USS Liberty: Accident or Cover-up?

[Copernicus]

I would think with specific dates and persons/orgs involved that these are unlikely to be lies:

Investigation Date Conclusion
U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry June 10-18, 1967 The attack was a case of mistaken identity. Calm conditions and slow ship speed may have made American flag difficult to identify. No indication the attack was intended against U.S. ship.


CIA Report June 13, 1967 The attack was not made in malice and was a mistake.


Joint Chiefs of Staff Fact Finding Team (Russ Report) June 9-20, 1967 Outlined "findings of fact," bud did not make any findings about the actual attack.


Clifford Report July 18, 1967 No premeditation, but "inexcusable failures" by Israeli forces constituing "gross negligence."


Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 1967 Secretary of Defense McNamara testified he supported conclusion that the attack was not intentional.


Senate Armed Services Committee Feb. 1, 1968 No conclusion. Secretary McNamara makes comparison of attack on Liberty to that on Pueblo with regard to uncertainty about what was happening at the time of the incident.


House Appropriations Committee April-May 1968 Navy communications "foulup" and no conclusion regarding Israeli actions. Much of report remains classified.


House Armed Services Committee May 10, 1971 Critical of Navy communications, no conclusion regarding Israeli actions.


Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 1979 Responding to critical book by Liberty crewman James Ennes, Senate investigation found no merit to his claim attack was intentional.


National Security Agency 1981 Liberty was mistaken for an Egyptian ship as a result of miscalculations and egregious errors.

House Armed Services Committee June 1991 Responding to request from Liberty Veterans Association, Subcommitte on Investigations launched probe that concluded there was no evidence to support allegations made by the Association and no reason for further investigation.

[Goater]

Well, Im not going to bother discussing the site PLOlover linked further. People can make their own minds up regarding its obvious excessive bias and factual incorrectness, not to mention that it clearly fits its content to its agenda so blatantly and poorly. I mean, this response in its FAQ to the question it poses is laughable - no attempt to even disguise its feelings towards Israel with its childish, amateur style, lack of serious discussion and ridiculous conclusion:

[ QUOTE ]
Q:
Why have the Israelis and their partisans made these claims?

A:
When you don't have a legitimate factual defense, and you are without shame and want your position to be accepted at any cost, the only thing left is lying. The best argument in favor of their guilt is the fact that they have taken so much trouble to lie about so many things. Why would innocent people lie?

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[tame_deuces]

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one more
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ussliberty.html
[ QUOTE ]
Israel attacked the USS Liberty using UNMARKED AIRCRAFT. This is the single fact which proves Israel knew exactly who they were attacking. Israel's story is that they thought USS Liberty was an Egyptian ship and therefore a legitimate target of war. Were that true, there would be no reason to attack a supposedly Egyptian ship with unmarked aircraft. The only possible reason to use unmarked aircraft to attack the ship is that Israel knew it was an American ship and intended to sink it, then to blame the attack on Egypt.

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Well, the same website also blames the Israeli for the 9-11 attacks. (linky to that is in the article you linked to)

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1) No it doesn't
2) Can we dispense with the ZOMG SOURCE business? Are you going to dismiss the BBC documentary because this site links to it? lol

If a KKK site linked to a site arguing the existence of gravity would you dismiss gravity?

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1. Yes it does.
2. This isn't 'ZOMG SOURCE' business and gravity on Klan pages - this is a now a doubtful source for the _very_ type of information you're quoting from it. Reading about black people on Klan pages would be a better analogy.

Anyways, I'm out. If you're going to be so anal about this as to even defend that website as credible for information , then this discussion is pointless. You've made up your mind and will believe anything that verifies it - even information with very high chance of being falsehoods.

[PLOlover]

[ QUOTE ]

Quote:

Quote:

Quote:
one more
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ussliberty.html

Quote:
Israel attacked the USS Liberty using UNMARKED AIRCRAFT. This is the single fact which proves Israel knew exactly who they were attacking. Israel's story is that they thought USS Liberty was an Egyptian ship and therefore a legitimate target of war. Were that true, there would be no reason to attack a supposedly Egyptian ship with unmarked aircraft. The only possible reason to use unmarked aircraft to attack the ship is that Israel knew it was an American ship and intended to sink it, then to blame the attack on Egypt.





Well, the same website also blames the Israeli for the 9-11 attacks. (linky to that is in the article you linked to)



1) No it doesn't
2) Can we dispense with the ZOMG SOURCE business? Are you going to dismiss the BBC documentary because this site links to it? lol

If a KKK site linked to a site arguing the existence of gravity would you dismiss gravity?



1. Yes it does.
2. This isn't 'ZOMG SOURCE' business and gravity on Klan pages - this is a now a doubtful source for the _very_ type of information you're quoting from it. Reading about black people on Klan pages would be a better analogy.

Anyways, I'm out. If you're going to be so anal about this as to even defend that website as credible for information , then this discussion is pointless. You've made up your mind and will believe anything that verifies it - even information with very high chance of being falsehoods.

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looks to me like the actual info is correct, despite your attempt to discredit the info by attacking the website.



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not a primary source, but it seems to me probably true.


http://www.ussliberty.org/washrp96.txt

Quote:




The Liberty attack was a war crime

The attack on USS Liberty was itself a war crime. US Navy Commander
Walter Jacobsen, a Navy Legal Officer then doing graduate work at George
Washington University, conducted an extensive legal analysis of the
attack.

His conclusion, reported in the Winter, 1986, Naval Law Review, was that
several aspects of the attack violated provisions of the Geneva
Conventions -- war crimes. Specifically, Commander Jacobsen found that
the attack was not legally justified, that it constituted an act of
aggression under the United Nations Charter, that the use of unmarked
aircraft, the wanton destruction of life rafts in the water, the jamming
of international radio distress frequencies, and the failure of the
torpedo boat commanders to render immediate assistance to a disabled and
helpless enemy were all violations of international law.

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[bills217]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
one more
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ussliberty.html
[ QUOTE ]
Israel attacked the USS Liberty using UNMARKED AIRCRAFT. This is the single fact which proves Israel knew exactly who they were attacking. Israel's story is that they thought USS Liberty was an Egyptian ship and therefore a legitimate target of war. Were that true, there would be no reason to attack a supposedly Egyptian ship with unmarked aircraft. The only possible reason to use unmarked aircraft to attack the ship is that Israel knew it was an American ship and intended to sink it, then to blame the attack on Egypt.

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Well, the same website also blames the Israeli for the 9-11 attacks. (linky to that is in the article you linked to)

[/ QUOTE ]

1) No it doesn't
2) Can we dispense with the ZOMG SOURCE business? Are you going to dismiss the BBC documentary because this site links to it? lol

If a KKK site linked to a site arguing the existence of gravity would you dismiss gravity?

[/ QUOTE ]

1. Yes it does.
2. This isn't 'ZOMG SOURCE' business and gravity on Klan pages - this is a now a doubtful source for the _very_ type of information you're quoting from it. Reading about black people on Klan pages would be a better analogy.

Anyways, I'm out. If you're going to be so anal about this as to even defend that website as credible for information , then this discussion is pointless.

[/ QUOTE ]

You somehow missed the point, even though I spelled it out for you. I didn't defend any information on that website - I barely even looked at it. Do you dismiss the BBC documentary because this site links to it? Yes or no?

You know what - this gives me a great idea. I need to start some kind of racist/homophobic/anti-Semitic website, and make a page with all kinds of links to John Locke, Hobbes, Keynes, etc., and you guys will probably dismiss statism! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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You've made up your mind and will believe anything that verifies it - even information with very high chance of being falsehoods.

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Like the BBC and the Chicago Tribune and the NSA and the CIA and the White House and the survivors themselves and...

[bills217]

San Diego Union-Tribune hates Jews obv

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Two former NSA directors – Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, Gen. William Odom – and two ex-deputy directors – Gen. John Morrison and Oliver Kirby – told me that there has never been any question at the agency but that Israel's attack on the Liberty was deliberate.

Kirby, for example, is "absolutely certain" about this. A storied career NSA official, Kirby had founded the ELINT program under which the Liberty and her several sister ships operated. "It was my baby," he said in an interview last year.

Pressed about what made him sure the Israelis wanted to destroy the Liberty, Kirby said it was because he'd personally analyzed the SIGINT intercepts of their communications gleaned from various American intelligence sources. These disclosed: 1) that the on-scene attackers that June 8 correctly identified the ship, and 2) that regardless, Israeli commanders at an as-yet-unknown level instructed them to annihilate the Liberty.

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William Odom, former NSA Director and retired Army lieutenant general, said on March 3, 2003 that on the strength of such data, the attack's deliberateness "just wasn't a disputed issue" within the agency.

On March 5, 2003, retired Navy Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, NSA director from 1977-81, said he "flatly rejected" the Cristol/Israeli thesis. "It is just exceedingly difficult to believe that [the Liberty] was not correctly identified." Inman said his conclusions were based on his talks with NSA senior officials who had direct knowledge at the time. All four officials said they were unaware of any agency official at any time who dissented from the "deliberate," conclusion, based on the intelligence.

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You guys need to give the CIA and NSA a call and explain to them how easy it is for friendly fire to happen in these kinds of situations.

Something else I hadn't considered in regard to Felix's case that the Israelis were justified even if they saw the American flag because of false-colors issues - the problem with that is, not a single Israeli has ever claimed that this was the case or was even a consideration. One pilot even claimed (this is either in the wiki or the Tribune article) to have slowly circled the boat twice and not seen a flag of any kind. The problem is this flatly contradicts the eyewitness testimony of every single person on the boat that day.

The Israeli story is that there was no flag and that they confused it with a specific Egyptian ship - period. The testimony about the transcripts recording the Israelis as identifying and confirming the ship as American directly contradicts their story. If they saw the American flag but thought it was an Egyptian ship flying false colors, then why is every single one of them lying about it?

So, Felix's case about the false colors would make a lot of sense, except the Israelis have never claimed that it was an issue. You should have been their public relations advisor. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[PLOlover]

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San Diego Union-Tribune hates Jews obv

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now we can parse anti-jew vs anti-zion vs anti-israel and hope everyone forgets the actual info you posted.

[Goater]

[ QUOTE ]
You somehow missed the point, even though I spelled it out for you. I didn't defend any information on that website - I barely even looked at it. Do you dismiss the BBC documentary because this site links to it? Yes or no?

You know what - this gives me a great idea. I need to start some kind of racist/homophobic/anti-Semitic website, and make a page with all kinds of links to John Locke, Hobbes, Keynes, etc., and you guys will probably dismiss statism!

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Are you really this dumb? We have been through this before. Your hypothetical questions are irrelevant to this matter. If you are talking about how we should treat secondary links from a site you linked to (that we consider unreliable) rather than the content of the site itself, you should have stated that. In your example, the BBC largely stands on its merits as it is widely believed that the BBC is reliable. If the link is from a KKK site to an article on a white supremacist site regarding black people, yes, we would dismiss it. Talking about gravity (something everyone accepts) is ridiculous - we are talking about issues that are hotly debated and therefore the interests of the site that links to the article is extremely relevant.

As I replied earlier:

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"If a KKK site linked to a site arguing the existence of gravity would you dismiss gravity?"

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No, but it would inform most people of how credible a site was that linked to such rubbish.

The site should be viewed in the context of its obvious bias.

[bills217]

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If you are talking about how we should treat secondary links from a site you linked to (that we consider unreliable) rather than the content of the site itself, you should have stated that.

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2) Can we dispense with the ZOMG SOURCE business? Are you going to dismiss the BBC documentary because this site links to it?

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I never defended one single piece of content on that site. I just pointed out how stupid it is to say "ZOMG SOURCE" because it has some possibly biased, unverifiable material and throw out the other unbiased, verifiable material with it. People do that on this forum all the time, regardless of the source or viewpoint in question, and it's lazy and dishonest. (I've seen The Free Republic dismissed as biased from both sides!) And I consider that pretty relevant in a thread where other posters are categorizing extrapolations based on a Chicago Tribune article as "believing everything you read." (What WOULD you believe?)

And one of the sites (not sure which) made an excellent point relative to what some posters are doing in this thread: If motive is all that matters and hard evidence is irrelevant, Charles Manson should have been acquitted for lack of a clear motive.

FWIW, the rogue officer theory doesn't require any sort of coherent motive on the part of Israel. Which is not to say that Felix would agree any motive was rational even if the Israeli gov't admitted to it tomorrow.

[PLOlover]

[ QUOTE ]
I never defended one single piece of content on that site. I just pointed out how stupid it is to say "ZOMG SOURCE" because it has some possibly biased, unverifiable material and throw out the other unbiased, verifiable material with it. People do that on this forum all the time, regardless of the source or viewpoint in question, and it's lazy and dishonest. (I've seen The Free Republic dismissed as biased from both sides!) And I consider that pretty relevant in a thread where other posters are categorizing extrapolations based on a Chicago Tribune article as "believing everything you read." (What WOULD you believe?)

And one of the sites (not sure which) made an excellent point relative to what some posters are doing in this thread: If motive is all that matters and hard evidence is irrelevant, Charles Manson should have been acquitted for lack of a clear motive.

FWIW, the rogue officer theory doesn't require any sort of coherent motive on the part of Israel. Which is not to say that Felix would agree any motive was rational even if the Israeli gov't admitted to it tomorrow.

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the fact that some poster go so far as to defend the lavon affaiar thing shows their bias, imo.

otoh, if they live in israel or something then I can understand their defense of their country, but I can't really understand how an *american* could defend such a bias.