The "Hidden Day" Israel Deliberately Attacked American ****p, Killing
34
By Ray McGovern, Consortium News. Posted October 10, 2007.
For 40 years, intelligence analysts have kept this knowledge secret, a
testament to our country's widespread fear of the Israel lobby.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee brags that it is the most
influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and
it has demonstrated that time and again, and not only on Capitol Hill.
Nowhere is the lobby's power more clearly demonstrated than in its
ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967, during the
Six Day War:
Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ****p USS
Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ****p, 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 40-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
destroyed voice tapes seen by many intelligence analysts, showing
beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.
But the truth will come out -- eventually. All it took in this case is
for a courageous journalist (of the endangered species kind) 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 --
unimpeachable 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 re****ter
John Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on
Oct. 2 titled "New revelations in attack on American spy ****p." (For
the full story, click here.)
To the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year:
"Veterans, do***ents 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 coverup 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-nan article published than an article with the im****tance
and explosiveness of this damning 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, Mo.
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 magazine 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 scholar****p. 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 im****tant factor? Indeed. But of equal im****tance, 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 United States 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 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, Sgt. 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
****p 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 -- ****ps 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 60-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 ****p
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 ****pmates dragged one 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 ****pmate 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 do***ented article, together with the 57
pages that James Bamford devotes to the incident in Body of Secrets
and recent confessions by those who played a role in the coverup,
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 ****tray it as just a terrible mistake.
Crewdson refers to U.S. Navy Capt. Ward Boston, who was the Navy
lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Adm. Isaac C. Kidd, named by
Adm. John S. McCain to "inquire into all the facts and cir***stances."
(Yes, the father of presidential hopeful, Sen. John McCain.)
The fact that they were given only one week to gather evidence and
were forbidden to contact the Israelis screams out "coverup."
Capt. 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 Adm. Kidd and I believed with certainty
that this attack ... was a deliberate effort to sink an American ****p
and murder its entire crew ... Not only did the Israelis attack the
****p 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 Adm. 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 to sink a ****p
of the U.S. Navy is a subject of speculation.
One view is that the Israelis did not want the United States to find
out they were massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria and
wanted to deprive the United States of the op****tunity to argue
against such a move.
James Bamford, in Body of Secrets, adduces evidence, including
re****ting 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 im****tant 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, Capt. 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 Wa****ngton
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 has emerged more and more, others are
showing more courage in speaking out. In a recent email, a former CIA
analyst-colleague shared:
"The chief of the analysts studying the Arab/Israeli region at the
time told me about the intercepted messages and said very flatly and
firmly that the pilots re****ted 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 sup****t (particularly the
one-sided sup****t by the current U.S. administration) go a long way
toward explaining why it is that 1.3 billion Muslims "hate us."
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