Al Jazeera investigates the USS Liberty attack in ‘The Day Israel Attacked America’

On June 8, 1967, in the midst of the Six Day War, a state of the art intelligence ship controlled by the National Security Agency was sitting near Egypt in international waters when it was attacked by unmarked Israeli aircraft  who strafed its decks and dropped napalm.  An unmarked Israeli naval vessel torpedoed its target five times.  For seventy-five minutes Israel pummeled the unarmed U.S.S. Liberty and when it was over 34 Americans were dead and 172 wounded which amounted to two-thirds of the ship’s crew.   Israel owned up to the attack but claimed it was an accident, that the ship was mistaken for an Egyptian vessel.

“The Day Israel Attacked America,” a 50 minute video produced by Al Jezeera, offers proof that Israel deliberately intended to destroy the Liberty.  The video broadcasts for the first time ever audio exchanges in Hebrew between the pilots and ground control.   At least three times, starting at 5:15 a.m, ground control is told the ship is American.   By 2:00 pm, ground control commands the pilot to attack the ship.  An argument ensues when the pilot reminds his superiors the ship is American.  Ground control confirms the order and the pilot is forced to obey.

Through interviews with now elderly Liberty crewmen, Part I of the video covers what happened and how Israelis assuredly knew the ship was American.  The crew point to the ship’s huge American flag visible “for miles.”  One man described how earlier in the day an Israeli marked plane swooped low enough for he and the pilot to wave at one another, and he felt comfort that an ally was near.   Several men explain that only an ally can know a ship’s frequencies.   To a man, they are convinced that it was an intentional assault.  If, as the Israelis claim, it was an accident, then, as one veteran put it, it was the best planned accident in history.

Most dismaying to the Liberty’s crew was the belated response by the U.S. Sixth Fleet aircraft carrier 500 miles away to send fighter jets to the scene.  Even more inexplicable, indeed personally devastating to the surviving crew, was the cover-up.   Not only were the men ordered not to discuss any of the events, especially not with journalists, but the gag order applied to their families as well.

Subsequent government reports excluded crew testimony damaging to Israel, such as, that life boats were machine gunned by the Israelis and the jar of napalm collected by one sailor mysteriously disappeared.   Basically the U.S. government accepted Israel’s “my dog ate my homework” excuse and a lame apology.  In 1980, the Americans sought $17 million compensation for damage to the Liberty. The Israelis counter offered $6 million.  Done deal.  The crew and family members of the dead received compensation but to this day remain painfully aggrieved by the betrayal.

Part II of the video explores the confounding why? of it all.   Why did Israel attack the Liberty?   Why did American fighter jets delay a response?  Why did the U.S. government not treat Israel’s action for the war crime that it was?   What was the Liberty’s real mission in the region? Why is the subject today not grounds for outrage among Americans?

As to the first question, the video proposes that the Israelis had promised U.S. officials it would be a limited war and not a land grab.  Having captured Jerusalem and crushed the Egyptians, the Israelis were poised to invade the Golan Heights and they wanted to keep this secret from the Americans, and they did so by debilitating all the ship’s sophisticated surveillance.  But that theory doesn’t explain in any way why the Israelis clearly tried to sink a U.S. spy ship and backed off only when U.S. retaliatory fighter jets finally came to the rescue.

In addition to the Golan Heights invasion, the U.S.S Liberty Memorial website offers two additional possible motives:

It is possible that [the Israelis] were afraid Liberty might learn and report to the United States that Israeli forces were executing up to 1,000 Egyptian Prisoners of War at El Arish at the very moment that Liberty was just 13 miles off the shore.

It is also possible that USS Liberty was attacked to prevent the ship from reporting a deliberate massacre of 14 Indian United Nations peacekeepers that took place in Gaza shortly before Israel’s attack on USS Liberty.

President Lyndon Johnson believed the attack was intentional and he leaked his opinion to Newsweek.  When that sourcing was then leaked, the Israelis rallied their forces. If Johnson did not change his position they would cry “blood libel” and accuse him of gross anti-Semitism.  As Bobby Ray Inman, former NSA director, put it in the video, it was “blackmail” pure and simple.  If Johnson decided to run for reelection he would get nowhere when the “Jewish lobby” waged the campaign that it threatened to. One legacy of the Liberty affair is that similar coercive tactics against politicians have been employed to this day to great success.

The Israelis had captured and hauled away the entirety of Egypt’s surface to air missiles made in the Soviet Union, including the maintenance manuals.  These were the same pesky missiles that the Vietnamese used to shoot down American aircraft left and right in that pesky war LBJ just couldn’t seem to defeat.   The Israelis turned the weaponry over to the Americans.   As a reward, the following year, aid to Israel increased four-fold and the government kept the Liberty issue out of the public eye and tacitly accepted Israel’s accident/mistaken identity excuse.

“The Day Israel Attacked America” is definitely worth watching to get your feet wet on this subject.   But it has limitations.   It doesn’t interview a single Israeli and it doesn’t present other evidence that seemingly implicates U.S. intelligence as a partner to the Israeli crime.  A 2002 BBC video, “Dead in the Water,” interviewed the late former CIA Director Richard Helms who stated that Israel “intended to attack the ship” and it has “no excuse to say it was a mistake.”   Yet, when asked about U.S. intelligence involvement, he told the BBC they’d have to ask former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, which BBC did, but McNamara categorically denied the allegation on camera.

The BBC also interviewed James Ennes, an officer on the Liberty’s bridge, who spent years searching for answers which culminated in his book, Assault on the Liberty: The True Story of the Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship.  Scouring the Liberty records in the LBJ Library in Texas, Ennes stumbled upon a smoking gun – a one-page memo of the minutes of the 303 Committee held in advance of the war in April 1967.   The Committee consisted of a handful of top level intelligence and government officials who examined black operations and devised plausible deniability for the executive branch in the event of public discovery of an attack.  The memo relates to a clandestine joint US-Israeli effort to blame Egypt for the sinking of the Liberty.  The BBC examines how this false flag plot was foiled, but it was not able to answer a number of questions that remain to this day.

It  is interesting that the “The Day Israel Attacked America” has come out at a moment when U.S.-Israeli relations are perhaps at their lowest point in history.   The nadir results from the American public’s increasing refusal to accept Israeli war crimes in Gaza,  routine blackmail of Congress by the same tactics used against LBJ, and the ongoing brazen theft of Palestinian land in the Occupied Territories. This video has the potential to tip the scales even more given how highly emotionally Americans respond when land, property or people are attacked by a foreign force.

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Thanks for this. I don’t have access to Al Jazeera, so I particularly appreciate it. The history deserves to be known. It was a betrayal and blatant criminal act. Likewise, the American complicity in the coverup. That coverup has contributed to the on-going American guilt in enabling the dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, and to the corruption of the American political process.

Americans have many, many scores to settle with the Israelis and their US Lobby and the US politicians who have protected them.

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/p-neff.html

Israel Charged with Systematic Harassment of U.S. Marines

By Donald Neff
Former Time Magazine Bureau Chief, Israel
Washington Report, March 1995

It was 12 years ago, on March 14, 1983, that the commandant of the Marine Corps sent a highly unusual letter to the secretary of defense expressing frustration and anger at Israel. General R.H. Barrow charged that Israeli troops were deliberately threatening the lives of Marines serving as peacekeepers in Lebanon. There was, he wrote, a systematic pattern of harassment by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that was resulting in “life-threatening situations, replete with verbal degradation of the officers, their uniform and country.”

As to the why: an account in Stewart Steven’s generally Israel-friendly The Spymasters Of Israel and summarized in the study linked below (search for “signals”) claims Israeli intelligence intercepted signals from Egypt to Jordan reporting Egyptian defeat, and instead sent the Jordanians deceptive signals boasting of great victories to lure them into the fighting in which Israel conquered East Jerusalem and the West Bank. When the US informed Israel they were aware of the deception, Israel realized it was being spied on by the USS Liberty.

http://www.gtr5.com/commentary/A%20Juridical%20Examination%20of%20the%20Israeli%20Attack%20on%20the%20USS%20L1..pdf

Again with the blood libel.

If President Johnson, a product of the rough and tumble world of cutthroat Texas politics buckled under the pressure of the Israel Lobby, than that lobby must be insanely powerful. Imagine, turning the loyalty of the Commander in Chief against those who died serving under him. Israel continues to disgust me.

So another thing to utter, besides “Jonathan Pollard,” whenever anyone makes the outrageous claim that Israel is our ally: “What about the USS Liberty?”

I was told the truth of this matter many years ago by my late best friend, a former ranking U.S. Naval officer who had met the commander of the torpedo boat sent to finish Liberty off. They met in a Yacht Club when both were retired and the Israeli confirmed that his orders were to sink the American ship. Such was the integrity of my friend that I could not doubt his story of the meeting but as evidence it was valueless.
Nevertheless, the knowledge continued to colour my analysis as I studied the political events both before and after that shameful incident and I believe that there is more to it than meets the eye, a deeper and darker secret.
Consider Johnson’s subsequent behaviour which seems counter-intuitive:

Israeli author Michael Karpin writes that “as soon as [Johnson] entered the White House the pressure on Israel on the Dimona issue ceased.”

And while Kennedy’s final budget, for fiscal year 1964, allocated $40 million in aid to Israel, Johnson’s first budget, for fiscal year 1965, set aside $71 million – an extraordinary increase of 75 percent. The amount nearly doubled in 1966, to $130 million.

Beyond the numbers, the precise nature and terms of the aid signaled a dramatic break with past American policy. Development loans and surplus food had constituted the extent of U.S. aid under Eisenhower and Kennedy, and the anti-aircraft missiles sold to Israel by the Kennedy administration required a cash payment. Johnson changed all that: Not only did he become the first American president to sell offensive weapons to Israel (the missiles from Kennedy were defensive), but from now on the Israelis would be permitted to buy American arms with American aid money, which meant no funds would have to leave Israel’s hard-pressed government coffers.

As a result of the new arrangement, the percentage of American aid to Israel earmarked for military expenditures rose dramatically, more than tripling between 1965 and 1967. By the middle of 1966, the Israelis were purchasing military hardware the type of which would have been unthinkable under prior administrations, including four-dozen Skyhawk bomber attack planes and more than 200 M-48 tanks
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/front-page/lbj-and-israel/2008/08/27/

I cannot help wondering what caused Johnson, who was initially outraged by the Liberty attack, to not only cover it up but then to display this unprecedented largesse before declining to run for a second term:

He left the White House in January 1969 a broken man, vilified as perhaps no president in American history up to that time. He died four years later, not yet 65 but looking like a man two decades older.

Whatever else can be said of Lyndon Johnson, he proved to be a true friend of the Jews and Israel. He proved it as a young lawmaker when, with limited clout and resources, he did everything he could to get as many Jews as possible out of Europe; he proved it as one of Israel’s strongest and most important backers in Congress during the Jewish state’s early years; and he proved it as president by granting Israel then-unprecedented levels of financial and military aid and by refusing, in marked contrast to Eisenhower’s actions after the Suez crisis of 1956, to force unilateral concessions on Israel following the Six-Day War.