ISRAEL MAKES UNPROVOKED ATTACK
ON U.S. NAVY SHIP - Page 3
The USS Liberty is attacked by
Israel with aircraft and torpedoes.
Investigations of the attack
Several official US and Israeli investigations
maintained the initially published conclusion that the event
was a tragic mistake through misidentification. The scope
of the Israeli investigations was to decide whether or not
anyone in the Israeli Defense Forces should be tried on crimes
(no criminal wrongdoing was found), accepting as a premise
that the attack was a mistake. The scope and performance of
U.S. congressional investigations and four other U.S. investigations
subsequent to the U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry did not satisfy
some parties. The majority of those subsequent U.S. reports
were issues such as communications failures rather than culpability.
The Naval Court of Inquiry conclusions continue to be disputed
(see below). According to Raymond Garthoff, nonetheless, US
military and intelligence agencies are unanimous in finding
that the the Israeli attack was “deliberate and unprovoked.”
Israeli investigations
Three subsequent Israeli inquiries concluded
the attack was conducted because Liberty was confused with
an Egyptian vessel and because of failures of communications
between Israel and the U.S. The three Israeli commissions
were:
The Israeli government said three crucial errors
were made: the refreshing of the status board (removing the
ship's classification as American, so that the later shift
did not see it identified), the erroneous identification of
the ship as an Egyptian vessel, and the lack of notification
from the returning aircraft informing Israeli headquarters
of markings on the front of the hull (markings that would
not be found on an Egyptian ship). As the general root of
these problems, Israel blamed the combination of alarm and
fatigue experienced by the Israeli forces at that point of
the war when pilots were severely over-worked.
American investigations
Ten official American investigations are claimed
regarding the Liberty incident.
Critics -- including an active group of survivors
from the ship -- assert that five U.S. congressional investigations
and four other U.S. investigations were not investigations
into the attack at all, but rather reports using evidence
only from the U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry, or investigations
unrelated to the culpability of the attack but rather discussing
issues such as communications. In their view, the U.S. Navy
Court of Inquiry is the only investigation on the incident
to date. They claim it was hastily conducted, in only 10 days,
even though the court’s president, Rear Admiral Isaac
Kidd, said that it would take 6 months to properly conduct.
The incident exposed possible weaknesses in
the military capabilities of the U.S., in that the USA was
apparently unable to reliably transmit orders from Washington
to its naval ships in the field and count on them being received
and promptly obeyed. The USS Liberty was a highly sophisticated
electronics eavesdropping ship with the best radio equipment
in the fleet, yet it claimed to have not received orders to
leave the battle zone. Investigations threatened to publicly
expose and emphasize either an inability of U.S. warships
to receive orders from Washington dependably or else a failure
of a U.S. naval captain to follow orders. One possibility
is that the U.S. Navy sought to avoid embarrassing discussions
of its operational deficiencies.
The National Archives in College Park, Md.,
includes in its files on Liberty's casualties copies of the
original telegrams the Navy sent out to family members. The
telegrams called the attack accidental. The telegrams were
sent out June 9, the day before the Navy court of inquiry
convened.
Captain Ward Boston, JAGC, U.S. Navy, has in
recent years said the court's findings were intended to cover
up what was a deliberate attack by Israel on a ship it knew
to be American. He has prepared and signed an affadavit in
which he claimed that Admiral Kidd had told him that the government
ordered Kidd to falsely report that the attack was a mistake,
and that he and Kidd both believed the attack was deliberate.
He wrote, in part,
"The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd
and I believed with certainty that this attack, which killed
34 American sailors and injured 172 others, was a deliberate
effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.
Each evening, after hearing testimony all day, we often spoke
our private thoughts concerning what we had seen and heard.
I recall Admiral Kidd repeatedly referring to the Israeli
forces responsible for the attack as 'murderous bastards.'
It was our shared belief, based on the documentary evidence
and testimony we received first hand, that the Israeli attack
was planned and deliberate, and could not possibly have been
an accident."
However, there is no record of Kidd ever publicly
expressing such opinions.
USS LIBERTY DAMAGE
Ctsy: Wikipedia
Critics of Boston believe that he is not telling
the truth in regard to Kidd's views and any pressure from
the government. In particular, A. Jay Cristol, who also served
as an officer of the Judge Advocate General in the U.S. military,
suggests that Boston was responsible in part for the original
conclusions of the Court of Inquiry, and that by later declaring
that they were false he has admitted to "lying under
oath." Critics also note that Boston's claims about pressure
on Kidd was hearsay, and that Kidd was not alive to confirm
or deny them, and they note that Boston did not maintain prior
to his affadavit and comments related to it that Kidd spoke
of such instructions to him or to others. Supporters of the
intentional-attack theory believe that Boston's statement
invalidates the conclusions of the Court, and that Boston
would not have made such an accusation if he did not know
it to be true.
Ongoing Controversy & Unresolved
Questions
Several key intelligence and military officials
dispute Israel's explanation:
• "...the board
of inquiry (concluded) that the Israelis knew exactly what
they were doing in attacking the Liberty."- Former CIA
Director Richard Helms
• "I was never satisfied with the
Israeli explanation. . . . Through diplomatic channels we
refused to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them
then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was
outrageous "- Former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk
Some of the survivors claim that this incident
stands as the only peacetime attack on a U.S. naval vessel
not investigated by Congress, and want a full Congressional
hearing; they claim that a proper investigation has never
taken place and that all previous reports including the ones
by the U.S. Congress are incomplete, mention the incident
in passing, and either that they are intended to exonerate
Israel or that they do not even question the culpability of
the attack (instead, they hold, it focuses on other topics,
such as American communication problems).
Israel stated that the attack was not
deliberate using the following arguments:
•The previous day, Israel's warplanes
had erroneously attacked an Israeli armored column, demonstrating
unintentional mistakes, where the IAF had even attacked Israel's
own forces.
• The incident took place during the Six
Day War when Israel was engaged in battles with three Arab
countries, 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 nautical miles from those shores at the time
of the attack.)
• Had Israel intended to attack the USS
Liberty, IAF aircraft would have been sent out with bombs,
not light machine gun ammunition, sinking the Liberty within
the first few minutes of the incident.
• The attacking aircraft used napalm rockets
and machine guns, and napalm is an ineffective armament for
doing real damage to a steel-hulled ship—other than
starting fires in combustibles. Machine guns, though, are
often used to keep a ship's company under cover, thus keeping
the company from manning weather deck stations and doing damage
control topside.
• Liberty opened fire first on the gunboats.
This, though, was after the aerial attacks.
• No adequate benefit has been put forward
that the Israelis would derive from the attack on an American
ship, especially considering the high cost of the predictable
complications that must inevitably follow such an attack on
a powerful ally, and the fact that Israel immediately notified
the American embassy after the attack.
Details in dispute
The events surrounding the attack, even very
simple elements such as its duration, are the subject of fierce
controversy. Among the disputed facts:
• Visibility of ensign: The most vehemently
debated point is the visibility of the American flags that
the ship was flying; Americans claimed the flags were clearly
visible in the wind. The Israeli pilots claimed they did not
see any flag. Official reports have the Liberty cruising at
5 knots on a calm day, so that the flag would have been furled
or fouled, while others maintain the ship was cruising at
28 knots, and insist the flag should have been clearly visible.
• USS Liberty bore an eight-foot-high
"5" and a four-foot-high "GTR" along either
bow, clearly indicating her hull (or "pendant")
number (AGTR-5), and had 18-inch-high letters spelling the
vessel's name across the stern. These markings were not cursive
Arabic script but in English. Israeli pilots claim initially
they were primarily concerned with making sure the ship was
not Israeli and that they called off the attack when they
noticed the English markings.
Source: Wikipedia
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