USS Liberty was very conspicuously arrayed with the numerous specialized antennas and an ultramodern (for 1967) 16-foot microwave dish. A device possessed by no other ship in the world, except her sister ship Belmont. She bore standard US Navy markings, which included a freshly painted 10-foot high hull number, and USS Liberty on the stern. The radio jamming is by itself damning evidence that the assailants knew exactly whom they were attacking. As such jamming requires intimate advance knowledge of the target being jammed, obtained by extended monitoring of its signals. This was selective jamming; it struck Liberty’s frequencies and no others.

Afterward, in one of their ever changing explanations, the Israelis claimed to have learned the ship’s identity when they heard its distress signals. But the attack continued for sixty six minutes after the first distress signal (which the Israelis had jammed) was sent. Had this particular Israeli claim been true, they would have recalled the torpedo boats before they even reached the ship. The Israelis claimed that the ship’s US flag hung limp because there was no wind. Later, when presented with the fact that the flag had been perfectly visible, they claimed that they thought that the ship was an enemy vessel flying false colors.

The extended radio monitoring, exposing considerable advance investigation of Liberty’s communication facilities, refutes this claim. The Israelis claimed that the torpedo boats, after first sighting the ship, had called in the aircraft to attack after the ship refused to identify itself. This is an obvious lie, because the attack was clearly a preplanned and well coordinated punch, employing different branches of the Israeli Defense Forces. The jets were already intent on attacking the ship before the Liberty came into the torpedo boat’s radar range. Directly contradicting themselves, the Israelis later claimed that their aircraft had called in the torpedo boats.

The Israelis eventually admitted that before the attack, their commanders had compared reconnaissance photos of the Liberty with Jane’s Fighting Ships. But they claimed that before the attack they twice telephoned the US naval attache in Tel Aviv inquiring whether the Liberty was a US ship and were told that there were no US Navy ships in the area. They claimed that having received a negative reply, they decided that the ship had to be the El Quseir. However, the US embassy in Tel Aviv, and later the naval attache, emphatically stated that no such inquiries were made. The Israelis not only knew the ship’s nationality and that she was an ‘ELINT’ ship; they also knew she was USS Liberty herself.

Immediately preceding the attack, an Israeli pilot recognized Liberty as a US ship and radioed this information to IDF headquarters. He was instructed to attack anyway. This dialogue was intercepted at the US embassy in Beirut. Former US Ambassador to Lebanon Dwight Porter revealed the existence of this intercept in 1991. Finally, there is evidence, circumstantial but clear, of a relationship between the attack on the Liberty and a postponement of Israel’s planned attack on the Golan Heights. The Golan attack was scheduled for 11:30am on June 8th; the Liberty was spotted by 6am or earlier; last minute orders delayed the Golan attack; the Liberty was put out of commission; and the Golan attack occurred shortly thereafter. The vaunted IDF made very few mistakes in that war.

After the attack Secretary of State Dean Rusk recommended a strong response, and Presidential Counselor Clark Clifford advised President Johnson to treat Israel in the same manner as the US would treat the Soviets or the Arabs if they had committed the atrocity. The US would certainly not have taken this insult in silence had the offender been any country but Israel. But President Johnson stoically accepted Israel’s explanation. The Navy conducted a Court of Inquiry, which ignored and even suppressed testimony that the attack had been deliberate; it dealt only with the actions and performance of the Liberty crew.

State Department legal advisor Carl Salans performed an assessment of Israel’s official explanation; with only the Navy’s highly incomplete and erroneous preliminary investigation to go on, he thoroughly discredited the Israeli Government’s claims of innocent error. The logical next step was to confront the Israelis with his findings, but that was not done. The US regime inaction was completely out of keeping with the outrageousness of the attack. What was Israel’s motive for this act? The scheduling of the Israeli assault on the Golan Heights for June 8th, was a move to defeat an intense effort in the United Nations to halt the war, a ceasefire having been scheduled for June 9th. A pressure was also being applied by the US.

The IDF leaders were under stress to acquire the Golan before the ceasefire was imposed, preferably without being labeled the aggressor (as in 1956 when Israel had colluded with Britain and France to attack Egypt). But with all the pressure to attack Syria, and after all the hurried preparations to do so, the Golan attack was suddenly called off within hours of its scheduled commencement. Why? Obviously, someone in the IDF leadership feared the Liberty might intercept some of the many signals then filling the air that would expose Israel’s preparations for invasion. They might then be forced into a ceasefire before they conquered the coveted territory.

Mind you, US 6th Fleet, positioned nearby, received a distress call from the Liberty, and one carrier dispatched a squadron to search for the disabled ship. Yet before USS Liberty was found, the fleet received devious orders from Washington, ordering the planes back. Moorer called on Congress to clear up once-and-for-all the uncertainties, speculation and unanswered questions surrounding this tragedy. Which is still thought by many to be a deliberate cover-up on the part of US establishment and Israeli junta. The following appeared in the Fall, 1995 (Vol 8, No 3 Issue of the) International Journal of Intelligence & Counterintelligence. The Attack on the Liberty: an ‘Accident’? By Reverdy S Fishel.

Although David Rodman’s review of ‘The Secret War Against the Jews’: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People, by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, notes some of the serious flaws in that work, his critique contains its own serious flaw that should gall anyone who knows a few basic, uncomplicated facts about the Israel’s June 8th, 1967 attack on the electronic intelligence ship, USS Liberty. All serious scholarship on the subject accepts Israel’s assault as having been perpetrated quite deliberately, but Rodman says that the ‘most credible’ explanation of the attack is that it was an ‘accident’. To see so flagrant a misstatement in IJIC, considering its standards of factuality, is startling. Assault on the Liberty (1980), by James Ennes, a lieutenant who was on the bridge during the attack, was a very big seller; so the facts of the case need not be out of anyone’s reach.

In fact, Israel’s attack on the Liberty was as accidental as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The US military had posted the Liberty off the coast of Gaza, in international waters, to monitor developments in the region during the Six Day War. At dawn June 8th, 1967, Israeli aircraft began reconnoitering the ship, some flying so close that the pilots could clearly be seen, and as low as masthead height, obviously photographing it. This extensive observation lasted seven hours and involved eight separate observations, at about 0600, 0900, 1000, 1030, 1100, and 1130, 1200 and 1215pm.

US intercept stations twice overheard Israeli pilots reporting that the ship was American. The visibility conditions were perfect; the ship’s American flag was flying free and clear in a good breeze. At 1400 a well coordinated attack by jet aircraft and torpedo boats began. Jets hammered the virtually unarmed ship with cannon and rockets, and napalmed it. Its forward machineguns were wiped out in the first firing pass, and whatever transmitting antennas survived that pass were disabled by the second. Nine minutes into the attack, crewmen jury-rigged a transmitter to an antenna. But the radiomen discovered that four out of five of the ship’s radio frequencies, including the international distress frequency, were being jammed.

Ironically, the only time Liberty could transmit was while the jets were firing their missiles. A frantic cry for help was sent to the Sixth Fleet, only 400 miles away and off Crete; despite the Israeli jamming, the Liberty’s plea for assistance was received. The patchwork transmitting arrangement ceased functioning soon afterward. Torpedo boats soon arrived and continued the attack, firing five torpedoes, with one hitting and killing 25 men. They then leisurely circled the defenseless ship for 40 minutes, pumping hundreds of 40mm, 20mm, and 50cal rounds at wounded men on deck, stretcher bearers and fire fighters.

Thinking the ship was about to sink, the crew threw life rafts over the side; the attackers machinegunned those too. With increased radio activity from the US Sixth Fleet indicating an impending US response (many of the Fleet’s messages bore ‘Flash’ precedence), the Israelis suddenly contacted the US embassy and informed it of this ‘accident’. It was probably the longest ‘accidental’ attack in the history of naval warfare an hour and 15 minutes. Two separate flights of jets from the carriers America and Saratoga were recalled by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the first flight probably because Washington was not absolutely certain of the attacker’s identity and was leery of starting a war with the Russians if they were the guilty party. The second flight was recalled after receipt of the Israeli xplanation.

Ironically enough since Russia was the unofficial enemy of the US, a Russian warship that was nearby came over after the attack to assist the USS Liberty. Though the Liberty declined Russian ship’s help (nevertheless, the Russians stood by and waited until shortly before the American warship arrived, which is probably a good thing, as the Israelis might have returned to finish the job). It was 15 hours before help finally arrived from an American vessel. The crew had been left for dead; it was a miracle, given the vicious nature of the attack (as USS Liberty looked like Swiss cheese), that most survived.

As a result amateur folks visiting this forum to endure Zionist chutzpah all along by the verbose Chris, unyielding as ever to pursue his modus operandi …”official inquiries have convinced a great many well informed (zionist) people of the accidental nature”… tantamount to zionazi academy ploys to ignore any proof presented and demand the impossible corroborations.

This is perhaps a variant of the ‘play it dumb’ rule … regardless of what material may be presented by the well-meaning truth-seeker, claim the material was irrelevant and demand a proof that is impossible for an amateur to come by (it may exist but not be at the disposal, or it may be something which is withheld or destroyed).

So don’t hold your breath guys, to get your logical elaborations through the unusually thick skin with an ability to persevere and persist even in the face of overwhelming global community criticism and unacceptance. This likely stems from intelligence community training (at Pine Gap, Echelon installations) that no matter how condemning the evidence is, deny everything, and never become emotionally involved for real, or reactive.

Versus truth seeking folks who rather to examine the veracity of http://ussliberty.org published version on July 14th, 2003. According to which US Senator Adlai Stevenson III (in 1980, his last year as a US Senator from Illinois), invited USS Liberty lieutenant Jim Ennes to his Senate office for a private two hour meeting to discuss USS Liberty attack on June 8th, 1967 (and cover-up). Following an initial private meeting, Ennes was invited-back the next day to discuss the matter with the members of Stevenson’s staff, joined by members of the staff of Senator Barry Goldwater and members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

During that meeting USS Liberty lieutenant Jim Ennes was told that that his story was found to be convincing, yet no recommendation for the action will be issued to the senators (to pursue investigation), which only to antagonise Israeli interests while ‘nothing good could come of it’. Senator Goldwater accepted staff counsel, but Stevenson called a press conference in which he announced that he was convinced that the USS Liberty attack was deliberate and that the survivors deserved an investigation. So he would (he said), spend the remaining few weeks of his Senate term, attempting to arrange for an inquiry.

Almost immediately Israeli junta spin doctors contacted the White House and offered to settle the outstanding $40million damage claims via $6million compromise. Vice President Walter Mondale quickly agreed to that offer just before Christmas while Congress and President Carter were on vacation. The Department of State followed immediately with a press release, reported on the front page of the New York Times, which announced, ‘The book is now closed on the USS Liberty’.

Indeed, from that point on, it was impossible to generate any congressional interest in USS Liberty at all. Senator Stevenson’s staff told later that they felt the settlement was directly related to Senator Stevenson’s announced plan to hold an inquiry, and was engineered to block forever any inquiry plans. Israel did subsequently pay $6million in three annual installments of $2million each. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said later that he considered the payments meaningless, as Congress merely increased the annual Israeli allotment by that amount.

Adlai Stevenson later ran for Governor of Illinois. He was strongly opposed by Israeli / Zionist interests. No wonder, he lost. Many feel it was his support for USS Liberty that cost him the election. Many also feel it was Stevenson’s experience with the Liberty that has intimidated also other members of Congress who might otherwise support the survivors. Thomas Moorer accused US regime and Israeli junta of covering-up evidence surrounding the 1967 Israeli attack on the American intelligence ship USS Liberty as 34 American crewmen were killed and 171 wounded in the combined air and sea attack on June 8th, 1967, against the reconnaissance ship, cruising in international waters 15 miles off the Sinai Peninsula during the Six Day War.

Israel maintains its fighter pilots, who buzzed the ship for eight hours before the attack (along with torpedo boat crews), mistook USS Liberty for an Egyptian ship. ‘The Israelis maintain this was simply a case of mistaken identity, but this clearly does not hold water’, said Moorer, who was chief of naval operations at the time of the attack. ‘In clear visibility, this unique ship was very easy to identify. ‘The Israeli forces circled the ship and then proceeded to attack over an extended period of time. There is simply no way the fighter pilots and torpedo boat crews could have come to such a conclusion’, he said.

And Who is the Israeli pilot? Why does no one know? One could easily have said that they were in a group meeting with the CO of the boat. And at that meting they were all informed of the story they must tell in order to get revenge. Of course there are no minutes of that meeting and I can’t tell you who the sailor was who told me. He could get killed.

That is the gist of the credibility of McCloskey’s story.

The truth, which you can all read form the latest official inquiry, is that it was a tragic accident.

http://www.ussliberty.org/
USS Liberty pix WAR CRIMES REPORT FILED BY USS LIBERTY SURVIVORS USS Liberty pix
USS Liberty pix HTML Version of War Crimes Report USS Liberty pix

The USS Liberty Veterans Association has filed a formal
Report of War Crimes Committed Against U.S. Military Personnel,
June 8, 1967, by elements of the Israeli military forces.

The Report has been filed with the Department of Defense.

http://home.cfl.rr.com/gidusko/liberty/
“On that June day in 1967, the weather was beautiful… Clear and sunny, visibility unlimited… the LIBERTY, an elaborate state-of-the art intelligence gathering platform, was in international waters off the Gaza strip and was flying the Stars and Stripes. Israeli reconnaissance planes flew overhead for hours. Pilots and ship’s crew waved to each other. Then, inexplicably, unmarked Israeli aircraft began attacking the ship.

The defenseless LIBERTY radioed for help. Two aircraft carriers in the Med responded by launching fighter aircraft. Unbelievably, they were recalled by the White House. RADM Geis, then commanding the carriers in the Sixth Fleet, called Washington personally to confirm the order. SecDef McNamara came on the line, then President Johnson. Johnson indicated to Geis that the aircraft were to be returned, that he would not have his allies embarrassed, and that he didn’t care who was killed or what was done to the ship. Geis, like any good sailor, recalled the aircraft.”

http://www.ussliberty.org/report/report.pdf

http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0693/9306019.htm
June 1993, Page 19

This Month in History

The Assault on the USS Liberty Still Covered Up After 26 Years

By James M. Ennes Jr.

Twenty-six years have passed since that clear day on June 8, 1967 when Israel attacked the USS Liberty with aircraft and torpedo boats, killing 34 young men and wounding 171. The attack in international waters followed over nine hours of close surveillance. Israeli pilots circled the ship at low level 13 times on eight different occasions before attacking. Radio operators in Spain, Lebanon, Germany and aboard the ship itself all heard the pilots reporting to their headquarters that this was an American ship. They attacked anyway. And when the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime.

There is no question that this attack on a U.S. Navy ship was deliberate. This was a coordinated effort involving air, sea, headquarters and commando forces attacking over a long period. It was not the “few rounds of misdirected fire” that Israel would have the world believe. Worse, the Israeli excuse is a gross and detailed fabrication that disagrees entirely with the eyewitness recollections of survivors. Key American leaders call the attack deliberate. More important, eyewitness participants from the Israeli side have told survivors that they knew they were attacking an American ship.

Israeli Pilot Speaks Up

Fifteen years after the attack, an Israeli pilot approached Liberty survivors and then held extensive interviews with former Congressman Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey about his role. According to this senior Israeli lead pilot, he recognized the Liberty as American immediately, so informed his headquarters, and was told to ignore the American flag and continue his attack. He refused to do so and returned to base, where he was arrested.

from what I was able to deduce, not one of the survivors has acepted the fisings of the investigations into the USS Liberty attack. They are unanimous in tehir belief the investigations were a whitewash.

Like it or not, these peoepl are the ultimate authority as to what is true and what is flase.

Any investigation that denies the primary witnesses from giving tehir accounts is ultimately flawed. Not one fo the investigations that has beenundertaken allowed any of the survivors to give their account of what happened.

One can onyl deduce that this was done to prevent the witnesses account from enterring the record.

Superficially, any case is compelling. And the official inquiries have convince a great many well informed people of the accidental nature of this tragedy.

Look, pesnal feud’s aside. Am I blowing smoke when the Captain of the USS Liberty, a former Secrataries of State, 2 former CIA Directors, a former NSA Director, 2 former NSA Deputy Directors, a former US Navy captain all state very frankly that the USS Liberty attack was no accident?

Surely you have to admit that this is a compelling case and that the investigation that have covered it have clearly faile to convince a great many well informed people.

Your complaining about my harping over the fundimental basis of argument, the “honesty in facts” factor? And you are whining about someone elses supposed ‘poor’ character? You’ve put the teapot up to boil but forgot to add water.

You have proved nothing with your hodgepodge. Top secret documents that we can not read can not be used for proof of anything. You have pilots that no one knows and documents that no one can read. You are blowing smoke.