Replies

Never happened? And Vince Foster committed suicide.

Some quotes by people who might actually know what happened.

-- Lieutenant General Marshall S. Carter, director of the National Security Agency at the time: "There was no other answer than it was deliberate."

-- Dr. Louis Tordella, the deputy director of NSA at the time: "I believed the attack might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula [where the massacres were taking place] who wrongly suspected that the Liberty was monitoring his activities." Tordella also scrawled across the top page of the formal Israeli "mistake" report, "A nice whitewash."

-- Major General John Morrison, NSA deputy director of Operations at the time: "Nobody believes that explanation. The only conjecture that we ever made that made any near sense is that the Israelis did not want us to intercept their communications at that time."

-- Walter Deeley, the senior NSA official who conducted an internal NSA investigation of the incident: "There is no way that they didn't know that the Liberty was American."

-- Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "I have to conclude that it was Israel's intent to sink the Liberty and leave as few survivors as possible. Israel knew perfectly well that the ship was American."

-- Captain William L. McGonnagle, the Liberty's commander: "After many years I finally believe that the attack was deliberate."

-- Phillip F. Tourney, president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association and a survivor of the attack: "The Israelis got by with cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Americans."

-- Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence at the time: "Your chapter on the Liberty was exactly right."

-- George Christian, press secretary to President Johnson at the time: "I became convinced that an accident of this magnitude was too much to swallow."

-- Paul C. Warnke, Under Secretary of the Navy at the time: "I found it hard to believe that it was, in fact, an honest mistake on the part of the Israeli air force units.... I suspect that in the heat of battle they figured that the presence of this American ship was inimical to their interests."

-- Dean Rusk, Secretary of State at the time: "The Liberty was flying an American flag. It was not all that difficult to identify, and my judgment was that somewhere along the line some fairly senior Israeli official gave the go-ahead for these attacks."

-- David G. Nes, the deputy head of the American mission in Cairo at the time: "I don't think that there's any doubt that it was deliberate.... [It is] one of the great cover-ups of our military history."

-- George Ball, Under Secretary of State at the time: "American leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of its citizens."