Was the Israili attack on the Liberty deliberate or mistaken?

[Sirotnikov]

Guardian - source on the ignore order and jail time?

Patty is correct. I read that after the initial attack round Israelis became concerned was a wrong i.d..

However, I read that during the first intermission, the liberty fired back on Israeli forces. This caused them to go on round 2 and 3 of fire on the american ship.

[TCO]

source on the firing back?

[Blaupanzer]

Big, loud (in terms of radio-transmitting) ship in the Med using American channels to transmit impressions of Israeli plans and actual unit movements to an indeterminant receiver. The Israelis do not like this behavior, as they may not be the only ones who can intercept and decrypt. In this time period, the US does not report or respond to other countries as related to US spy ships. The Egyptians tell the Israelis to go **** themselves when warned about this ship so the Israelis suspect the US ID is a fake. The initial engagement probably includes defensive fire so additional exchanges occur. Somebody on some channel shouts "Whoops," and the American ship survives.

That's about as much as we will know until at least 40 years after the event. Classified cables, incident reports, logs, and analytical reports all get reviewed for downgrade at either the 25, 40, or 50 year point based on regs. The time for release of some of this data may be soon. We've recently seen the release of Gulf of Tonkin (1964) stuff, so materials related to this attack/incident are probably under review right now.

[Guardian]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov
Guardian - source on the ignore order and jail time?

Sorry, should have posted that right away. It was somewhere on the USS Liberty Memorial website - http://www.ussliberty.org - so yeah, I suppose the source is biased...