-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [PEN-L] USS Liberty inquiry--the cover-up continues Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 10:21:53 -0800 From: "Craven, Jim" <JCraven at CLARK.EDU> Reply-To: PEN-L list <PEN-L at SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU> To: PEN-L at SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
Tempers flare over US spy-ship inquiry By Guy Dinmore in Washington Financial Times: January 13 2004
Survivors of one of the most hotly disputed incidents in American military history - the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty spy-ship in 1967 - on Monday accused the US authorities, past and present, of a cover-up in backing Israeli claims that it was a tragic mistake.
Emotions boiled over in the basement of the State Department as the Office of the Historian opened a public conference on the six-day Arab-Israeli war with heated debate over newly released intercepts from the archives of the secretive National Security Agency.
Most of the basic facts are undisputed. On June 8 1967, Israeli aircraft and later torpedo boats struck the Liberty just off the Mediterranean coast, killing 34 crew and wounding 172. The ship, one of the world's most sophisticated listening vessels but only lightly armed, limped into port.
>From there the controversy begins. An immediate US Navy court of
>Inquiry backed the Israeli claim that it had been mistaken for an
>Egyptian warship. The US accepted $12m (?9.4m, £6.5m) in compensation.
While some historians have accepted this, survivors and a varied group of academics and former military officials insist the attack was deliberate.
"You're trying to whitewash it," one survivor shouted from the audience as Marc Susser, the State Department's historian, acted as moderator and sought to keep order, refusing to allow speeches from the floor. Even debate on the panel of invited historians descended into acrimony with one contributor accused of being an Israeli agent.
Two recent developments added fuel to the controversy.
Last week Ward Boston, a naval captain who acted as senior legal counsel for the Navy's court of inquiry in 1967, signed an affidavit declaring that the late Admiral Isaac Kidd, president of the court, had told him that President Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, defence secretary, had ordered a cover-up.
And on Monday, David Hatch, the National Security Agency's own historian, elaborated on the recently declassified NSA material, the first time the eavesdropping agency had released real voice intercepts.
Mr Hatch confessed that the information "doesn't settle much". But his analysis of the conversations between an Israeli air controller and two helicopter pilots "suggested strongly" that the Israelis did not know at first they were attacking a US vessel, although there was mention of a US flag flying.
He also regretted that the new NSA material did not clarify why the Liberty had not received orders sent to it to leave a war zone.
Joseph Lentini, a survivor who has spent the past 36 years researching the tragedy, told reporters he remained convinced that the attack was deliberate.
He admits it is hard to understand why the Israelis would want to sink a ship of its closest ally at a time of war. Conspiracy theories abound.
Response Jim C:
The why of the attack was documented thoroughly in James Bamford's book "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Sercurity Agency", Doubleday, NY, 2001. and it is not some kind of "conspiracy theory." I should note that Bamford's first book on the NSA called "The Puzzle Palace" brought the wrath of NSA down on him. Later, when Bamford's scholarship could not be impeached, NSA started giving him direct access to NSA and even intercepts which he used in this book and now he even lectures to NSA personnel inside the NSA, in NSA facilities, on the history of the NSA. (If you can't threaten them, then co-opt them) What is also interesting is why NSA would release to Bamford the intercepts that he used to write and document what is below:
>From Bamford:
"Although no one on the ship knew it at the time, the Liberty had suddenly trespassed into a private horror. At that very moment, near the minaret at El Arish, Israeli forces were engaged in a criminal slaughter...(pp.200-201)
As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. In the shadow of the El Arish mosque, they lined up about sixty unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert turned red. 'I saw a line of prisoners, civilians and military', said Abdelsalam Moussa, one of those who dug the graves, 'and they opened fire at them all at once. When they were dead, they told us to bury them.'. Nearby, a group of Israelis gunned down thirty more prisoners and then ordered some Bedouins to cover them with sand.
In still another incident at El Arish, the Israeli journalist Gabi Bron saw about 150 Egyptian POWs sitting on the ground, crowded together with their hands held at the back of their necks. 'The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death', Broin said. ' I witnessed the executions with my own eyes on the morning of June 8th, in the airport area of El Arish.'
The Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki, who worked in the army's history department after the war, said he and other officers collected testimony from dozens of soldiers who admitted killing POWs. According to Yitzhaki, Israeli troops killed, in cold blood, as many as 1,000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai including some 400 in the sand dunes of El Arish.
Ironically, Ariel Sharon, who was capturing territory south of El Arish at the time of the slaughter, had been close to massacres during other conflicts. One of his men during the Suez crisis in 1956, Arye Biro, now a retired brigadier general, recently admitted the unprovoked killing of 49 prisoners of war in the Sinai in 1956. 'I had my Karl Gustav [weapon] I had taken from the Egyptian. My officer had an Uzi. Th Egyptian prisoners were sitting there with their faces turned to us. We turned to them with our loaded guns and shot them. Magazine after magazine. They didn't get a chance to react.' At another point, Biro said, he found Egyptian soldiers prostrate with thirst. He said that after taunting them by pouring water from his canteen into the sand, he killed them. 'If I were to be put on trial for what I did,' he said, 'then it would be necessary to put on trial at least one-half the Israeli army, which, in similar circumstances, did what I did.' Sharon who says he learned of the 1956 prisoner shootings only after they happened, refused to say whether he took any disciplinary action against those involved, or even objected to the killings...(pp.201-203)
Into this sea of lies, deception and slaughter said the USS Liberty, an enormous American spy factory loaded with $10.2 million worth of the latest eavesdropping gear. At 10:39 A.M. the minaret at El Arish was logged at seventeen miles away, at bearing 189 degrees. Sailing at five knots, the Liberty was practically treading water.
By 10:55 AM, senior Israeli officials knew for rcertain that they had an American electronic spy in their midst. Not only was the ship clearly visible to the forces at El Arish, it had been positively identified by Israeli naval headquarters... The report said that the ship cruising slowly off El Arish was 'an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy named Liberty, whose marking was GTR-5.'
Not only did the ship have a 'GTR-5' painted broadly on both sides of its bow and stern, it also had its name painted in large, bold, black letters: 'U.S.S. Liberty.' (pp. 203-204)
Note: What the Israeli's didn't know is that in addition to the Liberty recording Israeli radio chatter revealing the ongoing massacres of POWs at El Arish, there was also an EC-121 aircraft doing the same thing. They went after the Liberty to stop the surveillance and destroy what had been recorded thinking that the Liberty was the only witness. They didn't know that the EC-121 also had gathered the evidence including evidence from radio intercepts that the Israelis knew exactly who they were going after and why they were doing it.
Jim C.