HOW TO DESTROY A U.S. NAVY SHIP AND GET AWAY WITH IT
James
Scott’s father was a young ensign on board the U.S.S. Liberty when the
Israelis attacked the ship with fighter jets, bomber jets, and torpedo
boats. The Israeli jets strafed the American sailors as they were
trying to escape the slaughter, while later, an Israeli torpedo blew a
giant hole in the side of the ship which nearly sank the Liberty. Even
napalm was used against the Liberty’s crew. A sitting duck for the
Israeli Air Force and Navy, the Liberty was a U.S. intelligence ship
that carried only 50 caliber machine guns for protection. That the
ship didn’t sink is something of a miracle. The sneak Israeli attack
resulted in the killing of 34 American sailors and wounded 171 more.
The attack was a war crime of serious proportions.
The
Liberty had been ordered by the Pentagon to sail off the coast of
Israel and Egypt to pick up radio transmissions during the June, 1967
Arab-Israeli war. She had been sailing in international waters boasting
a large American flag from her mast, with her identification “GTR 5″ in
four foot white letters on her hull. The “5″ was six foot high. An
Israeli government investigation concluded that the attack was an
accident, noting also Israel’s apology. The Pentagon conducted an
investigation that also concluded the attack was an accident. The
glaring insufficiencies in both reports reflect the intention of both
the Israeli and the American governments to cover up what really
happened. It is that continuing cover-up that enrages the families of
those U.S. sailors who were killed and wounded during the assault, as
well as the bitter memories of those crew members who survived the
attack.
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| Liberty - Main blast area |
It is
obvious that the Israelis intended that there be no survivors to
describe what happened. But when it became clear that there were
witnesses, the U.S. government ordered the surviving officers and men
to maintain total silence about the attack, and to refrain from talking
to anyone about what happened that day. It is only after they left the
service that the survivors were able to open up, expressing their
bitterness to anyone who would listen. They, of course, feel betrayed
by their government, and show no signs of abandoning the fight to have
the truth told in an official manner.
One rationale offered by the Israelis was that the Liberty resembled an Egyptian horse and troop transport ship, the El Quseir.
The problem with that explanation is that Egyptian ships have their
ship’s names in Arabic on the hull, and not in English, as the Liberty
had. As well, the Quseir is a much smaller ship than the
Liberty, which had an array of antennae on its superstructure befitting
its mission as an intelligence gathering ship.
The mainstream
press continues to ignore what happened, preferring instead to give
excess coverage to missing blond teenagers, or taking part in the media
orgy following the death of Michael Jackson. The survivors fight a
lonely battle, continually ignored by members of Congress who have the
ability to hold official hearings as part of an official investigation.
The Pentagon, which, under the tutelage of Cyrus Vance, took part in
the cover-up, has never been eager to pursue the matter.
The
Senate Armed Services Committee, the logical venue to investigate and to
hold hearings, is currently chaired by Michigan Senator Carl Levin, who
has little interest in pointing any fingers at Israel. Moreover, John
McCain, a senior Republican on the Committee, has at stake the memory of
his father, Admiral John McCain who relayed the order to the American
fighter jets to return to their carrier before they could arrive to help
the beleaguered Liberty crew.
There is, however, a wealth of new
information that has become available to assist in finding the truth of
the attack. Author James Bamford, in his book, Body of Secrets,
disclosed the presence of an American spy plane circling over the war
zone which picked up radio traffic, and overheard Israeli pilots
carrying out the attack, acknowledging that they knew the Liberty was an
American ship. And James Scott has uncovered a treasure trove of
declassified documents that back up the fact that the attack on a U.S
ship was a deliberate act on the part of the Israelis.
Even
without such evidence, the Israeli explanations that they mistook the
Liberty for an Egyptian ship defies logic. Israeli reconnaissance
planes had been flying over the Liberty since early morning on June 8,
1967. It is beyond credibility that those planes could not identify a
ship belonging to a supposed ally of Israel, especially one that was
clearly marked, as the Liberty was.
The Navy’s inquiry of the
attack, which lasted only a week, resulted in a Pentagon-ordered
cover-up of the attack. Captain Ward Boston, who was an assistant to
Admiral Isaac Kidd, the chief investigator, in later years disclosed
that Kidd actually had been ordered to conclude that the attack was
accidental, despite evidence they had gathered to the contrary.
Evidence
collected for this book by the author clearly shows that some officers
inside Israel’s chain of command understood that this was an American
ship long before the torpedo attack that resulted in more than two-dozen
of the Liberty’s 34 deaths. But they allowed the assault to continue.
Israeli pilots radioed in the hull number of the Liberty more than 20
minutes before the torpedo strike, and that information was passed to
the Israeli Navy. Had the attack stopped then, the majority of the lives
lost that day would have been saved.
The book reveals for the
first time the extent of the outrage and widespread disbelief of many of
President Johnson’s senior advisers over Israel’s claim that the attack
was an accident. Even LBJ was convinced the attack was no accident and
confided his disbelief in Israel’s story to a Newsweek reporter, stating
that he believed Israel attacked the ship because it was spying on the
war. The book also quotes many senior State Department, Navy, NSA and
CIA officials talking of their disbelief in the story.
The
book further documents, through interviews with senior officials, how
and why President Johnson decided to cover-up the assault. Johnson had a
great fear of offending American Jewish supporters at a time when he
was trying to maintain support for his failing Vietnam policy. In 1967,
the U.S. lost an average of 26 men a day in Vietnam. In May of 1967,
those numbers spiked to 37 men a day. The Liberty’s dead and wounded
were essentially one day’s casualty count in Vietnam. Many American Jews
were at the forefront of the anti-Vietnam War movement and Johnson
feared that picking a fight over the Liberty would risk more loss of
support from that important constituency. In effect, the Liberty was
sacrificed to Lyndon Johnson’s failing war policy. Nicholas Katzenbach,
the second in command of the State Department, is quoted discussing
this in the book. “It was no help if you had a lot of people getting
angry at the Israelis,” he said. “If the Israelis screw up the
relations, then the Jewish groups are going to bail out the Israelis. It
ends up with you having a more difficult situation than you would have
otherwise.”
Some American officials even considered sinking the
Liberty at sea to prevent reporters from photographing it and inflaming
public opinion against Israel. Scott’s book also shows how civilian
leaders inside the Pentagon even went so far as to pressure the Navy to
tone down the publicly released version of the court of inquiry, already
weak to the point of ineffectiveness. When the draft was first given to
the Navy for review, Chief of Naval Operations David McDonald was
outraged. He wrote a memo that revealed his belief that the United
States was trying to protect Israel. “I think that much of this is
extraneous and leaves me with the feeling that we’re trying our best to
excuse the attackers,” he wrote in a handwritten memo. “Were I a parent
of one of the deceased this release would burn me up. I myself do not
subscribe to it.”
Very few people at senior levels of the Navy
believed the attack was an accident. Jerome King, Jr., the senior aide
to Adm. McDonald and later a vice admiral, on his first occasion to
speak publicly about the Liberty said, “It certainly was not mistaken
identity,” King said. “I don’t buy it. I never did. Nobody that I knew
ever did either. It wasn’t as though it was at night or a rainy day or
anything like that. There wasn’t any excuse for not knowing what the
ship was. You could divine from just the apparatus on deck - all the
antennae and so on - what its mission was.”
Extensive Israeli
documents Scott obtained for the book also reveal how officials at the
Israeli Embassy in Washington devised their own plan to manipulate the
American media to downplay the story and to pressure American officials
to drop the case. Israeli officials convinced Newsweek to tone down a
story on the Liberty and even had other stories killed. The embassy also
tapped influential American Jews to help put pressure on the White
House to make the Liberty issue go away.
Israel’s apologists are
many and varied on the question of whether the attack was deliberate,
including Jay Cristol’s apologia to Ram Ron’s report. Cristol is a
Federal Judge in Florida, and Ron was in the Israeli military and was
tasked to investigate the incident. Ron had no experience either in
naval operations or in Air Force operations. He did not interview any
of the pilots who attacked the ship, nor did he interview any of the
officers who were in charge of military operations for Israel at the
time.
Admiral Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
however, came out publicly in defense of the Liberty’s crew, calling the
attack deliberate. Additionally, Congressman Pete McCloskey
interviewed one of the Israeli pilots who confirmed that the Israeli
military knew the Liberty was an American ship, but nevertheless
continued with the bloody attack.
Scott’s research of the newly
available data leaves little room for doubt as to the deliberate nature
of the attack, but what no one knows for certain is why Israel decided
to attack a ship belonging to a supposed ally. There is adequate
informed speculation, however.
One theory has it that Lyndon
Johnson had given Israel the go ahead to attack Egypt, but warned them
to go no further. At the time, Egyptian President Nasser’s big mouth
provided a rationale for Israel to attack first, which they did. Their
propaganda, however, which has stuck in the minds of many, is that Egypt
attacked first. Because Israel intended to also attack Syria, it
wanted to prevent the U.S. government from listening to the radio
traffic necessary to build up for such an attack on Syria. Israel
wanted the attack to be a fait accompli, realizing that LBJ could do nothing about it once it happened.
Another
theory has it that Israel was slaughtering Egyptian prisoners it had
captured, and wanted to prevent that knowledge from being overheard by
the Americans.
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| Picture from the site http://www.uss-liberty.com |
I strongly believe that this country owes the
survivors of the Liberty at least a full governmental hearing on how the
attack happened and who was ultimately responsible. Our country should
do something that would signal to those survivors that their government
cares about them. Absent that, we are at least entitled to no longer
hear the political mantra that “we support our troops.” There is a way
to show that support other than simply talking about it.
* James
Abourezk, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, is a former U.S. Senator from
South Dakota. He currently practices law in South Dakota.
Source : http://calitreview.com
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