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June 8^th, 1967 is a date in history that the world should recognize because it was the day that Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a US Navy spy ship during the Six-Day War.  So why would a supposedly staunch US ally do such a thing against one of its most loyal servants?  Was it an accident or was it a failed false-flag operation? 

In this time of uncertainty, the Israelis have been planning numerous ways to stop Iran’s nuclear program but the question is how would they accomplish such a task?  Israeli officials including its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who is perhaps, the most vocal of the crowd would do almost anything at this point to prevent Washington from re-entering the Joint Comprehension Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran since the Trump administration abruptly pulled out from the deal in 2017.

Tel-Aviv is getting anxious to derail Iran’s nuclear program, so would they orchestrate another false-flag operation to commit the US into a shooting war with Iran since the bonds of friendship between both countries are unbreakable?  How long before Israel pushes the US into another war in the Middle East?  I mean why not? They got their wish when the US invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 since Israel and its hard-line supporters  pushed Washington to declare war by the “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction”propaganda from the Bush neocons and powerful lobbyists such as American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and of course, the Israelis themselves led by Netanyahu. That one tragic day in 1967 is relevant to today’s dangerous situation developing in the Middle East between Israel and Iran.

The USS Liberty incident occurred during the Six-day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors including Egypt, Syria, Jordan. Lebanon and even Iraq who had a minor role in the war.  It began when Israel had attacked the USS Liberty, a US Navy technical research ship (or a spy ship) with its fighter jets and motor torpedo boats that had killed 34 and injured 171 crew members including marines, naval officers, seamen, and a civilian employee from National Security Agency (NSA).  The US Naval ship was in international waters in the north of the Sinai Peninsula at the time.  There were multiple investigations from the US and Israeli governments who both claimed that it was a mistake while the crew members who were aboard the ship say it was deliberate.  So was it a mistake as claimed by both government’s or was it deliberate?

During the Six-Day War, the US had maintained its ‘neutral country status.  A week before the war began, the USS Liberty was ordered to the eastern Mediterranean sea for an intelligence collection mission near the north coast of Sinai, Egypt.  During the mission, the Israel Air Force (IAF) had flown over the USS Liberty claiming that they were searching for Egyptian submarines that had been previously spotted near the coast.  Around 2 pm, the IAF had sent two Mirage III fighter jets to oversee the ship which they had claimed had no “distinguishable markings” or any flag on the ship.  The USS Liberty was then attacked.  However, right before the attack, the Mirage fighter jets codenamed Kursa had verbal exchanges between a command post weapons systems officer, air controllers and a chief air controller who reportedly questioned whether there was the possibility of a US ship in the area and around 1:57 pm, the chief air controller, Lieutenant-Colonel Shmuel Kislev gave the green light to attack the USS Liberty as the fighter jets unleashed 30-mm cannons, rockets and napalm killing and injuring scores of US crew members.

The Israeli fighter jets had purposely jammed US communications frequencies before the attack meaning that they knew it was an American naval ship.

There were also three Israeli torpedo boats as they too had launched an attack on the ship with cannons, mounted machine guns and torpedoes.  One of the torpedo’s that hit the Liberty killing 25 crew members as the lower decks became flooded.  The Israeli torpedo boats had also damaged the life rafts as the crew had prepared to abandon the ship.  At around 3:15, two Israeli helicopters appeared with armed IDF personnel leading to the conclusion by those who were on the ship that the Israelis were there to kill the remaining survivors, but miraculously, that did not happen.  Meanwhile, the ship was still under attack as the crew members reinforced their lines of communications and called for help.  When the USS Saratoga and the USS America received the message, they had ordered US fighters to help protect the ship, but in a bizarre move, the mission was aborted by direct orders from Washington.  Israel already knew that the US fighter jets were on their way when they picked up the transmission and immediately called off the attack.  Israel’s torpedo boats and helicopters quickly returned to their base of operations.

Israel then notified Washington that they had mistakenly attacked an American ship and once again its fighter jets were recalled for a second time.  There is an interesting fact to ponder regarding President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara who halted the rescue mission.  A high-ranking official Admiral L. R. Geis, the commander of the Sixth Fleet carrier force, told Lt. Commander David Lewis of the USS Liberty that he had challenged McNamara’s orders to recall the rescue mission, but then it was reported that LBJ got on the phone and said he didn’t care if the ship sank, and that he wasn’t going to embarrass an ally.  The communications officer from the Liberty in charge of the transmission has given the same testimony.

It was not until 2007 that new revelations on the Israeli attack became readily available.  Citing more than two dozen US Navy veterans who survived the onslaught, The Chicago Tribune’s ‘New Revelations in Attack on American Spy ship‘ reported about the anger directed at both Israel and the US government’s NSA “that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots — communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.”  The article also suggests that there was a cover-up by both the US government and Israel:

The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel’s reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation.

In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country’s chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had “become the center of considerable controversy and debate.” It was not the agency’s intention, it said, “to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material,” available at http://www.nsa.gov/liberty

How did Israel know that it as a US Naval ship? Earlier that day, Israeli jets had repeatedly circled the Liberty before they began their attack:

Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared on the horizon and circled the Liberty. The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first day of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. America was Israel’s ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there. The ship’s mission was to monitor the communications of Israel’s Arab enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications. The Liberty felt safe.

Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore Arfsten, a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw the blue Star of David on the planes’ fuselages. At first, crew members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their ship

But the information that the Liberty was 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula was somehow “lost”:

An Israeli military court of inquiry later acknowledged that their naval headquarters knew at least three hours before the attack that the odd-looking ship 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula, sprouting more than 40 antennas capable of receiving every kind of radio transmission, was “an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy,” a floating electronic vacuum cleaner.

The Israeli inquiry later concluded that that information had simply gotten lost, never passed along to the ground controllers who directed the air attack nor to the crews of the three Israeli torpedo boats who picked up where the air force left off, strafing the Liberty’s decks with their machine guns and launching a torpedo that blew a 39-foot hole in its starboard side

Image below: President Lyndon B. Johnson and McNamara at a cabinet meeting, 1968 (Public Domain)

What is interesting about these new revelations is what actions were undertaken by the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as told by J.Q. “Tony” Hart, who was a chief petty officer at a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco.  Hart was in-charge of communications between Washington and the US Navy’s 6th Fleet remembered that McNamara had ordered Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, the commander of the carrier to bring back the jets:

When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that “President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.”

McNamara, who is now 91, told the Tribune he has “absolutely no recollection of what I did that day,” except that “I have a memory that I didn’t know at the time what was going on”

How convenient that McNamara could not remember what happened in 1967 to his own countrymen.

One other main question that is always up for debate regarding the USS Liberty is whether the American flag was visible?

For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be reduced to a single question: Was the ship flying the American flag at the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?

The survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the Liberty was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the attack, except for a brief period in which one flag that had been shot down was replaced with another, larger flag — the ship’s “holiday colors” — that measured 13 feet long.

Concludes one of the declassified NSA documents: “Every official interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag — and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and identification”

Of course, the Israeli court of inquiry investigated the attack and had concluded that “throughout the contact,” it declared, “no American or any other flag appeared on the ship.”  Another comment was made by Steve Forslund on the declassified documents was a former intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, a high-level position within the strategic planning office in the Air Force said that “the ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it”Forslund had remembered that “the aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag” and that the  ground control station had “ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors.” 

The Chicago Tribune also interviewed James Gotcher, an attorney in California who served with the Air Force Security Service’s 6924th Security Squadron, part of the NSA network at Son Tra, Vietnam who said that “it was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty” Gotcher said in his e-mail that “Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to ‘complete the job’ and get out of there.”

Former Air Force Capt. Richard Block in charge of the intelligence wing that monitored communications from Middle Eastern countries had remembered that there “were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack,” Block said. “The pilots said, ‘This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?’ continued “and ground control came back and said, ‘Yes, follow orders.”

According to the Chicago Tribune, “Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.”  Obviously, corrupt officials at the NSA and the Israelis manipulated the transcripts as Gotcher points out, “there is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as what I saw,” he continued “more to the point, for anyone familiar with air-to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn’t the way pilots and controllers communicate.” 

One other person who was interviewed for the report was Oliver Kirby, the NSA’s deputy director for operations during the attack on the USS Liberty had confirmed what was actually said in the NSA transcripts, “they said, ‘We’ve got him in the zero,’” Kirby recalled, “whatever that meant — I guess the sights or something.” According to Kirby’s account, they saw the American flag, “Can you see the flag?’ They said ‘Yes, it’s U.S, it’s U.S.’ They said it several times, so there wasn’t any doubt in anybody’s mind that they knew it.”

Obviously, those transcripts were manipulated to fit a certain narrative as Kirby himself said that the Jerusalem Post transcript were “something that’s bothered me all my life. I’m willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew.” 

A decade later, Haaretz decided to revisit the USS Liberty incident in an article that can be best described as spin, ‘But Sir, It’s an American Ship.’ ‘Never Mind, Hit Her!’ When Israel Attacked USS Liberty‘ by Ofer Aderet claims that the Israeli attack on the US Naval ship was a mistake and that

“Israel apologized and paid compensation to the victims’ families. Israeli and American commissions of inquiry found that the attack was a mistake. But naturally, as often happens in such events, to this day there are some who believe Israel attacked the ship with malicious intent.” 

Yes, they did compensate the families of the crew members who were either killed or injured with US taxpayer’s money they receive from Washington in the name of providing aid to Israel.  The article touches upon a book that was released on the 50^thanniversary of the attack titled ‘Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas’ , the article starts off with the positive outcome for Israel during the Six-Day War which is described as a celebration, but later mentions what happened on June 8^th,

“Amid the  jubilee celebrations for the Six-Day War, the tragic story of the American spy ship USS Liberty – which was bombed by an Israeli fighter jet and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967 in the eastern Mediterranean – was somewhat overlooked.”

Well it obviously it has been overlooked by the media, US politicians and historians.  Aderet asks, ‘Is it “A conspiracy? Healthy suspicion?”  He declares “Call it what you will.”

However,the book ‘Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas’ was written by Phillip F. Nelson, Ernest A. Gallo, Ronald G. Kukal and Philip F. Tourney is mostly accurate in terms of what happened on that tragic day, but what they get completely wrong is who would have benefited if the ship had sunk?  Israel’s intended goal was to drag the US into a war which could have led into a World War III type of scenario at the time.

The problem is that the authors of the book believe that US President Lyndon B. Johnson was actually the mastermind behind the plan, that it was his idea all along which leads us to believe that Israel had a minor role in the plot.  The author’s conclusion gives Israel a pass since it was Johnson’s idea to sink the USS Liberty to get US forces to join Israel in its war against its Arab neighbors.  Israel has a long-term plan to destroy their neighbors so that they can expand beyond their borders, acquiring more land in the process with help from the US military.  Yes, it is true that Israel was behind the attack, and it is also true that LBJ went along with the plan, but not as the mastermind, rather more like another controlled puppet of Israel:

A new book published in May in the United States (its authors include several survivors of the attack) promises that “the truth is being told as never before and the real story revealed.” The 302 pages of “Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas” include quite a number of documents, testimonies, arguments and information that were gathered in the subsequent 50 years.

The authors’ bottom line is that then-U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the attack, in an attempt to blame then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser – an excuse that would then enable the United States to join the Six-Day War

Aderet mentions a censored CIA document that contains a quote from an anonymous source,

“they said that [then-Israeli Defense Minister Moshe] Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship, and that one of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, ‘This is pure murder.”

Aderet argues that “there is no dispute about the authenticity of the document, but clearly not every sentence written in an intelligence document is the unvarnished truth.”   A former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, Dwight Porter had spoke about a conversation that was picked up by an NSA aircraft and sent to multiple CIA offices. Here is what was sent to the intelligence community:

“Israeli pilot to IDF war room: This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?

IDF war room to Israeli pilot: Yes, follow orders.

Israeli pilot to IDF war room: But sir, it’s an American ship – I can see the flag!

IDF war room to Israeli pilot: Never mind; hit it“

Dr. Michael Oren is an American-born Israeli author, historian, politician, a former ambassador to the United States from 2009–2013, also a former member of the Knesset and a former Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office who claims that he researched the incident and conveniently rejects the claim that Israel had deliberately attacked the USS Liberty.  Here is what he said to Haaretz:

“There is no doubt,” he says. “Not even the smallest percentage. I’ve taken part in wars. I know what ‘friendly fire’ is. There’s a lot of chaos. It was a classic screw up.

A classic screw up, especially in wartime, has more than one reason. It’s a sequence, a chain of screw ups.”

Oren adds: “I’m a historian. I have to stick with the facts. I can’t get into conspiracies and theories. A historian must proceed on the basis of the data before him. Today, almost all the papers have been publicized, including the texts of the recordings of the U.S. spy plane and spy submarine.

“Attempts to explain why Israel was interested in attacking the Liberty have failed thus far,” he continues. “They’re trying to answer the question ‘Why?’ and they’re having difficulty. It began with the claim that the Liberty discovered the Israel Defense Forces’ intentions or preparations to occupy the Golan Heights. And then they said it had homed in on some preparations in Dimona [the site of Israel’s nuclear reactor]. And finally, that it had listened in on the slaughter of Egyptian prisoners of war – I don’t know how slaughter sounds on the communications network. All kinds of bizarre theories.

“If we start with the assumption that the attack was deliberate and planned in advance, the question is why. And nobody answers this question. The answer is that it wasn’t planned.

“What continues to fuel these conspiracy theories?” Oren asks. “The subject is revived every few years. It is part of a ‘theory’ that Israel, together with Russia and China, spies on the United States. As Israel’s ambassador to the United States I saw this undercurrent, which is also sometimes anti-Semitic”

Since the attack on the USS Liberty, Israel has of course continued to wage numerous wars throughout the Middle East with help from the US.  Israel’s wars led to the destruction of Lebanon, Syria and the biggest obstacle at the time, Iraq.  Israel was instrumental in the lead-up to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

It’s was all part of the long-term plan and Iraq was part of that plan, in fact, the most powerful lobby in Washington is AIPAC and the Bush neoconservatives including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Elliot Abrams and others who pushed Washington into a war with Iraq.  According to John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of ‘The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ AIPAC was a major supporter for the War on Iraq:

AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United States to invade Iraq. Nathan Guttman made this very connection in his reporting [in Haaretz, April 2003] on AIPAC’s annual conference in the spring of 2003, shortly after the war started: “AIPAC is wont to support whatever is good for Israel, and so long as Israel supports the war, so too do the thousands of the AIPAC lobbyists who convened in the American capital.” AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr’s statement to the New York Sun in January 2003 is even more revealing, as he acknowledged “‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” was one of “AIPAC’s successes over the past year.” And in a lengthy New Yorker profile of Steven J. Rosen, who was AIPAC’s policy director during the run-up to the Iraq war, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war” 

It was all part of the larger plan.  The US Army War College published a strategy research project ‘Assault on the USS Liberty: Deliberate or Tragic Accident?‘ by Colonel Peyton E. Smith who came to the conclusion that the attack on the USS Liberty was deliberate, “The attack was most likely deliberate for reasons far too sensitive to be disclosed by the US (or) Israeli government and that the truth may never be known.”   Smith said that the only way to expose the truth on what happened on June 8^th, 1967 is by having both the US and Israeli governments release all of the data available, but that obviously won’t happen anytime soon:

Since this event occurred almost forty years ago, much personal testimony has surfaced regarding the incident. Based on the testimony of many eyewitnesses and the memoirs of senior government officials, the attack on the USS Liberty was most likely deliberate. Unfortunately, this issue may go to the grave unresolved unless the US government and the government of Israel release all data related to the incident. Perhaps forty years ago at the height of the cold war and with fears of major Soviet expansion into the Middle East, the information regarding the USS Liberty, the unknown subsurface contact (submarine), and the intelligence collecting aircraft (EC121) that were supposedly not there, would have been too sensitive to disciose.106 However, now that the Cold War is long over and the global conditions have changed, the US and Israeli governments should release all pertinent information and conduct an official inquiry. There is no discernable national security rational for continuing to keep these records secret. Only when they are finally released for careful scrutiny can we finally close the book on this unfortunate and tragic naval incident

The only possible reason Israel attacked the Liberty was to get the US into the Six-Day War so that Israel can step aside, spare its own soldiers and allow their American counterparts to fight their Arab neighbors for them.

Israel’s plan to dominate the Middle East continues today as it aims to destabilize Iran in the process since it is one of the last remaining obstacles to solidify its goal of complete hegemonic control over the Arab world.  The reason why Israel wants Iran destroyed is because they can be an economic and political powerhouse in the Middle East especially now with its close economic and political ties with China and Russia.

The bottom line is that it all fits into The Yinon Plan, The Zionist Plan for the Middle East, a plan to expand Israel’s territorial claims and dominate the region as a Jewish state under “God”.  Rabbi Fischmann was a member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine who openly declared in his testimony to the United Nations Special Committee of Enquiry on July 9th, 1947 that “the Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.”  Israel can initiate another false-flag operation so that they can blame Iran and force the US into another unwinnable war in the Middle East.  Will Israel succeed?  Unfortunately, the answer may be yes.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.