MUJCA & USS Liberty

[outsider]

Looks like this important incident is at last getting some attention from the 9/11 Truth Campaigners!








USS Liberty

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June 8th Marks 40th Anniversary of USS Liberty Atrocity

RESEARCHERS & PATRIOT MOVEMENT INCREASINGLY BLAME AMERICANS, NOT ISRAELIS

Next Friday, June 8th marks the 40-year anniversary of the brutal slaughter of 34 Americans and the wounding of 171 others in the unprovoked Israeli attack on the unarmed USS Liberty.

Why should MUJCA care? Because the USS Liberty issue has driven a wedge between pro-Zionist Jews on one side, and many Christians and Muslims on the other, with the former claiming that anybody who mentions the Liberty must be anti-Semitic, and the latter seeing the incident and its coverup as evidence that Washington D.C. is, as Pat Buchanan put it, "Israeli-occupied territory."

My fellow GCN talk show host Alex Jones has called attention to a third perspective, best-outlined in Peter Hounam's book Operation Cyanide. Far from being a purely Israeli atrocity, Jones cites Hounam and argues that Lyndon Johnson and other top US officials planned the Liberty sinking as a false-flag trigger for US involvement in the 1967 Mideast war.

Now the American Free Press, a bastion of unfettered journalism that has helped expose 9/11, is echoing Hounan's charges.

Funny how the mainstream media and academy, to the very limited extent they consider the Liberty incident, blame it on Israel. Yet these same mainstream journalists and academics toss insults like "anti-Semitic" at people in the patriot movement who question 9/11-- people like Alex Jones and AFP, who, unlike the mainstreamers, blame American officials, not Israeli Jews, for the Liberty atrocity!

To me, that suggests that people like Alex Jones and AFP search for the truth wherever it leads--while the mainstream is just a sewer of official lies.

--Kevin Barrett, http://mujca.com


http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/liberty_attack_scheme.html

LIBERTY ATTACK PART OF GRAND SCHEME

Newly Uncovered Evidence Indicates Assault May Have Been Pre-Planned ‘Useful Disaster’




* * *

By Mark Glenn

This June 8, 2007, marks the 40-year anniversary of Israel’s bloody attack on the USS Liberty, a lightly armed U.S. Navy ship sailing off the coast of Egypt at the time.

Over the years, there have been numerous reports indicating that the unprovoked assault caught the White House and the military by surprise.

New information, however, reveals that officials in various agencies in the U.S. government played a key role in setting up the Liberty for the purpose of drawing the Soviet Union into a fight in the Middle East and ultimately igniting World War III.

For those who follow the intrigues and explosive events surrounding the relationship between America and Israel over the last four decades it is easy to “get into a rut” so to speak and blame every single catastrophic event solely on the treachery of Israel. The tragedy though (and certainly the hardest part to swallow by patriotic Americans who would sooner take their own lives than betray their fellow countrymen) is that there have been and are players on the American side of the equation whose hands are just as dirty as those of their Israeli counterparts.

Whether it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the bombing of the twin towers in 1993, the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in 1995 or the events taking place on 9-11, the only way these could have taken place is if elements within the U.S. government cooperated with the planning, execution and subsequent dissemination of propaganda in the aftermath of these operations.

Now, a new and terrible tale has surfaced indicating yet again that elements of the U.S. government were involved at the highest level in even more criminal acts against the very same American people whom it is charged with protecting. The case in question involves the June 8, 1967, attack on the USS Liberty by the air and naval forces of the state of Israel during the height of the Arab-Israeli war that led to the deaths of 34 American servicemen.

Long believed that players within the Johnson administration simply assisted in the cover-up of the attack so as “not to embarrass” America’s greatest ally, Israel, it now it appears that American political, intelligence and military persons played a key role in setting up the Liberty for the purpose of igniting WW III in what was code-named “Operation Cyanide.”

It was a heady time, to be sure. The United States and the Soviet Union were neck-deep in the Cold War, and by all appearances it seemed that a shooting match between the two superpowers was inevitable.

The incident in question took place only a few short years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and at a time when America seemed unable to stop the spread of communism in Asia and other parts of the world.

In the Middle East, states such as Egypt, with dynamic, fiery and recalcitrant leaders such as President Gamal Abdel Nasser, were forming strong bonds with the Soviets for military and economic aid. Using the same rationale that led to America inserting itself militarily into Korea and Vietnam, it was believed that, if not stopped, the Soviets would entrench themselves in the Middle East to the point that America’s access to the oil of that region would be directly jeopardized and that, just as the communists had predicted decades before, the West would be conquered “without a shot being fired.”

It has long been assumed that Israel’s deliberate attack on the USS Liberty was just another of Israel’s made-to-order false flag operations done simply for the purpose of dragging an unwilling America into a Middle East war on the side of the Jewish state. However, new information uncovered by former BBC investigative journalist Peter Hounam reveals that the U.S. government—and more specifically the administration of Lyndon Johnson—was not as much the unsuspecting victim in all of this that Israel has claimed these last 40 years.

Based on relatively new evidence, the attack on the Liberty was actually part of a much larger plan. The Liberty incident was just one domino in a series that had as the ultimate goal a real live shooting war between the United States and the Soviets. Had the Liberty been sunk with no witnesses as planned, the world would be a much different place as a result—and certainly not for the better.

The plan for that awful day in American history was to sink the defenseless, unarmed American ship sailing in international waters off the coast of Egypt. The Soviets and their Arab allies (in particular Egypt) would then be blamed for the event.

As with the sinking of the USS Maine nearly 70 years earlier, the cry would be “Remember the USS Liberty” and America’s “justifiable” response to such a horrendous act would be the launching of nuclear weapons against Egypt, an ally of the Soviet Union. Working in tandem with the United States would be allies such as Israel, Great Britain and, interestingly, Australia.

The end result would be a Middle East free of any Soviet presence, leaving America and her ally Israel in possession of Arab oil for the foreseeable future and in a better position to dictate terms to the communists. In the minds of powerful men such as these—men who sit in comfortable offices and expensive chairs and who do not have to answer to anyone for their actions, the rationale for such an act was simple: It is better for 300 U.S. sailors to die in the service of their country than have the “free world” fall into the clutches of Soviet communism.

What prevented all of this from taking place was that—simply by the grace of God—the Liberty did not sink, and the world was spared. Of course, there is no official confirmation of Operation Cyanide. In fact there is no mention of it at all. In various interviews that have been conducted over the years, individuals from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to Dean Rusk to Richard Helms to Mossad spy chief Rafael Eitan have demonstrated great intellectual and verbal dexterity for men their age when discussing various items. However, they clam up instantaneously when Operation Cyanide is mentioned as if they were witnesses to an organized crime hit and they feared for their lives.

However, the smaller players involved at the time have a different tale to tell. Piecing together all the small parts that they individually bring to the table fleshes out a picture that, although not crystal clear, is clear enough to suggest that America was involved in the murder of 34 young men on that day in a much deeper fashion than previously thought.

For the sake of those men who died then, and for those who survived the attack and who have endured the assault of lies that has been waged against them these last 40 years, the truth concerning what took place must be told.

In the opinion of many, exposure of the Liberty incident may very well hold the key to freeing America from the bondage it suffers under men such as those who have murdered not only American citizens, but our traditional political system as well.

A former schoolteacher fluent in several languages, Mark Glenn spoke at the AFP-TBR conference on the Middle East panel. He is a prolific writer whose provocative essays have been published worldwide. He and his wife Vicki and their eight children maintain a ranch in northern Idaho. His book, No Beauty in the Beast, can be ordered from TBR BOOK CLUB (1-877-773-9077) for $28 ppd.

(Issue #23, June 4, 2007)

http://home.cfl.rr.com/gidusko/texts/ocreview.txt


MILITARY HISTORY BOOK REVIEW MH-122 December 2003 Edited 7/23/2003

OPERATION CYANIDE: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III, by Peter Hounam, Vision, a division of Satin Publications, Ltd, London,

2003, $24.95

Since it reviewed A. Jay Cristol's book, THE LIBERTY INCIDENT, in August 2003, MILITARY HISTORY was bombarded with letters, including some from outraged survivors, insisting that the Israeli attack on their ship on June 8, 1967, was not in error, but deliberate (see letters, P. , and demanding that the guilty party confess to the crime. Absent from all such accusations, however, was a substantial explanation of motive: What would make it worth Israel's while to attack a ship -- even a spy ship -- being operated by one of its few supporters in the world?

In OPERATION CYANIDE, Peter Hounam, an investigative reporter for the SUNDAY TIMES and the British Broadcasting System with 30 years' experience, presents the results of his research into the question of "who really dunnit," which evolved into more of what he called a "why dunnit." Hounam structures his book accordingly, as the reader follows him from interview to interview, gathering clues like a detective from testimonies that tend to be scattered, fragmentary, guarded and sometimes almost cryptic. As Hounam "connects the dots," however, the scenario that emerges is fantastic and yet, in view of the United States' rush to war with Iraq in 2003, not entirely implausible.

In essence, President Lyndon B. Johnson and some key officials, seeing the increasingly Soviet-leaning Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser as a threat, made secret arrangements to help Israel in its coming June offensive with the intention of toppling Nasser. As part of Operation Cyanide, USS LIBERTY was sent to operate off the Sinai coast, where it was to be sunk with all hands by unmarked Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats, after which the United States would blame the attack on Egypt and launch carrier air strikes against Cairo -- with nuclear weapons if necessary. The stubborn refusal of LIBERTY'S crew to die or let their ship sink after 75 minutes of air and sea attack -- in spite of two American carrier sorties to aid her being inexplicably called back -- led to the cancellation of Operation Cyanide, Israel's apology and offer of restitution for a "tragic mistake," the Johnson Administration's swift acceptance of that explanation and an equally quick, reassuring "hot line" telephone call to Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin.

The first book to seriously examine the possible reason behind the attack on USS LIBERTY, OPERATION CYANIDE presents fragmentary evidence to support an extraordinary theory. If, however, the emergence of further evidence proves its premise to be true, one cannot help but wonder if their being set up for destruction by the government they swore to serve, in the interests of starting a nuclear war based on a lie, is the sort of truth that LIBERTY'S bitter survivors were hoping for.

Jon Guttman

BOOK REVIEW OF "OPERATION CYANIDE"

By John Simpson

BBC World Affairs Editor

This is an extraordinary story, one of the most extraordinary, perhaps, of the entire twentieth century. Suppose, in an attempt to shore up his critically damaged presidency, Lyndon Johnson deliberately engineered an event in which American lives were sacrificed and the United States was brought disturbingly close to an all-out nuclear war with Russia? Suppose

this involved a secret agreement between Israel and American intelligence, which resulted in an Israeli attack on an American naval vessel, in the latter stages of the Six-Day War?

It sounds, I know, like one of those depressing conspiracy theories which cluster round every big controversial event from the death of Princess Diana to the attack on the World Trade Centre. People often have problems in handling the banality of truth, and prefer to imagine deeper, darker plots beneath the surface. Yet this book is based on careful, rigorous

investigation by a well-known and respected journalist who has meticulously tracked down the people and the documents who have survived from the event itself: the attack on the USS Liberty, in the eastern Mediterranean in June 1967.

As with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, four years earlier, the official version is even more unlikely than some of the conspiracy theories. In order to believe the hasty, often contradictory account which came out of Washington, you would have to accept all sorts of virtual impossibilities: that Israeli planes and torpedo boats could have mistaken a modern American warship of ten thousand tons for an elderly Egyptian horse transport less than a quarter of its size, come to within fifty feet of it without spotting that it was flying a particularly large American flag, and blazed away at it from close range for forty minutes before realizing what it was they were shooting at. A hasty American enquiry immediately afterwards called it 'a bona fide mistake.' That seems, to say the least, a little implausible.

Yet this is the official version, which stands to this day. Any other version -- that of the Liberty's surviving crew members, for instance -- has been extremely hard to establish because of the intensity of the security blanket which the Israelis and Americans wrapped around the entire incident.

The blanket remains in place to this day, yet this book provides sufficient evidence for any open-minded person to see that something else lies underneath: something very disturbing.

I have found Peter Hounam's research compelling, and the story which unfolds in these pages rivetting. It is time a little daylight was shed on Operation Cyanide. This book does precisely that, and we should be grateful for it.

John Simpson
Paris
October 2002

[xmasdale]

Mmmmmmmmmmm

That was an excellent post. I'm surprised to see a hitherto anti-conspiracy-theory hard-nut as John Simpson supporting the legitimacy of the book's claims. It just shows, that if the evidence is researched and presented by an MSM insider it will be taken seriously.

I suggest we invite Peter Hounam to talk about his book at some of our future meetings.

Well done MUJCA.

[outsider]

!A Luta Continua! ('The Struggle Continues'(Portuguese)).
'Liberty' survivor writes hard-hitting 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/

[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. #