Remember The Liberty Part 1

Attacked By Israel

Nov 22, 2023

The Commission’s Report concluded:
“That there is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.
“That fearing conflict with Israel, the White House deliberately prevented the US Navy from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack.
“That surviving crew members were threatened with ‘court-martial, imprisonment or worse’ if they exposed the truth; and [the survivors] were abandoned by their own government.
“That there has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history.
“That a danger to our national security exists whenever our elected officials are willing to subordinate American interests to those of any foreign nation.”
Source

Source: Veterans Today

Remember the Liberty!

By David Martin

June 8, 2017

Most Americans have never heard of the Israeli, Ephraim “Eppie” Evron. A half century ago, in May of 1967, he was deputy chief of mission in the Israeli embassy in Washington and in that ostensible capacity had a meeting with President Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office on May 26. From all indications, as we learn from Phillip Nelson in Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas, Evron was likely the real power in the embassy as the top Mossad official there. An even more interesting thing about Evron was that he was “one of the main conspirators” in the infamous Lavon Affair, a failed plot in 1954 by Israel to bomb U.S. and British facilities in Egypt and pin it on Arab extremists. (In 2005 the Israeli government outrageously honored nine of its agents involved in that episode.) Thanks to America’s Israel-first press, the appalling, treacherous Lavon Affair is no doubt as little known to Americans as is Eppie Evron.

Thirteen days after that meeting, on June 8, 1967, on the fourth day of Israel’s highly successful Six-Day War with its Arab neighbors, after hours of aerial surveillance, Israel would launch a murderous, multi-staged assault on the American intelligence ship, the USS Liberty. The identity of the ship was as unmistakable as if it had been the Statue of Liberty. It was bristling with antennas, it flew a large American flag, and its name was clearly painted on its stern. The 4-foot high identification numbers on either side of the bow were in Latin writing, GTR-5, not in Arabic. The weather and visibility were perfect.

Beginning shortly after dawn, “at least twelve, possibly thirteen Israeli aircraft began surveilling the Liberty, some of which were only 1,000 feet or less in altitude, apparently to photograph and ‘map’ her for later targeting purposes.” The assault began without warning just before 2:00 p.m. when three curiously unmarked French-built Mirage fighter jets “bore down on the ship in a fast low-level attack that began with rockets targeted at the four gun mounts and heat-seeking missiles aimed at the communications gear, with their warmed transmitters.”

With the Liberty’s ability to defend itself completely neutralized by the knocking out of its four meager .50-caliber machine guns, slower Super Mystere fighters replaced the Mirage jets, “probably because they could rake the ship even more effectively.” That they did with cannons, rockets, and napalm, spreading carnage among the defenseless, stunned crewmen.

The Liberty carried 294 men. Just over 70% of them would end up as casualties of the attack, with 34 dead and 174 injured. Officially, to this day, the episode is written off as just a “tragic accident,” a simple case of “mistaken identity.” So thoroughgoing has the news suppression been that four years after the event Lyndon Johnson (more precisely, his ghost writer, Doris Kearns Goodwin) was able to write in his memoirs, Vantage Point, that 10 men had been killed and 100 injured, and no one of note said anything about the outrageous undercount. “Who cares?” our news media said in so many words.

The experience, as it is recounted in the book, is made all the more poignant by the fact that we get eyewitness accounts from Nelson’s co-authors, attack-survivors Ernest A. Gallo, Ronald G. Kukal, and Phillip F. Tourney. The four writers together are almost uniquely qualified to provide in this 50th anniversary year the definitive account and analysis of the assault on the Liberty. Nelson, with his previous two books, LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination and LBJ: From Mastermind to Colossus has established himself as the most incisive and fearless biographer of the “psychopathic,” ultra-Zionist 36th president of the United States. In that second book, with most of a chapter devoted to the subject, Nelson gives the sort of attention to the Liberty attack that is missing from LBJ’s Wikipedia page, but one should not think that he already knows all he needs to know about the Liberty assault from that account. This latest book is full of important new revelations.

Gallo was one of the many intelligence officers on the Liberty, which was under the control of the National Security Administration, though manned largely by U.S. Navy sailors. He is the author of the 2013 book, Liberty Injustices: A Survivor’s Account of American Bigotry and is the current president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association. Kukal was the petty officer in charge of body recovery and identification on the Liberty. No one is more intimately familiar with the pain and suffering caused by the attack. Tourney, a three-time president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association, was a Navy enlisted man assigned to damage control (fireman) on the day of the attack. He is the author of What I Saw That Day: Israel’s June 8th, 1967 Holocaust of US Servicemen aboard the USS Liberty and its Aftermath and is the host of the Saturday call-in show Your Voice Counts on the Republic Broadcasting Network.

Frustrated Madman President

No one reading Remember the Liberty can reach any other conclusion than that, as with the Lavon Affair, this was another failed false flag attack, and that it was virtually a miracle that it failed. After the ship’s defenses and communications had been blown away, gunboats fired four torpedoes that missed. The fifth torpedo struck the Liberty, but it did not penetrate into the bowels of the ship, having squarely hit one of the structural I-beams. Even so, it opened a large hole in the side of the ship. Had the torpedo struck a couple of inches to the left or the right, though, it would have caused the ship’s boilers to explode as the cold sea water rushed in and the ship would have fractured and sunk within minutes. That was the clear intent of the attackers.

As Nelson has pieced together the evidence, the assault on the Liberty was as carefully planned over a long period of time as was the Six-Day War itself. The 294 men on board were meant to be the sacrificial lambs for the audacious, grandiose scheme that was to draw in the United States with both feet—likely even with the use of nuclear weapons—against the Egyptians, who had been virtually pushed into the orbit of the Soviet Union by America’s strongly pro-Israel policy under Johnson. Two A-4 bomber aircraft launched from the USS America aircraft carrier at the same time that fighter jets took off from the carrier to come to the aid of the Liberty were, according to one of the pilots, carrying nuclear weapons targeted for Cairo. Those fighter jets, had they not have been recalled by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara himself, would have arrived in time to prevent the worst of the attack, the torpedo attack that killed 26 men in the communications room. For their part, the bombers did not return until four or five days later. As the pilot explained, the nuclear bombs made the planes “too heavy and dangerous to land back on the aircraft carrier,” and they had to be diverted to a land-based airstrip.

In California, at Beale Air Force Base north of Sacramento, B-52 bombers along with KC-135 midair refueling tankers were scrambled between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., which would have been at least an hour before the attack actually took place. Presidential adviser and future defense secretary Clark Clifford wrote in his memoirs that he was awakened at home at 6 a.m. that same morning, June 8, for an emergency meeting at the White House. That was two hours before the “surprise” Israeli attack began.

At the center of the scheme was President Johnson. As an American politician not from the state of New York, Johnson had long since shown himself to be ahead of his time in his total commitment to the state of Israel, his “passionate attachment,” if you will. To illustrate his point, Nelson reminds us of the letter that Johnson, as Senate majority leader, wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles in February of 1957 in opposition to UN sanctions on Israel for its role in the Suez Crisis and then leaked to The New York Times. Eisenhower and his administration supported the sanctions and he was furious with Johnson for undercutting official U.S. government policy. In response to Johnson’s affront, Eisenhower went on radio and television with this message, not mentioning Johnson by name: “America has either one voice or none, and that voice is the voice of the President—whether everybody agrees with him or not.” He further stated that the U.N. had “no choice but to exert pressure upon Israel.”

As president, Johnson didn’t just reverse John Kennedy’s policy on Vietnam, dramatically escalating American involvement in the war as opposed to Kennedy’s directive to begin bringing our troops home, but he gave the green light to Israel’s nuclear program, which Kennedy had strongly opposed, setting the country off on the extremely pro-Israel course that it has followed ever since. That this was done in spite of the vicious, unprovoked assault on 294 Americans serving their country is evidence, almost in itself, that something is seriously amiss here. America’s military assistance to Israel also took a big jump up during Johnson’s administration. In Nelson’s words:

Unfortunately, the cost to the United States was very high, especially in terms of the intangible loss of valued integrity, respect and honor to its friends and allies. Even to Israel itself, which Undersecretary of State George Ball concluded, poignantly, resulted in the Israelis coming to believe that, if they could get by with an attack of this enormity, then they could “get by with almost anything.” It may explain why Israel gets the most foreign aid dispensed by the U.S., but still wants more. Their 2016 request is up to $5 billion per year from $3 billion in recent years.

As Nelson tells it though, as things have turned out they are not nearly as bad as they might have been had the plot to sink the Liberty succeeded. By Nelson’s thesis, Johnson saw our big plunge into the Middle East on the successful side of beleaguered little Israel as a dramatic way to reverse the course of his own political fortunes, always foremost in his consideration. Jewish Americans, who tend to be heavily liberal in their orientation, were in the forefront of the opposition to his Vietnam policy. Here was his chance for him to be their hero and to thereby cement his chance for re-election in 1968. What the grand gesture on behalf of Israel needed was what something that the Project for a New American Century has since given a rather bad name, a “catalyzing event.” That event was to have been the sinking of the Liberty by the Soviet-allied Egyptians, we were to be told, with the loss of all of its crew. A more dastardly plot is hard to imagine, but no other explanation for what is known to have transpired makes nearly as much sense.

“I want that Goddamn ship going to the bottom. No help. Recall the wings.” That is the precise order that Johnson gave Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, the commander of the battle group of which the America was a part, the second time American planes were recalled, this time after the torpedo had struck. Geis gave that information years later to Lieutenant Commander David Lewis, who had been the head of the NSA group on the Liberty. Geis had asked Lewis to keep it secret until after he was dead, which Lewis did.

Johnson apparently thought Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had not been forceful enough when he recalled the planes from their first attempt at a rescue effort. McNamara’s words to Geis had been, “President Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.” This information comes from Chief Petty Officer J.Q. “Tony” Hart, who worked in a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco processing communications between Washington and the 6th Fleet. Probably the most revealing thing about this conversation is that at that early stage of the attack neither Geis nor even the men on the Liberty knew that the attackers were actually our Israeli “ally.” Geis learned the identity of the attackers from his superiors, not from the ones who were crying for help.

The Foiled Plot

The scheme to sink the Liberty was thwarted not just by the fortunate trajectory of that one torpedo that struck the ship. The heroic efforts of Captain William McGonagle and his crew must also be credited, but, before that, what the 23 year-old seaman Terry Halbardier did saved the day for the 260 men who survived, and probably saved the day for a lot more of us. One can read a very moving and informative tribute to Halbardier by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern at Consortiumnews.com., who also wrote the foreword to Remember the Liberty!

As noted, the attacking airplanes had specifically targeted the ship’s communications. Within ten minutes of the initial onslaught Halbardier risked his life to go out amid the strafing to string a new cable from the one undamaged antenna to the one functioning transmitter, which was only functioning because it happened to have been shut down when the heat-seeking missiles came in. They sent a cry for help that somehow got through the intense radio jamming efforts of the Israelis (which were tellingly aimed at American radio frequencies). It was because of this fact that Johnson and McNamara were forced into their extraordinarily incriminating scurry-around mode in which they had to justify orders to American military officers not to go to the aid of fellow servicemen under attack. That action might well represent the lowest point in the history of the American presidency (although one can think of a number that rival it).

The authors are not sure as to what caused the Israelis to scuttle the fourth, coup de grace, stage of the attack. Helicopters with armed commandos hovered for a while over the blasted ship with its gaping hole in the side. The plan, apparently, was for the commandos to rappel down onto the deck and kill all the survivors before finally sinking the ship. But not only did the Israelis know that the cry for help had gone out and might, in spite of the plan in which the American president was known to be complicit, result in rescuers arriving at any minute from one of their warships, but also a Russian destroyer had come into view.

From “Catalyzing Event” to Cover-up

When the Liberty failed to sink, LBJ and our ruling criminal elite were forced into full cover-up mode, and that is where we have remained now for exactly half a century. “Rush up and hush up” is how we might sum up the farce of an “investigation” and the general aftermath of the attack. Given the assignment of overseeing the under-rug-sweeping, the Court of Inquiry, was the Commander in Chief, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, John McCain, Jr., the father of Senator and former Republican presidential nominee, John McCain III. How McCain performed his duties is well summed up by this information from Gallo in the book:

We later learned the testimonies of the wounded on the USS America and USS Little Rock (a cruiser and Sixth Fleet Flag Ship) were considered important by the court but were over-ruled by Admiral McCain in London. They also wanted to interview Israelis, however McCain insisted the court conclude as soon as possible. Members of the crew who gave critical testimony obtained a copy of this report and they indicated that their testimony was left out if it indicated Israeli brutality.

A proper inquiry into the incident, according to the Navy Judge Advocate General Captain Ward Boston, Jr., who was chief assistant to the president of the Court, Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, would have required at least six months. Instead, they were given a week.

So much for the “rush up” part. The “hush up” comes from the words of Admiral Kidd, addressing the men on the crippled ship, as recalled by Tourney. The quote heads up Chapter 4:

Ok fellas, now I’m an admiral again and I want each and every one of you to understand something. We’re talking about National Security here, not your personal feelings, not what you did or did not do… I could really give a shit about any of that. You listen to me once, because this is the only time you’re ever going to hear it. You are NEVER to repeat what you just told me to ANYONE—not your mother, your father, your wife—ANYONE! Including your shipmates. You are not to discuss this with anyone, especially—ESPECIALLY—not with the MEDIA, or you will end up in PRISON, or WORSE!

The general hush-up was successful for quite a long time. The silence was broken with a bang, though, in 1979 when survivor James M. Ennes Jr. came out with his book Assault on the Liberty; The True Story of the Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship. Since that time there has been no good excuse for anybody really interested in the truth to believe the official “tragic accident” story.

That did not stop former U.S. Navy aviator and retired bankruptcy court judge A. Jay Cristol from publishing The USS Liberty Incident: The 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S Navy Spy Ship, which purported to give the last word on the matter, that is, the same as the official first word, “tragic accident.” Thirteen investigations, said Cristol among a lot of other things, had all come to that same conclusion. As Terence O’Keefe pointed out in his December 2003 article in the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, actually that hasty first inquiry remains to this day the only thing that has been done that even purports to be an investigation, and here’s what he says about that:

The U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry: The senior legal adviser to the Court of Inquiry reflected that, in his entire career, he has never seen court of inquiry appointing letters with such limited authority, or an investigation made in such haste. The court’s hearings began before the Liberty even arrived in Malta, and the report was completed just 10 days after the attack. The court commented on this haste in the official record: “The Court of Inquiry experienced no unusual difficulties incident to conducting the subject proceedings except for the necessity of investigating such a major naval disaster of international significance in an extremely abbreviated time frame.”

Due in part to the required haste and the limitations imposed on the scope of the court’s inquiries (“It was not the responsibility of the court to rule on the culpability of the attackers, and no evidence was heard from the attacking nation”), the court concluded that “available evidence combines to indicate…[that the attack was] a case of mistaken identity.”

How, one might ask, could one inquire into all of the circumstances without hearing from the attacking nation? In fact, the court did neither. According to Captain Ward Boston, chief legal counsel to the Court of Inquiry, the court found that the attack was deliberate, but reported falsely that it was not because they were directed by the president of the United States and the secretary of defense to report falsely. So the findings are fraudulent. Yet these fraudulent findings were the basis for several other reports that followed.

Boston, in fact, had been so infuriated by the Cristol book that he came forward with an affidavit stating that what the Court of Inquiry had done was, in effect, a cover-up. The full affidavit is on pp. 125-128 of Remember the Liberty. On the Internet, one can read it at the web site of If Americans Knew.

Cristol, of course, has had his promoters. One very predictable one is the Jewish-American academic, Daniel Pipes. A response to Pipes’ favorable review of Cristol’s book on his own web site by David Smyth, which corresponds with what one will find in Remember the Liberty, to my mind, speaks very nearly the last word as to the deliberateness of the attack:

Mr. Pipes says of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty: “conspiracy theories pointing to a purposeful Israeli attack arose quickly and have persisted through the years.” About twenty years ago I did a story for the Associated Press on the Liberty incident that was published by the Los Angeles Times and a large number of other US newspapers. I spoke to the following officials (their titles correspond to the positions they occupied at the time of the Liberty incident) and they all told me that the Israeli attack was deliberate, not an accident:

Secretary of State Dean Rusk
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer
CIA Director Richard Helms
NSA Deputy Director Louis Tordella.

I am no authority on conspiracy theories, but there seem to be three possibilities here. A) Rusk, Moorer, Helms and Tordella were all propagators of a conspiracy theory. B) They were all dupes of a conspiracy theory. C) There is no valid conspiracy theory.

I am retired now, but I have always considered it my business to report facts, not to disentangle conspiracy theories, so I will leave that task to others. I might add that I gathered other statements. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told me on the phone that he had “no recollection” of the Liberty Incident. I also talked on the phone to Admiral Isaac Kidd, who headed the naval court of inquiry into the Liberty attack. I told him what Rusk and the others had said and asked if he had any opinion on Israeli culpability. He said, “The giants of that time can speak out. I know when to keep my mouth shut.”

As it turned out, Kidd continued to keep his mouth shut about the Liberty attack until the end, but his assistant, Captain Boston, later did his speaking for him.

Where Does Your Allegiance Lie?

Although half a century has now passed, hardly any event, when looked at in the clear light of day, permits us to come to grips more completely with the political reality of the United States today than does the assault on the USS Liberty. We live in an era in which members of the United States military have never been more venerated. From sports events to airport encounters, we’re expected to honor them at every turn. “Support the troops” is seemingly an admonition that no one can disagree with.

All of the military reverence comes to a screeching halt, though, when it comes to the surviving crewmen of the USS Liberty. They can only be brushed aside, with their demands for a true accounting for what was done to them by our great “ally” with the connivance of their own leaders. For our politicians to do otherwise and to get to the bottom of what happened there in the Eastern Mediterranean on June 8, 1967, would put them on a collision course with the real ruling power in the country. When it comes down to the choice of supporting our troops or supporting the ethnic-supremacist state of Israel, whose fundamental nature was revealed as much by the Liberty attack as it was by the Lavon Affair, and for whom we regularly pour out our fortune, our credibility, and our blood, Israel it has to be.

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Source: The Libertarian Institute

11/9/23 James Bamford on the Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty

Scott is joined by James Bamford to discuss Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. Bamford lays out the story of what happened. They then discuss the coverup and play down by the US government and compare it with the impression at the top of the intelligence community that the attack was deliberate.

Discussed on the show:

James Bamford is a journalist, professor, documentary filmmaker, and the author of Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency and A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies. Find him on Twitter @WashAuthor.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott.

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Source: Global Research

The Prospect of a Major False-Flag Operation in the Middle-East Grows by the Day: Remembering June 8th, 1967 the Day Israel Attacked the USS Liberty

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

April 23, 2021

June 8^th, 1967 is a date in history that the world should recognize because it was the day that Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a US Navy spy ship during the Six-Day War. So why would a supposedly staunch US ally do such a thing against one of its most loyal servants? Was it an accident or was it a failed false-flag operation?

In this time of uncertainty, the Israelis have been planning numerous ways to stop Iran’s nuclear program but the question is how would they accomplish such a task? Israeli officials including its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who is perhaps, the most vocal of the crowd would do almost anything at this point to prevent Washington from re-entering the Joint Comprehension Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran since the Trump administration abruptly pulled out from the deal in 2017.

Tel-Aviv is getting anxious to derail Iran’s nuclear program, so would they orchestrate another false-flag operation to commit the US into a shooting war with Iran since the bonds of friendship between both countries are unbreakable? How long before Israel pushes the US into another war in the Middle East? I mean why not? They got their wish when the US invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 since Israel and its hard-line supporters pushed Washington to declare war by the “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction”propaganda from the Bush neocons and powerful lobbyists such as American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and of course, the Israelis themselves led by Netanyahu. That one tragic day in 1967 is relevant to today’s dangerous situation developing in the Middle East between Israel and Iran.

The USS Liberty incident occurred during the Six-day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors including Egypt, Syria, Jordan. Lebanon and even Iraq who had a minor role in the war. It began when Israel had attacked the USS Liberty, a US Navy technical research ship (or a spy ship) with its fighter jets and motor torpedo boats that had killed 34 and injured 171 crew members including marines, naval officers, seamen, and a civilian employee from National Security Agency (NSA). The US Naval ship was in international waters in the north of the Sinai Peninsula at the time. There were multiple investigations from the US and Israeli governments who both claimed that it was a mistake while the crew members who were aboard the ship say it was deliberate. So was it a mistake as claimed by both government’s or was it deliberate?

During the Six-Day War, the US had maintained its ‘neutral country status. A week before the war began, the USS Liberty was ordered to the eastern Mediterranean sea for an intelligence collection mission near the north coast of Sinai, Egypt. During the mission, the Israel Air Force (IAF) had flown over the USS Liberty claiming that they were searching for Egyptian submarines that had been previously spotted near the coast. Around 2 pm, the IAF had sent two Mirage III fighter jets to oversee the ship which they had claimed had no “distinguishable markings” or any flag on the ship. The USS Liberty was then attacked. However, right before the attack, the Mirage fighter jets codenamed Kursa had verbal exchanges between a command post weapons systems officer, air controllers and a chief air controller who reportedly questioned whether there was the possibility of a US ship in the area and around 1:57 pm, the chief air controller, Lieutenant-Colonel Shmuel Kislev gave the green light to attack the USS Liberty as the fighter jets unleashed 30-mm cannons, rockets and napalm killing and injuring scores of US crew members.

The Israeli fighter jets had purposely jammed US communications frequencies before the attack meaning that they knew it was an American naval ship.

There were also three Israeli torpedo boats as they too had launched an attack on the ship with cannons, mounted machine guns and torpedoes. One of the torpedo’s that hit the Liberty killing 25 crew members as the lower decks became flooded. The Israeli torpedo boats had also damaged the life rafts as the crew had prepared to abandon the ship. At around 3:15, two Israeli helicopters appeared with armed IDF personnel leading to the conclusion by those who were on the ship that the Israelis were there to kill the remaining survivors, but miraculously, that did not happen. Meanwhile, the ship was still under attack as the crew members reinforced their lines of communications and called for help. When the USS Saratoga and the USS America received the message, they had ordered US fighters to help protect the ship, but in a bizarre move, the mission was aborted by direct orders from Washington. Israel already knew that the US fighter jets were on their way when they picked up the transmission and immediately called off the attack. Israel’s torpedo boats and helicopters quickly returned to their base of operations.

Israel then notified Washington that they had mistakenly attacked an American ship and once again its fighter jets were recalled for a second time. There is an interesting fact to ponder regarding President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara who halted the rescue mission. A high-ranking official Admiral L. R. Geis, the commander of the Sixth Fleet carrier force, told Lt. Commander David Lewis of the USS Liberty that he had challenged McNamara’s orders to recall the rescue mission, but then it was reported that LBJ got on the phone and said he didn’t care if the ship sank, and that he wasn’t going to embarrass an ally. The communications officer from the Liberty in charge of the transmission has given the same testimony.

It was not until 2007 that new revelations on the Israeli attack became readily available. Citing more than two dozen US Navy veterans who survived the onslaught, The Chicago Tribune’s ‘New Revelations in Attack on American Spy ship‘ reported about the anger directed at both Israel and the US government’s NSA “that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots — communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.” The article also suggests that there was a cover-up by both the US government and Israel:

The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel’s reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation.
In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country’s chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had “become the center of considerable controversy and debate.” It was not the agency’s intention, it said, “to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material,” available at http://www.nsa.gov/liberty

How did Israel know that it as a US Naval ship? Earlier that day, Israeli jets had repeatedly circled the Liberty before they began their attack:

Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared on the horizon and circled the Liberty. The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first day of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. America was Israel’s ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there. The ship’s mission was to monitor the communications of Israel’s Arab enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications. The Liberty felt safe.
Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore Arfsten, a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw the blue Star of David on the planes’ fuselages. At first, crew members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their ship

But the information that the Liberty was 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula was somehow “lost”:

An Israeli military court of inquiry later acknowledged that their naval headquarters knew at least three hours before the attack that the odd-looking ship 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula, sprouting more than 40 antennas capable of receiving every kind of radio transmission, was “an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy,” a floating electronic vacuum cleaner.
The Israeli inquiry later concluded that that information had simply gotten lost, never passed along to the ground controllers who directed the air attack nor to the crews of the three Israeli torpedo boats who picked up where the air force left off, strafing the Liberty’s decks with their machine guns and launching a torpedo that blew a 39-foot hole in its starboard side

President Lyndon B. Johnson and McNamara at a cabinet meeting, 1968 (Public Domain)

What is interesting about these new revelations is what actions were undertaken by the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as told by J.Q. “Tony” Hart, who was a chief petty officer at a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco. Hart was in-charge of communications between Washington and the US Navy’s 6th Fleet remembered that McNamara had ordered Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, the commander of the carrier to bring back the jets:

When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that “President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.”
McNamara, who is now 91, told the Tribune he has “absolutely no recollection of what I did that day,” except that “I have a memory that I didn’t know at the time what was going on”

How convenient that McNamara could not remember what happened in 1967 to his own countrymen.

One other main question that is always up for debate regarding the USS Liberty is whether the American flag was visible?

For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be reduced to a single question: Was the ship flying the American flag at the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?
The survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the Liberty was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the attack, except for a brief period in which one flag that had been shot down was replaced with another, larger flag — the ship’s “holiday colors” — that measured 13 feet long.
Concludes one of the declassified NSA documents: “Every official interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag — and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and identification”

Of course, the Israeli court of inquiry investigated the attack and had concluded that “throughout the contact,” it declared, “no American or any other flag appeared on the ship.” Another comment was made by Steve Forslund on the declassified documents was a former intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, a high-level position within the strategic planning office in the Air Force said that “the ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it”Forslund had remembered that “the aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag” and that the ground control station had “ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors.”

The Chicago Tribune also interviewed James Gotcher, an attorney in California who served with the Air Force Security Service’s 6924th Security Squadron, part of the NSA network at Son Tra, Vietnam who said that “it was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty” Gotcher said in his e-mail that “Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to ‘complete the job’ and get out of there.”

Former Air Force Capt. Richard Block in charge of the intelligence wing that monitored communications from Middle Eastern countries had remembered that there “were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack,” Block said. “The pilots said, ‘This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?’ continued “and ground control came back and said, ‘Yes, follow orders.”

According to the Chicago Tribune, “Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.” Obviously, corrupt officials at the NSA and the Israelis manipulated the transcripts as Gotcher points out, “there is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as what I saw,” he continued “more to the point, for anyone familiar with air-to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn’t the way pilots and controllers communicate.”

One other person who was interviewed for the report was Oliver Kirby, the NSA’s deputy director for operations during the attack on the USS Liberty had confirmed what was actually said in the NSA transcripts, “they said, ‘We’ve got him in the zero,’” Kirby recalled, “whatever that meant — I guess the sights or something.” According to Kirby’s account, they saw the American flag, “Can you see the flag?’ They said ‘Yes, it’s U.S, it’s U.S.’ They said it several times, so there wasn’t any doubt in anybody’s mind that they knew it.”

Obviously, those transcripts were manipulated to fit a certain narrative as Kirby himself said that the Jerusalem Post transcript were “something that’s bothered me all my life. I’m willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew.”

A decade later, Haaretz decided to revisit the USS Liberty incident in an article that can be best described as spin, ‘But Sir, It’s an American Ship.’ ‘Never Mind, Hit Her!’ When Israel Attacked USS Liberty‘ by Ofer Aderet claims that the Israeli attack on the US Naval ship was a mistake and that

“Israel apologized and paid compensation to the victims’ families. Israeli and American commissions of inquiry found that the attack was a mistake. But naturally, as often happens in such events, to this day there are some who believe Israel attacked the ship with malicious intent.”

Yes, they did compensate the families of the crew members who were either killed or injured with US taxpayer’s money they receive from Washington in the name of providing aid to Israel. The article touches upon a book that was released on the 50^thanniversary of the attack titled ‘Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas’ , the article starts off with the positive outcome for Israel during the Six-Day War which is described as a celebration, but later mentions what happened on June 8^th,

“Amid the jubilee celebrations for the Six-Day War, the tragic story of the American spy ship USS Liberty – which was bombed by an Israeli fighter jet and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967 in the eastern Mediterranean – was somewhat overlooked.”

Well it obviously it has been overlooked by the media, US politicians and historians. Aderet asks, ‘Is it “A conspiracy? Healthy suspicion?” He declares “Call it what you will.”

However,the book ‘Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas’ was written by Phillip F. Nelson, Ernest A. Gallo, Ronald G. Kukal and Philip F. Tourney is mostly accurate in terms of what happened on that tragic day, but what they get completely wrong is who would have benefited if the ship had sunk? Israel’s intended goal was to drag the US into a war which could have led into a World War III type of scenario at the time.

The problem is that the authors of the book believe that US President Lyndon B. Johnson was actually the mastermind behind the plan, that it was his idea all along which leads us to believe that Israel had a minor role in the plot. The author’s conclusion gives Israel a pass since it was Johnson’s idea to sink the USS Liberty to get US forces to join Israel in its war against its Arab neighbors. Israel has a long-term plan to destroy their neighbors so that they can expand beyond their borders, acquiring more land in the process with help from the US military. Yes, it is true that Israel was behind the attack, and it is also true that LBJ went along with the plan, but not as the mastermind, rather more like another controlled puppet of Israel:

A new book published in May in the United States (its authors include several survivors of the attack) promises that “the truth is being told as never before and the real story revealed.” The 302 pages of “Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas” include quite a number of documents, testimonies, arguments and information that were gathered in the subsequent 50 years.
The authors’ bottom line is that then-U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the attack, in an attempt to blame then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser – an excuse that would then enable the United States to join the Six-Day War

Aderet mentions a censored CIA document that contains a quote from an anonymous source,

“they said that [then-Israeli Defense Minister Moshe] Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship, and that one of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, ‘This is pure murder.”

Aderet argues that “there is no dispute about the authenticity of the document, but clearly not every sentence written in an intelligence document is the unvarnished truth.” A former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, Dwight Porter had spoke about a conversation that was picked up by an NSA aircraft and sent to multiple CIA offices. Here is what was sent to the intelligence community:

“Israeli pilot to IDF war room: This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?
IDF war room to Israeli pilot: Yes, follow orders.
Israeli pilot to IDF war room: But sir, it’s an American ship – I can see the flag!
IDF war room to Israeli pilot: Never mind; hit it“

Dr. Michael Oren is an American-born Israeli author, historian, politician, a former ambassador to the United States from 2009–2013, also a former member of the Knesset and a former Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office who claims that he researched the incident and conveniently rejects the claim that Israel had deliberately attacked the USS Liberty. Here is what he said to Haaretz:

“There is no doubt,” he says. “Not even the smallest percentage. I’ve taken part in wars. I know what ‘friendly fire’ is. There’s a lot of chaos. It was a classic screw up.
A classic screw up, especially in wartime, has more than one reason. It’s a sequence, a chain of screw ups.”
Oren adds: “I’m a historian. I have to stick with the facts. I can’t get into conspiracies and theories. A historian must proceed on the basis of the data before him. Today, almost all the papers have been publicized, including the texts of the recordings of the U.S. spy plane and spy submarine.
“Attempts to explain why Israel was interested in attacking the Liberty have failed thus far,” he continues. “They’re trying to answer the question ‘Why?’ and they’re having difficulty. It began with the claim that the Liberty discovered the Israel Defense Forces’ intentions or preparations to occupy the Golan Heights. And then they said it had homed in on some preparations in Dimona [the site of Israel’s nuclear reactor]. And finally, that it had listened in on the slaughter of Egyptian prisoners of war – I don’t know how slaughter sounds on the communications network. All kinds of bizarre theories.
“If we start with the assumption that the attack was deliberate and planned in advance, the question is why. And nobody answers this question. The answer is that it wasn’t planned.
“What continues to fuel these conspiracy theories?” Oren asks. “The subject is revived every few years. It is part of a ‘theory’ that Israel, together with Russia and China, spies on the United States. As Israel’s ambassador to the United States I saw this undercurrent, which is also sometimes anti-Semitic”

Since the attack on the USS Liberty, Israel has of course continued to wage numerous wars throughout the Middle East with help from the US. Israel’s wars led to the destruction of Lebanon, Syria and the biggest obstacle at the time, Iraq. Israel was instrumental in the lead-up to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

It’s was all part of the long-term plan and Iraq was part of that plan, in fact, the most powerful lobby in Washington is AIPAC and the Bush neoconservatives including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Elliot Abrams and others who pushed Washington into a war with Iraq. According to John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of ‘The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ AIPAC was a major supporter for the War on Iraq:

AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United States to invade Iraq. Nathan Guttman made this very connection in his reporting [in Haaretz, April 2003] on AIPAC’s annual conference in the spring of 2003, shortly after the war started: “AIPAC is wont to support whatever is good for Israel, and so long as Israel supports the war, so too do the thousands of the AIPAC lobbyists who convened in the American capital.” AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr’s statement to the New York Sun in January 2003 is even more revealing, as he acknowledged “‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” was one of “AIPAC’s successes over the past year.” And in a lengthy New Yorker profile of Steven J. Rosen, who was AIPAC’s policy director during the run-up to the Iraq war, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war”

It was all part of the larger plan. The US Army War College published a strategy research project ‘Assault on the USS Liberty: Deliberate or Tragic Accident?‘ by Colonel Peyton E. Smith who came to the conclusion that the attack on the USS Liberty was deliberate, “The attack was most likely deliberate for reasons far too sensitive to be disclosed by the US (or) Israeli government and that the truth may never be known.” Smith said that the only way to expose the truth on what happened on June 8^th, 1967 is by having both the US and Israeli governments release all of the data available, but that obviously won’t happen anytime soon:

Since this event occurred almost forty years ago, much personal testimony has surfaced regarding the incident. Based on the testimony of many eyewitnesses and the memoirs of senior government officials, the attack on the USS Liberty was most likely deliberate. Unfortunately, this issue may go to the grave unresolved unless the US government and the government of Israel release all data related to the incident. Perhaps forty years ago at the height of the cold war and with fears of major Soviet expansion into the Middle East, the information regarding the USS Liberty, the unknown subsurface contact (submarine), and the intelligence collecting aircraft (EC121) that were supposedly not there, would have been too sensitive to disciose.106 However, now that the Cold War is long over and the global conditions have changed, the US and Israeli governments should release all pertinent information and conduct an official inquiry. There is no discernable national security rational for continuing to keep these records secret. Only when they are finally released for careful scrutiny can we finally close the book on this unfortunate and tragic naval incident

The only possible reason Israel attacked the Liberty was to get the US into the Six-Day War so that Israel can step aside, spare its own soldiers and allow their American counterparts to fight their Arab neighbors for them.

Israel’s plan to dominate the Middle East continues today as it aims to destabilize Iran in the process since it is one of the last remaining obstacles to solidify its goal of complete hegemonic control over the Arab world. The reason why Israel wants Iran destroyed is because they can be an economic and political powerhouse in the Middle East especially now with its close economic and political ties with China and Russia.

The bottom line is that it all fits into The Yinon Plan, The Zionist Plan for the Middle East, a plan to expand Israel’s territorial claims and dominate the region as a Jewish state under “God”. Rabbi Fischmann was a member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine who openly declared in his testimony to the United Nations Special Committee of Enquiry on July 9th, 1947 that “the Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.” Israel can initiate another false-flag operation so that they can blame Iran and force the US into another unwinnable war in the Middle East. Will Israel succeed? Unfortunately, the answer may be yes.

Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Cynthia McKinney US Lawmakers Forced to Sign Pledge to Support Israels

Former US lawmaker Cynthia McKinney says every candidate for Congress has to sign a pledge to support Israel. "Every candidate for Congress at that time had a pledge. They were given a pledge to sign ... that had Jerusalem as the capital city," McKinney said in an interview with Press TV on May 22, 2011. "You make a commitment that you would vote to support the military superiority of Israel that the economic assistant that Israel wants that you would vote to provide that," she added. McKinney said that if a candidate does not sign the pledge or perform accordingly, "then you do not get money to run your campaign." The former Congresswoman said that after she made the pledge issue public "the tactic changed." "But this is what is done for 535 members of the United States Congress, 100 senators and 435 members of the House of Representatives have to now write a paragraph which basically says the same thing." Her comments came as US President Barack Obama vowed to sustain Israel's military superiority over its neighbors at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) annual gathering on Sunday. "We (the US) will maintain Israel's qualitative military edge"... "We have increased military financing to record levels," Obama said.
'US lawmakers forced to support Israel' (archive.org)