I take it seriously and this is why it is important to understand
the situation as it really existed and not to dismiss the official
investigations or the evidence which shows how the Liberty was off
course and that the Israelis thought they were attacking an Egyptian
vessel.

Your attempts to defile the incident by turning it into propaganda
against our close allies in Israel - even though they have accepted
responsibility for the attack and apologized for it 45 years ago and
even though we accepted the apology 45 years ago...

It is your propagandizing and histrionics which shamefully defile
the memories of our sailors.

Yes, The Laughing Heads on a subject as serious this is totally disrespectful.

And The Laughing Heads are a sign that one has lost the Argument.

What amazes me is the ignoring of the testaments of the survivors.

For crying out Loud They Were on Board The ship that was attacked.

If I took that stance I would be labeled as an American Basher.

I respect both the US sailors and the Israelis!



What I disrespect is the attempts of some on this thread including
the OP to dishonor our friends and our troops with misrepresentations
of the accident.

Of course they only present one very distorted view of the incident
and dismiss any possibility that it was a tragic mistake and insist
that instead it was a nefarious and inscrutable plot for the Israelis
to intentionally shoot themselves in the foot!



My personal opinion is that the anti-Israeli spinmeisters are secretly
Mossad agents who are trying to make such arguments look ridiculous!
And the Mossad you know are all direct descendants of Don Knotts.



Here, let me disrespect these arguments with some more quotes from
the Wikipedia. I cannot stay away from such an ingenious Mossad plot!



The following arguments, found in official reports or other sources, were published to support that the attack was due to mistaken identity:

Accidents do occur in wartime. According to journalist Ze'ev
Schiff, the day before the attack on the Liberty, Israeli aircraft
had bombed an Israeli armored column south of the West Bank town of
Jenin, demonstrating such mistakes do happen.[61]

The incident took place during the Six Day War when Israel was
engaged in battles with two Arab countries and preparing to attack
a third, creating an environment where mistakes and confusion were
prevalent. For example, at 11:45, a few hours before the attack,
there was a large explosion on the shores of El-Arish followed by
black smoke, probably caused by the destruction of an ammunition
dump by retreating Egyptian forces. The Israeli army thought the
area was being bombarded, and that an unidentified ship offshore
was responsible. (According to U.S. sources, Liberty was 14 nmi (16
mi; 26 km) from those shores at the time of the explosion.)

As the torpedo boats rapidly approached, Liberty opened fire on
them. This was after the aerial attacks. At the inquiry, Commander
McGonagle expressed that the torpedo boats appeared to be
approaching in an attack formation. Thus, he sent a person to the
forward machine gun to fire at them. After several shots were
fired, McGonagle ordered cease fire. Then a machine gun on 03 level
sounded like it was firing, but nobody was seen at the gun.
McGonagle said that he felt sure the torpedo boat captains believed
they were under fire from the Liberty. Ensign Lucas, the ship's
gunnery officer who left the bridge shortly after the beginning of
the air attack and then returned during the torpedo boat attack,
testified that he gave permission for manned firing of the 03 level
machine gun after the torpedo boats began firing at Liberty. Then,
later when the gun was unmanned, heat from a nearby fire apparently
caused machine gun rounds at the 03 level gun to explode.[17]

Admiral Shlomo Erell, former head of the Israeli Navy in 1967,
states that no successful argument of benefit has been presented
for Israel purposely attacking an American warship, especially
considering the high cost of predictable complications that would
follow after attacking a powerful ally, and the fact that Israel
notified the American embassy immediately after the attack.[62]

I see no reasone why these high ranking men would sign affidavits claiming that they were ordered to cover it up. No reasone at all unless it were true.

All the evidence is present.

The Liberty was an attempted false flag no doubt to drag the US into a war with Israels enemies the trouble was the ship did not sink thanks to the heroric efforts of its crew.

If it had sunk our rallying cry for that war would be "remember the USS Liberty"

1. There was no cover-up. Naval personnel were ordered not to discuss
the incident to avoid revealing operational details, vulnerabilities
and to avoid embarassment of our own command and that of our allies.

No one was ever directed to lie about it - so no cover-up only
discretion and silence.

2. Israel would never jeopardize their close relationship with the US
by intentionally trying to sink a US vessel. There was no credible
scenario where the attack could be interpreted to have been caused
by Jordan, Egypt, Iraq or Syria.



3.More importantly, the facts do not bear out any of these far-fetched
conspiracy theories. They appear pretty much blown out of proportion
on antisemitic and anti-Israel websites.

Read the Wiki article for a reasonably balanced scholarly discussion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

Slowhand It was attacked by unmarked plans and was supposed to have been sunk with all hands and no witnesses, Israel would never have been exposed.

They had to go in spin mode when it didnt sink and their were witnesses and survivors.

Attempted false flag for sure wake up and smell the coffee.

We know the truth and I think deep down so do you but for some reasone you are compelled to regurgitate the official white wash version of events that both Israel and the US choose to use.

The surviveing sailors know better and so do I.

I think you do too

Once again there was never any reason for Israel to attack the
Liberty and jeopardize their relationship with us.

There could have been no realistic expectation that an attack on
the USS Liberty could have been blamed on anyone else. It is even
more unrealistic to expect that any attack on an intelligence
ship like the Liberty could go unmonitored and result in 100%
casualties. All available objectice evidence on the other hand points
to Israel being confused by the location and appearance of the USS Liberty
which fired on Israeli vessels and did not appear in US communications
with Israel.

Secret recently declassified NSA surveillance actually captured
Israeli military conversations clearly mistaking the USS Liberty
as an Egyptian ship!

It is all in the Wiki article I cited above.

How do you know this? You act as if you have all the inside information and all you have is rhetoric and your opinion.

Do you realize that they postponed their attack on Egypt for 24 hours when the USS Liberty showed up?




THEN WHY DID ISRAEL USE UNMARKED AIR PLANES?

1. Israel has a special and close relationship with the US and
we have helped Israel with intelligence, supplies, advisors and
diplomatically knowing that this is the right thing to do when
they are unjustly target with terrorist attacks and other barbaric
acts. We were actually supporting the Israelis in the defense of
Israel in the 67 war. There is no good reason why Israel would
intentionally subvert that support when 4 armies surrounding it
were attacking and no one except the US was readily coming to their
assistance.

2. If you bothered to research it you would find that some sailors saw Israeli markings and others did not and markings are not necessarily visible from all angles.

Signalman Russell David saw Israeli insignia on the attacking jets and reported this to the Captain.

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_article=161&x_context=3

From the Wiki:

Events leading to the attack

During the Six-Day War between Israel and several Arab nations, the United States of America maintained a neutral country status.[8] Several days before the war began, the USS Liberty was ordered to proceed to the eastern Mediterranean area to perform a signal intelligence collection mission in international waters near the north coast of Sinai, Egypt.[9] After the war erupted, due to concerns about her safety as she approached her patrol area, several messages were sent to Liberty to increase her allowable closest point of approach (CPA) to Egypt's and Israel's coasts from 12.5 nmi (14.4 mi; 23.2 km) and 6.5 nmi (7.5 mi; 12.0 km), respectively, to 20 nmi (23 mi; 37 km) and 15 nmi (17 mi; 28 km), and then later to 100 nmi (120 mi; 190 km) for both countries.[10] Unfortunately, due to ineffective message handling and routing, the CPA change messages were not received until after the attack.[10]

According to Israeli sources, at the start of the war on June 5, General Yitzhak Rabin (then IDF Chief of Staff) informed Commander Ernest Carl Castle, the American Naval Attaché in Tel Aviv, that Israel would defend its coast with every means at its disposal, including sinking unidentified ships. Also, he asked the U.S. to keep its ships away from Israel's shore or at least inform Israel of their exact position.[11][12] The United States did not provide Israel any information about Liberty's mission or location.

American sources said that no inquiry about ships in the area was made until after the Liberty attack ended. In a message sent from U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk to U.S. Ambassador Walworth Barbour, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Rusk asked for "urgent confirmation" of Israel's claim. Barbour responded: "No request for info on U.S. ships operating off Sinai was made until after Liberty incident." Further, Barbour stated: "Had Israelis made such an inquiry it would have been forwarded immediately to the chief of naval operations and other high naval commands and repeated to dept [Department of State]."[13]

With the outbreak of war, Captain William L. McGonagle of the Liberty immediately asked Vice Admiral William I. Martin at the U.S. 6th Fleet headquarters to send a destroyer to accompany the Liberty and serve as its armed escort and as an auxiliary communications center. The following day, June 6, Admiral Martin replied: “Liberty is a clearly marked United States ship in international waters, not a participant in the conflict and not a reasonable subject for attack by any nation. Request denied.”[14] He promised, however, that in the unlikely event of an inadvertent attack, jet fighters from the Sixth Fleet would be overhead in ten minutes.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, and in response to Arab complaints that the U.S. and British were supporting Israel in the conflict, United States Ambassador Arthur Goldberg announced that the U.S. forces were hundreds of miles from the conflict.[10] At the time the statement was made, this was the case, since the Liberty was just entering the Mediterranean Sea[15] but would ultimately steam to within a few miles of the Sinai Peninsula.

On the night of June 7 Washington time, early morning on June 8, 01:10Z or 3:10 AM local time, the Pentagon issued an order to 6th Fleet headquarters to tell the Liberty to come no closer than 100 nmi (120 mi; 190 km) to Israel, Syria, or the Sinai coast (Oren, p. 263).[16] (pages 5 and Exhibit N, page 58).

According to the Naval Court of Inquiry[17] (p. 23 ff, p. 111 ff) and National Security Agency official history,[18] the order to withdraw was not sent on the radio frequency that USS Liberty monitored for her orders until 15:25 Zulu, several hours after the attack, due to a long series of administrative and message routing problems. The Navy said a large volume of unrelated high-precedence traffic, including intelligence intercepts related to the conflict, were being handled at the time and it also faulted a shortage of qualified radio men as a contributing factor to the failure to send the withdrawal message to Liberty in time.[17] (p. 111 ff)
Visual contact

During the morning of the attack, early June 8, the ship was overflown by Israeli Air Force (IAF) aircraft including a Nord Noratlas "flying boxcar" and Mirage III jet fighters eight times.[19][20] At least some of those flybys were from a close range.[21] Many Liberty crewmen gave testimony that one of the aircraft flew so close to Liberty that its propellers rattled the deck plating of the ship, and the pilots waved to the crew of Liberty, and the crewmen waved back.[22] The aircraft were hunting for Egyptian submarines, which had been spotted near the coast.[23] At about 5:45 a.m. Sinai time (GMT +2), reports were first received at Israeli Central Coastal Command (CCC) about the Liberty, identified by pilots as a destroyer and the vessel was placed on the plot board using a red marker, indicating an unknown vessel. At 6:03 a.m. that morning, the Nord identified the ship as a U.S. supply ship, though the marker was only changed from the red 'unknown ship' to a green 'neutral ship' at 9 a.m., when CCC was ordered to do so after naval command inquired as to the marker's status. Also around 9 a.m. an Israeli pilot reported that a ship north of Arish had fired at his jet after he tried to identify the vessel, and naval command dispatched two destroyers to investigate. These destroyers returned to previous positions at 9:40 a.m. after doubts emerged during debriefing over the pilot's claim of receiving fire. When the Nord landed and its naval observer was debriefed, the ship was further identified as the USS Liberty based on its "GTR-5" markings.[24] The ship was removed from CCC's plot board at 11 am, due to its positional information being considered stale.[25]

At 11:24 a.m., IDF General Staff Headquarters received the first of several reports that Arish on the Sinai coast was being shelled from the sea. Israeli troops in the city had seen a massive explosion and noticed two unidentified ships offshore. Though the explosion was probably the result of a burning ammunition dump, the Israelis were unaware of the fact, and both Israeli and Egyptian sources had reported shelling of the area by Egyptian warships the previous day. Minutes after the explosion, the Liberty reached the eastern limit of its patrol and turned back in the direction of Port Said.[23] Investigative journalist James Bamford points out that Liberty had only four .50 caliber machine guns mounted on her decks and, thus, could not have shelled the coast.[26]

Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin was concerned that the supposed Egyptian shelling was the prelude to an amphibious landing that could outflank Israeli forces. Rabin reiterated the standing order to sink any unidentified ships in the area, but advised caution, as Soviet vessels were reportedly operating nearby. No fighter jets were available, and the navy was asked to intercede, with the assumption that air cover would be provided later. Naval headquarters did not react to the request in any way, and more than half an hour later, the General Staff issued a rebuke: "The coast is being shelled and you have done nothing". At 20:05 p.m., naval command dispatched three torpedo boats to find and destroy the enemy warship thought to be shelling Arish.[23] The torpedo boats were T-203, T-204 and T-206, and were from the 914th Squadron, codenamed "Pagoda".

At 1:41 p.m., the torpedo boats detected an unknown vessel 20 miles northwest of Arish and 14 miles off the coast of Bardawil. The ship's speed was estimated[1] on their radar.[27] The Combat Information Center officer on T-204, Ensign Aharon Yifrah, reported to the boat's captain, Commodore Moshe Oren, that the target had been detected at a range of 22 miles, that her speed had been tracked for a few minutes, after which he had determined that the target was moving westward at a speed of 30 knots. These data were forwarded to the Fleet Operations Control Center.[27]

The speed of the target was significant because it indicated that the target was a combat vessel.[27] Moreover, Israeli forces had standing orders to fire on any unknown vessels sailing in the area at over 20 knots, a speed which, at the time, could only be attained by warships. The Chief of Naval Operations asked the torpedo boats to double-check their calculations. Yifrah twice recalculated and confirmed his assessment.[23][27] A few minutes later, Commodore Oren reported that the target, now 17 miles from his position, was moving at a speed of 28 knots on a different heading.[28] Bamford, however, points out that the Liberty's top speed was far below 28 knots. His sources say that at the time of the attack the Liberty was following its signal-intercept mission course along the northern Sinai coast, at about 5 knots speed.[26]

The data on the ship's speed, together with its direction, indicated that it was an Egyptian destroyer fleeing toward port after shelling Arish. The torpedo boats gave chase, but did not expect to overtake their target before it reached Egypt. Commodore Oren requested that the Israeli Air Force dispatch aircraft to intercept.[23][27] At 1:48 p.m., the Chief of Naval Operations requested dispatch of fighter aircraft to the ship's location.[29]


The IAF dispatched two Mirage III fighter jets, which arrived at the Liberty at about 2:00 p.m.[27] The formation leader, Captain Iftach Spector, made two reconnaissance passes at 3,000 feet. He reported the vessel appeared to be a "Z", or Hunt class destroyer, and saw that it lacked the deck markings present on Israeli warships.[23][27] The off-center fed parabolic antenna on the ship's forecastle was mistaken for a gun. At this point, Colonel Yeshyahu Barekat, the Chief of Air Force Intelligence, contacted US Naval attaché Castle in an attempt to ascertain whether the suspect ship was the Liberty. Castle reportedly professed no knowledge of the Liberty's schedule, a claim later denied by Castle but confirmed by McGonagle. A recorded exchange also took place between a command headquarters weapons systems officer, one of the air controllers, and the chief air controller questioning a possible American presence. At 1:57 p.m., immediately after the exchange, the chief air controller, Lieutenant-Colonel Shmuel Kislev, cleared the Mirages to attack.[23][30]

yeah!
Right!

The truth of the matter is there was never a proper or full
investigation on the attack and no one was punished for the "screw up."

Even if it was an accident, which I don't believe, there had to have been gross negligence involved.

yep they were onboard!
But that still doesn't mean they have more knowledge,or are able to judge the Situation!
All we hear and see now is so-called "Evidence" from a bunch of CT-Sites!

Thre was a similar Incident between the Bahamas and Cuba,the Flamingo-Incident,which resulted in Cuban MIG sinking the The Flamingo,a Ship from the Royal Bahamas Defense-Force!
The Sailors who were on board swore that the Attack was deliberate,the Cubans claimed they were strafing a Pirate-Vessel,even though the Vessel was a Navy-Ship,who had stopped and taken some illegal Cuban Fishingvessels in tow!


What really gets me,that if it were any other Nation in the World that attacked the LIBERTY you all would give them the benefit of the doubt,but no not to Israel!
Them Jews are guilty!

Ridiculous the way you all are thinking!


http://www.caribbean.com/jsp/feature.jsp?currentDestination=1&&id=1244

THAT IS A SROCK OF CHIT.

If it had been any other country, we would have declared all out war against them. Instead, our government accepted money and called it an accident.

They took a bribe.

CT!

CT?? Not at all.

They (America government) took money in exchange for accepting their(Israel's) apology. If they (America) wanted revenge and war, there would have been no money exchanged.

That's fact.

That sort of thing is referred to as 'compensation.'

so the Bahamian Government took a Bribe too,when they accepted the Cuban Apology and Restitution?

Maybe the US government should have invoiced Al-Quaeda for the attack on the USS Cole?

guess they did,at Abbottabad!

Paid in full then?