The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship

[RamboLiberal]

This one is on my must read list. From Amazon.com

On June 8, 1967, as war raged between Israel and its neighbors, an American spy ship, the U.S.S. Liberty, eavesdropped on communications off the coast of Egypt. When Israeli fighter jets flew overhead, the Liberty's crew assumed that the ship's identifying markings and American flag would be visible to the pilots in the clear skies above. After several passes over a period of hours, the jets suddenly opened fire and began strafing and napalming the deck of the Liberty, which had minimal defenses. When the air attack ended, Israeli torpedo boats appeared and scored a direct hit. By the time the assault was over, 34 crewmen had been killed and 171-two-thirds of the crew-seriously injured. Only heroic efforts by the crew saved the ship from sinking.
Back in Washington, news of the attack on the Liberty was received with a mixture of shock and outrage. Many in the Pentagon and in Congress demanded that Israel be held accountable for the unprovoked attack in international waters. The Johnson administration initially responded by threatening Israel but soon softened its attitude. Israel's stunning victory in the Six-Day War, as it became known, was a source of pride to many American Jews, and their support was crucial to an administration mired in an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. With the death toll mounting daily in Vietnam, the attack on the Liberty was pushed to the back pages of the nation's newspapers and ultimately all but forgotten.

James Scott is a journalist and the son of a surviving Liberty officer. In this riveting book, he recounts the story of the horrifying attack and the tremendous impact it had on the lives of the crew. He puts the attack in context, showing how political considerations trumped the demands for justice from the survivors and their supporters in the military and in Congress. Drawing on new interviews and recently declassified documents, he demonstrates that Israel's initial insistence that the attack was a mistake caused by misidentification of the ship is implausible.

Scott documents, for the first time, the fact that the ship was correctly identified by at least one of the pilots prior to the attacks. His descriptions of the crew under fire and their frantic work to save the ship are dramatic and unforgettable. Scott takes readers into the conference rooms at the White House where the most senior officials in the government debated how to respond to the attack and then eventually devised a plan to protect Israel from public outrage.

The Attack on the Liberty is the finest account yet of this tragedy and a remarkable tale of men under fire in an incident that remains bitterly disputed after more than forty years.

[Behind the Aegis]

1. Add this to your list...

The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship

Amazon

by A. Jay Cristol

Brassey's Military n/k/a Potomac Books, Washington (DC), 2002

ISBN: 157488414X

On the fourth day of the Six Day War (8 Jun 1967), at about 2 PM Sinai time (then, GMT+2), Israeli defense forces attacked the USS Liberty about 14 miles off the coast of the Sinai peninsula, near El Arish.

After ten official US investigations (including five congressional investigations), there was never any evidence that the attack was made with knowledge that the target was a US ship. There is substantial evidence the attack was a tragic mistake caused by blunders of both the US and Israel. Eight US presidents, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush (41), Clinton, and Bush (43), have each accepted the conclusion that the attack was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

Nevertheless, conspiracy theorists continue to claim the Israelis knowingly attacked a US ship. By some estimates, there are more conspiracy theories about the Liberty incident than about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Source - The Liberty Incident

OR--

USS Liberty: Israel Did Not Intend to Bomb the Ship
By A. Jay Cristol
Mr. Cristol is the author of the forthcoming The Liberty Incident.

Editor's Note: This summer HNN devoted a special edition to Israel's attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 during the Six Day War, which resulted in the deaths of 34 Americans. Israel insists the attack was an accident. Many others contend it was deliberate, among them, James Bamford, author of Body of Secrets., which has attracted a great deal of attention. A. Jay Cristol, a federal bankruptcy judge in Florida, has spent 14 years researching the incident and has been allowed exlusive access to Israeli archives and officials. His long-awaited book, The Liberty Incident, will be published in March by Brassey. In the piece below, Judge Cristol critiques the claims advanced by Mr. Bamford. The judge's conclusion? Mr. Bamford is guilty of telling "tall tales."

Bamford: Describes the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty as "unprovoked."

Fact: He completely ignores that the United States had publicly announced to the world at the United Nations Security Council only two days before June 8, 1967 that it had no warships within hundreds of miles of the combat zone. The chain of reactions were started by an Israeli army report of explosions at El Arish. Since Israel controlled the air and the ground, they made the assumption that they were being shelled from the sea and a warship was in eye view. In view of the U.S. public announcement, it seems more logical for the Israelis to have assumed that a haze grey warship sailing within eye view of the ongoing combat was an enemy vessel rather than a U.S. ship.

Bamford: "Israel fighters and torpedo boats assaulted the ship for more than an hour."

Fact: The air attack lasted about 12 minutes and was terminated as soon as the Israel Air Force determined the ship was not an Arab ship. While the Air Force was initiating rescue operations, the torpedo boats approached, stopped, and began signaling to the Liberty. The response of the Liberty was to begin shooting at the torpedo boats which thereupon began the torpedo attack. It lasted less than 15 minutes during which time the navy torpedo boats believed they were facing an enemy who initiated the shooting at them.

Bamford: The Israeli attackers used "cannon fire, rockets, heavy bombs, burning napalm and five torpedoes"

Fact: No rockets were fired at Liberty. No bombs, "heavy" or otherwise, were used. The attacking aircraft were not armed to attack a ship. Had they dropped the standard 500 pound iron bombs normally used against ship targets, the Liberty would very likely have been sunk in minutes. (During the battle of Midway in World War II, U.S. Navy dive bombers using standard 500 pound iron bombs sank three Japanese aircraft carriers in ten minutes.) Four napalm canisters were dropped by the attacking aircraft. At least three and possibly all missed. The Liberty's doctor reported no treatment of any crew member for napalm burns.

more...

[Chulanowa]

4. Mark your calenders - I'm with you on this one

Technically, books on the awesome power of pyramids and how to make a perpetual motion machine are "nonfiction" as well, after all.

[here_is_to_hope]

6. lol...

"After years of research for this book, Judge A. Jay Cristol has reached a
similar conclusion to one my father reached in his June 18, 1967,
endorsement of the findings of the court of inquiry. I commend Judge
Cristol for his thoroughness and fairness, and I commend this work."
- SEN. JOHN McCAIN

[rateyes]

8. How many hours was the Liberty attacked before Israel realized

its "mistake?" :eyes:

[Democracyinkind]

11. It depends on what "attack" means

If you are implying that the Liberty was shot at for hours, or even something like that, the facts contradict you. By now it is clear that most of the so called "evidence" of the crew is just a subjective reaction to a traumatic event.

No one shot up the Liberty continuously. There were 2 runs from the air, unrelated, plus an unrelated attack from the sea. Unrelated in this sense means that they were not part of a centralized, coordinated attack. Both planes as well as the ships that did attack did not cross-communicate and were not under the same command structure.

I'm open to see more facts on this, but there is nothing the crew could say that makes this a vicious Israeli attack. I like to believe things when there is evidence for it. Funny thing is that much of the crew's testimony has been thoroughly discredited and that most authors (journalists, not historians) that take the Anti-Israel stance on this always turn out to rely 100% percent of the crews testimony, or are know anti-semites, or rely on other testimony that has been refuted. ( There has been 3 Israelis since 1967 who have claimed to be "insiders" and provided some "facts" about how that "false flag operation" was done, turns out, all of them are liars who did not have the remotest of connections to the incident)

I am never happy when the best book available on a subject is from people with vested interests in the status quo, but Cristol's book is just so way much better than anything I have ever read on the subject. In fact, compared to Cristol, no other book is even wort reading. A typical example of latent anti-semitism, reliance on the crew's subjective perspective, and reliance on dubious Israeli fraudster-sources is James Scott's "Attack on the liberty"... sadly... elements of the trash that gets regurgitated in that book are characteristic of almost every other journalistic attempt to "reveal the truth"...

Cristol gives a fairly good description of Israels innocence - especially when one regards the complexity of structural issues leading to the incident. I'd go as far as to say that maybe somebody engineered or calculated on that complexity to obfuscate a deliberate attack on an ally, but, I will only start to consider that when the first circumstantial or hard evidence for that turns up. Even then, I'd need more - something like a plausible motive and a plausible explanation why they did not sink the fucking ship if it was their intention - which clearly it wasn't.

Of course claiming that F-14's can and did regularly carry nuclear warheads doesn't help much to gain the confidence of anyone actually interested in military history. (Scott - how stupid is the guy? and what standards does american publishing still obey if you can print such shit unchallenged?)

Dead in the water, my ass.
My sympathies for anyone that died that day or got hurt or traumatized. But rationalizing this incident away with this "us vs. them" mythology just doesn't help, trust me.

[denbot]

2. Is it that time again..

I normally chime in after the opening carpet bombing these posts ignite. I think I'll get in on the ground floor (ground zero) on this one.

Nobody, but nobody, from the most rural dhow skipper, to a dug out canoe paddler mistakes a U.S. Navy vessel for a freighter. The Liberty was strafed for hours by land sea and air, with gun boats scooping it's shot up life rafts out of the Med, and then continuing to fire upon her.

Flame on!!!

[ORDagnabbit]

3. how can you say such evil things about our ally? Next you'll tell me they have spies in our country

and steal our secrets?????

[rateyes]

9. Now, now. Don't you think that bit of sarcasm

gets just a little too close to the truth? :hi:

[Wednesdays]

5. K&R

:kick:

[rateyes]

7. I hope someone is brave enough to make a movie about this.

It will be a blockbuster.

[driver8]

10. My father was a crypto tech in the Navy and had a friend on The Liberty.

My father's friend and other crewmembers sued the Israeli government.

I forgot what the settlement was, but it wasn't much --50K or so.

This pisses me off every time I think about it.

Absolutely disgusting...