| Author | Message | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 8:34 am Post subject: Murder on the USS Liberty |
| Lockwood was one of three US Marines assigned on Liberty, the only Marine to survive the attack on the Liberty. He was awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart. He later became a Pastor.
Murder on the USS Liberty
Survivor of Israeli attack remains full of anger.
Brian Lewis, Associate Editorial Page Editor Springfield News-Leader (MO)
There's no statute of limitations for war crimes. There's also no statue of limitations for murder.
Bryce Lockwood of Strafford was a witness to both. He was a member of the crew of the USS Liberty, which Israel attacked on June 8, 1967. On that day, 34 of his fellow crewmen died and 174 were injured, including himself.
Link with pictures of Lockwood, then badly burned and today.
Staff Sgt. Bryce Lockwood after he was burned in the attack on the USS Liberty.
Local peace activist Joan Collins called to tell me about Lockwood after a recent column about a program on forgiveness at Evangel University. Here's a somewhat similar story, she suggested.
Lockwood was the focus of a Chicago Tribune story published earlier this month. The reporter started off his story with Lockwood screaming into the phone at him. He quoted Lockwood in the second paragraph: "I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething with anger."
Forty years.
On the 40th anniversary of the attack, the National Security Agency declassified several documents related to the attack. They can be found at http:// www.nsa.gov/liberty/.
On that government Web site is this message: "The attack on the USS Liberty, like others in our nation's history, has become the center of considerable controversy and debate. It is not NSA's intention to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material."
How diplomatic. Many conclusions can be drawn from a thorough review of the material.
Lockwood has drawn his conclusion. The Israeli military deliberately attacked the USS Liberty, attempting to sink it and kill all its crew. Why? Lockwood would like to know that.
"We wish we knew the answer to that and for our own government to cover it up for 40 years is preposterous," he said.
The official Israel story has been that they mistook the ship for a much smaller Egyptian horse carrier.
"For Israel to say it was a case of mistaken identity, give me a break," he said.
It's a violation of international law, Lockwood said, to fire on a ship without first identifying it. The Liberty had the letters GTR 8 feet tall, which meant it was a general technical research ship, a noncombatant.
It also would be hard not to know that the USS Liberty was an American ship because the ship was flying an American flag. When the original flag was shot down, the sailors raised up a larger flag.
One Israeli pilot even protested that he was supposed to attack an American ship. His supervisor told him to attack anyway, according to a Chicago Tribune story published earlier this month.
What's more, Lockwood said, the Liberty radio frequencies were jammed so that it could not easily send out a distress signal.
"You can't jam somebody's else's radio frequencies if you don't know who they are," he said.
Also, Israeli boats machine-gunned the Liberty's life rafts, which Lockwood said is another war crime.
Only one investigation has ever been conducted into the event. It was completed 10 days after the attack. Adm. Isaac Kidd Jr. presided over that hasty investigation. Many Liberty survivors were not even given an opportunity to speak.
"Can you just imagine the anger that's burning inside us?" Lockwood asks.
It took a while to see Collins' point about forgiveness. How does this angry man relate to that? But near the end of our interview, I told Lockwood how I'd heard stories about medical malpractice situations where doctors admitted they'd done something wrong. He finished my sentence for me at first. He thought of the times when doctors would say, "I did nothing wrong. I'm not at fault." That's essentially been his experience with the state of Israel. They claim they did nothing wrong, that they made an innocent mistake.
But what if, I asked him. What if the state of Israel acknowledged that they deliberately attacked the Liberty, it was not an accident and they explained why they did it?
He exhaled. "That would help so much," he said, almost sighing in a vastly different tone of voice. "That would help so much," he repeated.
As it is, no one expects that anything like that might happen. Israel is surrounded by enemies and they believe they can't show weakness.
Lockwood would like a congressional investigation to be opened into this incident. He believes that some Israelis still living could be tried on war crimes charges.
And to even discuss this incident is to risk charges of anti-Semitism. But we can't cover up what happened and just say that Israel is our friend. The truth needs to be acknowledged here by both the U.S. and Israel.
As Lockwood said, there's no statute of limitations on war crimes. And time won't begin to heal his wounds without more resolution. | |  | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
