Return to the USS Liberty

[Lonestar]

Yahoo linky

For those of you uninformed, the Liberty was an American Intelligence gathering ship that was attacked by Israeli planes and boats in 1967.

WASHINGTON - A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 American servicemen says former President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry conclude the incident was an accident.

As a Navy CT, one of the things we were taught about was the Liberty attack. All evidence seems to indicate that the Israelis intentionally attacked the vessel knowing full well it was an American ship.

The Question is, why? And why would Israel, to this day, continue to decide *not* to provide restitution?

Maybe some of our Israeli Apolytoners can shed some light on the subject.

[Dis]

Damn you Israel!

You will pay for this!

[Lonestar]

Well, the point is we continued to give them massive $$$ even after the fact.

[Dis]

yes it is a cover up.

I don't know why the U.S. is covering for them. It is perplexing.

[SlowwHand]

Just go, will ya? Don't play like you know something. Jackass.

[Lonestar]

Are you talking to me or him, you Airman truckdriver you?

[SlowwHand]

I'm talking to your squid ass.
And the thank you was a thank you for serving.

Jackass.

[Dis]

sloww must be drunk today

he already got one of my threads deleted .

maybe I'll make another since that one was deleted.

[SlowwHand]

Tell you what, laddie-bucks; if you're going to start in on me, you'd best go get some friends.
You're about to be in way over your heads.

[David Floyd]

Quite frankly, I think we should have bombed Israel is retaliation for the Liberty incident, and certainly cut off all aid.

[Ming]

Keep it up slow... and they won't need any friends

[SlowwHand]

Got me in trouble, again.
Thanks. Thanks a lot. That's all I have to say.

[mrmitchell]

It's too late now.

But Israel should issue an apology at least.

[chequita guevara]

The best theory I have read is:

The United States was leaning heavily on Israel to stop the war after having humiliated Egypt and crushed Jordan. In the UN, the US was preparing a SC resolution to demand a cease fire.

Israel attacked the Liberty in order to take out its electronic listening capabilities to keep the U.S. from knowing that Israel was about to attack Syria in order to keep the US from rushing the SC resolution through. It should be noted that the Israel attack paid particular attention to the EL section of the ship, an area on the Egyptian horse carrier would not have been important.

As for why the U.S. didn't push the issue: it realized after the 6-Day War that Israel would be far too important an ally to let the Liberty get in the way. Plus, the U.S. public strongly identified with the plucky little state and saw the 6DW as a redemption for the Holocaust and it would have been politically problematic to punish Israel over the Liberty.

[Mordoch]

There does appear to be a fair amount of room for doubt on whether the attack was due to a misidentification or not.

Here's some passages from an article in another forum rebutting most of the physical evidence pointing to an attack.

Israeli naval commanders called up the air force and asked for help from whatever was available. What was available were two Mirages returning from a bombing strike, they were armed only with 30 millimeter cannons and air-to-air missiles and were very short on fuel. Had this been a deliberate attack they would have carried a warload better suited for attacking a ship. Making two passes at 3,000 feet, the formation commander reckoned that the ship was a "Z" or Hunt-class destroyer without the deck markings (a white cross on a red background) of the Israeli navy (which also operated both classes). The command pilot then spoke with air force commander Gen. Motti Hod, who asked him repeatedly whether he could see a flag. They failed to see either flags or markings on the ship. Not surprising, again these were pilots who were not trained for maritime operations and didn't have any knowledge of naval operations or ship recognition. History is replete with examples of such pilots grotesquely misidentifying ships; although this was an error, it cannot be held against the pilots.

After two low sweeps by the lead plane, at 1:58 p.m., the Mirages were cleared to attack. For want of anything more potent, they strafed the ship they saw. (by the way, its pure luck - good or ill - that they didn't shoot up the Israeli FAC - they just hit the first ship they saw). The first salvos caught the Liberty's crew in "stand-down" mode; several officers were sunning themselves on the deck, unaware of the Israeli jets bearing down on them. Before they could take shelter, rockets and 30-mm cannon shells stitched the ship from bow to stern, severing the antennas and setting oil drums on fire. Nine men were killed in the initial assault, and several times that number wounded, among them McGonagle.

Minutes later came a second group of planes, Super-Mysteres, equally ill-suited for a naval engagement. They had been diverted from a strike against Egyptian infantry positions and carried napalm (but had been diverted going out, not coming back so had a decent fuel reserve). They dropped their canisters and one set fire to the deck, enshrouding the ship in smoke. The air attacks lasted 14 minutes; by 2:20 the aircraft had finished with their assault.

It was at this junction that one Israeli pilot finally recognized Latin, not Arabic, letters on the hull. He made a desperate emergency call to the Israeli air controllers causing them to call off the action immediately. Now we have glitch ten. The Israeli communications system in 1967 was basically WW2 equipment that had been overhauled and modernized. It was already overloaded with running a fast-moving mobile war and , thanks to a breakdown in that communications system, the message to the Navy was caught in a backlog of calls waiting to go out. Classic case of too much flow down too small a pipeline. As a result, the order was very long delayed in reaching the navy; it finally made it to the FACs just after 4:00 pm. ref e

It is at this point that we have a minor mystery. One of the major claims is that the Israelies were jamming US radio frequencies in order to prevent calls from help getting out. If true, this would be powerful evidence to suggest that the attackw as deliberate. There are, however, serious problems with this assertion. Firstly, the Liberty was a specialist electronic warfare ship and carried advanced ECCM equipment; it is hard to see how she could have been closed down so comprehensively. Secondly, the Israeli capability in EW at this time was virtually non-existant; neither aircraft nor the torpedo boats carried any ECM equipment. Thirdly, the communications equipment on the Liberty was such that jamming equipment would have to be placed within a series of carefully-defined positions relative to the ship and fourthly, any jamming capable of taking down US Navy communications so comprehensively would have affected a wide area. No such jamming was reported anywhere else by anybody. This leaves only three possible explanations for the alleged jamming (1) The crewmen on Liberty who reported such jamming are lying, (2) the reports that crewmen made such claims are fabricated or (3) whatever happened wasn't jamming. If we discount (1) we are left with either fabrication or something else. The accusations made against the Israelies feature extensive fabrication so (2) is certainly possible but the most likely explanation is that the Liberty had already been strafed and napalmed with over 800 holes in her. The entire superstructure of the ship, from the main deck to the bridge, was aflame.The "jamming" was probably simply battle damage that had knocked out the ships wave guides and antennas.

There now followed a lull in the action that lasted for 24 minutes while the Israeli torpedo boats caught up with the Liberty. Think about the geometry of this. They are sailing out to attack a ship offshore that has just turned away from them. That means they are in a tail chase. Now the Liberty was rated at 17.7 knots - lets say she had cranked up her engines and was doing 16. The Israeli FAC are rated at 40 knots - meaning at best the closing speed is 24 knots. However, in any sort of rough sea its unlikely they were doing more than 30 knots and possibly were down to 25. So that gives us a closing speed of (at best) 16 knots and possibly as little as 8. However, at those speeds, the FAC are bouncing all over the place and are throwing up large clouds of spray. The vibration is intense and the noise is deafening. Incidently, these are not the modern 200 - 400 ton, 56-meter missile craft, they are 70 foot MTBs, 10 feet shorter than a US WW2 PT boat (albeit somewhat heavier that the 35 - 45 ton PT boats). Ref f

Now its reasonable to assume the Liberty had her stern to the FAC. Think about this. The Flag is at the stern, the ship is heading away from the FAC that are chasing her from astern. That means they are seeing the Flag (if they see it at all) edge-on from the rear. Their only hope of recognizing it is if it flutters from side to side. So to state the Israelies must have seen the Flag, we have to ask the two guys on the bridge to recognize a fluttering flag edge-on from a range of 4 to 8 miles from a 60 ton speedboat bouncing around in a cloud of spray while being shaken to pieces by two 4,000 shaft horsepower diesels running flat out. Now add in that the Liberty had been hit by a tank of napalm and was burning - in other words there were clouds of black smoke around her making visibility intermittant. Suddenly, it doesn't seem so easy does it? ref g

At this point the Israeli flagship signaled "AA" - "identify yourself." Due to damaged equipment, McGonagle could only reply in kind, AA, with a hand-held Aldis lamp. Now we have a weird coincidence - Udi Erell's father had been in command of a 1956 operation where the Israeli Navy had captured the Egyptian destroyer Ibrahim al-Awwal. This ship had tried to pose as a neutral ship when the israeli force closed in and had also replied to the interrogatory AA by responding with a repeat AA. There is little doubt Udi Erell was familiar with that story as family history and was sure that he now faced an enemy ship.

Now we have another glitch, number 11. One of the American sailors on board, disregarded Captain McGonagle's order not to fire on the approaching craft, and opened up with a deck gun. (ref h) Another machinegun opened fire by itself when fired cooked off its ready-use ammunition. Erell repeatedly requested permission from naval headquarters to return fire. Rahav finally approved.

The Israeli FAC skipper also jumped to the assumption that the ship in front of him was Egyptian (Glitch 12), consulted his intelligence manual, identified it as the Egyptian naval freighter El Quseir, This identification has been criticised on grounds that the El Quseir was smaller than the Liberty and lacked her distinctive antennas. In reality, the El Quseir was laid up in Alexandria and its asserted (without proof) that "the Israelies must have known that". Its also pointed out (quite correctly) that the Israeli FAC had a copy of JFS on board. Consulting a copy of the relevent edition of that publication, it does indeed list both Liberty and El Quseir - but includes photographs of neither. Rather pathetically, those who dispute the identification point out that the El Quseir was painted silver rather than the Liberty's Haze Gray. In reality, under the circumstances prevailing, telling the difference between dirty silver and shiny gray is very hard - especially since both would have taken on a blue tinge by reflection from the surrounding sea and sky. However, all thats irrelevent since we now have Glitch 13 - he wasn't trying to find out "which ship is this" he was looking for "which Egyptian Ship looks most like the one in front of me"

The FAC commander elected to fire torpedoes. Now lets look at those torpedoes. They are not modern 21 inch jobs. The FAC in question were armed with World War Two ex-Italian 17.7 inch torpedoes. These had a 440 pound warhead and had a speed of 30 knots to 8,000 meters (ref i) . Distinctly lacking in range speed and striking power. Also unguided; there is no way a torpedo like that is aimed at any specific part of the ship. At 2:45 the Israeli FAC fired five torpedoes at a range of 6,000 meters for a single hit at around 2:50. This killed 25 men almost all of them from the intelligence section.

The torpedo boats then closed in and from 3:00 onwards circled the ship, from the stern spraying it with 20 millimeter and 40 millimeter gunfire. When they reached the bows, the captain of one boat saw "GTR-5" on the hull. He immediately halted fire, extended help to the Liberty, and called for rescue helicopters. For the first time in the whole stupid story somebody did something right. Two Israeli Helicopters reached the Liberty and offered assistance. Erell, shouting through a bullhorn, also tried to communicate with the ship but Captain McGonagle refused to respond. Realizing, finally, that his assailants had been Israeli, he flagged the torpedo boats away and made a gesture that the Israelies describe as "obscene, but under the circumstances, understandable". By 5:05 p.m., the Israelis had broken off contact, and the Liberty, navigating virtually without systems, with 34 dead and 171 wounded aboard, staggered out to sea.

http://pub82.ezboard.com/fhistorypoliticsandcurrentaffairs68862frm2.showMessage?topicID=47.topic

Recently released intercepts from the NSA support the details about the helicopter and provide evidence that the attack was accidental. The linked to article also links directly to the NSA official site with this info.

finally, the National Security Agency released copies of the recordings it made from an EC-121 aircraft in the vicinity of the attacks during the time periods 2:30 p.m. Sinai time to 3:27 p.m. Sinai time. These tapes contain nothing to support the prior conspiracy claims and show that the helicopters were first dispatched to rescue Egyptians, and then demonstrate the confusion as to the identification of the target ship."

Cristol adds: "The tapes confirm that the helicopter pilot observed the flag at 3:12 p.m. This perfectly dove-tails with the audio tapes which the Israel Air Force released to Judge Cristol of the radio transmissions before, during and after the attack.

http://pub82.ezboard.com/fhistorypoliticsandcurrentaffairs68862frm2.showMessage?topicID=47.topic