a 40 x 40 foot torpedo hole in her side, 821+ canon and rocket holes, thousands of rounds of fifty caliber armor piercing bullets and napalm that had been burning up our ship. Thirty four American souls were murdered, 173 were wounded, which constituted attempted murder, out of a crew of 294. Two thirds of the crew had been murdered or wounded.
Israel and our government, in this 2 hour attack, had come up with a plan to sink our ship, blame it on Egypt and bring the U.S. into the Six Day War. If this so called accident was so cut and dry, why were all records sealed tighter than Fort Knox? Israel got by with cold-blooded murder and other war crimes and it’s only a matter of time until they do it again, perhaps on a ship off the coast of Iran. Israel controls America’s fate and our elected officials bow to their every whim.
I love my country and will not stand by and let this continue. While there is time, we must do what we can to save our sinking ship of state. In many ways, America today is the USS Liberty after that 2 hour attack taking place 40 years ago. We are badly hit and stand the chance of sinking into the abyss with everyone being lost forever unless something is done immediately. Write your president and congressmen and let them know you know what is going on and you will not fight anymore for Israel. Israel has 300 nukes, so let them take care of themselves. There is nothing, neither in the Middle East nor elsewhere, that is worth one more drop of precious American blood.
The leaders of our country who swore an oath to protect this nation ordered the survivors of the LIBERTY to never repeat this piece of history under penalty of jail or worse. 40 years ago, another nation got away with cold-blooded murder on the high seas, and as an American veteran, let me say this for the record–NO ONE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GET BY WITH COLD-BLOODED MURDER, AND ESPECIALLY NOT ISRAEL, NOT THEN AND NOT NOW.
The USS LIBERTY VETERANS ASSOCIATION is offering $10,000.00 to anyone who can disprove that our story is the truth. as of this moment, no one from the pro-Israeli crowd has accepted the challenge.
December 10, 2007 By Phil Tourney, survivor of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty.
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/12/10/treason_on_the_high_seas
Phil Tourney's 'USS Liberty Blog':
http://ussliberty.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/%e2%80%9ctreason-on-the-high-seas%e2%80%9d/ | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2008 12:12 am Post subject: |
| From: "Chuck Brucks"
Subject: "John McCain is a Fraud."
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2008 23:29:56 -0500
----- Original Message -----
From: tbacane
John McCain is a fraud and a traitor not a hero and certainly not capable of being President. So it is no wonder that he would consider the attack on the USS Liberty to have been an accident, when in fact it was a deliberate attack by Israel on our naval vessel. McCain is the kind of traitor that violates his military Code of Conduct and then has the balls to want to be Commander in Chief. Bushit! He probably should be in jail for what he did to his fellow service members and POWs. Everyone should be asking this smug bastard why he won't allow his POW records to be released. He knows he is no damn hero, the heroes are the men who he helped to kill by his treason and cowardly actions. Commander in Chief I think not!
---
----- Original Message -----
From: Chuck Brucks
To: Chuck Brucks
Sent: 2/7/2008 7:38:21 PM
Subject: An Expose on "LittleJohnnyMcCain"&HisFather(Admiral)& The USSLibertyCov...
----- Original Message -----
To: brucksc@bellsouth.net
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 9:10 PM
Subject: Fwd: An Expose on "LittleJohnnyMcCain"&HisFather(Admiral)& The USS LibertyCov...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent: 2/7/2008 6:28:26 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time
Subj: An Expose on "LittleJohnnyMcCain"&HisFather(Admiral)& The USS LibertyCoverUp!!!!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent: 2/7/2008 3:48:15 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time
Subj: Fw: Liberty incident
Please pass on!
Tom B
----- Original Message -----
From: ron
To: Lauri Kraft ; Suzanna Thomas ; Abernethy, Virginia Deane ; Tom Buggeln
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2008 1:21 PM
Subject: Fw: Liberty incident
I ask you all to please forward this as far and as wide as possible. It's something that we have known
about McCain for many years. Of course his father was the one who was really at fault here, but his
son has also defended what his father did to us many years ago. This comes to me from Paul Carig
Roberts and for those that don't know Paul has written an artictle for "Hustler" magazine about the Liberty,
which will come out in June or July.
Paul has credentials that are as long as your arm, and maybe both arms. The Liberty survivors are getting
older, and we have decided to pull out all stops. We would be called some kind of name no matter what
we tried to do to uncover the truth, so the tide is now turned. This country needs to know what Sen
McCains father did to us, and what Senator McCain has done in agreeing with the book written by
Judge A.J. Cristol stating that the attack was an accident. This whole nation needs to know that is
was not an accident, and that they meant to kill us all. We cannot blame a whole country for what
a few have done, but the people who did this must be brought to justice, if any are still alive.
Ron Kukal
----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Roberts
To: ron Kukal
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2008 12:37 PM
Subject: Liberty incident
Bryant Jordan: Demand answers about the Liberty incident
01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, February 5, 2008
BRYANT JORDAN
WASHINGTON, D.C.
IN THE PAST YEAR, Congress has been busy defending the reputations of American service members.
Republicans pushed for a resolution condemning the now famous “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” ad. Democrats opened up a front against Rush Limbaugh after he asserted that some of those who criticize the Iraq war were actually “phony soldiers.”
Meaningless antics.
If senators and representatives want to take up an issue that has insulted service members and their families, they can look at the Liberty, an American spy ship that was strafed, napalmed and torpedoed by Israeli air and naval forces on June 8, 1967, as it sailed in international waters [during the Six-Day War between Israel on one side and Egypt, Jordan and Syria on the other]. Thirty-four American men died in the incident; at least 173 were wounded.
For 40 years politicians have dodged this issue by relying on the Naval Court of Inquiry report that concluded that it was all a mistake. But that report never held much water. It ignored most of the testimony of the survivors. The last drop turned to vapor more than five years ago when its legal adviser, retired Capt. Ward Boston, told me the court’s work was a sham to cover up the truth.
Since then I found copies of Navy telegrams to the Liberty deads’ next-of-kin, in which the Navy had labeled the incident an accident even before the court convened. Anyone who knows — or can even imagine — military policy on death notification will find this more than strange.
More recently, reporter John Crewdson, in the Chicago Tribune, reported that the National Security Agency intercepts of the Israeli pilots’ communications during the attack left no doubt that Israel knew that it was attacking an American ship. Crewdson, relying on recently declassified NSA records and interviews with people with first-hand knowledge of the intercepts, tells a story that backs up the survivors’ long-dismissed claims.
Why investigate a 40-year-old incident? These Americans were serving their country, and they — and their families — deserve better than to be disregarded because their claims may embarrass a country with close connections to the U.S. or because its American supporters wield a lot of political clout.
And if American deaths of 40 years ago can be ignored, does the same hold true for deaths today or tomorrow? You would think that at a time when politicians are so quick to defend the honor and integrity of living service members and veterans, some might decide it’s time to ask some long overdue questions about those who did not come home.
Sen. John McCain, himself a Navy man who served his country in combat, ought to be interested. Five years ago, even as Captain Boston was admitting what many had long suspected about the court’s work, McCain was endorsing The Liberty Incident, a book that argues the attack was a tragic misunderstanding.
McCain’s connection to Liberty is personal. His father, Adm. John S. McCain, then commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe, ordered the court to be convened and offered the first official endorsement of its findings.
In 2002, Senator McCain noted on the back jacket of The Liberty Incident that author A. Jay Cristol “reached a similar conclusion to the one my father reached in his June 18, 1967, endorsement of the court of inquiry. I commend . . . Cristol for his thoroughness and fairness, and I commend this work.”
What, then, does McCain owe to the survivors and the dead of the Liberty, given that the report has been skewed and new evidence and witnesses point to a different conclusion? How about his fellow senators, so ready to defend living veterans from the rantings of talk-show hosts, or the hundreds of legislators in the House who ran to the battlements to defend General Petraeus’s good name from a newspaper ad?
Where Congress was right to interject itself was in the case of Pat Tilman, the soldier whose friendly-fire death was covered up by who-knows-how-many rungs in the chain of command. Tilman’s family and his fellow Americans deserve to know what really happened to him on that day. Same with the Liberty crew — the living and the dead.
Congress at long last needs to muster the courage and decency to demand answers to what really happened to those American sons. Until it does so, it only shames itself by posing as the defender of American troops against radio hosts and newspaper ads.
Bryant Jordan, a journalist and a Vietnam veteran, is associate editor of military.com ( bryant.jordan@military-inc..com). | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2008 12:16 am Post subject: |
| Bryant Jordan (mentioned in the prior post above) wrote the following article which first appeared in the Marine Times and then appeared in the Navy Times as well:
For the truth on the USS Liberty, please access the following:
http://www.ussliberty.org
REMEMBER THE USS LIBERTY
This is in rememberance to our valiant American naval men who lost their precious lives in a brutal attack on the USS Liberty June 8, 1967. Also, to the brave men who were wounded and kept the Liberty from sinking. Israel didn't expect such a formidable effort as our naval men showed them that day.
Israel Attack On USS Liberty
'No Accident' Says Helms
By Bryant Jordan Staff Writer
Marine Corps Times
From Navy Times
7-7-2
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. Should Congress reopen the investigation into the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty? The Israelis claim the attack was a mistake; some veterans contend it was deliberate. As of 8:40 PDT Sunday, 67% say YES.
http://members.aol.com/w4lmk/sdari/
http://www.ussliberty.org
Body of Secrets
provides new Liberty revelations
http://www.ussliberty.org/margolis.txt
A report based on eyewitness accounts from the Israeli press
http://www.ussliberty.org/washrp96.txt
Liberty web sites by other USS Liberty crewmen
http://www.ussliberty.org/crewsite.htm
Memorials to our lost shipmates
http://www.ussliberty.org/memorial.txt
Awards and Medals
http://www.ussliberty.org/awards.htm
Annual Ceremony by No Greater Love
http://www.ussliberty.org/greater.htm
Did Israel commit one war crime to after another?
http://www.ussliberty.org/washrp96.txt
Statement by JCS Chairman Admiral Thomas H. Moorer
http://www.ussliberty.org/moorer3.txt
Charley Reese reviews new book about USS Liberty
http://www.ussliberty.org/reese.htm
New evidence on USS Liberty:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/10/31/new-evidence-on-uss-liberty.php
sc&start=20
US/UN Double Standard When It Comes to Israel
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/09/15/us-un-double-standard-when-it-comes-to-israel.php
War Without End :: View topic - VFW RESOLUTION DEMANDING ISRAELI USS LIBERTY INVESTIGATION:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/09/20/vfw-resolution-demanding-israeli-uss-liberty-investigation.php
AGTR-5
Sham Naval Court of Inquiry (into the USS Liberty Attack)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+_+_+
The Naval Court of Inquiry was a major event in 1967. And
Ward Boston was a major player in the Court. And now we find
out that the survivors were right, the court was a fraud and
a sham, with the outcome directed by the U.S. government.
I am puzzled why the media does not treat Ward Boston's words
for what they are worth! This is a huge story and should be
in every paper in the country. The USS Liberty attack was
covered up by the U.S. Government!
This is exactly how I feel as well.. Believe me as there definitely is some kind of conspiracy going on in the US media/press regarding the Liberty attack and ongoing cover-up because I contacted all the major press/media establishments (Washington Post, Fox News Channel, Associated Press, CNN, etc.) about that above referenced Navy Times article (with Captain Boston's comments conveying the cover-up), and not one has covered it to my info. We are talking about a 35 year cover-up and documents still clasified at the NSA which could potentially further reveal prrof of such... Look at what James Bamford (with his "Body of Secrets" book has already revealed by getting access to those NSA documents that he was able to get access to as there are others that are still classified (some 35 years later, but why as what are the Israeli and American governments stilling wanting to keep from getting out so many years later?).
AP Review of Cristol's Bogus Book ("The Liberty Incident"):
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A scorching review of A. Jay Cristol's "The Liberty Incident" was on the
Associated Press news wire August 2, 2002.
The review is reproduced below, but we do not know what newspapers actually printed it.
=======================================================
Friday, August 2, 2002
`Liberty' attack still a mystery
By DAVID SMYTH
Associated Press
On June 8, 1967, Israeli warplanes and gunboats almost destroyed but did
not sink the USS Liberty.
Even after 35 years, it seems nothing can douse the smoldering dispute
about that attack on the nearly defenseless U.S. intelligence-gathering
vessel. In fact, The Liberty Incident, by A. Jay Cristol, will probably fan
the flames of controversy.
Thirty-four Americans were killed and 172 wounded in the attack. At 69
percent of the crew, it was one of the highest casualty rates ever suffered
by a U.S. Navy vessel.
The focus of the dispute is: Was the attack accidental or intentional?
Israel claimed its forces had mistaken the Liberty for an Egyptian
horse-transport a few miles off the Egyptian coast during the 1967
Arab-Israeli war, and apologized. The Johnson administration accepted the
apology and did not formally challenge the explanation.
However, knowledgeable contemporaries have long claimed the attack was
deliberate. They include, among others, former Secretary of State Dean
Rusk; former CIA Director Richard Helms; former National Security
Administration Director Marshall Carter; one-time presidential advisers
George Ball and Lucius Battle; the Liberty's captain, Cmdr. William
McGonagle; and surviving crew members.
More recently, Capt. Ward Boston, legal counsel to the 1967 naval court of
inquiry presided over by Rear Adm. Isaac Kidd, has spoken up. On June 26,
Boston told a Navy Times reporter he and Kidd believed the Israelis knew
they were attacking an American ship. The court itself, an internal naval
review, did not address the matter of Israeli responsibility.
Curiously, Cristol, whose book is devoted wholeheartedly to the "clear
conclusion" the attack was accidental, there being "no competent evidence
to the contrary," has dedicated his work to Kidd. And he says Kidd told him
he always believed the Israeli attack was accidental. Kidd died in 1999, so
the discrepancy with Boston's statement remains unresolved.
Lt. Cmdr. James Ennes, the Liberty's deck officer during the attack and
author of the book Assault on the Liberty, says Kidd repeatedly encouraged
him to challenge claims of an accident. Cristol apparently interviewed very
few Liberty crew members. He cites no interviews with a dozen who say the
Liberty's life rafts were machine-gunned by the Israeli gunboats, nor with
others who say the Liberty was overflown by an Israeli helicopter filled
with armed men.
Cristol says he was given liberal access to Israeli officials and records,
thanks to Israeli navy friends. He reports an Israeli reconnaissance plane
identified the Liberty as an American ship eight hours before the attack
and Lt. Cmdr. Uri Meretz then specifically identified it as the Liberty. A
marker representing the ship was placed on the plotting table in the war room.
Five hours later - three hours before the attack - the marker was removed,
and this, it is alleged, led to the mistaken assault.
Cristol dismisses various possible motives for an intentional Israeli
attack. One was Israel's need to prevent American foreknowledge of its
impending invasion of Syria's Golan Heights, a move opposed by U.S. policy.
Another was the desire to cover up a massacre of Egyptian prisoners at El
Arish, a few miles from the Liberty.
Members of the Liberty Veterans Association have long complained none of the U.S. investigations was ever convened to discover whether the attack was deliberate. They note that even the initial Navy Court of Inquiry took no testimony from the crew about possible Israeli culpability, leaving that issue to Congress and the State Department, which ignored the question.
John Borne, in an academic study of the Liberty incident, points out that
this is the only peacetime attack on a U.S. Navy vessel that did not have a formal congressional investigation.
According to the Navy Times, a number of U.S. naval officers are requesting a congressional inquiry. Until this demand is met, and until all secret U.S. government files are released, the Liberty question will probably remain unanswered.
John Borne's Excellent Web Site (about USS Liberty)
http://www.logogo.net/00liberty.htm
VFW RESOLUTION DEMANDING ISRAELI USS LIBERTY
INVESTIGATION:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/09/20/vfw-resolution-demanding-israeli-uss-liberty-investigation.php
US/UN Double Standard When It Comes to Israel:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/09/15/us-un-double-standard-when-it-comes-to-israel.php
Price of Support for Israel
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/12/17/the-price-of-israel.php
Passionate Attachment for Israel
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/12/24/passionate-attachment-to-israel.php
Coming War has Been Planned Years in Advance
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/12/25/a-war-in-the-planning-for-four-years.php
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