08Jun1967 - USS Liberty attacked by Israeli Air Force in Med

[outsider]

'Call me stupid, but...'(please don't sue for plagiarism, Charley..) why the hell aren't we making hay out of Alex Jones revelations in 'Terror Storm'? I was aware of the attack by Israeli forces on the 'Liberty', and the subsequent US cover-up. But LBJ collusion! We need to get as much documentary confirmation as pos, as soon as pos, and go Mega with it. Can we get this reverberating around the net as our 'November Surprise' gift to the Neo-Cons? Any one who hasn't heard of the 'USS Liberty' attack should watch Alex's DVD. The BBC put out a program last year, 'Operation Cyanide', but they did not mention the US collusion. There is also a book out by the Captain of the vessel, but I haven't read it.

[scubadiver]

The plan was apparently to use the incident to provoke a general Middle East war.

I think LBJ was going a bit loopy...

[Andrew Johnson]

It's pretty amazing to consider the BBC made this, about 3 years ago:

Israel's Secret Weapons


Link

[outsider]

Scubadiver says 'LBJ going a bit loopy'; remember LBJ was waiting in the wings on JFK's assassination, obviously a 'safe pair of hands' for stepping up Vietnam War 'Gulf of Tonkin **Incident**'; surely you don't think he operated on his own on 'Liberty'? It was very clearly an early attempt at '9/11', and should be flagged up as such AS LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE, AND AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. Talk about window of opportunity being missed; this gives 9/11 Truth tremendous opportunity which should be grasped with both hands PRONTO.

[xmasdale]

[outsider]

'xmasdale' writes that there are innacuracies in 'Terror Storm'. As I wrote originally, we should try to get documentary backup; I asked Annie at last meeting if she would try to get copies of supporting docs. from Alex Jones; as she has appeared in 'Terror Storm' she would be in a much stronger position to request the docs. than me. I am still amazed at our collective paralysis in the face of this incredible opportunity. There is absolutely no doubt that Israel attacked the 'Liberty'; I have personally seen the BBC programme with Shimon Peres smugly saying 'no comment' when asked about it, and the fact that US aircraft were ordered to return to the carrier without assisting the 'Liberty' by the White House. How are the US military (the 'grunts', not the 33* Scottish Rite Generals and other high 'initiates' who know they have a Jahbulon-given right to rule,control, exploit and eliminate the unitiated human cattle as they see fit) going to react if all this gets widespread publicity? Sacrificial lambs sent to be intentionally slaughtered in a classic 'False Flag' operation?

[Stephen]

I haven't had the chance to check out all the Info in Terrorstorm.

Xmasdale, what inaccuracies are there?

[ian neal]

These have been suggested as inaccuracies. Some are more obvious and significant than others.

. he implies that the London bombings of 7/7/05 were needed by Tony Blair because he was facing electoral unpopularity. In fact Blair had just won an election when they occurred and was riding high. He was not fighting an election as implied.

. he says that "free speech" has been banned for several miles around
parliament. In fact it is not "free speech" which has been banned but public demonstrations and it is not several miles but one kilometre.

. he says Michael Meacher was a cabinet minister in Blair's government. In fact Meacher has never been in the cabinet, but only a junior government minister. This is an important distinction because the cabinet were in law jointly responsible for the decision to go to war. See Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Meacher

. he says that Jean Charles de Menezes "knew something he shouldn't". That is pure speculation.

. he says that Jean Charles de Menezes was murdered by a "special military hit team". While that may be true, it too is speculation.

. he says that Jean Charles de Menezes "bought" a Metro paper. Londoners know that that paper cannot be bought as it is a freebee.

. he says that ID cards of the four London bombers were found. We do not have ID cards in this country.

. he heavily implies that the simultaneous exercise by firm of a 1000
employees, referred to by Peter Power, was an exercise with 1000 or so
personnel underground and in the streets. We have no evidence about the numbers of people involved nor that it was anything more than a paper exercise.

. he says that police ordered the diversion of the bus that was blown up in
Tavistock Square. I'm not sure we have evidence that the diversion was due to the police..

. he says that Operation Gladio involved "hundreds" of bombings. That
implies at least 200. I suspect it is an exaggeration.

. he says that the majority in the US think 911 was an inside job. There
have been opinion polls which show that the majority think that the
government are covering up something about 911, but that is not the same as believing it was an inside job.

. he says that Operation Himmler involved the killing of one person and
dressing him in Polish uniform to give the appearance Polish troops had
attacked Germany. In fact the operation involved 21 incidents along the
Polish-German border.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

that said the early part of the film is very strong IMO especially the USS Liberty section

We need to better place 9/11 in the wider context of the military industrial complex and false flag terrorism and Terrorstorm does that pretty well.

Here are a couple of other videos looking at recent US foriegn policy and war crimes

Why we fight
http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=why+we+fight and

What I've Learned About US Foreign Policy: The war against the Third World
http://morganucadon.com/node/65

from this rather excellent site http://morganucadon.com/

[Stephen]

Thanks for that Ian, But why is Jones telling Little white Lies?

The everdance there anyway?? Why add on s***?

[outsider]

You have made my point, Ian. It is the strength of the 'Liberty' section that I have flagged up. The importance of Alex Jones' DVD is that it exposes the fact that LBJ colluded with Israel. I say 'fact' because of Alex's certitude on this collusion, and his reported interviews with relevant witnesses. You seem to have missed my suggestion that we get supporting docs; I asked Annie to do this as she appeared in Terror Storm and would thus be much more likely than me to get these docs. from Alex. The FACT that the USS Liberty was attacked mercilessly and in full knowledge that it was a US vessel is not in dispute, nor that US aircraft were launched, then recalled; and in the BBC programme, 'Operation Cyanide', Shimon Peres is asked about the attack. With a half smile, he refused to comment. IS THERE ANY ONE OUT THERE THAT REALISES THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS COLLUSION? One last point: in my response to scubadiver I forgot one important thing - according to Stephen Knight, LBJ was a Mason. The plot thickens, and the dots come closer to joining.

[xmasdale]

[Worried]

Here's a documentary on the USS Liberty which includes the testimony of crewmembers

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7267134620652018859

[outsider]

Worried, I am only on dial-up at present, so went to a library to watch the video clip - came up 'Access denied'. I'll be sending in a complaint.

[outsider]

I have now read Peter Hounam's 'Operation Cyanide', and it backs up everything Alex Jones states in 'Terror Storm' except for LBJ saying ' No help. I want that g-ddam ship to go to the bottom. Recall the wings' and the soviet spy ship being the reason Israel stopped the attack. But that does not mean Alex was wrong, just that he had been given different info. And Peter H. has LBJ personally coming on the radio to the Sixth Fleet ordering they recall the planes. He also has Admiral Geis saying Egypt was three minutes from being nuked (which had been the object of the False-Flag op in the first place). Had LBJ's scam succeeded in 1967, there would have been no need for 911.

[brian]

outsider, have you seen this BBC documentary on the Liberty?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5073.htm

Only recently have Information Clearing House put this full version up, only the second part played before.

I asked a while back if anyone had a copy - if any of those more capable can grab this so it can be copied to disc and kindly give me a copy I would be grateful.

[Annie]

Outsider

I'm on the case.

Regards

Annie

[outsider]

Brian, I'm only on dial-up so can't watch vidoes; but I suspect it's one I've seen and taped (when I find it I'll transfer it to DVD and send you a copy); Annie, thanks. Glad your on the case!

[Thermate]

Interesting that this is possible prior evidence for elements of the US administration and Israel working in collusion to kill American citizens and blame it on a third (Arab) party.

All stemming from the man who stepped into job after JFK was murdered...

[THETRUTHWILLSETU3]

Thermate will you take part in the 911 Truth March

[outsider]

[outsider]

[blackcat]

[outsider]

[outsider]

I've now found the BBC video I knew I had of the USS Liberty, and from next week if any one would like a DVD of it email me with your name and address. It is based on Peter Hounam's book 'Operation Cyanide'.

[outsider]

I've already emailed John Crewsden setting him straight on a few points, but it's good to get the issue to the public again:

New Revelations on 1967 Incident: USS Liberty attacked by Israeli fighter jets By John Crewdson
Posted on October 8, 2007 by dandelionsalad
Dandelion Salad

Global Research, October 8, 2007
Chicago Tribune - 2007-10-02

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 athttp://www.nsa.gov/liberty .

An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, called the attack on the Liberty “a tragic and terrible accident, a case of mistaken identity, for which Israel has officially apologized.” Israel also paid reparations of $6.7 million to the injured survivors and the families of those killed in the attack, and another $6 million for the loss of the Liberty itself.

But for those who lost their sons and husbands, neither the Israelis’ apology nor the passing of time has lessened their grief.

One is Pat Blue, who still remembers having her lunch in Washington’s Farragut Square park on “a beautiful June afternoon” when she was a 22-year-old secretary for a law firm.

Blue heard somebody’s portable radio saying a U.S. Navy ship had been torpedoed in the eastern Mediterranean. A few weeks before, Blue’s husband of two years, an Arab-language expert with the NSA, had been hurriedly dispatched overseas.

As she listened to the news report, “it just all came together.” Soon afterward, the NSA confirmed that Allen Blue was among the missing.

“I never felt young again,” she said.

Aircraft on the horizon

Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared on the horizon and circled the Liberty.

The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first day of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. America was Israel’s ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there. The ship’s mission was to monitor the communications of Israel’s Arab enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications. The Liberty felt safe.

Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore Arfsten, a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw the blue Star of David on the planes’ fuselages. At first, crew members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their ship.

Thirty-four died that day, including Blue, the only civilian casualty. An additional 171 were wounded in the air and sea assault by Israel, which was about to celebrate an overwhelming victory over the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and several other Arab states.

For most of those who survived the attack, the Six-Day War has become the defining moment of their lives.

Some mustered out of the Navy as soon as their enlistments were up. Others stayed in long enough to retire. Several went on to successful business careers. One became a Secret Service agent, another a Baltimore policeman.

Several are being treated with therapy and drugs for what has since been recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. One has undergone more than 30 major operations. Another suffers seizures caused by a piece of shrapnel still lodged in his brain.

After Bryce Lockwood left the Marines, he worked construction, then tried selling insurance. “I’d get a job and get fired,” he said. “I had a hell of a time getting my feet on the ground.”

With his linguistic background, Lockwood could have had a career with the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI. But he was too angry at the U.S. government to work for it. “Don’t talk to me about government!” he shouts.

U.S. Navy jets were called back

An Israeli military court of inquiry later acknowledged that their naval headquarters knew at least three hours before the attack that the odd-looking ship 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula, sprouting more than 40 antennas capable of receiving every kind of radio transmission, was “an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy,” a floating electronic vacuum cleaner.

The Israeli inquiry later concluded that that information had simply gotten lost, never passed along to the ground controllers who directed the air attack nor to the crews of the three Israeli torpedo boats who picked up where the air force left off, strafing the Liberty’s decks with their machine guns and launching a torpedo that blew a 39-foot hole in its starboard side.

To a man, the survivors interviewed by the Tribune rejected Israel’s explanation.

Nor, the survivors said, did they understand why the American 6th Fleet, which included the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga, patrolling 400 miles west of the Liberty, launched and then recalled at least two squadrons of Navy fighter-bombers that might have arrived in time to prevent the torpedo attack — and save 26 American lives.

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, remembered listening as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis, commander of the America’s carrier battle group, to bring the jets home.

When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that “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.”

The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel’s claim that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But internal White House documents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library show that the Israelis’ explanation of how the mistake had occurred was not believed.

Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson’s intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was “inconceivable” that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.

The attack “couldn’t be anything else but deliberate,” the NSA’s director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.

“I don’t think you’ll find many people at NSA who believe it was accidental,” Benson Buffham, a former deputy NSA director, said in an interview.

“I just always assumed that the Israeli pilots knew what they were doing,” said Harold Saunders, then a member of the National Security Council staff and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs.

“So for me, the question really is who issued the order to do that and why? That’s the really interesting thing.”

The answer, if there is one, will probably never be known. Gen. Moshe Dayan, then the country’s minister of defense; Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime minister; and Golda Meir, his successor, are all dead.

Many of those who believe the Liberty was purposely attacked have suggested that the Israelis feared the ship might intercept communications revealing its plans to widen the war, which the U.S. opposed. But no one has ever produced any solid evidence to support that theory, and the Israelis dismiss it. The NSA’s deputy director, Louis Tordella, speculated in a recently declassified memo that the attack “might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the LIBERTY was monitoring his activities.”

Was the U.S. flag visible?

Though the attack on the Liberty has faded from public memory, Michael Oren, a historian and senior fellow at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem, conceded that “the case of the assault on the Liberty has never been closed.”

If anything, Oren said, “the accusations leveled against Israel have grown sharper with time.” Oren said in an interview that he believed a formal investigation by the U.S., even 40 years later, would be useful if only because it would finally establish Israel’s innocence.

Questions about what happened to the Liberty have been kept alive by survivors’ groups and their Web sites, a half-dozen books, magazine articles and television documentaries, scholarly papers published in academic journals, and Internet chat groups where amateur sleuths debate arcane points of photo interpretation and torpedo running depth.

Meantime, the Liberty’s survivors and their supporters, including a distinguished constellation of retired admirals and generals, have persisted in asking Congress for a full-scale formal investigation.

“We deserve to have the truth,” Pat Blue said.

For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be reduced to a single question: Was the ship flying the American flag at the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?

The survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the Liberty was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the attack, except for a brief period in which one flag that had been shot down was replaced with another, larger flag — the ship’s “holiday colors” — that measured 13 feet long.

Concludes one of the declassified NSA documents: “Every official interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag — and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and identification.”

The Israeli court of inquiry that examined the attack, and absolved the Israeli military of criminal culpability, came to precisely the opposite conclusion.

“Throughout the contact,” it declared, “no American or any other flag appeared on the ship.”

The attack, the court said, had been prompted by a report, which later proved erroneous, that a ship was shelling Israeli-held positions in the Sinai Peninsula. The Liberty had no guns capable of shelling the shore, but the court concluded that the U.S. ship had been mistakenly identified as the source of the shelling.

Yiftah Spector, the first Israeli pilot to attack the ship, told the Jerusalem Post in 2003 that when he first spotted the Liberty, “I circled it twice and it did not fire on me. My assumption was that it was likely to open fire at me and nevertheless I slowed down and I looked and there was positively no flag.”

But the Liberty crewmen interviewed by the Tribune said the Israeli jets simply appeared and began shooting. They also said the Liberty did not open fire on the planes because it was armed only with four .50-caliber machine guns intended to repel boarders.

“I can’t identify it, but in any case it’s a military ship,” Spector radioed his ground controller, according to a transcript of the Israeli air-to-ground communications published by the Jerusalem Post in 2004.

That transcript, made by a Post reporter who was allowed to listen to what the Israeli Air Force said were tapes of the attacking pilots’ communications, contained only two references to “American” or “Americans,” one at the beginning and the other at the end of the attack.

The first reference occurred at 1:54 p.m. local time, two minutes before the Israeli jets began their first strafing run.

In the Post transcript, a weapons system officer on the ground suddenly blurted out, “What is this? Americans?”

“Where are Americans?” replied one of the air controllers.

The question went unanswered, and it was not asked again.

Twenty minutes later, after the Liberty had been hit repeatedly by machine guns, 30 mm cannon and napalm from the Israelis’ French-built Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers, the controller directing the attack asked his chief in Tel Aviv to which country the target vessel belonged.

“Apparently American,” the chief controller replied.

Fourteen minutes later the Liberty was struck amidships by a torpedo from an Israeli boat, killing 26 of the 100 or so NSA technicians and specialists in Russian and Arabic who were working in restricted compartments below the ship’s waterline.

Analyst: Israelis wanted it sunk

The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.

“The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it,” Forslund recalled. “The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.

“The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors.”

Forslund said he clearly recalled “the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely.”

“He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was frustrated with the pilots’ responses that it didn’t sink.”

Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read the transcripts. “Everybody saw these,” said Forslund, now retired after 26 years in the military.

Forslund’s recollections are supported by those of two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots’ communications.

One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then serving with the Air Force Security Service’s 6924th Security Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.

“It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty,” Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. “Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to ‘complete the job’ and get out of there.”

Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete, Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern communications.

The transcripts Block remembered seeing “were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack,” Block said. “The pilots said, ‘This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?’

“And ground control came back and said, ‘Yes, follow orders.’”

Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.

“There is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as what I saw,” Gotcher said. “More to the point, for anyone familiar with air-to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn’t the way pilots and controllers communicate.”

Block, now a child protection caseworker in Florida, observed that “the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly identified the ship as American and asked for further instructions from ground control appears to be a missing part of that Jerusalem Post article.”

Arieh O’Sullivan, the Post reporter who made the newspaper’s transcript, said the Israeli Air Force tapes he listened to contained blank spaces. He said he assumed those blank spaces occurred while Israeli pilots were conducting their strafing runs and had nothing to communicate.

‘But sir, it’s an American ship!’

Forslund, Gotcher and Block are not alone in claiming to have read transcripts of the attack that they said left no doubt the Israelis knew they were attempting to sink a U.S. Navy ship.

Many ears were tuned to the battles being fought in and around the Sinai during the Six-Day War, including those belonging to other Arab nations with a keen interest in the outcome.

“I had a Libyan naval captain who was listening in that day,” said a retired CIA officer, who spoke on condition that he not be named discussing a clandestine informant.

“He thought history would change its course,” the CIA officer recalled. “Israel attacking the U.S. He was certain, listening in to the Israeli and American comms [communications], that it was deliberate.”

The late Dwight Porter, the American ambassador to Lebanon during the Six-Day War, told friends and family members that he had been shown English-language transcripts of Israeli pilots talking to their controllers.

A close friend, William Chandler, the former head of the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Co., said Porter recalled one of the pilots protesting, “But sir, it’s an American ship — I can see the flag!’ To which the ground control responded, ‘Never mind; hit it!’”

Porter, who asked that his recollections not be made public while he was alive because they involved classified information, also discussed the transcripts during a lunch in 2000 at the Cosmos Club in Washington with another retired American diplomat, Andrew Kilgore, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar.

Kilgore recalled Porter saying that he “saw the telex, read it, and passed it right back” to the embassy official who had shown it to him. He quoted Porter as recalling that the transcript showed “Israel was attacking, and they know it’s an American ship.”

Haviland Smith, a young CIA officer stationed in Beirut during the Six-Day War, said that although he never saw the transcript, he had “heard on a number of occasions exactly the story that you just told me about what that transcript contained.”

He had later been told, Smith recalled, “that ultimately all of the transcripts were deep-sixed. I was told that they were deep-sixed because the administration did not wish to embarrass the Israelis.”

Perhaps the most persuasive suggestion that such transcripts existed comes from the Israelis themselves, in a pair of diplomatic cables sent by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, to Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv.

Five days after the Liberty attack, Harman cabled Eban that a source the Israelis code-named “Hamlet” was reporting that the Americans had “clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway.”

Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising Eban, who is now dead, that the White House was “very angry,” and that “the reason for this is that the Americans probably have findings showing that our pilots indeed knew that the ship was American.”

According to a memoir by then-CIA director Richard Helms, President Johnson’s personal anger was manifest when he discovered the story of the Liberty attack on an inside page of the next day’s New York Times. Johnson barked that “it should have been on the front page!”

Israeli historian Tom Segev, who mentioned the cables in his recent book “1967,” said other cables showed that Harman’s source for the second cable was Arthur Goldberg, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

The cables, which have been declassified by the Israelis, were obtained from the Israeli State Archive and translated from Hebrew by the Tribune.

Oliver Kirby, the NSA’s deputy director for operations at the time of the Liberty attack, confirmed the existence of NSA transcripts.

Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts, Kirby replied, “I sure did. I certainly did.”

“They said, ‘We’ve got him in the zero,’” Kirby recalled, “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, now 86 and retired in Texas, said 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.”

One set of transcripts apparently survived in the archives of the U.S. Army’s intelligence school, then located at Ft. Holabird in Maryland.

W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel who spent eight years as chief of Middle East intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the transcripts were used as “course material” in an advanced class for intelligence officers on the clandestine interception of voice transmissions.

“The flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship in view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that it was clearly marked with the U.S. flag,” Lang recalled in an e-mail.

“The flight commander was reluctant,” Lang said in a subsequent interview. “That was very clear. He didn’t want to do this. He asked them a couple of times, ‘Do you really want me to do this?’ I’ve remembered it ever since. It was very striking. I’ve been harboring this memory for all these years.”

Key NSA tapes said missing

Asked whether the NSA had in fact intercepted the communications of the Israeli pilots who were attacking the Liberty, Kirby, the retired senior NSA official, replied, “We sure did.”

On its Web site, the NSA has posted three recordings of Israeli communications made on June 8, 1967. But none of the recordings is of the attack itself.

Indeed, the declassified documents state that no recordings of the “actual attack” exist, raising questions about the source of the transcripts recalled by Forslund, Gotcher, Block, Porter, Lang and Kirby.

The three recordings reflect what the NSA describes as “the aftermath” of the attack — Israeli communications with two Israeli helicopters dispatched to rescue any survivors who may have jumped into the water.

Two of the recordings were made by Michael Prostinak, a Hebrew linguist aboard a U.S. Navy EC-121, a lumbering propeller-driven aircraft specially equipped to gather electronic intelligence.

But Prostinak said he was certain that more than three recordings were made that day.

“I can tell you there were more tapes than just the three on the Internet,” he said. “No doubt in my mind, more than three tapes.”

At least one of the missing tapes, Prostinak said, captured Israeli communications “in which people were not just tranquil or taking care of business as normal. We knew that something was being attacked,” Prostinak said. “Everyone we were listening to was excited. You know, it was an actual attack. And during the attack was when mention of the American flag was made.”

Prostinak acknowledged that his Hebrew was not good enough to understand every word being said, but that after the mention of the American flag “the attack did continue. We copied [recorded] it until we got completely out of range. We got a great deal of it.”

Charles Tiffany, the plane’s navigator, remembers hearing Prostinak on the plane’s intercom system, shouting, “I got something crazy on UHF,” the radio frequency band used by the Israeli Air Force.

“I’ll never forget it to this day,” said Tiffany, now a retired Florida lawyer. He also remembers hearing the plane’s pilot ordering the NSA linguists to “start taping everything.”

Prostinak said he and the others aboard the plane had been unaware of the Liberty’s presence 15,000 feet below, but had concluded that the Israelis’ target must be an American ship. “We knew that something was being attacked,” Prostinak said.

After listening to the three recordings released by the NSA, Prostinak said it was clear from the sequence in which they were numbered that at least two tapes that had once existed were not there.

One tape, designated A1104/A-02, begins at 2:29 p.m. local time, just after the Liberty was hit by the torpedo. Prostinak said there was a preceding tape, A1104/A-01.

That tape likely would have recorded much of the attack, which began with the air assault at 1:56 p.m. Prostinak said a second tape, which preceded one beginning at 3:07 p.m., made by another linguist aboard the same plane, also appeared to be missing.

As soon as the EC-121 landed at its base in Athens, Prostinak said, all the tapes were rushed to an NSA facility at the Athens airport where Hebrew translators were standing by.

“We told them what we had, and they immediately took the tapes and went to work,” recalled Prostinak, who after leaving the Navy became chief of police and then town administrator for the village of Lake Waccamaw, N.C.

Another linguist aboard the EC-121, who spoke on condition that he not be named, said he believed there had been as many as “five or six” tapes recording the attack on the Liberty or its aftermath.

Andrea Martino, the NSA’s senior media adviser, did not respond to a question about the apparent conflict between the agency’s assertion that there were no recordings of the Israeli attack and the recollections of those interviewed for this article.

U.S. inquiry widely criticized

Rather than investigating how and why a U.S. Navy vessel had been attacked by an ally, the Navy seemed interested in asking as few questions as possible and answering them in record time.

Even while the Liberty was still limping toward a dry dock in Malta, the Navy convened a formal Court of Inquiry. Adm. John McCain Jr., the commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe and father of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chose Adm. Isaac Kidd Jr. to preside.

The court’s charge was narrow: to determine whether any shortcomings on the part of the Liberty’s crew had contributed to the injuries and deaths that resulted from the attack. McCain gave Kidd’s investigators a week to complete the job.

“That was a shock,” recalled retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, the inquiry’s counsel, who said he and Kidd had estimated that a thorough inquiry would take six months.

“Everyone was kind of stunned that it was handled so quickly and without much hullabaloo,” said G. Patrick March, then a member of McCain’s staff in London.

Largely because of time constraints, Boston said, the investigators were unable to question many of the survivors, or to visit Israel and interview any Israelis involved in the attack.

Rear Adm. Merlin Staring, the Navy’s former judge advocate general, was asked to assess the American inquiry’s report before it was sent to Washington. But Staring said it was taken from him when he began to question some aspects of the report. He describes it now as “a hasty, superficial, incomplete and totally inadequate inquiry.”

Staring, who is among those calling for a full congressional investigation on behalf of the Liberty’s survivors, observed in an interview that the inquiry report contained several “findings of fact” unsupported by testimony or evidence.

One such finding ignored the testimony of several inquiry witnesses that the American flag was flying during the attack, and held that the “available evidence combines to indicate the attack on LIBERTY on 8 June was in fact a case of mistaken identity.”

There are also apparent omissions in the inquiry’s report. It does not include, for example, the testimony of a young lieutenant, Lloyd Painter, who was serving as officer of the deck when the attack began. Painter said he testified that an Israeli torpedo boat “methodically machine-gunned one of our life rafts” that had been put over the side by crewmen preparing to abandon ship.

Painter, who spent 32 years as a Secret Service agent after leaving the Navy, charged that his testimony about the life rafts was purposely omitted.

Ward Boston recalled that, after McCain’s one-week deadline expired, Kidd took the record compiled by the inquiry “and flew back to Washington, and I went back to Naples,” the headquarters of the 6th Fleet.

“Two weeks later, he comes back to Naples and calls me from his office,” Boston recalled in an interview. “In that deep voice, he said, ‘Ward, they aren’t interested in the facts. It’s a political issue and we have to put a lid on it. We’ve been ordered to shut up.’

“It’s time for the truth to come out,” declared Boston, who is now 84. “There have been so many cover-ups.”

“Someday the truth of this will come out,” said Dennis Eikleberry, a NSA technician aboard the Liberty. “Someday it will, but we’ll all be gone.”

James Ennes, now 74, who was officer of the deck just before the attack began, and later spent two months in a body cast, is one of the more vocal survivors. Like the others, Ennes is tired of waiting.

“We want both sides to stop lying,” he said.

[outsider]

'Liberty' survivor writes stinging 'Open Letter' to Congress...
http://ussliberty.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/open-letter-to-the-united-s tates-congress-by-the-survivors-of-the-uss-liberty/

[blackcat]

Thanks for posting that Outsider. Another coincidence probably.

[outsider]

And some more:

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/12/june-8-1967-july-4th-in-hell-wit hout-the-ice-cream/



June 8, 1967: July 4th in Hell without the Ice Cream
by Eileen Fleming, Dissident Voice, December 24th, 2007



On another day in infamy, June 8, 1967, Lieutenant Richard Kiepfer was the lone medical doctor on board the spy ship, the USS Liberty, who "with complete disregard for his own personal safety, exposed himself to overwhelmingly accurate rocket and machine gun fire… administered first aid… treated [171 wounded] men for pain, shock… [and] conducted a major surgical operation." 1

Six weeks after boarding the USS Liberty and fifteen minutes into the attack, while operating on a sailor to control his bleeding, Dr. Kiepfer received eleven shrapnel wounds into his abdomen, and shortly thereafter, a gun shot to his leg, burns, and a broken knee cap. He remained on his feet, caring for the crew for the next twenty-eight hours and their spirits ever since.

This reporter visited with 70-year-old Dr. Richard F. Kiepfer, a Catholic born and bred in Brooklyn, at his Texas home where the deer ignore the corn put out by his neighbors, for Dr. Kiepfer provides prime feed in his front yard. Obese raccoons dine on a daily feast of dog food and multiple cats eat better than mine, in his back yard. Friends, who check on the doctor daily, set the food out since Dr. Kiepfer can no longer do what he once did.

A Master Bridge player while still in his teens, Dr. Kiepfer today continues to play the cards he has been dealt in life with aplomb and grace. In 1973, he nearly died in a plane crash. Instead he parachuted atop some Georgia pecan trees, ending his surgical career and the use of his right hand and arm.

"As I laid there and looked at my arm and failed every test to move it, I knew then I would never operate again and began to think about what I could do in life to continue to be useful, and decided on nuclear medicine. The pilot landed a mile away from me, and was impaled on a forest of pine trees," said Dr. Kiefer

After twenty years in nuclear medicine he retired after suffering a heart attack and since then has suffered the loss of two wives, but not his sense of humor, which borders on the ribald. My weekend visit with Dr. Kiepfer, in his home adorned with icons of St. Francis, occurred only a week after his discharge from a rehabilitation center. He had spent the last six months recuperating from a below-the-knee amputation.

In an email from retired Commander David Ed Lewis 2 who had been the officer in charge of 195 men out of the total crew of 294 on the USS Liberty he wrote, "I know Doc has suffered more and complained less than anyone I know. Job didn't have much on Doc… He has always dedicated his life to others and has never asked anything in return from them."

The book of Job is a critique about the justice of God in light of the suffering of innocent people and finding meaning and value in that pain and playing the cards one has been dealt with in life without blaming God.

Being a retired nurse, I had many questions for Dr. Kiepfer, utmost was what was left out of the Court of Inquiry: such as how could the deck log which documents the hours during the attack be so neatly written and list all the dead and wounded in alphabetical order within the hours of noon to four PM but make no mention of the many Israeli over flights that occurred during that morning before the attack.

Dr. Kiepfer explained, "The deck log was not written during the attack. Captain McGonagle signed off on the Log and that makes it legal, but not authentic. McGonagle was concerned that he would be blamed for the USS Liberty being in troubled waters. I told him, 'Over my dead * body!'"

After the hellacious and unprovoked attack by Israel, they did indeed blame the victims. "Israel did identify the ship six hours before the attack… Israel did know that the ship was American and admitted to our government that they knew the ship was American; Israel claims only that the attacking forces failed to get the word… Modern diplomacy simply does not permit one to embarrass a 'friendly' nation, even when that nation is caught red-handed with its torpedo in one's ship… McGonagle [was] tormented by the idea that he was somehow responsible for the agony his ship and crew suffered… One top level theory holds that someone in the Israeli armed forces ordered the Liberty sunk because he suspected that it had taken down messages showing that Israel started the fighting [during the Six Day War]… typical of Israel's casual attitude toward the episode, an attitude which suggested from the beginning that it was really our fault for being there [in international waters] in the first place…messages from Israel directly charged that a share of the blame was McGonagle's… the Shreveport Times suggested… that our government was involved in a cover-up… and that the attack itself may have been conducted to prevent the ship [and the United States] from detecting the pending invasion of Syria," 3 which was scheduled for June 8th but implemented on June 9, 1967.

Dr. Kiepfer continued to relay the events of that day:

"McGonagle may have misremembered or may have not reported the over a dozen Israeli over flights that morning because he may have thought he should have abandoned our mission-which was to listen in on all communications. My opinion as a civilian is that the Court of Inquiry — which was to determine if the Navy was at fault — would have inquired why he didn't get the Liberty out of the area since we could see the smoke from Al Arish, in Gaza.

"I was the only Medical Corp officer to be appointed Officer of the Deck; that means I was in charge of everything on the ship when the Captain was off duty. I stood mid watch from midnight to 4 AM the night before the attack of June 8, 1967 and all was quiet. I always slept until 7:29 because breakfast ended at 7:30. Beginning at sunrise to 8 AM, the bridge reported a couple of propeller driven aircraft overhead and by noon several more. At lunch people were talking about all the Israeli over flights, but nobody was worried; they were our friends. Afterwards, as usual I went to the ward room for coffee while the Corpsmen began the start of sick call and off duty officers pursued the national sport of sunbathing on the quarter deck.

"Lieutenant George Golden and I were together when the attack began and we thought a steam line had ruptured when we heard the first explosion. We both headed off to our general quarters stations as the announcement sounded that we were under attack. I assumed it was perpetrated by the Arabs or Russians. Understand that nobody could identify Mirage fighter bombers that travel at MACH One. Imagine as I say these words to you that the jets are a mile away, now they are overhead and now they are a mile away from us. That is how fast they travel.

"Fifteen minutes into the attack, while I was operating on a sailor and trying to control his bleeding, I was hit with eleven pieces of shrapnel into my abdomen. A rocket struck above the ceiling of sick bay and the light over my head and the operating table protected me; both acted as a life saver for me, otherwise I would have gotten hit in my shoulders, side and back. I was knocked against a wall and waves of red and white pain throbbed through me.

"I knew I had to finish with the guy on the table; if I walked away, I wouldn't have returned. All I could think about was keeping limbs attached to sailors. From the moment the attack began, I felt a greater presence within me that was physically holding me up. I thought it was the spirit of all the navy docs who had gone before me. I felt physically held up by my invisible assistants and with all that adrenalin coursing through me and some carefully titrated morphine that I self injected, I was able to do what I did.

"It was not until I finished that operation did I even examine myself. The fragments that penetrated me were so hot they cauterized my wounds. The pain was intense, but after applying surgical dressings to my wounds and putting on a life vest to control the bleeding I gave myself a shot of morphine and remained on my feet and working for the next twenty-eight hours.

"Just before the torpedo struck, I was summoned to the bridge and went through the mess decks from sick bay, where a number of wounded sailors were. Captain McGonagle was the only man still functioning there, the lookouts were dead, the helmsman — the guy at the steering wheel was dead and I saw the blown apart remains of our Navigator, Mr. Toth, two decks below me. All I could do was administer morphine to the still living and get them onto stretchers to evacuate them. I had two Corpsmen working with me and knew I needed more surrogates, for the wounded were shoulder to shoulder the full circumference of the passageway.

"While I was on the deck, I got hit by a fifty-caliber machine-gun bullet to my leg that came from the torpedo boats. I was bleeding into my shoes and not until the next day when I was able to lie down did the bleeding slow down. You know the story of the Incredible Hulk and mother's who lift cars off of their kids? When you are angry and hurt you can do amazing things.

"If you got one hundred people into my skin that day, probably all of them would have thrown up from the hell that erupted on the Liberty. Men were groaning and crying for their mothers, but it was just background noise for me. I was slip sliding as I crossed the bloody deck to get to the Captain who had been hit. McGonagle was leaning back in the Captain's chair, bleeding from many orifices, some natural and some new ones. I applied battle dressings, started an IV, gave him some morphine and sent an enlisted man to find as many officers as possible to come up to the Bridge and assist him and to watch him for shock. The Captain said, 'If I sit up, I pass out, but as long as I stay in this position, I am OK.'

"People I had eaten lunch with were dismembered all around me, burned, dead. To this day, every time I have a phone conversation with Phil Tourney, who held the light while I was operating on Blanchard; 4 he tells me he can still see the look in my eyes.

"Everyone in the Navy hierarchy knew we were scapegoats and the Navy would have done anything to exact retribution, but the Navy never got the chance.

"In LBJ's mind we were just an average day's losses in Vietnam. I doubt Israel would have attacked without the knowledge or complicity of our State Departments willingness to sacrifice a few hundred sailors to have a 'stabilized' Middle East and all that oil. Our State Department's morality and ethics are just slightly below those of a Madame in a house of ill repute or a large scale drug dealer.

"June 8, 1967 on the Liberty, was like July 4th in hell without the ice cream… and yes, I agree that it was God that kept us afloat.

See previous parts: Remembering the USS Liberty , The Torpedo that Hit the USS Liberty: Made in the USA?, and Seconding Captain McGonagle's Two Word Epithet.

Admiral John S. McCain, Silver Star Medal Commendation. #
Read more about Lt. Commander Dave Ed Lewis . #
Assault on the Liberty, James M. Ennis, Jr. pages 213, 214, 131, 136, 141, and 142. Reintree Press, 1979. #
Read more about Blanchard. #

[outsider]

USS Liberty survivors now have a weekly two-hour program on Republic Broadcasting Network, Saturdays 10.00-12.00 Central Standard Time (I think that is 16.00-18.00 our time), hosted by Phil Tourney (one of the survivors).
It is also a generally good on-line radio station. Check it out, folks!

http://www.republicbroadcasting.org/index.php?cmd=listenlive

(Press 'listen live' at bottom of page).

(I originally posted this as 04.00-06.00 our time, but I made a mistake).

[reprehensor]