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In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel’s attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.
Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.
Soon more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.
A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship’s top officers.
The Liberty’s radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called “a buzzsaw sound.” Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet’s large aircraft carrier.
Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty’s aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. “Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,” he barked. McNamara’s injunction was reiterated in saltier terms by Admiral David L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations: “You get those fucking airplanes back on deck, and you get them back down.” The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.
After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.
As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. No body was going to get out alive that way.
After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: “Do you need any help?”
The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: “Fuck you.”
The Israeli boat turned and left.
A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty’s conning officer refused.
Finally, 16 hours after the attack two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.
The following morning Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.
Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. “These errors do occur,” McNamara concluded.
•�•�•
In Assault on the Liberty, a harrowing first-hand account by James Ennes Jr., McNamara’s version of events is proven to be as big a sham as his concurrent lies about Vietnam. Ennes’s book created a media storm when it was first published by Random House in 1980, including (predictably) charges that Ennes was a liar and an anti-Semite. Still, the book sold more than 40,000 copies, but was eventually allowed to go out of print. Now Ennes has published an updated version, which incorporates much new evidence that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the US government went to extraordinary lengths to disguise the truth.
It’s a story of Israel aggression, Pentagon incompetence, official lies, and a cover-up that persists to this day. The book gains much of its power from the immediacy of Ennes’s first-hand account of the attack and the lies that followed.
Now, decades later, Ennes warns that the bloodbath on board the Liberty and its aftermath should serve as a tragic cautionary tale about the continuing ties between the US government and the government of Israel.
The Attack on the Liberty is the kind of book that makes your blood seethe. Ennes skillfully documents the life of the average sailor on one of the more peculiar vessels in the US Navy, with an attention for detail that reminds one of Dana or O’Brien. After all, the year was 1967 and most of the men on the Liberty were certainly glad to be on a non-combat ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, rather than in the Gulf of Tonkin or Mekong Delta.
But this isn’t Two Years Before the Mast. In fact, Ennes’s tour on the Liberty last only a few short weeks. He had scarcely settled into a routine before his new ship was shattered before his eyes.
Ennes joined the Liberty in May of 1967, as an Electronics Material Officer. Serving on a “spook ship”, as the Liberty was known to Navy wives, was supposed to be a sure path to career enhancement. The Liberty’s normal routine was to ply the African coast, tuning in its eavesdropping equipment on the electronic traffic in the region.
The Liberty had barely reached Africa when it received a flash message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sail from the Ivory Coast to the Mediterranean, where it was to re-deploy off the coast of the Sinai to monitor the Israeli attack on Egypt and the allied Arab nations.
As the war intensified, the Liberty sent a request to the fleet headquarters requesting an escort. It was denied by Admiral William Martin. The Liberty moved alone to a position in international waters about 13 miles from the shore at El Arish, then under furious siege by the IDF.
On June 6, the Joint Chiefs sent Admiral McCain, father of the senator from Arizona, an urgent message instructing him to move the Liberty out of the war zone to a position at least 100 miles off the Gaza Coast. McCain never forwarded the message to the ship.
A little after seven in the morning on June 8, Ennes entered the bridge of the Liberty to take the morning watch. Ennes was told that an hour earlier a “flying boxcar” (later identified as a twin-engine Nord 2501 Noratlas) had flown over the ship at a low level.
Ennes says he noticed that the ship’s American flag had become stained with soot and ordered a new flag run up the mast. The morning was clear and calm, with a light breeze.
At 9 am, Ennes spotted another reconnaissance plane, which circled the Liberty. An hour later two Israeli fighter jets buzzed the ship. Over the next four hours, Israeli planes flew over the Liberty five more times.
When the first fighter jet struck, a little before two in the afternoon, Ennes was scanning the skies from the starboard side of the bridge, binoculars in his hands. A rocket hit the ship just below where Ennes was standing, the fragments shredded the men closest to him.
After the explosion, Ennes noticed that he was the only man left standing. But he also had been hit by more than 20 shards of shrapnel and the force of the blast had shattered his left leg. As he crawled into the pilothouse, a second fighter jet streaked above them and unleashed its payload on the hobbled Liberty.
At that point, Ennes says the crew of the Liberty had no idea who was attacking them or why. For a few moments, they suspected it might be the Soviets, after an officer mistakenly identified the fighters as MIG-15s. They knew that the Egyptian air force already had been decimated by the Israelis. The idea that the Israelis might be attacking them didn’t occur to them until one of the crew spotted a Star of David on the wing of one of the French-built Mystere jets.
Ennes was finally taken below deck to a makeshift dressing station, with other wounded men. It was hardly a safe harbor. As Ennes worried that his fractured leg might slice through his femoral artery leaving him to bleed to death, the Liberty was pummeled by rockets, machine-gun fire and an Italian-made torpedo packed with 1,000-pounds of explosive.
After the attack ended, Ennes was approached by his friend Pat O’Malley, a junior officer, who had just sent a list of killed and wounded to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He got an immediate message back. “They said, ‘Wounded in what action? Killed in what action?’,” O’Malley told Ennes. “They said it wasn’t an ‘action,’ it was an accident. I’d like for them to come out here and see the difference between an action and an accident. Stupid bastards.”
The cover-up had begun.
•�•�•
The Pentagon lied to the public about the attack on the Liberty from the very beginning. In a decision personally approved by the loathsome McNamara, the Pentagon denied to the press that the Liberty was an intelligence ship, referring to it instead as a Technical Research ship, as if it were little more than a military version of Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso.
The military press corps on the USS America, where most of the wounded sailors had been taken, were placed under extreme restrictions. All of the stories filed from the carrier were first routed through the Pentagon for security clearance, objectionable material was removed with barely a bleat of protest from the reporters or their publications.
Predictably, Israel’s first response was to blame the victim, a tactic that has served them so well in the Palestinian situation. First, the IDF alleged that it had asked the State Department and the Pentagon to identify any US ships in the area and was told that there were none. Then the Israeli government charged that the Liberty failed to fly its flag and didn’t respond to calls for it to identify itself. The Israelis contended that they assumed the Liberty was an Egyptian supply ship called El Quseir, which, even though it was a rusting transport ship then docked in Alexandria, the IDF said it suspected of shelling Israeli troops from the sea. Under these circumstances, the Israeli’s said they were justified in opening fire on the Liberty. The Israelis said that they halted the attack almost immediately, when they realized their mistake.
“The Liberty contributed decisively toward its identification as an enemy ship,” the IDF report concluded. This was a blatant falsehood, since the Israelis had identified the Liberty at least six hours prior to the attack on the ship.
Even though the Pentagon knew better, it gave credence to the Israeli account by saying that perhaps the Liberty’s flag had lain limp on the flagpole in a windless sea. The Pentagon also suggested that the attack might have lasted less than 20 minutes.
After the initial battery of misinformation, the Pentagon imposed a news blackout on the Liberty disaster until after the completion of a Court of Inquiry investigation.
The inquiry was headed by Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd. Kidd didn’t have a free hand. He’d been instructed by Vice-Admiral McCain to limit the damage to the Pentagon and to protect the reputation of Israel.
The Kidd interviewed the crew on June 14 and 15. The questioning was extremely circumscribed. According to Ennes, the investigators “asked nothing that might be embarrassing to Israeland testimony that tended to embarrass Israel was covered with a ‘Top Secret’ label, if it was accepted at all.”
Ennes notes that even testimony by the Liberty’s communications officers about the jamming of the ship’s radios was classified as “Top Secret.” The reason? It proved that Israel knew it was attacking an American ship. “Here was strong evidence that the attack was planned in advance and that our ship’s identity was known to the attackers (for it its practically impossible to jam the radio of a stranger), but this information was hushed up and no conclusions were drawn from it,” Ennes writes.
Similarly, the Court of Inquiry deep-sixed testimony and affidavits regarding the flag-Ennes had ordered a crisp new one deployed early on the morning of the attack. The investigators buried intercepts of conversations between IDF pilots identifying the ship as flying an American flag.
It also refused to accept evidence about the IDF’s use of napalm during the attacks and choose not to hear testimony regarding the duration of the attacks and the fact that the US Navy failed to send planes to defend the ship.
“No one came to help us,” said Dr. Richard F. Kiepfer, the Liberty’s physician. “We were promised help, but no help came. The Russians arrived before our own ships did. We asked for an escort before we ever came to the war zone and we were turned down.”
None of this made its way into the 700-page Court of Inquiry report, which was completed within a couple of weeks and sent to Admiral McCain in London for review.
McCain approved the report over the objections of Captain Merlin Staring, the Navy legal officer assigned to the inquiry, who found the report to be flawed, incomplete and contrary to the evidence.
Staring sent a letter to the Judge Advocate General of the Navy disavowing himself from the report. The JAG seemed to take Staring’s objections to heart. It prepared a summary for the Chief of Naval Operations that almost completely ignored the Kidd/McCain report. Instead, it concluded:
that the Liberty was easily recognizable as an American naval vessel; that it’s flag was fully deployed and flying in a moderate breeze; that Israeli planes made at least eight reconnaissance flights at close range; the ship came under a prolonged attack from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats.
This succinct and largely accurate report was stamped Top Secret by Navy brass and stayed locked up for many years. But it was seen by many in the Pentagon and some in the Oval Office. But here was enough grumbling about the way the Liberty incident had been handled that LBJ summoned that old Washington fixer Clark Clifford to do damage control. It didn’t take Clifford long to come up with the official line: the Israelis simply had made a tragic mistake.
It turns out that the Admiral Kidd and Captain Ward Boston, the two investigating officers who prepared the original report for Admiral McCain, both believed that the Israeli attack was intentional and sustained. In other words, the IDF knew that they were striking an American spy ship and they wanted to sink it and kill as many sailors as possible. Why then did the Navy investigators produce a sham report that concluded it was an accident?
Twenty-five years later we finally found out. In June of 2002, Captain Boston told the Navy Times: “Officers follow orders.”
It gets worse. There’s plenty of evidence that US intelligence agencies learned on June 7 that Israel intended to attack the Liberty on the following day and that the strike had been personally ordered by Moshe Dayan.
As the attacks were going on, conversations between Israeli pilots were overheard by US Air Force officers in an EC121 surveillance plane overhead. The spy plane was spotted by Israeli jets, which were given orders to shoot it down. The American plane narrowly avoided the IDF missiles.
Initial reports on the incident prepared by the CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency all reached similar conclusions.
A particularly damning report compiled by a CIA informant suggests that Israeli Defense minister Moshe Dayan personally ordered the attack and wanted it to proceed until the Liberty was sunk and all on board killed. A heavily redacted version of the report was released in 1977. It reads in part:
“[The source] said that Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship and that one of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, ‘This is pure murder.’ One of the admirals who was present also disapproved of the action, and it was he who ordered it stopped and not Dayan.”
This amazing document generated little attention from the press and Dayan was never publicly questioned about his role in the attack.
The analyses by the intelligence agencies are collected in a 1967 investigation by the Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations. Two and half decades later that report remains classified. Why? A former committee staffer said: “So as not to embarrass Israel.”
More proof came to light from the Israeli side. A few years after Attack on the Liberty was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an Israeli pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book and wanted to tell him his story. Toni said that he was the pilot in the first Israeli Mirage fighter to reach the Liberty. He immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy vessel. He radioed Israeli air command with this information and asked for instructions. Toni said he was ordered to “attack.” He refused and flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily arrested for disobeying orders.
•�•�•
How tightly does the Israeli lobby control the Hill? For the first time in history, an attack on an America ship was not subjected to a public investigation by Congress. In 1980, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater planned to open a senate hearing into the Liberty affair. Then Jimmy Carter intervened by brokering a deal with Menachem Begin, where Israel agreed to pony up $6 million to pay for damages to the ship. A State Department press release announced the payment said, “The book is now closed on the USS Liberty.”
It certainly was the last chapter for Adlai Stevenson. He ran for governor of Illinois the following year, where his less than perfect record on Israel, and his unsettling questions about the Liberty affair, became an issue in the campaign. Big money flowed into the coffers of his Republican opponent, Big Jim Thompson, and Stevenson went down to a narrow defeat.
But the book wasn’t closed for the sailors either, of course. After a Newsweek story exposed the gist of what really happened on that day in the Mediterranean, an enraged Admiral McCain placed all the sailors under a gag order. When one sailor told an officer that he was having problems living with the cover-up, he was told: “Forget about it, that’s an order.”
The Navy went to bizarre lengths to keep the crew of the Liberty from telling what they knew. When gag orders didn’t work, they threatened sanctions. Ennes tells of the confinement and interrogation of two Liberty sailors that sounds like something right out of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program.
“In an incredible abuse of authority, military officers held two young Liberty sailors against their will in a locked and heavily guarded psychiatric ward of the base hospital,” Ennes writes. “For days these men were drugged and questioned about their recollections of the attack by a ‘therapist’ who admitted to being untrained in either psychiatry or psychology. At one point, they avoided electroshock only by bolting from the room and demanding to see the commanding officer.”
Since coming home, the veterans who have tried to tell of their ordeal have been harassed relentlessly. They’ve been branded as drunks, bigots, liars and frauds. Often, it turns out, these slurs have been leaked by the Pentagon. And, oh yeah, they’ve also been painted as anti-Semites.
In a recent column, Charley Reese describes just how mean-spirited and petty this campaign became. “When a small town in Wisconsin decided to name its library in honor of the USS Liberty crewmen, a campaign claiming it was anti-Semitic was launched,” writes Reese. “And when the town went ahead, the U.S. government ordered no Navy personnel to attend, and sent no messages. This little library was the first, and at the time the only, memorial to the men who died on the Liberty.”
•�•�•
So why then did the Israelis attack the Liberty?
A few days before the Six Days War, Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited Washington to inform LBJ about the forthcoming invasion. Johnson cautioned Eban that the US could not support such an attack.
It’s possible, then, that the IDF assumed that the Liberty was spying on the Israeli war plans. Possible, but not likely. Despite the official denials, as Andrew and Leslie Cockburn demonstrate in Dangerous Liaison, at the time of the Six Days War the US and Israel had developed a warm covert relationship. So closely were the two sides working that US intelligence aid certainly helped secure Israel’s devastating and swift victory. In fact, it’s possible that the Liberty had been sent to the region to spy for the IDF.
A somewhat more likely scenario holds that Moshe Dayan wanted to keep the lid on Israel’s plan to breach the new cease-fire and invade into Syria to seize the Golan.
It has also been suggested that Dayan ordered the attack on the Liberty with the intent of pinning the blame on the Egyptians and thus swinging public and political opinion in the United States solidly behind the Israelis. Of course, for this plan to work, the Liberty had to be destroyed and its crew killed.
There’s another factor. The Liberty was positioned just off the coast from the town of El Arish. In fact, Ennes and others had used town’s mosque tower to fix the location of the ship along the otherwise featureless desert shoreline. The IDF had seized El Arish and had used the airport there as a prisoner of war camp. On the very day the Liberty was attacked, the IDF was in the process of executing as many as 1,000 Palestinian and Egyptian POWs, a war crime that they surely wanted to conceal from prying eyes. According to Gabriel Bron, now an Israeli reporter, who witnessed part of the massacre as a soldier: “The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death.”
The bigger question is why the US government would participate so enthusiastically in the cover-up of a war crime against its own sailors. Well, the Pentagon has never been slow to hide its own incompetence. And there’s plenty of that in the Liberty affair: bungled communications, refusal to provide an escort, situating the defenseless Liberty too close to a raging battle, the inability to intervene in the attack and the inexcusably long time it took to reach the battered ship and its wounded.
That’s but par for the course. But something else was going on that would only come to light later. Through most of the 1960s, the US congress had imposed a ban on the sale of arms to both Israel and Jordan. But at the time of the Liberty attack, the Pentagon (and its allies in the White House and on the Hill) was seeking to have this proscription overturned. The top brass certainly knew that any evidence of a deliberate attack on a US Navy ship by the IDF would scuttle their plans. So they hushed it up.
In January 1968, the arms embargo on Israel was lifted and the sale of American weapons began to flow. By 1971, Israel was buying $600 million of American-made weapons a year. Two years later the purchases topped $3 billion. Almost overnight, Israel had become the largest buyer of US-made arms and aircraft.
Perversely, then, the IDF’s strike on the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel together, in a kind of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF attacks defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and Apache helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody assaults as a joint operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden partner.
Thus, does the legacy of Liberty live on, one raid after another.
A version of this essay appeared in The Politics of Anti-Semitism by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
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Many of the serious problems of the last 50 years gain from the fundamental treason committed by US government officials in not militarily responding to and then in covering up this incident.
With a “friend” like Israel, America doesn’t need any enemies.
This column is 100% Muslim-Supremacist lies, like so much of the rest of the Unz.com’s Muslimist brigade.
It’s all good, they’re allegedly “god’s chosen people!”
Video Link
Please! Don’t embarrass friends of Israel!
You risk making all the sneering gibes at hasbara seem true. (I assume that is not your trollish purpose).
So much of what is said is well known, long established fact that you really need to point to evidence of where any of it is wrong. BTW your “Muslim-Supremacist” is bizatre. Anti-Semitism on UR yes – but whete is the Muslim voice except for the moderate Talha?
Given the availability of radar, radio and visual means, the United States was aware of what was happening in real time.
The U.S. knew right from the start that the attack was launched by Israel. Moreover, the Israelis themselves knew from the start that there was zero chance of hoodwinking the mighty United States.
It follows that one of two things must have happened:
(1) Israel acted with tacit U.S. approval, i.e. LBJ and McNamara intentionally sacrificed the crew for a PR coup to justify the U.S. joining the war against Egypt, but LBJ and McNamara later pulled back and left the USS Liberty crew to die.
(2) The USS Liberty was found to be passing vital security to the Arabs and had to be neutralized by Israel even at the risk of causing a major rupture in its relations with the U.S.
Great emotional argument to rationalize McNamara’s abandonment of the USS Liberty crew. Emotional voters will have lapped this up. Factually, the point is completely ridiculous given the locale and practices at the time.
Even having U.S. aircraft in the vicinity as observers could have made a major difference.
The big hole in this article for one who has never made a special study of the Liberty affair but woud have expected to have heard of the execution of Palestinians and Egyptian POWs , but hadn’t, is to find the reference to it inserted casually with not supporting material cited. Where’s the best source?
Please! You embarrass friends of Israel. Maybe you intend to give hasbara a bad name on this site but where you get the idea of UR being Muslim Supremacist is impossible to see. (Plenty of anti-Semites sure).
Have a look at this from the Fimes of Israel:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/long-suppressed-censored-voices-speaks-out-on-six-day-war/
Muslim Supremacist lies?
” Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet’s large aircraft carrier. ”
It was a little more complicated.
Israeli lack of coordination, or stupidity.
Israel had specially built rockets that homed in on the Liberty antenna’s.
Alas, they had overseen that the jamming by strong emitters made the rockets fly towards the jamming equipment.
So in order to make the rockets function the jamming had to be interrupted.
In these pauses the Liberty informed USA naval forces that it was under attack from Israeli forces.
McNamara then ordered back the planes already on their way, with atomic bombs.
Probably Cairo was spared the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hey Lot, which Muslim-Supremacist are you talking about? Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Qatar, Morroco, Turkey, Jordan, Mahmood Abbas (of Palestinian Authority), and even ISIS are all Israeli friends.
The Israelis knew which ship it was, jammed the ship’s radios (prior knowledge) and the attacking pilots knew they were attacking an American ship, plus any survivors were to be killed and the ship was deliberately (?) isolated and located just off the Egyptian coast = another Israeli False Flag from a county with a tradition of False Flags directed against the US (and Britain), this time designed to outrage the US public against the Egyptians and get the US to attack yet more Arabs.
An interesting piece of False Flag investigation would involve a search for pre-prepared media material explaining all the details of the “Egyptian” attack to the US public. Of course this media package would have needed to be quickly destroyed after the FF failed, but some of it may still exist somewhere.
Also, US foreknowledge and later actions implicate Johnson, McNamara and McCain with a requirement for their participation and readiness to launch an attack on Egypt. Is there evidence of US political/military preparation for an attack on Egypt triggered by an “event” on 8th June 1967?
Another question is why Johnson would betray the US for the benefit of Israel? Maybe he had already done so with regard to the Kennedy assassination and was open to blackmail?
That’s the picture that emerges from Michael Collins Piper’s useful book “Final Judgment” https://www.amazon.com/Final-Judgment-Missing-Assassination-Conspiracy/dp/0974548405/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1496563877&sr=8-2&keywords=final+judgment
I can’t prove this – but, talk of US officials being incompetent or negligent in response to the attack don’t ring true to me. I get the sense the US expected the attack, or “a” attack by the Israeli’s. The speed with which orders were given by the defence Sec’ to get the F4’s landed back on the carrier, the denial of request for an escort, the failure to even send a message about moving the Liberty out of danger, & the immediate unwillingness to allow “action” as a description of events (no it was an “accident”) all suggest US foreknowledge. The mind boggles. This shameful incident should remind us (as if we needed reminding) that Elites are completely blase about sacrificing the lives of citizens or allies for even the pettiest or incomprehensible reasons.
Gee, Lot are you a troll ?
If not, perhaps you’d like to advance some evidence or argument for your Prima facie out-landish claims ?
There are idiotic Americans who can’t come to terms with the reality that elements of the “greatest ally” wanted to murder American sailors in cold blood. They should be reminded that it was only eleven years earlier in 1956 that Pres Eisenhower forced the Israelis along with France and the UK to stop their Suez offensive. Many Israelis would have wanted to give the Americans a bloody nose then. Few of the East European Jewish elite in Israel had much sympathy for the US due their background.
I knew nothing about the USS LIBERTY until 13 October 2007 while in California, when President of the USS LIBERTY Veterans Association, Philip F. Tourney announced to the crowd: “IT WAS GOD THAT KEPT THE USS LIBERTY AFLOAT.”
I knew in a flash I would do more than just listen to him.
The crew of the USS Liberty is the most decorated crew since World War II, but very few Americans know what happened on 8 June 1967 as she navigated in international waters during the Six Day War.
The USS Liberty was America’s premier surveillance [spy] ship during the Six Day War.
Virtually unarmed and having been refused an escort, the US Navy ship was attacked by Israeli planes and torpedo boats.
Thirty-four US Sailors and Marines were killed and 174 more wounded.
The attack on the USS Liberty has never received a full investigation, as required by law.
In October of 2003, an Independent Commission of Inquiry convened including Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, United States Navy, (Ret.), Former Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Raymond G. Davis, United States Marine Corps, (MOH), Former Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps; Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, United States Navy, (Ret.), Former Judge Advocate General of the Navy; and Ambassador James Akins, (Ret.), Former United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
The Independent Commission of Inquiry, having undertaken an independent investigation of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, including eyewitness testimony from surviving crewmembers a review of naval and other official records, an examination of official statements by the Israeli and American governments, a study of the conclusions of all previous official inquiries, and a consideration of important new evidence and recent statements from individuals having direct knowledge of the attack or the cover up, concluded that there was compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was deliberate and ‘Israel committed acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States.’
The Independent Commission of Inquiry called upon the Department of the Navy, the Congress of the United States and the American people to immediately take the following actions:
FIRST: That a new Court of Inquiry be convened by the Department of the Navy, operating with Congressional oversight, to take public testimony from surviving crew-members; and to thoroughly investigate the circumstances of the attack on the USS Liberty, with full cooperation from the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the military intelligence services, and to determine Israel’s possible motive in launching said attack on a U.S. naval vessel;
SECOND: That every appropriate committee of the Congress of the United States investigate the actions of the White House and Defense Department that prevented the rescue of the USS Liberty, thereafter threatened her surviving officers and men if they exposed the truth, and covered up the true circumstances of the attack from the American people; and
THIRD: That the eighth day of June of every year be proclaimed to be hereafter known as “USS LIBERTY REMEMBRANCE DAY, in order to commemorate the Liberty’s heroic crew and to educate the American people of the danger to our national security inherent in any passionate attachment of our elected officials for any foreign nation.” – PETITION to CONGRESS
Ernest Gallo of Florida is the current President of the USS Liberty Veterans Association. Gallo has invited President Trump and Senators Nelson, Rubio and other high ranking officials to attend this June 8th Arlington Cemetery USS Liberty graveside memorial service.
I am not a veteran and will never be a politician, but I will attend the USS Liberty Remembrance Day graveside memorial service at Arlington Cemetery because I live in the land of the free and the home of the brave; so I vocally denounce war yet support American troops by listening to them.
I am also on a mission to establish June 8 as USS LIBERTY Remembrance Day in hearts and minds of Americans…
How would this have been possible, Israel conspired with McNamara.
As opposed to Hasbara trolls and the cuck brigade?
“Ennes got a call Evan Toni, an Israeli pilot”.
How come when I Google “Evan Toni” (or variations like “Evan Tovni”) the only place this name appears is in fringe conspiracy websites?
Is there any proof such a person exists, and, if so, was he truly an Israeli pilot who was jailed for refusing to bomb the Liberty?
The Liberty was sailing in waters that were, by all accounts, a war zone.
Israel repeatedly warned foreign governments to keep their ships out of these waters. Israeli pilots and ground control were stressed and exhausted from ferocious combat and it is not without justification that mistakes could have occurred.
The Israeli Lobby in the US in 1967 had nowhere near the influence it has today and US-Israel relations were cordial at best. (The US even had an arms embargo against Israel during the Six Days War).
Many of the military actions the Israelis were allegedly trying to keep secret by bombing the Liberty were already published in American newspapers prior to the Liberty attack.
Israel had zero motive to deliberately attack and pick a fight with the US.
I’ve read quite a bit about the Liberty over the years from both attackers and defenders of Israel. After 50 years nobody has produced a smoking gun that this was a deliberate attack.
There are plenty of documents to back this story up.
I hope we can document MSM duplicity on the upcoming anniversary. From my point of view as a conservative I believe it will indict Fox News, Conservatism Inc, and the Republican establishment for treason on the grounds that their elaborate efforts in concealing the truth about the Liberty and 911 provide compelling circumstantial evidence of their complicity and guilt.
This is what can happen when friends spy on friends. We should be grateful Mutti M doesn’t have Israeli chutzpah.
That’s a pretty general statement. Would you care to elaborate? What, exactly, are you labeling lies? Be specific.
It is just amazing that brave, little Israel had the opportunity to attack the one ship in the US Navy manned entirely by Anti-Semites. Why else would the surviving Liberty crew keep up their attacks on brave, little Israel after all these years? Don’t they know about the Holocaust?
Or maybe Israel is as guilty as sin and should have been carpet bombed by the US Navy in retaliation.
I will go with option 2.
No doubt they were buying those arms with American dollars.
Here’s another, nearly unknown, story that needs to see the light of day.
Those interested would probably be gratified by Googling “Teddy Kollek.” He was, besides being a gangster and arms smuggler, one of the original mayors of Jerusalem.
Yeah, that’s what was going on. Maybe get things straight before just ‘showing up. War is hell boys. By 1967 how many innocent North Vietnamese women and children had American war criminals like the toe now old goober McCain turned into blood puddles for no reason? Get over it…stuff happens.
That’s an interesting detsil about the jamming. Can you give a good source for it?
What is your point? Has it got anything to do with the article? That there waa incompetence on the part of the US navy, or even higher up is not in doubt, so are you saying that the US had no right or reason to feel aggtieved by a deliberate attack by Israel on a US navy ship and the killing of many Americans?
Having your wife turned to salt does some really weird things to a guy. Get help.
Poking around the periphery of a war zone wasn’t the cleverest idea (Americans, after all), but these were international waters, the ship was clearly identifiable as American, and the Israelis repeatedly attacked it. Combat fatigue/fog of war doesn’t even come close to rationalizing Israeli actions (whatever their ultimate motivation).
Probably true there weren’t monstrosities like AIPAC (or phony opposition like J Street) back then, but Jewish power (fragmented then due to the historical accident of the Cold War) was still formidable (Truman’s fatal recognition of Israel was an explicit nod to Jewish political influence) and without question a factor in US decision making.
Yep.
It’s good that this tragic case is kept alive even if it’s in the ‘non’ main stream media. Fuck Israel and fuck the owned American politician then and now!
This is the best summary I’ve read so far, many thanks.
The strength of such pieces can be easily gauged by the hasbara mob reaction, in direct proportion.
All the proof you need is right here, in the comments.
Zionist, try reading the article.
Psycho, try Prozac.
Jooie Lot was pleased the wifie was turned into a pillar of salt by his omnipotent sky fag deity……he could then hide out in a cave and safely have sex with his daughters. Yup, it’s all there in the Jooie Book and the Jooie Book doesn’t lie……….
No.
Over the years, I read, and heard, documentaries, about the Liberty.
Over the years a picture emerged.
It is very clear, McNamara conspired with Israel to kill the Liberty crew to the last man, giving him the excuse to nuke Cairo.
Israeli incompetence with jamming and rockets bungled it.
Once the Liberty could send a message that it was under attack by Israel, McNamara had to call back the planes on their way to Cairo, with nukes.
The idea was to blame the USSR.
There is information galore on the Liberty, of course there is also disinformation galore.
As with Sept 11, who is interested, and has an open mind, it is not difficult to see the truth.
According to H. Sacher, “get over it” is the antithesis of zionism:
According to Norman Finkelstein, “get over it” is not the Jewish way:
“I like the Jews much more. I like their attitude. Do you know what the Jewish attitude is?
Never to forgive.
Never to forget.
I agree with that.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDe65-nF3FQ
Video Link
Finkelstein’s affirmation of the “Jewish attitude” finds its source in Jewish scriptures; specifically, the Psalms of David, #137:
“If I forget thee o Jerusalem may my right hand be forgotten . . .”
Never forget:
“Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.”
And not only “Never forgive” but as an element of worship of the Jewish god, persistently and perpetually the Jewish psalter encourages Jews to seek revenge and the obliteration of the Other: Find your happiness in killing the children of those who thwart your territorial ambitions:
Statement [1] is undoubtedly true – this statement by the U.S. is embarrassing to the U.S. and is thus probably true.
Statement [2] is a rationalization after the fact cooked up by Pentagon PR people and designed to tug at American emotions. It is completely ridiculous to assume that the only two F-4s sent on this mission happened to only carry nuclear armaments.
Bottom line: Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert McNamara knew what was going on, and intentionally or with wanton recklessness sacrificed the USS Liberty crew for their personal aims.
The Israeli attack on the Liberty was either a desperate measure to avoid intelligence being passed to Egypt and the Arabs, or it was a “false flag” operation planned jointly with Robert McNamara’s Pentagon with LBJ pulling out at the last minute.
What is indisputable in either case is that the USS Liberty crew was knowingly betrayed and sacrificed by the Pentagon under Robert McNamara.
I can recommend
Harold Weisberg, ‘Whitewash – the report on the Warren Report’, 1965, 1966, New York.
If anyone believes me, I do not know, but, reading the Warren Report I had the same feeling as with the memoirs of Churchill: too good to be true.
Hey Chuck
Wow, you exposed our deepest secrets!
You’re 100% correct. Every day Jews pray to kill children.
Sherm
“Yeah, that’s what was going on. Maybe get things straight before just ‘showing up. War is hell boys. By 1967 how many innocent North Vietnamese women and children had American war criminals like the toe now old goober McCain turned into blood puddles for no reason? Get over it…stuff happens.”
I assume that you are Jewish or an Israeli, so this is rich coming from someone form a group that counts every slight, real or imagined, since time began. It’s not just that war is hell, life is hell. The tables will turn again, and everyone will know too much to be guilted next time.
I’m trying to remember if there would have been nukey F4s ready on deck in the Med in 1967. I’m pretty sure that would have required a yellow alert.
Whatever. Wiki says two A4s were launched along with the Phantoms.
Whoa there! You left out “plucky”, which is de rigeur.
It is just amazing that brave, plucky little Israel had the opportunity to attack the one ship in the US Navy manned entirely by Anti-Semites.
I just read Pour Relire ‘Le Dernier des Justes’, by Francine Kaufmann.
Le Dernier des Justes is fiction, written in 1959, by a Polish jew living in France, he had to learn french in order to be able to write it, on jewish suffering beginning in England in York, 11th century or so, to entering the Auschwitz gas chambers.
The book sold in over a million copies, France, and, in translation, the USA.
Kaufmann is an erudite jewish scholar, there can be no doubt about that.
Few here know enough french to follow her courses on the Torah, I suppose, but I did.
Reading the mentioned book, published in 1987, comment on fiction, the comment is over 200 pages, I’m flabbergasted.
Of course the comment is based on literature, alas just literature written by jews.
So the comment is quite simple, for 2000 years innocent jews have been persecuted, tortured and killed.
No book critical of jews is mentioned, such as
Michael Grant, ‘The Jews in the Roman World’, 1973, New York
or
Alexander Solschenizyn, ´Die russisch- jüdische Geschichte 1795- 1916, >> Zweihundert Jahre zusammen <<´, Moskau 2001, München 2002.
Also not books written by jews describing the rise of antisemitism such as
Ismar Schorsch, 'Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870 – 1914', New York 1972.
So it does not surprise me that, in a footnote on literally the last page, one finds two statements:
' the Palestinians are our brothers', and
'antisemitism now is under the guise of antizionism'.
Planes ready to fly with nukes already on board were ready on the Med aircraft carrier at the time, two planes.
That at the time the USA aircraft carrier in the Med had two planes ready all the time, loaded with nukes, was confirmed by the commander of the carrier.
This commander also got the McNamara order to call them back, he literally said, according to him, to McNamara ‘you’re the boss, I’ll call them back’.
This theory is at least reasonably consistent with observed facts.
Given technology at the time, the idea that all antennas could be reliably rendered ineffective was wishful thinking. Some reports state that the USS Liberty crew jury-rigged an antenna to send out a distress call.
This makes much more sense than the ridiculous assertion that two F-4s were sent out to assist the USS Liberty but were called back because they happened to only carry nuclear armaments.
BOTTOM LINE: Whatever happened, McNamara was 100% aware of in real time, and 100% complicit. Given that McNamara was later “kicked upstairs” to a perch at the World Bank, he probably was and remained in a position to blackmail LBJ and others.
The Israeli government certainly acted in the perceived interest of its country, whether or not one agrees with the steps taken.
I know a man who was stationed in the port where/when the Liberty was towed in, and he said that the word from the men on the rescue ship was that the Liberty was attacked on purpose by the Israelis. The Liberty attack still pissed him off 40 years later.
I doubt that it was routine practice to arm planes with nukes. This would probably have required special orders issued at the highest level (McNamara, maybe LBJ). Note that the next statement quoted below shows the commander as a good military man who follows orders, and would surely not hesitate to lie in defense of his superiors and his organization (the US Navy).
In other words, as a smart senior officer, he realized the explosive nature of the order to recall, and made sure to create a record that did not leave him holding the baby.
CONCLUSION: EITHER the F-4s were in fact nuclear armed, and the aim was to nuke Cairo under the guise of responding to an “Egyptian” attack on the USS Liberty.
OR the story about the F-4s being nuclear armed was an ex post facto invention to make the recall seem less like the abandonment and betrayal of the USS Liberty that it was in either case.
The author does not mention the name of the operation under which the USS Liberty was sent to the war zone in the Middle East: Operation Cyanide. The operation was designed under the orders of President LB Johnson and Secretary Robert McNamara for Israel to sink the USS Liberty as if it had been sunk by Egypt, and provide the US a casus belli to attack Egypt. As shown in Peter Hounam’s book (“Operation Cyanide”), US planes were already in the air towards Cairo with nuclear bombs when it turned out that Israel did not succeed to sink the Liberty. Only then did Robert McNamara demand the recall of the planes.
The subsequent cover-up was not undertaken to protect Israel, but to protect the US criminals who intended to sacrifice hundreds of US citizens for their political madness. It is certainly criminal for Israel to have attacked the ship as a service to the US. But let us not conflate the principal and the adjunct.
See: http://nationalvanguard.org/2015/04/the-most-incredible-story-never-told-lbjs-order-to-destroy-the-uss-liberty/
He should be even more pissed realizing that he was deliberately set up by LBJ and Robert McNamara.
Please don’t minimize the influence of the Zionists around the time of the attack of the Liberty. They were influential, wealthy and well organized.
Louis Brandeis, who helped to create the Federal Reserve, was an advisor to presidents and became a Supreme Court justice, created a secret society, the Parushim, to further the zionist goals. The Parushim initiation ceremony stated, “By entering this brotherhood, you become a self-dedicated soldier in the army of Zion.” And members had to pledge “To this end I enroll myself in the fellowship of the Parushim. I pledge myself utterly to guard and to obey and to keep secret the laws and the labor of the fellowship, its existence and its aims.”
There was a very strong and wealthy Zionist lobby that influenced President Truman’s decision to recognize Israel so that he could get reelected.
Lyndon Johnson had a long-term affair with a former Irgun operative, Mathilde Krim, wife of Arthur Krim, chairman of the Finance Committee for the Democratic Party and president of United Artists. On the evening of the Israeli attack that started the 1967 War, Krim was on a “sleep-over” in the White House. Jack Ruby (aka Jacob Rubenstein) was a Zionist gun-runner.
https://truthscooper.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/was-lbj-shacked-up-with-a-pretty-zionist-when-israel-attacked-the-uss-liberty/
Pathetic. But what does anyone expect? So we got bitch slapped. The US is Israel’s ho, and sometimes ho’s gotz it coming. Question is, how many more poor American bastards will have to die for Izzy? Most Americans don’t care, because Israel is our ally, and the only democracy in the ME. They heard that on Hannity and Fox. Solution? Keep sending presidents over there to wear the beany and genuflect at the wall. Then sell another 6 Million raised to the nth power worth of arms to the Izzys and their Semitic Saudi cousins. That should do the trick.
The man I know wan’t a crew member of the USS Liberty. He was in port when the Liberty was towed in. He told me that members of the rescue ship that he spoke with said that the Liberty crew members that they spoke to told them that the attack by Israel was deliberate. Either way, he rightfully despises Israel, whether or not he understands the true extent of Jewish power in the U.S. that could make traitors out of McNamara or Johnson, and influence Truman, Bush and others to go against the best interests of the U.S.
Again, try reading the article, Zionist.
Lyndon Johnson’s maternal ancestors, the Huffmans, apparently migrated to Frederick, Maryland from Germany sometime in the mid-eighteenth century. Later they moved to Bourbon, Kentucky and eventually settled in Texas in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
According to Jewish law, if a person’s mother is Jewish, then that person is automatically Jewish, regardless of the father’s ethnicity or religion. The facts indicate that both of Lyndon Johnson’s great-grandparents, on the maternal side, were Jewish.
These were the grandparents of Lyndon’s mother, Rebecca Baines. Their names were John S. Huffman and Mary Elizabeth Perrin. John Huffman’s mother was Suzanne Ament, a common Jewish name. Perrin is also a common Jewish name.
Huffman and Perrin had a daughter, Ruth Ament Huffman, who married Joseph Baines and together they had a daughter, Rebekah Baines, Lyndon Johnson’s mother. The line of Jewish mothers can be traced back three generations in Lyndon Johnson’s family tree. There is little doubt that he was Jewish.
by Morris Smith
http://5tjt.com/our-first-jewish-president-lyndon-johnson-an-update/
All you Anti-Semites need to remember, ten years later brave, plucky, little Israel said “My bad, dudes” . What else to you want? Everyone knows “My bad” excuses any previous behavior. The US even had the nerve to bill brave, plucky, little Israel $6 million dollars for damage to the ship. That is like one dollar from every victim of the Holocaust! More proof that Jimmy Carter is a Nazi.
I have before, but I hate to copypasta, even as the same crap about the Liberty has been reposted here 20+ times. But I can’t refuse a polite request, so here is the short version.
People who do not have anti-Semite priors will realize that horrible accidents happen in the fog of war all the time. We killed 10 times as many people by accident as Israel did with the Liberty by shooting down an Iranian flight. And this is not during a war we were surrounded by enemies on all sides and with technology two decades more advanced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
The idea Israel thought it would benefit from and could cover up a false flag attempt against a more American ship is absurd. The idea that Egypt would attack a US ship is equally absurd, but would be required for the plan to work.
That’s where the Muslim supremacists/apologists come in. The same people (like Ron Unz) who think the Liberty attack was a failed false flag attempt to “smear Muslims” by Israel also think the various European terrorist attacks and 9/11 were the work of Israel.
If you are getting your information about history from this site, and Jeffrey St. Clair, well you are probably too far gone down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. But I tried.
Has Israel funded and built a museum in Jerusalem that is dedicated to the memory of the tragically but mistakenly slain crew members of The Liberty?
It is essential to Remember, so that Never Again —-
You forget….heading to Cairo.
I found survey on Liberty literature:
Azure •SPRING 5760 / 2000
The ‘USS Liberty’: Case Closed
Michael B. Oren
And George Ball, then Under Secretary of State, has called the American government’s response to the assault an “elaborate charade…. American leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of its citizens.”5
Support for these charges can be found in a wide range of publications on the Liberty incident. Assault on the Liberty, a 1979 memoir by former Liberty officer Jim Ennes, Jr., describes the attack as intentional and malicious, and argues that the truth has been obscured by a massive cover-up conducted by Israel and its advocates abroad. This allegation has been repeated in Richard Deacon’s The Israeli Secret Service (1977), in John Ranelagh’s The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (1986), and in Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israel Covert Relationship (1991). The cover-up theory is also central to Stephen Green’s Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel (1984), one of the best-selling of all anti-Israel polemics. Nor is the charge of Israeli premeditation confined to books aimed at a popular audience. It also features prominently in academic works such as The USS Liberty: Dissenting History vs. Official History by historian John E. Borne (1993), as well as Donald Neff’s Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days that Changed the Middle East (1984), considered by many scholars a standard text on the Six Day War.6 Indeed, so powerful is the trend towards acceptance of Israeli guilt for having planned the attack that a 1995 issue of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence was able to carry the assertion of Reverdy S. Fishel that “all serious scholarship on the subject accepts Israel’s assault as having been perpetrated quite deliberately….”7
Washington Report, August 2005, pages 17-18
Special Report
USS Liberty Veterans Present Pentagon With Report on Israeli War Crimes
By Delinda C. Hanley
Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, USN, Ret., former judge advocate general of the Navy, who was involved with the initial Court of Inquiry in 1967, next described hurriedly reading 607 pages of typed testimony. When he questioned some of its conclusions, the report was taken from him and whisked off to Washington officials.
Joe Lentini, a communications expert who was wounded on the Liberty, presented a detailed history of the attack. He showed the audience that the Liberty was unmistakably a spy ship with the latest technology and flew the American flag during the attack. He dedicated his Power Point presentation to Liberty Captain William McGonagle, without whom, he said, “we wouldn’t be here today.” Lentini said he would give his Power Point talk, complete with photos and other evidence of a planned and sustained Israeli attack, to anyone, anywhere, who will listen.
“I don’t know why Israel attacked a neutral vessel in neutral waters without warning or justification,” Lentini said. He’d like to know, he explained, because 14 of the 34 people killed were his own men.
Lentini went on to describe a litany of Israeli war crimes: Israeli forces fired on the wounded and their rescuers. Israeli torpedo boats shot at firefighters, shredding their fire hoses. “The same torpedo boats shot at USS Liberty’s life rafts,” he said, “after the rafts had been put over the side of the ship into the sea for use by shipwrecked survivors.”
One missile is not the same as an hours long surveillance and an hours long attack by multiple units. But nice try with your friendly fire/fog of war lie.
Wanting the US to stop being a bottom boy for Israel does not mean the person has any support or love for Muslims. We don’t need Muslims or Israelis in the US for any reason. Let the Russians or the Chinese have the whole mess.
Churchill’s writings are on a level with his sappy, corny, simplistic, sophomoric, daubing. Utterly unpalatable trash, and it is too self aggrandizing to be true, yet most people seem to believe most, if not all, of it.
Do Zionists simply skip the praying part?
I think you meant “goys” instead of “boys,” but the plural is “goyim.”
Anyway if war is hell, then these cats would’ve done well to remember that.
Can we all forget about “The” holocaust now? Shit happens, ya know.
I believe I explicitly referred to the reality of Jewish influence then, no? No minimization from me there.
Have we for Flight 655 where we accidentally killed 10 times more people?
In both cases financial reparations were made.
These issues are explained elsewhere. You will not find anything but a fanatical anti-Israel view here, on this issue or any other. If you like confirmation bias, I suppose that is your own business.
Accident? That was a pre-planned operation to draw the US in the war, Jews don’t like to die, but they love to kill. All these wars we’re fighting now are for the benefit of the tribe.
The shooting down of an Iranian commercial airline was no accident. United States intercepted the war after their slaves, Saddam, his supporters (Saudi America, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and the “Allies”), failed to defeat Iran. It was one of the biggest war crimes, and we were the proud nation to bring down a passenger airliner on a daily flight path that was only 25 minutes long!!
Accidents do happen, for example in Granada (one of the most dangerous countries on planet earth) invasion, where marines landed on two opposite sides of this “terrorist” island, that wanted to take away our Christmas, and ended up facing and shooting each other. They call this “friendly fire”. So I guess Lot considers the constant bombing of USS Liberty as just a friendly fire, after all who is our best friend in this lonely planet???????
“…horrible accidents happen in the fog of war all the time…”
Yack, yack, yack.
The US was not at war with Israel, so you can stuff that excuse.
To write off deliberate, hideous treachery as a “mistake” shows how some people dissemble and excuse anything, but thanks for doing that. It tells us a Lot…
You mean like Holocaust. May be it was an accident of war. Hitler didn’t mean to do it.
Jooie traitors in the USA and France transferred nuclear bomb technology and enriched uranium to the Izzies throughout the late 50s and early 60s. By 1966, the miscreants had several nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them anywhere in the Mideast and ESPECIALLY EUROPE (the so called Samson Option). 1966 is the exact date the Americans and Euroweanies lost control of the vile little monster they had created. From 1966 on, the Izzies could do anything they wanted with no fear of retribution from the West. No conincidence, they decided to make a statement by “accidentally” sinking a hostile intelligence collecting vessel in waters considered too close to their theater of operations…..the same way a pimp has to occasionally coat hangar the most uppity of his whores as an object lesson for all the other girls as to exactly who is in charge. Worked great…..from 1967 on, American ME policy has been dictated by Tel Aviv.
So what?
And how much by way of reparations have the Palestinians been paid?
I believe Germany has more than paid “reparations.” Does that mean you’re willing to overlook their “transgression,” both real and imaginary?
Explain.
In both cases the victims were not at war with assailants, it was to provoke one to enter the war, and the other was to enter the war on behalf of the provocateur. There’s no FOG here. Just premeditated terrrorism
Jews always whinge when anyone mentions the Liberty, but they never let go of anything. They rode the Free Pollard hobby horse until they got their way. We should be the same way, push every grievance, nurse every grudge.
Lot’s a well known Israel-first troll. Still, it never ceases to amaze me how much respect this scumbag is afforded by Sailer, who it seems is willing to go to astonishing lengths to court fairweather Jewish “friends” like Lot. It’s really something. I don’t know why the hasbara brigades even bother trolling Sailer. I’m certain he could be bought off for a mere pittance – at least if his boundless tolerance for hasbara horseshit is any guide.
I find it exceptionally unlikely that there were NO conventional weapons onboard either of the phantoms, only nukes. What Air to Air nuclear armament did the phantom even have? An old nuke air to air Falcon rocket, or something? Surely they were also armed with at least a pair of AIM-9s and sparrows. Why would the alert fighters not have any conventional armament? That’s ridiculous. Very hard to believe.
The idea that an aircraft carrier only had two aircraft on alert status and those were armed with nuclear weapons is ridiculous on its face.
Really?
An aircraft carrier deliberately left itself no means of aerial defense except a nuclear one?
No serious person would argue that this combined air-sea attack was an accident.
What is less clear – and unlikely to be finally resolved until records are opened in a few decades – is what the Israelis hoped to achieve. Those inclined to believe in all-encompassing conspiracies of evil Jews will “see” evidence of yet another dastardly act in the fragmented factual record.
What is beyond reasonable doubt, as stated above, is that the entire senior U.S. leadership including LBJ and Robert McNamara new exactly what was happening, in real time, and for whatever reason decided to hang out the USS Liberty crew to dry.
All later statements by those in the line of command at the time must be taken with a large dose of salt. There are obviously huge temptations to shade the truth one way or the other – whether to put the blame on others, to virtue-signal by exaggerating the evil perpetrated by the U.S., etc. Remember this is the 1960s – “It’s all the U.S.’s fault” was becoming a great pickup line.
“But let us not conflate the principal and the adjunct.”
In a plot so demonic, it hardly seems to matter. Besides, that the US part of the operation took orders from Washington means nothing. It doesn’t tell you who instigated the scheme.
It’s a pity you spoiled any chance of being taken seriously with that non-sensical “Muslim Supremacist” jibe. The mad conspiracists are indeed out in force but I think you should concede that it looks like a deliberate Israeli attack on a ship which could blow the story about Israel’s attack on Syria and taking of the Golan Heights in time to have it stopped – remembering how Eisdnhower and Dulles had pulled the plug in 1956 against more thzn just Israel.
Here is the USS Liberty Navy survivors official website.
http://www.gtr5.com/
There were, necessarily, great costs to rebelling against Christendom. And those costs began and will end with Jews being elevated at the expense of Christ.
The English revealed rather quickly that their ‘reformation’ meant bringing in Jews to help the few WASP Elites run roughshod over the vast majority of British Isles Christians. The French got their revolution because of a full century and a half of endless trouble from Protestants, virtually all of whom were were at least moderate Anglophiles and pro-Jewish.
Ideas have consequences.
“This column is 100% Muslim-Supremacist lies, like so much of the rest of the Unz.com’s Muslimist brigade.”
Wow! That’s a LOT of Fake Jews News shit.
No, America first, Canada second, Western Europe, Israel, and the Anglosphere third.
did you really vote for Trump?
Yea, good point Lot, on June 8, 1967 a ship full of crazed Muslim anti-Semites tried to threaten Israel’s right to exist by literally trolling its coastline, when brave IDF fighters managed after 6 hours to defend its innocence.
That is such a richly idiosyncratic take on the English Reformation that it deserves a request for elaboration and elucidation. There were practically no Jews in England during the first 120 years of the Reformation in England and the biggest single factor in the changes brought about by and during the Reformation in Britain was surely the use of English language bibles and prayer books.
Boy, they must have really been exhausted not to be able to recognize a large American flag after 8 recognizance flights on a clear day on an unarmed ship in international waters. Maybe they had spent too much time on Palestinian chairs the night before to realize they were creating a very convenient causis beli for the US to bail their asses out in case they got into trouble on the battlefield.
uncle sham abetting in the killing of its own citizens ?
Par for the course !
Every two bit tyrant who’s in uncle sham’s good book is licensed to kill…..even murkkans !
‘A 1976 internal report of the State Department said the Chilean government “might have believed this American [Horman] could be killed without negative fallout from the US government.” And, “US intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman’s death.”
The report suggests that he was fingered for the Pinochet regime by a CIA officer undercover as a consular official.’
https://www.commondreams.org/view/022500-104.htm
Yes.
The declaration was made in Amsterdam, at a WJC congress, chairman Samuel Untermeyer.
It was not just about an economic boycott, Untermeyer travelled several times to Moscow after the declaration.
Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, ´Roosevelt auf Kriegskurs, Amerikas Kreuzzug gegen den Frieden 1933-1941’, Kiel 2003, (´Zur Vorgeschichte des Roosevelt-Krieges’, 1943)
Also in 1933 FDR recognised the USSR diplomatically, USA technical assistence of the USSR on war preparation began.
Franz Kurowski, ‘Balkenkreuz und Roter Stern, Der Luftkrieg über Russland 1941 – 1944’, 1984, Friedberg
Davies, USA ambassador in Moscou, refused to see the nature of Stalins show trials, despite what Kennan tried to tell him.
George F. Kennan, ´Memoirs 1925 – 1950’, New York 1967, 1972
Davies was a nephew of Morgenthau, the man who invented the German guilt for WWI.
Thomas Fleming, ‘The Illusion of Victory, America in WW I’, New York 2003
Henry Morgenthau, ‘Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story’, New York, 1918
Heath W. Lowry, ‘The story behind Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story’, Istanbul 1990
Liberty, Ockam’s Razor: the simplest theory that explains the facts is the best.
McNamara conspired with Israel to use the destruction of the Liberty by the USSR as a pretext for nuking Cairo.
The USA’s history is one of pretexts, from an unexplained explosion in Havana harbour in 1898 to Boston pressure cookers.
the cover up had begun.sums it up nicely
there are those in Russia who remember the USS liberty with fondness.and have a quiet chuckle of how the usa was forced to blame the Israelis to avoid direct conflict with Russia.the USS liberty was attacked by Egyptian MIGs flown by Russian pilots.it was a false flag operation that was repaid towards the end of the war.
My fellow Catholics and I commemorate the Last Supper every Sunday plus Holy Days of obligation. I don’t think your point is as strong as you think it is.
It’s probably not the number of Jews (or anyone else) that counts, but the number of shekels involved, although it apparently doesn’t take a huge number of either to buy off a few key politicians.
I agree that more info or at least some references would be most interesting although what he wrote seems more than credible.
Reminds me of the “Lavon Affair.” And 9/11. And goading the Japanese to attack Pearl, to name a few others.
Could there be a pattern here somewhere, or am I just some stupid goy kunspiracy theerist? 😉
Talk about kunspiracy theerists, but it does explain Evan Toni…Yup…
How can we be sure it wasn’t Osama bin Laden and the “hijackers” training for 9/11?? 😉
The “Samson Option” is very real and contravenes American law, which states that NO FOREIGN AID is to be given to any country that has not signed nuclear non-proliferation treaties. It seems that Israel is the only “exception” to this law.
Israel refuses to account for its nukes, as they are not in Israel proper, but are “pre-positioned” all over the world, in major population centers, ready to be activated at a moment’s notice.
If people only knew of Israel’s treachery and hold that “poor little Israel” has on our world’s leaders, and its involvement in almost every “false flag” operation (yes, including the WTC 9-11), it would be turned into a “glass parking lot”… justifiably so…
@ Sherman,
“i’ve read quite a bit…After 50 years nobody has produced a smoking gun the this was a deliberate attack”.
Wow! You really put the ‘hoots’ in ‘hootspah’. Now I can understand how you and your co-religionists think nothing about publicly making fools of yourselves in the tradition of Adam Kidan and many ‘Crazy Joes’ out there. Dignity means nothing as long as you are the one counting the shekels at the end of the day.
I see a mcohen out there who wants to outdo you in disingenuous deflection. I suppose you fear that being circumscribed is the same as being circumcised. Oy it hurts!
Cheers-
Another very good article dealing with similar issues…
https://www.unz.com/nfinkelstein/to-live-or-to-perish/#comment-1895817
Bingo! Great comments! ROFL.
Half a minute’s thought about the idea that Israel’s nuclear weapons ate all prepositioned all over the world in major population centres would reveal it as so absurd as to be delusional.
That you are totally unconcerned about even a shred of rationality is shown by your non sequitur which has the fact that all Israel’s nuclear weapons are outside Israel as the reason that it “refuses to account for” them. However just consider what advantage Israel would have if attacked again by a Muslim alliance from having its most potent weapons in Moscow, Tokyo, London, Paris, Rome or wherever rather than available to use against their enemies. Consider the consequences of just one of them being discovered….etc.
the USS liberty was attacked by Egyptian MIGs flown by Russian pilots.
Troll!
Not absurd at all. Israel’s “weapons of mass destruction” ARE pre-positioned, as that makes the most sense. These weapons have been distributed by the use of the “diplomatic pouch” as well as the utilization of the most effective spy agency in the world–the mossad. (How do you think that all of the demolition equipment was moved into the WTC, pre-9-11)?
If Israel feels mortally threatened, IT WILL take out a European or American population center–count on it.
The “Samson Option” is a THREAT to the rest of the world–not just against moslems.
In fact, moslems and jews are much closer ethnically (and spiritually) than most people realize. When the SHTF and Israel is finally exposed as the one country that has caused much misery (along with its “facilitator”–the USA) throughout the world, you will see jews and moslems unite against their “common enemy”–the rest of the (now enlightened) world.
Regards,
The Catholic “Vatican II Ecumenical Council” was also compromised by Jews and Protestants who were brought in to destroy the Catholic faith.
Absolving the Jews for Christ’s crucifixion and death is but one error. Of course, Jews being Jews, they got others to do their “dirty work” for them; hence Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the whole affair, despite being aware that, if he had not ordered the crucifixion, there would have been Jewish riots. Pilate was “caught between a rock and a hard place”.
The prohibition of the celebration of the Tridentine Mass was but another casualty. This was done to force Catholics to accept the changes. In recent years, the prohibition on the celebration of this Mass has been relaxed.
Abolishing Latin in the Mass destroyed the Catholic Church’s “universality”. Prior to Vatican II, a Catholic could celebrate the Mass anywhere in the world, and be familiar with it.
Turning the priest around to face the congregation changed the priest from being the peoples’ representative to a mere “actor”.
Fortunately, brave bishops such as Marcel Lefebvre have successfully “pushed back” against the changes…
@ Jaques Sheete,
Thanks. I do appreciate the commentary on Unz.com in that I quite regularly find out more about a topic than I thought there was to it. In this case it was about the 2 F-4 Phantoms that took off and were nuclear armed. I haven’t had a chance to look into this but if true it potentially puts whole different spin on this ‘war-crime’ by considering deeper motives.
That is why I get real cross with ( barely concealed) agenda driven time wasters who think that all goys are dumb cattle and no matter how stupid they make themselves look, if they sold you the mattress at the end of the day, they won.
Cheers-
If that was the story, why the secrecy after that the Soviet Union had collapsed?
Why did the Israelis pay reparations ?
Israelis have been called many things over the years, but the words: ‘good sports’ I don’t think has crossed any of their critics’ lips.
I always thought “the holocaust” happened because it was clear the end was coming. Hitler needed to free up soldiers for the 2 defensive fronts, and there were so many soldiers wasting time guarding thousands of civilians who just couldnt be released, they would just become a huge nuisance running thru the countryside. I have no proof of this, it just seems to fit the time line rather well. Plus, nazis treated the prisoners well up untill the end. They were only starved when the german people no longer had access to any food for themselves. So you could say that the british are the true perpetrators of the “holocaust”……
I dont know how anyone could read the bible or the old testament and not walk away a complete athiest. Its a fucked up book of incest, infanticide, death and just foul human behavior. Plus the god in it is a complete dick.
Thats what i got from this whole piece. Im glad others see it that way too
A boat says its being attacked by planes, so a carrier group sends ONLY 2 planes armed with nuclear bombs. Really? Why would bombers be sent to engage planes? Why only 2 planes instead of a dozen? And why are they armed with nukes? I understand they were there incase they needed to nuke some one or something, the the distress call was for a boat UNDER ATTACK AT SEA FROM JETS! this whole mess screams incompetence and straight bullshit.
This answers the question i posted about why the aircraft carrier would send 2 bombers to help a boat being attacked by aircraft. It truly is scary knowing that we live in a world were that scenerio is the most likely one.
Lol I guess that one went over your head..
” . . . Fuck Israel and fuck the owned American politician then and now!”
A most concise summation!
I wish to make some observations before I befuddle my mind by looking into the nuclear armed F-4’s.
First off to the best of my knowledge the F-4 Phantom jets ( the flying bricks as they were called) were not nor could not be equipped with nuclear weapons. But if so, the second question would be what sort of nukes? Would they be limited defensive nukes that were designated to be used on the German border (on the West German side as told to me by minor German military officials back in the 1970’s) to counteract a massive Soviet tank offensive or a full out Nagasaki specials?
Now, most problematically the authorization for use of nuclear weapons would have to come from the very highest levels, in this case LBJ and ‘Strange’ McNamara. The Pentagram of course would endorse any war any time. They are not in the peace business.
If so, would anyone in the public domain expect that a fleet Admiral would nuke, say Cairo on his own authority? Of course not but here comes the conundrum, if following orders to do so would the peacocks at the top expect the Admiral to fall on his sword to protect them and say that he went rogue when now the fallout from the fallout could not just land him in a courts martial or the American justice system but indeed the in court of world history?
Puzzles within puzzles. Though I may be proven wrong I just can’t fathom any nuclear element in the Liberty tragedy. Most likely it was motivated by the impending Syrian situation. Shooting prisoners? Hey that’s just business as usual.
Cheers-
Navies and coast guards around the world plot positions, courses, and speeds all the time. Only the boys in Tell Aviv couldn’t get it right, huh?!
Of course, they may have been too busy planning aggression, murdering Egyptian POWs, and the like. . . .
So many idiots.difficult to know where to start.
the uss liberty was spying on russia and egyptian communications for israel.they were caught by russian counter intelligence.
end of story.
In any event it was to little to late for egypt as its airforce was decimated.
The nukes part of the story seems like a disinfo to me. It would be interesting to find out where and when it first appeared.
We should stick to what we know for sure was true:
(1) Israel intentionally attacked the USS Liberty
(2) The orders were to sink her and leave no survivors
https://www.unz.com/isteve/was-this-the-911-new-jersey-celebration-trump-remembered/#comment-1240650
The Pentagon’s (later) story was that the two F-4s were recalled from their ostensible mission to rescue/support the USS Liberty BECAUSE they carried nuclear armaments.
There are also reports that two A-4s were launched alongside the F-4s.
As stated earlier, it seems incongruous that nuclear-armed F-4s should have been launched if the aim was to come to the assistance of the USS Liberty. On the other hand, other incidents (Gulf of Tonkin) suggest that Democratic administration (LBJ/McNamara) may have wanted to stage an operation with the aim of involving the U.S. in another war, up to and including the nuking of Cairo under color of retaliation for an ostensible Egyptian attack on the USS Liberty. BTW it is far from clear that such an initiative was not initiated at the Pentagon (as Tonkin was).
KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE BALL: Whatever did happen, the U.S. had real-time radar, radio and visual intelligence on, whatever the U.S. may have been said in public.
The U.S. leadership (McNamara and LBJ) could NOT have been hoodwinked for even a microsecond. The U.S. government for whatever reasons obviously directed the later cover-up.
One more key point:
I wonder; the USS Liberty was attacked many years before I was even born…
2017 now, and the Israeli attack remains largely unknown to zamericans… quite amazing and a testament to something hardly ever discussed; Jewish power… the Zionist Power Configuration…
Before the USS Liberty, there was the Lavon Affair…
In 2001, we had 9-11, instantly, and without any real investigation or proof, conveniently blamed on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. The new Pearl Harbor has zionist fingerprints all over it.
The “investigation” was a complete farce, 100% a cover-up. Evidence quickly destroyed, lies planted by the zio controlled media framing “muslim terrorism”, and then the totally fraudulent and ongoing war on “Terror” was launched.
Given that after so many decades there is still no clarity re the treacherous israeli attack on the USS Liberty and little talk of the Lavon ‘affair’, the zionist rats are probably confident 9-11 will be a repeat of previous zionist ops against ZUSA, their responsibility never revealed.
People should take some time to read investigative journalist and author, C. Bollyn’s, “Solving 9-11: The Deception that Changed the World”:
http://bollyn.com/solving-9-11-the-book
Chapter III – America the Target: 9-11 and Israel’s History of False Flag Terrorism
http://bollyn.com/solving-9-11-the-book#article_11279
Well I’ll grant you your intellectual dash, not to say boldness, in giving the finger to all those UR have-it-all-ways enthusiasts for Koestler’s 13th tribe nonsense that Ashkenazim aren’t really Semites at all.
But you need a bit more evidence on the Samson Option involving prepositioning of nukes in major non Arab, non Muslim cities if I am not to believe that your failure to mention your version in the Wikipedia article on the Samson Option is because it is all imagination. True, the article does mention an author who imagines Moscow and othet European cities nuked if there was another Holocaust.
To try and make sense of your imagined scenario, let’s say there are two or three prepositioned nukes in the US and some in England France – plus one or two in ME countries – but with many more in Israel. Whoever uses nukes first let us suppose that Iranian rockets deliver nukes which devastate Tel Aviv and even Jerusalem. Many Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian cities are in ruins from Israeli strikes but Israel’s remaining government sees the danger of total annihilation or at any rate a totally insecure future unless the West steps in and, in the last resort, uses the threat of the prepositioned bombs (which it suggests have been placed by extremists who are not totally under control) to force great and powerful protectors to make war on Iran and its allies. One or two bombs are detonated more or less harmlessly to attract serious attention… Have you a better nightmare or fantasy?
Your 3. can”t be more than metaphorical and rhetorical. “The US knew” but who is this [one person, so presumably Robert Macnamara?] who was in touch with direct feeds to DC from radar (presumably some operators’ supervisor giving an interpretation every few minutes or quarter hours rather than seconds), radio (from the jammed Liberty?), visual observation (when a U2 happens to fly over it every few hours?), or intelligence sources the very second after their pigeons arrive from Gaza with vivid descriptions of what noises out to sea suggest may be happening?
Oh sorry. I had forgotten. You were there (underground at Pentagon, or was it White House?) so I must expect your secret and confidential info to be scrupulously obscured by smoke and BS.
9/11 was a false flag operation run by the Russians who believed that high intensity lasers mounted on top of the twin towers were attacking there military satellites.the USA believed that the Russians would never attack a civilian target like the twin towers but were proved wrong when in fact they were.
Israel warned the us intelligence agencies that an operation was afoot to attack the twin towers but nothing came of this.
in fact if one looks at the images of the twin towers you can see the aerial that was used to fire the pulse.the targeting hardware was mounted on the opposite tower
Yes, but why? It was obviously an intentional attack, but what was the purpose? The nuke theory ties together a lot of strands which are plausible but individually problematic. There can be no doubting the immense criminality of the US government. The idea that this was a joint US-Israeli operation (“ruined” by the crew jerry-rigging an antenna and hence providing evidence) to create a pretext for an attack on Egypt (a Soviet client state at the time) makes the most sense.
@ utu,
Agreed. Also it occurred to me that SAC had 24/7/365 nuclear armed B52’s airborne as in Dr. Strangelove for any nuclear war contingencies. Of course there was no involvement of any supposed nuclear armed jet fighters during the USS Pueblo or USS Mayaguez incidents.
So when dealing with occupied Palestine (Israel) there always seem to be red herrings.
Final observation, in no way, shape or form could a densely populated civilian target be nuked as a proportional response to an attack on a rusting spook ship assuming the Egyptian perp story had even stuck.
These days they could possibly get away with it what with the zombified citizenry but certainly not in 1967 when general sanity was still in evidence.
Cheers-
I strive for brevity. (Grin)
I think you got that wrong. You need to replace the word ‘Muslim’ with ‘wahabbi’ in your assessment. As far as it looks, the Israelis hate the other Muslims as much as the orthodox Christians if not more.
Looking at Syria/Iraq/Libya/Somalia destroyed/being destroyed and Iran, Lebanon on the pipeline, I think the only ‘Good’ Muslims that they think are in the region seem to be the oil rich Gulf monarchies, who everybody knows has a back channel link with the Israelis.
And there is no one Muslim monolithic block. The central Asian ‘stanis’, though Sunni are firmly under the Russian axis and wish to remain so (they know how Uncle Sam or rather Uncle Schlomo can sell them out for a dime or destroy them if they act too ‘independent’). Most shitte ones are very much pro Russia and are sworn enemies of Israel (which never ceases to remind the world of the dangers of ‘Terrorism’, the one emanating from Iran that is!!). Pakistan is currently torn between the Saudis and the Iranis and made sure they want to remain neutral (although the incentive to go for Saudis is more as they host a very big Pakistani expatriate population sending in the dough). The Bengalis are firmly under the Indian axis and will swing whichever way the Indians tell them to (although there are signs that they are making good of the rivalry between India and China and milking them both).
I’m curios as to which side the East Asian ones will choose. So no, your analysis leaves much room for correction there!
They had been expelled centuries before the Reformation by King Edward I in 1290. It was Cromwell who let them back in. Needed allies against the ‘Papists’ it seems. This is how one of history’s more hellish marriages arose: Britain and the Rothschilds. From modest beginnings …