In 1967, Israeli Forces Bombarded a U.S. Intelligence Ship, Killing 34 Americans and Leaving a Legacy of Suspicion

By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
On June 8, 1967, in one of the periodic explosions of violence we've learned to expect in the Middle East, an American intelligence ship named the USS Liberty was attacked with rockets, cannon fire and torpedoes while in international waters off the town of El Arish in the Sinai desert.

Thirty-four Americans were killed and 171 injured in what would remain the largest post-World War II loss of U.S. lives in the Middle East until the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983.

But unlike that latter attack, or the 1983 truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the suicide bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden, Yemen, which killed 17 less than three years ago, the attack on the Liberty was not made by terrorist bombs but by the jet fighters and torpedo boats of the nation of Israel.

The attack on the Liberty has never been fully explained. Official reports by both the Israelis and the U.S. Navy declared it accidental: "a case of mistaken identity" during the Six-Day War.

But today, dozens of Web sites still argue one side or another, and they're multiplying. Pro- and anti-Israeli authors, journalists and activists have sought to spin the Liberty story for their own purposes over the years. The controversy keeps growing, much as Middle East conflicts have grown to become the largest foreign policy and defense issue occupying the U.S. government.

For the Israelis, compared with the Americans, there has been less reason for resentment, blame and further investigation -- their people weren't killed, and after their government admitted its mistake, they did not have victims making charges of coverups. Not that they have ignored it: In 2000, for instance, Israeli historian Michael B. Oren wrote an article titled "The U.S.S. Liberty: Case Closed" -- a position he also took in the New Republic in 2001.

The attack on the Liberty, and the Six-Day War that surrounded it, introduced us to a fog of war that gets ever thicker. The same sort of bewilderment, suspicions and anger aroused by the Liberty incident continue to bedevil governments as U.S. troops mass on the borders of Iraq, war protesters parade and intellectuals debate.

The Six-Day War was "a turning point in our relationship with Israel," says former ambassador Richard Parker, political counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in 1967. The war did more than double the size of Israel with captured lands still the focal point of Israeli-Arab turmoil: "Up to that point we had avoided being a major arms supplier to Israel. And afterward, the security of Israel became one of our strategic objectives, which it had never been . . ."

The attack on the Liberty was not simply a case of a single bomb going astray. According to those who survived, it continued for nearly two hours. It involved rocket and napalm attacks by multiple flights of Israeli jet fighters, a simultaneous torpedo attack by three vessels of the Israeli navy and the machine-gunning of lifeboats tossed overboard as the Liberty survivors prepared to abandon their wounded ship.

Last month, during a program on the Liberty at the Middle East Institute here, Parker said those on record as believing that the Israeli attack was deliberate include former secretary of state Dean Rusk, former CIA chief Richard Helms, Adm. Thomas Moorer (a former chief of naval operations) and a host of former directors of the National Security Agency, as well as then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. Parker said he believes that the attack was accidental. But he also believes that a congressional investigation into the Liberty incident, even at this late date, "would be very useful."

In the past year alone, a Front Royal, Va., filmmaker has produced a video calling for a congressional investigation of the Liberty incident, and a Miami bankruptcy judge has published a book and set up an associated Web site endorsing the "mistaken identity" thesis and attempting to lay the incident to rest. Meanwhile a BBC documentary last June presented documents purporting to link the attack and its subsequent coverup to a mysterious covert operation the United States and Israel planned against Egypt, complete with nuclear weapons.

As the United States prepares for war in Iraq, the attack on the Liberty looms like a specter. Whether accidental or deliberate, the incident is full of examples of bungled orders, missed communications, operational stupidity and interservice rivalry on both sides -- the sort of foul-ups that dog every country's military in every conflict.

A Phantom Investigation?
"They tried to kill all the witnesses," Phil Tourney, president of the Liberty Veterans Association, said recently. "They didn't want any one of us left alive."

The official reports have been repeatedly rejected as insufficient by Liberty survivors and a sizable group of historians and scholars, who contend that the Israeli attack was deliberate. It was intended, many say, to erase the Liberty before its electronic eavesdropping could discover events Israel was anxious the world not know.

They say as well that a coverup (if not a conspiracy) has kept the truth about the incident from the American public for more than 35 years. They point to crucial NSA intercepts of Israeli radio signals known to have been made during the attack -- intercepts that remain classified by the U.S. government in the name of national security. That restriction has already lasted more than a decade longer than the one that cloaked "Ultra" -- the most crucial and tightly held code-breaking operation of World War II.

"There has never been a real investigation," says James Bamford, author of "Body of Secrets," a critically praised 2001 investigative history of the NSA that includes perhaps the most concise documented account of the attack on the Liberty. Disinformation was a major strategy employed by the Israelis in the Six-Day War from the beginning, he says, and the U.S. government, preoccupied at the time with the Vietnam War and the Cold War, chose to avoid looking closely at what happened to the Liberty.

"An investigation is what we did after the Cole bombing when we sent agents to Aden, or after the bombings at the embassies in Africa, when we sent agents there to find who was responsible," Bamford says. "Nobody was ever sent to Israel to ask questions about the Liberty. We just took the Israelis' word for what happened."

A Navy court of inquiry, Bamford says, "concerned itself with the ship's response to the attack. They never even questioned most of the survivors about why all those Americans died. And neither has Congress to this day."

And unlike the two U.S. pilots who face possible court-martial for the "friendly fire" bombing of Canadian troops last year in Afghanistan, no Israeli has ever been tried or reprimanded for the 205 U.S. casualties on the Liberty. Wrote the colonel who headed Israel's official investigation into the attack: "I have not discovered any deviation from the standard of reasonable conduct which would justify a court-martial."

In Harm's Way
To seek out the truth of what happened to the Liberty is to immerse oneself in a maelstrom of conflicting testimony, disputed accounts and questioned motives, not excluding suspicions of anti-Semitism. It is possible, however, to arrive at a basic outline of events using mainly agreed-upon facts.

The Liberty (GTR-5) was what was then known as a General Technological Research Vessel -- a converted 455-foot former World War II Liberty ship purportedly investigating science but actually an offshore electronic eavesdropper.

Its real mission was highly secret not only because spy ships might not be welcomed into every port but also because reading another nation's mail by intercepting radio signals (SIGINT) was seriously forbidden at that time. Despite its thousands of employees, the SIGINT-handling NSA was so secret in 1967 that officially it didn't exist. In the intelligence community, its initials were said to stand for No Such Agency.

Though it was technically a Navy ship and most of its 295 crewmen were Navy personnel, the Liberty generally reported directly to the NSA. In May 1967 it had been sailing slowly up and down the west coast of Africa, listening in on the messy wars in the Congo and other newly independent colonies.

On May 23, however, with war clouds gathering over Israel and Egypt, the ship was ordered to the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt was a major client state of the Soviet Union, and any Egyptian attack on America's ally Israel held the danger of dragging the United States into a nuclear war. The NSA had a need to know.

While the Liberty was still steaming eastward, however, Israel on June 5 launched its air force against Egyptian airfields, destroying almost all of that nation's air power in about 80 minutes.

Informed that war had broken out, the U.S. Navy ordered all its vessels to keep at least 100 miles from the war zone. The NSA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff followed that up with at least five similar orders directed specifically to the Liberty, according to Navy radio transcripts since made public. But the Liberty never received them. A series of bureaucratic bungles that defy logic or explanation delayed the messages for 16 hours and then routed them via Hawaii into some communications twilight zone.

The Liberty took station just outside Egypt's 12-mile territorial limit off the Gaza Strip at dawn on June 8. Though they knew they were in a war zone and kept careful watch, crew members were relaxed enough to sunbathe when off duty. Israeli planes circled the ship several times at close range. Crewmen waved at the pilots.

Then, shortly before 2 p.m., a flight of delta-wing Mirage jets approached the ship in what Capt. William McGonagle recognized as an attack pattern. He shouted a warning, but before he could sound the ship's general alarm the planes raked the ship from bow to stern with rockets and cannon fire, killing several sailors, along with the executive officer.

The attack shattered virtually all of the ship's 45 communications antennae. It took technicians more than 10 minutes to jury-rig enough wire to send an SOS to the 6th Fleet, 500 miles to the north. A radio operator on the USS Saratoga heard the message that the Liberty was under attack but demanded an authentication code that had been blown away by the first shots.

"Listen to the goddamn rockets, you son of a *****!" Liberty's radio operator screamed into the microphone, according to one survivor's account.

Drawing a Bead
Crew members on the Liberty had seen explosions on the beach earlier. The Israelis would later discover that the blasts were caused by Egyptian stragglers blowing up ammunition dumps. But at the time, the Israelis say, they received reports that an unidentified ship was shelling El Arish and sent three high-speed torpedo boats to investigate.

The Liberty was armed with only four 50-caliber machine guns with an effective range of less than two miles. It was cruising at about 5 knots. The Israelis say a plotting error aboard the torpedo boats convinced them that the Liberty was traveling at 30 knots -- the rate of a serious warship and more than 10 knots beyond the Liberty's highest attainable speed. The Israeli navy then summoned the air force to intercept the mysterious vessel.

The Israelis concede that they had investigated the Liberty earlier and had identified it as a U.S. ship. But they say that when a new shift of officers came on duty that information was somehow not passed along, even though the Liberty was the only such vessel within probably 50 miles and the Egyptian navy was effectively nonexistent.

Partial transcripts of Israeli air force communications from the fighters sent to investigate, recently declassified by Israel, reflect more than a little uncertainty about the identity of the Liberty and include at least one suggestion it might be American. But they reflect a greater concern that the jets sink the ship before the navy could share the glory: "Before the navy arrives, it will be a mitzvah [good deed]," says one of the pilots.

The torpedo boats did arrive, however. Uncertain about the identity of their target, they attempted to communicate with signal lights. By this time, however, the Liberty had eight men dead and 75 injured from rockets, cannon fire and napalm. Seeing three torpedo boats approaching in attack formation, the crew assumed the worst and one seaman opened fire before McGonagle could stop him.

The torpedo boats, assuming only an enemy would fire at them, launched their attack and loosed five torpedoes. McGonagle managed to avoid four of them. The fifth, however, blew a 40-foot hole in the Liberty's starboard side, shattering the ship's cryptographic compartment and killing most of the men in it. Only heroic damage-control measures by the survivors in the following hours kept the Liberty from sinking before it limped into Malta days later. Shipyard workers there counted more than 800 holes in its superstructure.

Digging for Information
Those are the basic facts of the incident, together with the Israeli explanation for why it happened. There is, of course, far more to the story, including much debate about whether the Liberty's American flag was visible, whether the Israeli jets were unmarked, whether the Liberty's lifeboats were targeted by the Israelis. There is debate over whether the Israelis could, as claimed, have mistaken the Liberty for the El Quseir, a decrepit, unarmed 38-year-old Egyptian coastal transport half the size of the Liberty and markedly different in profile.

Such debates are not helped by the narrow focus of the debaters, which tends to exclude the context of the Cold War, including Soviet vessels in the eastern Mediterranean, and an increasingly divisive Vietnam War.

The debates will probably never be resolved. But far more intriguing is the evidence that suggests a U.S. government coverup, past and present, of much surrounding the Liberty incident. The ship's casualties were vastly underreported initially. Survivors were threatened with court-martial, prison or worse if they talked about the incident. The Pentagon clamped a lid on discussion even as the Liberty was sold for scrap and the shattered pieces of those who died were buried in a common grave in Arlington National Cemetery. Israel eventually paid $6 million in restitution to the survivors of those killed and, in 1980, another $6 million to the U.S. government to end litigation. That $12 million was less than half the cost of the ship's SIGINT equipment alone.

James M. Ennes Jr., a Liberty survivor whose 1979 book, "Assault on the Liberty," was the first comprehensive effort to tell the crew's story, has since found a document in the Liberty's file at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin referring to a meeting of the White House "303 Committee" in April 1967, a few months before the outbreak of the Six-Day War. It concerns something called Operation Cyanide, which apparently involved a U.S.-Israeli covert operation that would have stationed a submarine in Egyptian waters.

Asked on camera by the BBC about Operation Cyanide, Rafi Eitan, who was with the Israeli secret service in 1967, smiled cryptically and said: "I know what I am able to tell you and where I have to stop. And here I stop."

When the same interviewers questioned former CIA chief Helms on camera, he confirmed the covert function of the 303 Committee but said, "You'll have to ask McNamara" about Operation Cyanide. When Robert McNamara, secretary of defense in 1967, was asked on camera about Operation Cyanide, he replied, "I won't say a word about the Liberty." Why?

When the U.S. Navy finally heard the Liberty was under attack, it was assumed the attackers were Egyptian. Strike aircraft were launched from the carrier Saratoga and elsewhere and Parker, the former ambassador, says he was warned in Cairo that they were en route to the Egyptian capital. But when Israel was identified as the attacker, they were recalled -- on direct orders from McNamara, according to several Navy sources. Other third-hand reports cited by Ennes and other authors claim the president himself, despite his belief that the attack was deliberate, ordered the Navy to send no planes to the aid of the Liberty.

Those speculating on reasons for Israel's attack on the Liberty have asserted it was to prevent Washington from learning of Israel's coming seizure of the Golan Heights from Syria, or to prevent disclosure of war crimes against Egyptian prisoners of war.

Bamford uncovered a July 27, 1967, CIA report quoting an Israeli official to the effect that Israel knew who the Liberty was and what she was doing, but was unsure who besides the United States might have access to the ship's intercepts, so it put the Liberty out of commission just to be sure.

There may indeed have been a conspiracy surrounding the Liberty. But Miami Judge A. Jay Cristol, in his 2002 book, "The Liberty Incident," discounts that possibility, quoting an old Marine proverb: "Never attribute to malice what can be blamed on stupidity."

Will we ever learn everything surrounding the attack on the Liberty? Probably not without intense pressure on the government from the public and the media, both of which have been fitful at best in their concern with the 205 U.S. casualties at the hands of a U.S. ally 35 years ago.

Bamford, who clearly won the cooperation of many at the NSA in writing "Body of Secrets," points out that a special public law exempts the NSA from the Freedom of Information Act so that only Congress or the White House has access to what's classified there.

At the Johnson library, tape recordings of LBJ's phone calls and office meetings are slowly being declassified, but it will be more than a year before archivists deal with those of June 1967. There is no certainty even then that anything dealing with the Liberty will come to light.

But as debate continues about the U.S. role in the Middle East, a growing chorus of voices is asking why an incident as central to our current involvement in the region as the attack on the Liberty continues to be shrouded for "national security" after so many years.

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/uss-liberty/2003/02/01/the-attack-on-the-uss-liberty.php

As the aniversary of this horible attack nears we should all be demanding the truth for the families who lost loved ones.

More Anti-Israel Propaganda?!?! Say it ain't so!
Here read an alternate view of the accident...






More Clowns and Tear Gas!! OMG!
http://mingle2.com/topic/show/305475?page=4

6 million jews... This propaganda existed well before WWII. In fact, there are nearly 200 occurances of 6 million jews prior to the war. The actual number is really unknown. Do you really think it was an accident that they paid it in 6 million dollar increments?

and around and around and around we go again..................
Chubby Checker!

can you enumerate those occurrences from before the War?

And they're off!

Let's bash Joos thread # ??????

yep,they revisit and revisit about a half-dozen Incidents out of context,then call it History,while it actually is Histery!

He probably can, but it'll (directly, or indirectly) come from sites by Irving and his mates. I've read this stuff before. A university has put up a site proving these claims as false, I'll see if I can find it for you later. Meanwhile, I have students waiting.

Like we haven't had an accident and accidently killed members of an allied nation. Accident's happen and that's all this was, an accident, a tragic accident!

definitely nothing from serious Scholars!
My guess is,Pappe,Finkelstein,Leuchter and others!
David Duke,yep and of course that Jailbird Irving!

David Duke? Why are we involving Ron Paul supporters in this conversation?

yep,Old Davie-Boy,past Grand Wizard,and Professional Jew-Baiter.

Thirty-four Americans were killed and 171 injured in what would remain the largest post-World War II loss of U.S. lives in the Middle East





The sacrificial Lambs .....what did they die for?


Peril Harbour

USS Liberty

911

and many more

War without end....nice little earner ...wads of money ...so what if here and there a few hundred/thousand lose their lives......profit is profit is profit .

Lovely Jubbly...

Another war another millionaire


The bravery of being out of range and making a fortune

How about moving that to the Propaganda-Thread?

Yeah, why would we do that when Ron Paul is one of only a few in Congress to defend Isreal when they bombed Iraq in 1981

"Ron Paul would not stop Israel from defending her interests in any way she saw fit. When Israel attacked a nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, almost the entire U.S. Congress voted to condemn the act. Ron Paul was one of the few dissenters: he voted against the condemnation and in favor of Israel’s right to self-determination."

Only an arrogant misinformed person would even infer such a reference or attempt at such an association.

Joe Lentini


Liberty survivor Joe Lentini replies to a critic
whose email is appended below
Dear Mr. Brown:

I was on board the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, and I can tell you without any doubt, the recount of the attack in the Ennes book is accurate and that there is much more to this issue than you are obviously aware.

First, let me thank you for caring enough to even look into it. So many Americans know nothing about the attack because of the politics involved, and so many others have a dual allegiance to the US and Israel and, when it comes to any problems between the two countries, they always lean towards Israel and so cannot see what happened in 1967 or, for that matter, in more recent history (e.g., Pollard spy case and the slaughter of Palestinians).

There is an enormous amount of material which is considered documented and accurate by both this country and Israel which clearly brings into question the accidental attack claim by the State of Israel. There have been discoveries over the last 35 years that have revealed attacking Israeli pilots identifying our ship and being told to attack anyway, identified US military intelligence personnel who were privy to various messages and transcripts clearly indicating the attack was a coordinated effort, and the sworn testimony of the survivors who, after all, were there. You may locate much of this material, and see the documentation for yourself, by simply doing a search on the Internet for "USS Liberty" and following all links. You will see many sites with accurate information, and some with not so accurate information, and many with a clear bias towards protecting Israel's reputation.

As for Jay Cristol's book - have not read it totally yet, but I can tell you without any doubt that much of his information and argument for the attack being an accident is based on half truths and highly questionable Israeli reports.

Let me give you something to think about, I hope, and something that will encourage you to look deeper into this historical moment.

1. The ships logs clearly indicate tracking first the torpedo boats and then the high-speed aircraft passing over them, both on a direct line to the USS Liberty.

2. The planes did not circle the ship trying to identify the ship, but, instead, approached the ship bow-on and came in shooting.

3. The planes were flying well below their top speed and many survivors who were fighting fires from the napalm and otherwise were topside performing assigned damage control noted that these planes were unmarked - this at a time when Israel was in control of the skies and had no reason to paint out the Star of David and other clearly Israeli markings.

4. A high ranking Israeli officer was interviewed several years later and clear states that Israel had identified the USS Liberty by June 7, 1967. This is consistent with the several documented overflights by Israeli slow-flying aircraft on the day prior to the attack which were clearly taking our picture for identification purposes.

5. Our flag was flying until the jets shot it away. We then hoisted another, and that was also shot away. Finally, we ran up the huge holiday flag - one of these shot-up flags is on display at the museum at the NSA Cryptologic Museum at Ft. Meade, Maryland. We were slowly sailing into the wind so the flag was standing out at all times and, while the pilots might not have seen it in a bow-on or stern-on attack posture, they certainly saw it as they crisscrossed the ship, attacking from both port and starboard. Please note that these pilots saw well enough to hit the four 50 cal machine gun mounts with at least two rockets each, put at least one rocket through all topside hatches/doorways, hit all antenna pods with two or more rockets, blew up the two small boats on board, and hit the only gasoline drum on board. Again, their speed allowed this degree of accuracy and they obviously had knowledge of our strategic targets.

6. One of the Israeli torpedo boat captains was also interviewed several years later and he said that, after one of the five torpedoes had hit the ship, he saw the colors of our flag and thought he had hit a Russian ship. Kind of puts a kink in the Israeli claim of June 1967 that we had no flag, doesn't it.

7. Cristol and Israel both give credibility to the Israeli claim of 1967 that the torpedo boats misread their radar to the point that they thought the "unknown" ship off the Sinai Peninsula was traveling in excess of 20 knots and that local Israeli field commanders reported shelling of their position from that area of the Med. Possible? Sure! But take the time to look a little deeper please - The torpedo boats identified us as the El Quisar (sp?), an Egyptian troop and animal carrier 1)known to be in an Egyptian port at that time, 2) unable to make even 8 knots, and 3) with absolutely no armament whatsoever. It gets better! This ship is about 2/3 the size of the USS Liberty, and has none of the topside antenna equipment, did not have a huge satellite dish on its stern, and was not painted USN grey with US information on both sides of the bow. The ship they said they thought we were could not go the speed they say they mistakenly thought we were going and had no means to attack a nything. Further, the Liberty had only 4 50 cal machine and was also unable to shell anything from its position some 13 miles offshore.

8. There are documents available from the LBJ Library that clearly indicate that LBJ wanted to seek reelection, did not want to offend this country's Jewish lobby, and had specific recommendations from his political advisors to stay at arm's length from anything having to do with the USS Liberty.

9. There are a number of plausible reasons for the attack, and

1) the accurate time-line of that day indicate that, in fact, taking the Golan Heights was not known until it was accomplished.

2) You might also find it interesting that Moshe Dyan, the head of the IDF at that time, said in an on-camera interview that this expansion had nothing to do with state security, but was, in his words, executed to take this property solely to increase the power and financial wealth of the political and some of the military leaders of that day.

3) There is also the very real issue of the added US support that would come if the US and the world thought a US ship was sunk by the Arab States - and the attack came very close to accomplishing that very thing. We were silenced in the first minutes of the attack and only got word out because our technicians were able to rig a temporary antenna under fire, an antenna that had never worked before but was made usable by their efforts and by a partial roc ket hit that somehow "fixed" whatever the initial problem was. Without that "word" getting out, they would have sunk us with all hands and, I suppose, planted some evidence that the deed was done by Arab State vessels/planes.

4) Israeli-documented slaughter of Arab prisoners at El Arish (sp?) that day could have contributed to the "justification" for the attack. Maybe not, but the fact that this slaughter occurred is documented by statements from Israeli soldiers, so, who knows. There may be other related possibilities, but the point is that reasons exist and there is much more than reasonable doubt that the attack was a pre-planned, coordinated air and sea attack which took 34 American lives.

By the way, if you wish to have any credibility in discussions about this subject, I suggest that you do not refer to sworn testimony of survivors who were there that day as "hearsay!" As for Jim Ennes being wounded so everything he said must have been second hand, simply not so, and to suggest that does him and other survivors a great dis-service and indicates that you have not researched this very well. Remember, the Captain was also wounded and I can personally promise you, his story was not "hearsay" and was very accurate.

Oh yes, there are many men present that day who saw for themselves the Israeli torpedo boats deliberately machine gun the life rafts and we have pictures taken just after the attack ended (about the same time as it became known we got word out to the fleet about the attack)which clearly show all life raft positions empty or with destroyed rafts clearly visible.

One other fact you might find interesting which relates back to the jets - their speed that day allowed them to target fire hoses in use by damage control personnel, and the men using them, during the attack. Again, multiple eyewitness accounts are documented concerning this and the use of "burning jelly" canisters dropped on our decks.

If you truly care about the truth, take the time to look into this more deeply. Consider the growing number of senior military and political people who publicly denounce this attack as deliberate. Consider the document facts, many of which are agreed to by both sides. Consider the contradictions in the "official" story over these many years, and consider Israel's history, short though it may be, which is full of examples of drastic military actions against friend and foe alike, military and civilian, in the name of Israel's security.

Finally, although it has nothing to do directly with the attack on the USS Liberty, I mention the Pollard case. Strange that you seem to be defending him when it is documented fact that Israel paid him to spy against his country. Let me put it another way, Israel, our "friend," paid him to spy against their claimed ally, the US. Is it really so hard to believe that this same "ally" found it to be in their best interests to attempt to sink a US intelligence ship with all hands back in 1967?

Cristol's book, and several others by Israeli writers or friends of Israel, reaches the wrong conclusions. It does not take much more that a quick look at the documented facts of this case to realize that the Israeli claim of an "accident" fails to hold up. I hope you will take the time to dig deeper and, keeping an open mind about this subject, consider all possibilities.

Again, thank you for your interest in this historical event.

Joseph C. Lentini CTOC
USN-ret USS Liberty Survivor

http://www.ussliberty.org/lentini2.htm

don't you people have anything better to do than bash the jews?

Its not bashing when its the truth. Can you imagine the outrage had this been an Iranian incident? Iraqi?.

This topic has been white washed and it is clearly not bashing.

5. Our flag was flying until the jets shot it away. We then hoisted another, and that was also shot away. Finally, we ran up the huge holiday flag - one of these shot-up flags is on display at the museum at the NSA Cryptologic Museum at Ft. Meade, Maryland. We were slowly sailing into the wind so the flag was standing out at all times and, while the pilots might not have seen it in a bow-on or stern-on attack posture, they certainly saw it as they crisscrossed the ship, attacking from both port and starboard. Please note that these pilots saw well enough to hit the four 50 cal machine gun mounts with at least two rockets each, put at least one rocket through all topside hatches/doorways, hit all antenna pods with two or more rockets, blew up the two small boats on board, and hit the only gasoline drum on board. Again, their speed allowed this degree of accuracy and they obviously had knowledge of our strategic targets.

From the source above.

so whats your point? me or you wasn't there in 1967, and we don't know any of the circumstances that are surrounding the ordeal. I have read in the past the captian of the liberty was warned repeatedly to turn around, and didn't. if it really happened like you said, there would have 50 navy ships there in minutes to help out. sounds to me just another reason to bash the jews...

Your welcome to your opinion but the SURVIVORS deserve the truth as do those slain on this attempted false flag attack..........