{"id":3709,"date":"2017-06-05T16:18:07","date_gmt":"2017-06-05T23:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/the-cover-up-of-the-uss-liberty\/"},"modified":"2017-06-05T16:18:07","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T23:18:07","slug":"the-cover-up-of-the-uss-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/opinion\/the-cover-up-of-the-uss-liberty\/","title":{"rendered":"The cover-up of the USS Liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI am compelled to speak out about one of U.S. history\u2019s most shocking cover-ups. On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked our proud naval ship \u2014 the USS Liberty \u2014 killing 34 American servicemen and wounding 172. Those men were then betrayed and left to die by our own government.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was Chief of Naval Operations in 1967, later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fifty years ago on June 5, 1967, Israel attacked Egypt. This began the Six-Day War and Israel\u2019s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Jerusalem which continues to this day. The USS Liberty, a spy ship, unarmed except for four machine guns, was sent to monitor events from international waters off Gaza. All morning on June 8, Israeli reconnaissance planes flew passes over the Liberty. Off-duty sailors sunbathing on the deck testified the planes were close enough to see the pilots as they waved. The sailors waved back. Without warning, unmarked Mirage and Super Mystere jets attacked the Liberty with napalm, rockets, cannon and machine guns. Nine Americans were killed, many wounded and the ship was an inferno. Survivors report that the initial barrage was to knock out the antennas so the ship couldn\u2019t get off a distress call. A sailor managed to run a cable to an unused antenna. The patch worked but the Israelis, against international law, were jamming Liberty\u2019s distress frequencies. They had to stop jamming while they strafed and the Americans were able to use those few seconds to get off a message to the Sixth Fleet.<\/span><\/p>\n

Twice the Fleet, fifteen minutes away by air, launched jets to help the Liberty. Both times Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered them back. Rear Admiral Larry Geis couldn\u2019t believe it and challenged the second order. Then President Lyndon Johnson repeated the recall order reportedly telling Geis that, \u201c\u2026he didn\u2019t care if the ship sunk, he would not embarrass his allies.\u201d*<\/span><\/p>\n

About 2 p.m. three Israeli torpedo boats arrived to finish the job. Captain William McGonagle, badly wounded, still on the bridge, evaded the first four torpedoes but the fifth hit Liberty midship killing 25 sailors and blowing a forty foot diameter hole in her below the waterline. The Israeli torpedo boats came in close to machine gun men fighting fires and carrying wounded. Captain McGonagle gave the order to lower life rafts for the most seriously wounded men in case the ship rolled. The Israelis machine gunned and sank those rafts at point blank range<\/span><\/p>\n

Unknown to Israel, a U.S. Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane high above the attack made audio recordings, some recently declassified, of Israeli pilots identifying the Liberty as an American ship to Israeli ground control. The pilots were ordered to attack the vessel and sink it.**<\/span><\/p>\n

There was no Congressional inquiry. The U.S. Navy\u2019s inquiry was rushed through in a week. Surviving crew members were ordered never to mention the attack to anyone, not even family or be \u2018court-martialed, imprisoned or worse.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

To this day Israel claims their coordinated, two-hour attack on a sunny day with unlimited visibility, in calm seas was an accident. Given its size, coloring, American flag, four-foot tall ship\u2019s letters, plus forty antennas, including huge round ones, the Liberty has been called the most distinctive vessel in the Mediterranean. Israel claims they mistook it for a small 1920\u2019s era Egyptian horse freighter, the El Quseir. That\u2019s like mistaking the state ferry Columbia for a Bering Sea crabber.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can believe Israel\u2019s narrative or you can believe Admiral Moorer and CIA Chief at the time Richard Helms, Secretary of State at the time Dean Rusk, NSA Director Lt. General Marshall Carter, National Security Council member Harold Sanders, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arliegh Burke, General of Marines Ray Davis, Captain Ward Boston, legal counsel for the only U.S. Navy Liberty inquiry committee, various American diplomats, the Liberty\u2019s officers and crew and many more on record stating Israel deliberately tried to kill our ship and its entire crew. The cover-up remains a disgrace to our country and a defining moment in American Middle East policy. Undersecretary of State George C. Ball put it this way, \u201cThe ultimate lesson of the Liberty attack was to have far more effect on policy in Israel than in America. \u2026 If America\u2019s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

* \u201cThe Cover Up\u201d by James Bamford in The Guardian, Aug. 1, 2001. Also see: \u201cNew revelations in attack on American spy ship\u201d by John Crewdson in The Chicago Tribune, Oct. 10, 2007.<\/span><\/p>\n

**\u201dThe Day Israel Attacked America,\u201d Al Jazeera documentary, 2014. The Moorer Commission\u2019s findings and recommendations to Congress are at: www.gtr5.com\/evidence\/moorer.htm<\/a> on the Liberty Memorial website.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u2022 Dick Callahan is a Juneau writer.<\/b><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI am compelled to speak out about one of U.S. history\u2019s most shocking cover-ups. On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked our proud naval ship \u2014 the USS Liberty \u2014 killing 34 American servicemen and wounding 172. Those men were then betrayed and left to die by our own government.\u201d \u2014 Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-3709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3709"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=3709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}