a Charles F Adams class destroyer (the standard US Navy destroyer class of the time) as North Vietnamese They should have known the difference....and probably did.
Posted on 07/08/2003 4:33:17 PM PDT by Courier
U.S. agency confirms sinking of USS Liberty was accident
By Nathan Guttman, Haaretz Correspondent
WASHINGTON - New documents released this week by America's National Security Agency support Israel's version of a long-festering controversy between the two countries: Israel's sinking of an American spy ship, the USS Liberty, off the coast of Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Israel has always said it had no idea the ship was American, but conspiracy theorists and anti-Israel propagandists still claim Israel sank the ship in the full knowledge that it was American.
The documents, originally defined as top secret, were made public by Florida Judge Jay Cristol, who
has been investigating the Liberty incident for years and published a book on the subject last year. On Monday, the NSA gave him a transcript of conversations held by two Israeli Air Force helicopter pilots who were hovering over the Liberty as it was sinking, and these tapes confirm Israel's claim that the sinking of the ship, which killed 34 American servicemen and wounded 171, was a tragic error.
After the Liberty was bombed by both the Israel Air Force and the Israel Navy, the two helicopter pilots were summoned from their base to assess the damage and evaluate the possibility of rescuing the surviving crew members. An American spy plane, which had been sent to the area as soon as the NSA learned of the attack, recorded their conversations, which took place between 2:30 and 3:37 P.M. on June 8, the third day of the war.
The spy plane also recorded the orders radioed to the pilots by their supervisor at Hatzor Base, which instructed them to search for Egyptian survivors from the "Egyptian warship" that had just been bombed - thus supporting Israel's claim that it had believed the ship was Egyptian when it ordered it attacked. "Pay attention. The ship is now identified as Egyptian," the pilots were told.
Nine minutes later, Hatzor informed the pilots that it was not an Egyptian warship, but an Egyptian cargo ship. Only at 3:07 were the pilots first informed that the ship might not have been Egyptian at all: Hatzor told them that if they found Arabic-speaking survivors, they should be taken to El-Arish, but if they found English-speaking survivors, they should be taken to Lod. "Clarify by the first man that you bring up, what nationality he is, and report to me immediately," the supervisor instructed, according to the transcript. "It's important to know."
Then, at 3:12, one of the pilots informed Hatzor that he saw an American flag flying over the wounded ship. He was asked to investigate and determine whether it was really an American ship.
This is not the first time such transcripts have been made public: Israel gave its own recordings of the pilots' conversations to the British television station Thames in 1987. But conspiracy theorists charged that Israel had doctored the tapes before handing them over to the station in order to hide the fact that it sank the Liberty intentionally. No such imputation can be made about these new transcripts, as they were never in Israeli hands.
Israel has always said it attacked the Liberty, which America sent to the region to gather intelligence on the progress of the war, because it believed it was an Egyptian supply ship ferrying supplies to the Egyptian troops that Israel was then fighting. When it discovered the error, it immediately informed the Americans, apologized and paid compensation to the victims' families.
The incident was investigated by inquiry commissions in both Israel and the United States, and both concluded that it had, indeed, been a tragic error. Nevertheless, the controversy never died. In 1979, one of the survivors, James Ennes, published a book accusing Israel of bombing the American ship deliberately. Ennes claimed an Israeli spy plane had hovered over the ship all morning and had surely identified it as American, since the American flag was clearly visible.
A later book, written by James Bamford, charged that Israel sank the ship in order to keep America from learning of its plans to attack Syria, and further claimed that the NSA had tapes of conversations among Israeli pilots that not only confirmed this, but also proved that the tapes released by Israel had been doctored.
Another claim that appears frequently on the dozens of Internet sites devoted to the affair is that Israel sank the ship to conceal a mass murder of Egyptian soldiers on the Sinai peninsula.
In its letter to Cristol, the NSA stressed that, contrary to the claims that often appear in such books and Web sites - that the agency has tapes from both the Liberty and from a nearby American submarine that confirm Israel's guilt - the only tapes that exist were those made by the spy plane and given to Cristol this week.
"It's the last piece of intelligence that remained classified, and every rational person that will read it will understand that there is no truth in these conspiracy theories against Israel," Cristol said Tuesday. But he added: "Those who hate Israel, who hate Jews, and those who believe in conspiracy will not be convinced by anything."
Cristol, a former U.S. navy pilot and legal officer, began investigating the Liberty incident 14 years ago. Since publishing his book, which vindicates Israel, he has received threats and been accused of being an Israeli agent. "I take this lightly, but I am saddened to learn that there is this kind of hate toward Israel," he said.
This poor writer has not gone mano a mano with conspiracy theorists, I fear. To them, the absence of evidence is... proof of a cover-up!
Also, kind of a reach to say that it's a controversy between Israel and the United States. The United States (meaning the government) has understood and accepted that this was an error all along. Remember, that these transcripts (or the key information in them) would have been before LBJ literally in minutes. No, the controversy is between Israel and the US on the one hand, and people who have blind faith in the conspiracies on the other.
Why didn't some members of the crew believe that the attack was an accident? Well, think about it. You are wounded, your ship blown to bits, your shipmates killed horribly. You aren't going to feel good about it, and you might be very disinclined to accept an apology. (Lots of Iranians felt the same way when we accidentally creamed one of their airliners in the late eighties -- as did many Japanese when one of our subs blindly slammed into a ship full of kids and sent it to the bottom a few years ago).
Accidents happen, in peace and in war, and even the greatest military organisations just plain blow it. Frequently.
Sorry about that.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Geez. I guess the NSA was taken over by the zog, somehow :))).
From an accuracy perspective, a first person account is just one of the raw materials of understanding. That's why, even though I read all the official after action reports from Operation Gothic Serpent, all the award writeups (including those that were not awarded or were downgraded), most of the message traffic, and spent an entire day debriefing one of the key players at the JOC, I really didn't have a good picture of the battle until I read Mark Bowden's Blackhawk Down. (Actually, his newspaper series, but that was the core of the book).
What's more, Mike Durant said (in his excellent In the Company of Heroes) that he didn't understand until he read Mark's book either, and he said most of the other participants also appreciated the book. (For those who don't know, Durant was a key player in the battle on 4-5 October, 1993).
You see, Mark wasn't involved in the battle, and he was able to talk to damn near everybody and get an overview of what was happening. That's why his book is one of the finest works of military history/reporting ever written -- and that's why every-damn-body in SF, 160th SOAR, and Rangers has a copy.
When you are in combat your horizon is very small. I would bet that the radioman people have mentioned knew lots of stuff other sailors didn't know, because he worked in the radio room. But because radio rooms are usually windowless, he didn't know a lot of stuff other sailors knew... just for one example.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Even *if* a flag was seen, that doesn't finally establish the identity of the ship.
In this case the Israelis had word from the US that there were no US ship in the area. ergo probable hostile
More likely than the IDF deliberately targeted a US ship was they were set up by someone in the US government who wanted the pro-Israel US policy changed.
Eh. How about 1967, when they outnumbered the Israeli Navy five to one? How about 1967, when their responce to Israel's largest ship, the destroyer Eilat, was to hound and harry it with torpedo boats until they finally sank it with great loss of life [47 KIA, 91 seriously wounded/burned] off Port Said? (This was only the second successful antiship missile attack in history -- the Germans pulled one off on the Italian Roma in WWII).
By the way, after 1967 it was the Israelis who gave up their dream of having a proper blue-water navy, and depend on little patrol boats and aircraft alone for maritime defence.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
a Charles F Adams class destroyer (the standard US Navy destroyer class of the time) as North Vietnamese They should have known the difference....and probably did.
How about the survivors with purple hearts?
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