Letters to the Editor
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Apparently not a theory anymore
This is the freshest news on the incident that I can find. Truly amazing that there is hardly any reporting of this. They must all care more about Obama's black preacher and bowling, like Gator90.
chicagotribune.com
TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT: THE STRIKE ON THE USS LIBERTY
Additional material published Dec 2
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 at http://www.nsa.gov/liberty .
[...]
THE ATTACK ON THE LIBERTY
1:56 p.m. Two Israeli Mirage III aircraft, followed by two Super Mystere aircraft, begin their attack on the Liberty.
2:14 p.m. The chief Israeli air controller in Tel Aviv tells the controller who is directing the attack on the Liberty that the ship is "apparently American."
[...]
Sources: National Security Agency documents, Tribune reporting
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-liberty_tuesoct02,1,6293149,print.story
Apparently not a theory anymore.
Even Israelis heard more about it than we did.
Last update - 14:04 04/10/2007
Israeli communications said to prove IAF knew Liberty was U.S. ship
By Yossi Melman, Haaretz Correspondent
The Israel Air Force warplanes and Israel Navy warships that attacked the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, at the height of the Six-Day War, were aware that the vessel was an American spy ship, according to new testimony published Thursday in the Chicago Tribune.
The report stated that the U.S. National Security Agency - to which the intelligence gathering ship belonged - was able to intercept IAF communications according to which, at some stage, the pilots identified the ship as American but were nonetheless instructed to push ahead with the attack.
According to the report, some of the transcripts and intelligence information have disappeared, while the rest can be found in U.S. government archives.
Oliver Kirby, the NSA's deputy director for operations at the time of the Liberty attack, is quoted by the Tribune as confirming the existence of the transcripts, saying he personally read them.
"They said, 'We've got him in the zero,'" Kirby was quoted as saying, "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 told the newspaper that 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."
The report also states that then U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara ordered jets that had been dispatched to assist the Liberty turned around.
The Tribune quotes 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, as saying that he listened in as McNamara said, "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."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/909552.html
Israel still denies it wasn't a case of mistaken identity. So would this administration, I suppose.