Hi all!
This is from today's Jerusalem Post:
_____
USS 'Liberty' hit was unintentional, says CIA
By JANINE ZACHARIA
New documents released by the State Department relating to the period of the 1967 Six Day War include CIA memos that say Israel did not know it was striking an American vessel when it attacked the USS Liberty off the coast of the Gaza Strip on June 8, 1967, killing 34 American sailors and injuring 172. The memos say the attack was carried out "by mistake, representing gross negligence."
Along with the release of the documents, the historian for the top-secret National Security Agency said Monday he believed available evidence "strongly suggested" Israel did not know it was bombarding an American ship.
On Monday, the State Department hosted a conference on the 1967 war, including the Liberty incident, to mark the release of a new volume of historical papers from the Johnson Administration. The 542 declassified documents, roughly 1100 pages in length, were culled from the archives of the White House, State Department, Pentagon and various intelligence agencies. They cover May through November 1967.
Historians said the new documentation included little new on the Liberty incident itself. It is still not known, for example, why the USS Liberty, an intelligence-gathering ship, was allowed to linger so close to the war zone, or why Israel was not informed of its presence in the area. Analysts said however that while its original mission remains murky, it was now evident that the ship was not sent to spy on Israel since the bulk of linguists on board spoke Arabic or Russian and the ship had no Hebrew translators to monitor Israeli communications in real time.
The most significant documents, transcripts of tapes of communications between an Israeli air controller and helicopter pilots sent to rescue the wounded from the attack, were released last July.
Those intercepts showed that the Israeli rescue pilots first identified the ship as Egyptian and gradually realized, after spotting a US flag, that the ship was American.
"A CIA memo of June 13 reported they had no intercepts from the attacking planes and torpedo boats, but that the helicopter pilots' communication left little doubt that the Israelis had failed to identify the Liberty as a US ship," said Harriet Schwar, editor of the newly released volume.
"A follow-up CIA memo on June 21st noted that the Liberty had been identified prior to the attacks but concluded that the Israelis were not aware at the time of the attack that they were attacking a US ship. It concluded that the attack was not made in malice, but was by mistake, representing gross negligence. The Defense Intelligence Agency reached a similar conclusion," Schwar added.
David Hatch, the National Security Agency Historian, said of the intercepted communications of the rescue pilots: "While falling short of proof, the intercepts to me suggest strongly the Israeli attackers did not know they were aiming deadly fire at a vessel belonging to the United States. The intercepted communications between the air controller at Hatzor and helicopters dispatched in the wake of the attack show a progressive reversal of perception on their part."
Included on the panel was James Bamford, an investigative journalist, who has written that Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty spy ship. Jay Cristol, a Miami-based judge who has written a book arguing that the attack was a mistake was also present, as was Michel Oren, author of a book on the Six Day War.
Bamford stood by his assertion that Israel had deliberately attacked the ship and that the US and Israel had orchestrated a "big cover up."
He read from a recent declaration by Ward Boston, who served as senior legal counsel for the Navy's Court of Inquiry into the Liberty attack. That Court concluded there was insufficient information to make a judgment about why Israel attacked the ship.
In his affidavit, Boston says, he and the Court were given only one week to gather evidence for the Navy's investigation, and that both he and the Court's president, Admiral Isaac Kidd, "believed with certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire
crew."
"I am outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of mistaken identity. In particular the recent publication of Jay Cristol's book, "The Liberty Incident," twists the facts and misrepresents the views of those of us who investigated the attack," Boston says.
Cristol's presentation for the Liberty panel was prepared in conjunction with Ernest Castle, the United States Naval Attache' at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in June 1967, who received the first report of the attack from Israel and advised the US, and John Hadden who was then the CIA Chief of Station in Tel Aviv. Both Castle and Hadden agree that the attack on the Liberty was a mistake.
Michael Oren, in his presentation, reviewed some of the mistakes Israel had made during the Liberty attack.
Earlier in the morning of June 8, the Israelis had surveyed and identified a ship in the area as the USS Liberty. A neutral green marker was placed on a model to represent the Liberty's position. Two hours later, the marker was removed since the ship's position would have changed by then and a new
senior Israeli official came on duty who was not informed of the Liberty's presence in the area, Oren explained.
The removal of the marker, a miscalculation of the speed at which the Liberty was traveling that would have indicated it was not a warship, and a breakdown in communication between the Israeli Navy and Army were all Israeli errors that contributed to orders to attack the ship.
The former Naval attache, Castle, said after the panel that he knew personally the Israeli official who had removed the marker and that it had ruined him" professionally and personally. The Israelis had no motive to attack the ship, he added.
The panel, which was open to the public, became raucous at times when survivors of the Liberty attack and a relative of a sailor killed in the incident yelled out to protest that the panel included two people who represented Israel's position, while survivors were not invited to participate.
One petty officer from the Liberty attempted to question Oren's credentials, saying someone who would have been "in diapers" at the time of the attack could not effectively analyze the incident. Others slammed Oren for being Israeli and suggested he could therefore not be impartial.
Link:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer&cid=1073881745637
_____
The AFP's story is:
WASHINGTON (AFP) - A State Department conference failed to quell the raging controversy over Israel's attack on a US spy ship during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, as an expert panel was unable to agree whether the strike was intentional.
All but one of four panelists said they either accepted or tended to accept Israel's stated explanation -- that the attack on the USS Liberty had been a case of tragic misidentification and an accident.
A senior State Department official said Washington had not changed its initial, nearly 35-year-old assessment that the attack was the result of "gross negligence" on the part of the Israeli military, but not an intentionally hostile act against the United States.
But survivors and families of victims of the incident, many of whom believe Israel deliberately attacked the ship, angrily charged the State Department with helping cover up Israel's role.
Controversy has raged for years over the June 8, 1967, attack on the Liberty, a US signals intelligence ship, in international waters off the Sinai Peninsula. Israeli jets and torpedo boats struck the ship, killing 34 US sailors and wounding 171.
Israel maintains that its forces mistook the Liberty for an Egyptian warship, but many dispute the Israeli account and demand a new investigation of the sinking.
The senior State Department official said the panel, part of a two-day conference on the 1967 war, had not intended to re-evaluate long-standing US acceptance of the Israeli explanation.
"In many respects, I think this is kind of a classic binational case of Murphy's Law: everything that could possibly go wrong on either side did," the official told reporters after the panel adjourned.
The official said nothing presented in new documents released Monday as part of the US diplomatic history of the 1967 war had changed the evaluation of Israel's explanation at the time.
"The unprovoked attack on the Liberty constitutes a flagrant act of gross negligence for which the Israeli government should be held completely responsible," the official quoted the US conclusion as saying.
However, that official and others, all of whom participated in the conference, admitted it was unlikely the panel had closed the matter or stemmed any of the controversy surrounding the case.
"I don't know if we settled anything, but I think perhaps we've shed a little light on different aspects of this question," Marc Susser, the State Department historian, told the conference.
One leading skeptic of the Israeli explanation is James Bamford, the author of several books on US intelligence.
Bamford, who repeated his call for a new investigation into the incident, argues that the Israelis intentionally sunk the Liberty to cover up a massacre of Egyptian prisoners of war on the Sinai.
Then US president Lyndon Johnson's administration hid the facts to avoid harming ties with Israel, Bramford claims.
Bamford urged in a 2001 book that intelligence data from a US spy plane in the area be released to shed light on the attack.
David Hatch, technical director for the Center for Cryptologic History, said at least some of those intercepts, released by the ultra-secret National Security Agency last year, indicated that the Israelis had not deliberately targeted a US vessel.
"While falling short of proof, the intercepts to me suggest strongly that the Israeli attackers did not know they were aiming deadly fire at a vessel belonging to the United States," Hatch told the panel.
The senior State Department official agreed with that analysis, although he allowed that there were still "some documents that could not be declassified" for the conference.
The conference also heard from Michael Oren, an Israeli historian, and Jay Cristol, a federal judge, both of whom have published investigations into the incident that have supported the Israeli explanation.
The panelists and their conclusions clearly irritated some in the audience, who appeared to believe that the United States was letting Israel -- which paid 12 million dollars in compensation afterwards -- get away with murder.
"There have been so many half-truths and misstatements made up here today," Liberty survivor Joseph Lentini said angrily before being cut-off by Susser.
"Let's hear from another survivor, one more survivor, two Israelis and one survivor," protested an unidentified man when Susser tried to end the question and answer period. "One more survivor has the right to talk."
"You're trying to whitewash it."
Link:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040112/pl_afp/mideast_us_israel_040112233236
_____
Claims, such as Bamford's, that we deliberately attacked the USS Liberty to cover up an alleged massacre of Egyptian POWs in the Sinai are mendacious, ludicrous and border on the anti-Semitic (in addition to having no basis other than pure speculation or Arab propaganda). Claims that we deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in order to cover our intentions to attack Syrian forces on the Golan Heights are also ludicrous. That we were going to attack the Syrians was no secret. That Syria had already committed acts of war by shelling Israeli civilian communities well inside the 1949 armistice line is no secret. And that Sinai is a helluva long way from the Golan Heights is also not a secret. The biggest hole in the claims of those who insist (in the face of how many US investigations & inquiries?
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/liberty2.html) that we deliberately attacked the USS Liberty is, and continues to be, motive. We had everything to lose and absolutely nothing to gain by doing so. But those have ulterior motives and/or whose emotions have got the better of their reason will not let the matter rest & probably never will. (Anyone who actually believes that the US deliberately and with malice aforethought bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade is dismissed, and rightly so, as either badly misinformed, a fool, a fanatic or someone with an ulterior axe to grind.)
BTW, Michael Oren, mentioned in both of the above articles, has written the following:
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/liberty1.html.
Be well!
ssv (a reserve medic, with the rank of sergeant, in the IDF reserves)
