posted 10-24-2003 12:20 AM            

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20031023/ap_on_go_ot/spy_ship_israel_4

posted 10-24-2003 07:01 AM            

All you need to know right here...
http://ussliberty.org/

Did Israel know the ship it was firing on 36 years ago—here, after the attack, listing from a deadly torpedo hit—was the USS Liberty? Today, top former U.S. intelligence officials are saying "Yes."

On 8 June 1967 the electronic intelligence ship USS Liberty (AGTR-5) was on station in international waters 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean. The Arab-Israeli War had wound down, the air was clear, and the seas were light. What happened early that Thursday afternoon is well known. Without warning, a furious attack on the ship commenced from Israeli Mirage and Mystere jets, followed by Ayah-class motor torpedo boats (MTBs). Employed were rockets, napalm, quick-firing 30-mm and 40-mm cannon, .50-caliber machine guns, and torpedoes. Four unshielded .50-caliber machine guns were the Liberty's only defense. The one Israeli torpedo hit of five launched left a yawning 40-foot hole in the hull, devastating the cryptological spaces below decks and killing 25 U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) technicians instantly.

Later, 821 shell holes were counted in the ship's superstructure and hull. A total of 34 men died, with another 172 wounded, many disfigured for life, among the highest peacetime tolls for any noncombatant U.S. Navy vessel and by far the worst single loss to the U.S. intelligence community. It seems a miracle the ship did not go down.1

Revisiting the Incident

In December 2002, the Naval Historical Center hosted a presentation on the still deeply controversial attack by Federal Judge and retired U.S. Naval Reserve Captain A. Jay Cristol, on a promotional tour for his recent book, The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship. Based on Judge Cristol's doctoral thesis, the book relies heavily on newly declassified (or newly interpreted) documents and more than 500 interviews with U.S. and Israeli political and military leaders involved in the incident, including former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Admiral Isaac Kidd, and Yitzhak Rabin, who was the Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff at the time. Only seven of the interviewees, however, were on board the Liberty during the attack.2

At the Washington Navy Yard's Education Center, Judge Cristol addressed a full house that included active-duty U.S. Navy personnel and surviving Liberty crew members. He argued that the evidence "in totality" validated Israel's long-standing position: namely, the catastrophe was the bitter fruit of mistaken identity and communications gaffes by both sides.3 The U.S. government quickly accepted Israel's apology 36 years ago, if not its explanation.4 Israel also settled death and injury claims, albeit reluctantly. And in 1980, the United States received $6 million in compensation for the $40-million intelligence ship.

The Liberty Incident contains considerable, largely Israeli-sourced detail. It also includes a chapter called "Television's Perspective," in which the author surmises that most survivors—some of whom openly criticize Israel's domestic policies and its formidable Washington lobby—have a political ax to grind.

Judge Cristol, with 38 years' naval service, mourns the mens' deaths and injuries, and his book honors their courage. But like the Israeli government, the judge is dubious of the nay sayers. They rely on "conjecture, hearsay and plain wishful thinking," flawed or traumatized memories, and "various conspiracy theories," he says.5

No Bigots

Such characterizations, along with the linking of Liberty veterans with Arab extremists and racist groups, sit poorly with the ship's crew. Indeed, the Internet Web site of the Liberty Veterans' Association (LVA) makes clear that all bigots' support is unwelcome.6 The suggestion of prejudice especially upsets Jewish survivors, such as the senior engineering officer, George Golden, who received the Silver Star for directing heroic efforts to keep the ship afloat. And James Ennes Jr., the LVA historian and spokesman accused in Judge Cristol's book of taking "an irrationally harsh line against Israel," refers to such assertions as "just silly."7

Ennes, a retired Navy lieutenant commander, was officer of the deck before being badly wounded early in the attack. He devoted 13 years' research toward his own book, Assault on the Liberty. Some half-dozen major—and many minor—disagreements mark the dispute's two main schools: Judge Cristol's "mistaken identity" and Ennes's, the crew's, and several U.S. intelligence professionals' "deliberate attack."

More Inquiries

Since 1967, survivors have pleaded for a more far-reaching government inquiry into the incident. But Judge Cristol argues that another would be a waste of time. Some 13 already have been conducted (five by Congress, one by the U.S. Navy, and several by Israel). And according to Cristol, while typically citing recklessness or inefficiency, all exonerate the Israeli attackers of deliberate intent.

"False!" retorts Ennes. Of the 13 investigations cited by Judge Cristol, Ennes observes, "Most were not investigations. . . . They were merely reports to the boss from advisors . . . (and) mostly summaries and excerpts of the Naval Court of Inquiry report."8

Clark Clifford, Chairman of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, drafted one such inquiry. Judge Cristol characterizes Clifford as angry, but finding Israel innocent of murder. Ennes infers darker meanings from the same document.

"Something had gone terribly wrong," Clifford wrote the President, "and then it had been covered up. I never felt the Israelis had made adequate restitution or explanation for their . . . unprovoked actions." Clifford also termed "unbelievable" the explanation that the attack was accidental. The Liberty's spotters, for example, had picked out the MTBs' small hull marks, yet the Israeli attackers claimed never to have seen the U.S. ship's much larger ones. Clifford, an intimate of Johnson's and champion of Israel, urged the attackers be "punished," as did U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, noting there was "every reason to believe that the USS Liberty was identified, or at least her nationality determined . . . one hour before the attack."9

But instead of punishing the attackers, Israel honors them in a museum. Told of the display, retired Air Force Major General John Morrison, NSA deputy director for operations at the time, commented, "I am offended by that." And retired Army Lieutenant General William Odom, NSA director from 1985 to 1988, and also unaware of the display, remarked, "I am astonished that Israel should put glory on the people who killed my SigInt-ers [signals intelligence personnel]."10 The Liberty's blood-stained flag is exhibited at the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Disputed Timelines and Communications

Although Liberty crew members insist the attack lasted about an hour and a quarter, Judge Cristol's book asserts that the Israeli jets and MTBs finished their grisly business in only 22 to 25 minutes.11

Ennes recalls being unsettled by the numerous flights over the Liberty by Israeli reconnaissance planes, starting the previous night and continuing for a six-hour period preceding the assault. Trained U.S. Navy observers counted a dozen overflights. Some were made by a lumbering, Star-of-David-marked Nord Noratlas "flying boxcar," which pulled several times to within mast-clipping range—low enough for any Israeli pilot to see a vessel incapable of harming his country.

Melvin Smith, senior enlisted intercept chief, reassured Ennes when he overheard the pilots several times identify the flag as U.S. and the ship for what she was.12 At that time, of course, Israel was a friend. Later, despite jamming of the ship's distress frequencies, and before all her transmitters were shot away, the Liberty's radio operators managed again to hear the attackers make a positive identification in the clear.13 Judge Cristol, conceding his newly released Israeli transcripts reveal one correct identification, states that they are confusing and mutually contradictory—typical of the "fog of war."14 Further, citing Ennes, he states that no Hebrew linguists were on board the spy ship, and that Israeli pilots would not have made unencrypted transmissions.15

Ennes acknowledges that no "official" Hebrew linguists were on board, but he points out that at least one of the doomed NSA men, Russian/Arabic linguist Allen Blue, understood Hebrew.16 As for the jamming, Ennes, quoting Chief Radioman Wayne Smith and an article in Proceedings, also notes that the ship could not have been misidentified, because the frequencies jammed were peculiar to the U.S. Navy. Liberty Radioman Richard "Rocky" Sturman also recalls that he and other technicians heard the radio jamming.17 Judge Cristol rejects such accounts as "myth."18

The Flag Issue

Again echoing Israel and citing its reports, Judge Cristol declares that no U.S. flag was visible. He points to film footage of the intact Liberty, taken at an unknown time from a slow-flying helicopter, which reveals no flag. He refers also to gun-camera stills from one of the attacking Israeli jets. These grainy images show billowing smoke "going straight up," indicating the flag was limp.19 To Judge Cristol, it is therefore unrealistic to think young, inexperienced pilots could have seen any flag, especially at 600 miles per hour.20

An Israeli motor torpedo boat passes close alongside the Liberty during the attack.

U.S. NAVY

Ennes, who maintained logs about such details, disagrees. He says that even at the Liberty's slowest steaming speed of 5 knots, the wind put 12 knots across Old Glory and kept it waving.21 Since the ship was near a combat zone, the crew also was ordered to keep "head's-up" by then-Commander William McGonagle, the ship's captain. Ensuring unfurled colors was a given. And after the normal flag was shot down early on, McGonagle ordered signalmen to hoist the bright new holiday ensign, measuring 7-by-13 feet.

In a January 2003 radio interview, Signalman Joe Meadors described the flag as fluttering each of several times he observed it during the attack.22 No survivor who glanced toward either flag at this time remembers it otherwise. Regardless, Judge Cristol—whose book offers "pilots' eye view" drawings—insists that even this gaudy parade standard would have appeared "tiny" to high-speed jet pilots.

Retired Navy Commander Tom Schaaf is a combat-tested jet aviator. He attended the Navy Yard lecture, and afterward queried Judge Cristol. Schaaf disbelieves the claimed 600 mile-per-hour speed for the attacking aircraft, adding in a written critique that pilots would have viewed a lot more detail than disclosed in film clips. Post-lecture answers suggest Judge Cristol flew the Navy's slowest propeller aircraft and has not seen combat. "He has no competence to analyze or discuss jet attack tactics," Schaaf concluded.23

The El Quseir

Since 1967, Israeli spoksmen have insisted the Israeli pilots had confused the Liberty with the El Quseir, a 1920s-vintage Egyptian horse cavalry transport said to have been in the area.24 Judge Cristol accepts this. Those same inexperienced airmen unable to notice the ship's flag and unique hull markings, he maintains, easily could have mistaken the Liberty for the Egyptian transport. Indeed, before the attack, Israeli headquarters had wrongly reported that some "enemy vessel" was shelling the coast from near the Liberty's position.25 To illustrate a resemblance, Cristol pairs the ships in silhouette drawings. He shows them, however, as the same size. (In fact, the El Quesir's length was 275 feet to the Liberty's 455.)26 Judge Cristol's text notes the actual difference, but opines that in the heat of battle such mistakes are plausible.

The Liberty's crewmen deem insulting the notion that arguably the world's most electronically advanced ship could be confused with one of its most pedestrian vessels. In this, they join Dean Rusk, Clark Clifford, and other senior U.S. officials, as well as author and historian James Bamford, whose NSA history, Body of Secrets, devotes a chapter to the Liberty.27

The skipperof the ship, Commander William McGonagle, who received the Medal of Honor, surveys the damage.
.


U.S. NAVY

Principally, the El Quseir lacked the U.S. ship's unique add-ons, which included, both topside, an 18-foot-wide satellite dish nearly as tall as the smokestack and a wading pool-sized microwave dish. The ship bristled, as well, with video capture antennae and other exotica found on no other vessel in the world, much less decrepit Arab transport ships.28 Ancillary reasons the "deliberate school" rejects Judge Cristol's El Quseir defense are as follows: The Egyptian craft

Flew colors markedly dissimilar to the U.S. flag
Was one-quarter of the Liberty's tonnage and just nearly half her length
Had been out of service for many months
Was waiting to be scrapped in Alexandria
Was illustrated—along with the Liberty—in Jane's Fighting Ships, to which Israel had access29
In addition, the Egyptian Naval Attache's office in Washington says El Quseir was painted silver, not the Liberty's battleship grey.30 It is highly unlikely, NSA officials on board and off explain, that Israel's hypervigilant spy agencies would be unacquainted with these facts.31 This suggests a question: why assault so concertedly an unthreatening old Egyptian transport (not to say an unarmed U.S. Navy ship) when she could be escorted to Haifa as a war prize (and the U.S. ship signaled to quit the area)?

Attack on the Life Rafts

After the attack, Commander McGonagle, his leg shredded and bleeding, yet still at the conn, gave the "prepare to abandon ship" order. (For his actions that day, he received the Medal of Honor. The award certificate does not mention Israel.) Concurrently, the MTBs circled to within 40 or 50 feet. Then, over a 40-minute span, according to U.S. Navy eyewitnesses, the boats' gunners loosed heavy automatic weapons at stretcher bearers, fire-control teams, and other men still upright on the decks.

The Liberty's motor whale boat had been destroyed, and few life rafts survived. But Lieutenant Lloyd Painter (Ennes's relief as officer of the deck) organized three undamaged ones and kicked them over the gunwales. Two were shot to pieces immediately in the water, the third hauled aboard one of the torpedo boats.32 At this distance, Ennes emphasizes, the large bow and stern marks on the freshly painted ship were unmistakable. The designator number "5" was 6 1/2 feet high and "GTR," four feet. Her name was in 18-inch lettering, in English.33

Judge Cristol quotes Lieutenant Painter's testimony to the naval hearing only on the rafts' casting away.34 He ignores what came next. This act alone, the U.S. sailors charge, proves deliberate intent to destroy a U.S. ship and leave no witnesses.35 (In 1986, Navy legal expert Lieutenant Commander Walter Jacobsen agreed, arguing in The Naval Law Review that it was also a war crime.36) Notwithstanding the gravity of these accusations, Judge Cristol leaves aside both the life raft matter and the attack's international legal ramifications. Israel insists that all shooting ceased immediately after the torpedo attack.37

The Liberty limps into Malta with a torpedo hole at her waterline and other holes in her hull and superstructure from aircraft fire.

U.S. NAVY

Explaining how either ship could have lobbed naval artillery shells 13-plus miles onto the war-wracked Sinai coast, Judge Cristol and the Israeli government again cite "fog of war." They declare that Israeli commanders had confused an exploding ammunition dump near Sharm el Sheikh with a coastal bombardment.38

Judge Cristol points out other areas of confusion. For example, the Liberty was identified correctly early in the morning, but then the error cycle kicked in anew when the marker was moved from a plotting table in Tel Aviv. Liberty spokesmen bristle at such "excuses." Moved markers or no, Israeli intelligence would have charted every ship then in the eastern Mediterranean: Arab, Russian, and U.S. The Liberty was the region's only blue-water U.S. Navy vessel.

Weeks after the attack, this "mistaken identity" feature—along with a half-dozen other disparities between the crewmens' and Israel's positions—was outlined for the Legal Advisor's Office by State Department lawyer Carl Salans.39 As Judge Cristol points out, the Top Secret report (released in 1983) drew no conclusions per se.40 But Liberty survivors see its stark comparisons as a refutation of Israel's position. Ennes terms the report "devastating."41

Perhaps the widest chasm separating the "mistakens" from the "deliberates" is the Naval Court of Inquiry. Ordered convened a week after the event by Commander-in-Chief Naval Forces Europe, Admiral John McCain, and headed by Rear Admiral Kidd, the hearing is dubbed "remarkably competent (and) thorough" by Judge Cristol, "a doctored sham" by the veterans.42 The judge stresses that 14 seamen spoke at the hearing. But ship's officers Ennes, Painter, Golden, and others charge that in dozens of cases, sworn testimony damaging to Israel's case was not allowed or, if allowed, not entered into evidence or made part of the transcript. Thus, Ennes and the LVA charge, the court's Findings of Fact often were unsupported by the evidence, contravening Navy rules of procedure.43

Charles Rowley, electronic intelligence specialist and ship's photographer, states that a photo he had made during the attack was seized by the naval court without explanation and marked "Top Secret." It showed the U.S. flag extended.44 Ennes avers not only that his testimony went unentered but also that deck and weather log entries in his hand were altered. Written observations had correctly mirrored others' to the time he was shot, he recounts, namely: multiple, close preattack overflights by Israeli reconnaissance planes, the attack by unmarked jets, and the U.S. flag standing out continually.45 Rather than adduce and document facts, former cryptologic technician Joe Lentini stated recently, the naval hearing helped Israel "get away with murder."46

Joe Meadors, Liberty signalman, observed at the Navy Yard gathering: "The Navy cannot investigate itself." Meanwhile, survivors contest Judge Cristol's statement that "some" had changed their minds after the inquiry, noting that he fails to identify them or crew members he claims agree the attack was an accident. Others also have changed their minds, including Captain Ward Boston, the senior Navy lawyer under pressure to give a peremptory evaluation of the Navy Board of Inquiry. In 2002, Boston dropped a bombshell on Judge Cristol's thesis. He informed Navy Times that Israel had knowingly assaulted the Liberty and has worked ever since to "try to get out of it." As surprising, he said, was that the court's president, Rear Admiral Kidd, shared this view, but owing to political pressure from Washington announced the opposite conclusion to the media. "Officers," Boston remarked, "obey orders." Boston explained in the interview that he was speaking now in part because "everyone else is shooting his mouth off."47

Judge Cristol could not explain what might have inspired such candor, although he writes that the late Admiral Kidd had told him that the attack was in error. That is the opposite of what Ennes maintains concerning his "many talks" with Admiral Kidd. Ennes also says that Admiral Kidd urged him and his group to keep pressing for an open congressional probe. Meanwhile, Judge Cristol has Boston recanting his Navy Times statements. In reality, Boston stands firmly behind them.48

Presidential Recall

When the Liberty's technicians finally found an unjammed frequency, they sent a last desperate message to the Sixth Fleet: "Flash Flash Flash. I pass in the blind." Jet fighters launched from the carriers USS America (CVA-66) and Saratoga (CVA-60). It was too late. Here, a dispute hinges on several related, much-argued elements: how many launches, from which aircraft carrier, and when? But most important, why did the President issue an order recalling the aircraft? Whether some planes had nuclear bombs is hotly debated, too.

Survivors speak of the turn-around orders being radio-telephoned direct from the White House and Defense Secretary McNamara to the carrier group in the Mediterranean Sea. Judge Cristol answers that such "secure" communications were impossible in 1967. This is misleading, the head of the Liberty's 94-man NSA contingent says. Clear —not secure—voice transmissions were used in the recall order, patched through the Naval Security Group relay station in Morocco.49

Otherwise, speculation is rife in this area. Some say President Johnson recalled the planes out of fear the attackers were Russian and a military response could trigger World War III. Others say the President, who at one stage believed Egypt had attacked the Liberty, was prepared to "nuke" Cairo. Still others believe LBJ, on learning the culprits were Israeli, would not retaliate for political reasons.

A final aspect of the Judge Cristol treatise, although not part of the point/counterpoint, has engendered the survivors' special disdain. The judge all but ignores them. Of 500-plus interviews conducted over more than a decade, only seven were with crewmen.50 "If he spoke to us," says Ennes, "it would blow his thesis out of the water—as the Israelis tried to do with our ship." He adds, "Not a single one of us agrees with Cristol."51 Judge Cristol replies that survivor/witnesses are not objective. And, unlike Ennes, he "writes history, not memoirs."

None of this may matter, because official support for the crew remains nonexistent. But growing numbers of former senior government and military officials have begun speaking out. Among those in support of the ship's 200-plus survivors, in addition to those mentioned previously and in the accompanying sidebar, are: former Chief of Naval Operations and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer, then CIA Director Richard Helms, then-NSA Director Marshall Carter, Carter's Deputy Louis Tordella (who wrote on the Israeli Navy's report, "A nice whitewash!"), NSA "Liberty incident" analyst Walter Deeley, and Hayden Peake, professor of intelligence history at the Joint Military Intelligence College and retired CIA officer.52

Why, Judge Cristol was asked at the Navy Yard, did his conclusions run so afoul of such seniors? He answered that although they were respectable men, their contradictions baffled him. In general, he suggests that because theirs are not firsthand knowledge, contrarian officials' statements may, like the survivors', be dismissed.53

Judge Cristol is not without his admirers. He counts (besides numerous Israeli officials, Israeli Defense Force officers, and other partisans) former CIA Director Admiral Stansfied Turner and the carrier America's captain, late Vice Admiral Donald Engen.54 But the supernova in this galaxy is Secretary McNamara. Quoted by Judge Cristol as seeing only "tragic error," McNamara's stock answer when queried by other Liberty researchers is, "I remember nothing about the incident."

Will the Liberty remain a sort of "Flying Dutchman," sailing forever around her poor men's souls? Until survivors get what they call "justice"—that elusive open forum—it seems her restless ghost will do just that.

Background on the attack is largely from James Ennes Jr., Assault on the Liberty: The True Story of the Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship (New York: Random House, 1979, updated version, Gathersburg, MD: Reintree Press Ed., Signature Books, 2002). back to article
A. Jay Cristol, The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship (Dulles, VA: Brassey's, 2002). back to article
Cristol lecture, Education Center, Washington Navy Yard, Washington, DC, 17 February 2002. back to article
Ennes, Assault, Appendix S. back to article
Cristol, Incident, pp. 199, 201. back to article
Web site: ussliberty.com. Since the Liberty Veterans' Association's founding in 1982, survivors have petitioned Congress and successive administrations to probe the attack, invite them to testify openly on what they witnessed, then publicly release the full text. The government refuses. back to article
Cristol, Incident, p. 97, and radio interview, Cristol, Ennes, Joe Meadors, Pacifica Radio KPFK, Los Angeles, 29 January 2003. back to article
Ennes e-mail to author, 14 February 2003. back to article
Clifford Report to the White House, July 1967, and Dean Rusk demarche to Israeli Ambassador Avraham Harmon, 10 June 1967, in Ennes, Assault, Appendix S. Clifford Report, cited in Cristol, Incident, notes, p. 263. back to article
Cristol, "The Liberty Incident," Ph.D. diss., University of Miami, 1997, p. 331, photo and caption. The wheel and bell of MTB-203, which launched the fatal torpedo, are displayed in Haifa's Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum. Interview, MGen. John Morrison, USAF (Ret.), 3 March 2003. Interview, former NSA Director LGen. William Odom, USA (Ret.), 26 March 2003. back to article
Cristol, Incident, pp. 55, 58. back to article
Ennes, e-mail 9 March 2003. CPO Melvin Smith was killed shortly thereafter. back to article
Ennes, e-mail, 3 March 2003. back to article
Cristol, Incident, p. 88. Judge Cristol also writes (p. 181) that the Israelis had "little knowledge" of warships they were not encountering in battle. He says if anything, the U.S. ship more likely would have been (and at one stage was) confused with a Russian electronic intelligence "trawler" (see pp. 49-50). The implications of an Israeli attack on a Soviet vessel in peacetime require no elucidation. back to article
Cristol, Incident, pp. 25, 109, 118. Ennes, e-mail, 13 March 2003: "Israeli and American pilots routinely broadcast in the clear. I don't believe there was (any) airborne encryption capability in 1967." back to article
Ennes, e-mail, 3 March and 9 March 2003. Cristol, Incident, p. 137, citing a letter to him from an unnamed NSA Hebrew linguist on board an EC-121, which James Bamford's NSA history—Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 2001)—first revealed was circling overhead. back to article
Richard Sturman, e-mail, 8 March 2003. See also Ennes, Assault, Addendum, p. 10, and Richard Smith, "The Violation of the Liberty," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 1978, note 10. Ennes e-mail, 13 March 2003 also notes that the Naval Court of Inquiry documented the radio frequencies' jamming. back to article
Cristol, Incident, p. 43. back to article
Cristol, Incident, pp. 73-84. back to article
Cristol, Incident, p. 180. back to article
Cristol, Incident, p. 75. back to article
Interview, Joe Meadors, Pacifica Radio KPFK, Los Angeles, 29 January 2003. back to article
Schaaf critique, quoted in Ennes e-mail, 3 February 2003. back to article
Cristol, Incident, pp. 54-55, 81. back to article
Cristol, Incident, pp. 34-35, 38. back to article
Cristol, Incident, p. 154. Two detailed diagrams (pp. 49, 56) show the sun, azimuth references, MTB positions and other indicia, but the Liberty's bow marks are backward, and her stern's are absent altogether. back to article
Bamford, Secrets, pp. 185-239. back to article
Bamford, Secrets, pp. 176, 207. back to article
Ennes, e-mail, 4 March 2003. back to article
Unnamed Egyptian officer, 18 February 2003. back to article
NSA Deputy Director Oliver Kirby, interview, 18 February 2003. On Israeli intelligence: "They're really good." back to article
Ennes, Assault, Addendum (2002), p. 18. Five witnesses "are willing to testify under oath" to this. back to article
Ennes, e-mail 3 February 2003. back to article
Cristol, Incident, pp. 57, 180. The book notes only that a "damaged" raft was "recovered" by an MTB. back to article
Lentini, Painter, et, al., interviews, "Dead in the Water," BBC-4 television documentary, 2001. back to article
LCdr. Walter Jacobsen, USN, "A Juridical Examination of the Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty," Naval Law Review, Winter 1986, p. 51. Cristol lecture, 17 Dec. 2002. Answering a question about life raft witness Lt. Lloyd Painter: "It's a new story from 10 years after the attack." He added, "I believe what Painter said in the (naval court) record." back to article
Ennes, Assault, p. 158, note 10, quoting Israeli Commission of Inquiry of 16 June 1967, the so-called Ram Ron Report. back to article
Cristol, Incident, p. 33. back to article
Ennes, Assault, Addendum, p. 14. The report was released in 1983 after a long, expensive court case filed by a Liberty supporter. back to article
Cristol, Incident, p. 94. back to article
Ennes, Assault, Addendum, p. 14. back to article
Cristol, Incident, p. 151, Ennes, e-mail, 3 February 2003. back to article
Ennes, Assault, Addendum, p. 8. back to article
Ennes, Assault, Addendum, p. 19. back to article
Ennes, e-mail, 12 March 2003. back to article
Television documentary, "Dead in the Water." No shipmate is known to contest Lentini's view. back to article
Navy Times, 26 June 2002. The same article quotes then-CIA Director Richard Helms on 29 May telling the reporter the attack "was no mistake." This directly contradicts Judge Cristol and an agency report from 13 June 1967, backing Israel's mistaken-identity claim. back to article
Ennes, e-mail, 21 March 2003. No evidence exists that Boston went public until he talked to Navy Times and no sign of a reversal. back to article
Cristol, Incident, p. 98. Interview with LCdr. David Lewis, USN (Ret.), head of the Liberty's 195-man NSA contingent, 28 February 2003. Despite Lewis's senior rank and position, "No one asked me to testify" at the naval hearing. Lewis was among the wounded. back to article
Ennes, e-mail, 3 February 2003. Most of these were perfunctory exchanges at a 1992 veterans' happy hour and not interviews, Ennes points out. back to article
Ennes, e-mail, 3 February 2003. back to article
Bamford, Secrets, and Ennes, Assault. The skipper had always held his tongue. But besides the "deliberate" remark in 1998 in an oral history (see Bamford, p. 233) a few months before dying in 2001 he asked President George W. Bush to look into the attack. Retired Captain William McGonagle was ignored. Peake quoted in The Intelligencer, Summer 2001, that "common sense" ruled out an accident. back to article
Ennes, e-mail, 21 March 2003. back to article
Cristol, Incident, book jacket endorsements. back to article
Mr. Walsh is a freelance writer and photographer headquartered in the Washington, D.C., area. He has worked as a consultant on segments concerning the USS Liberty for CBS News's "60 Minutes" and Britain's Thames Television.

Former NSA Officials Agree
David C. Walsh
The jamming of unique U.S. frequencies during the Liberty incident seems to establish deliberate intent. And in exclusive interviews with this author, several former high-level National Security Agency (NSA) officials agree.

On 14 February 2003, the "godfather" of the NSA's Auxiliary General Technical Research program, Oliver Kirby, noted that the Liberty was "my baby." Within weeks of the calamity, Kirby, deputy director for operations/production, read U.S. signals intelligence (SigInt)-generated transcripts and "staff reports" at NSA's Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters. They were of Israeli pilots' conversations, recorded during the attack. The intercepts made it "absolutely certain" they knew it was a U.S. ship, he said. Kirby's is the first public disclosure by a top-level NSA senior of deliberate intent based on personal analyses of SigInt material.

In an interview on 24 February 2003, retired Air Force Major General John Morrison, the agency's then-second-in-command (and Kirby's successor), said he had been informed at the time of Kirby's findings and endorsed them. Former NSA Director retired Army Lieutenant General William Odom said on 3 March 2003 said that, on the strength of such data, the attack's deliberateness "just wasn't a disputed issue" within the agency. On 5 March 2003, retired Navy Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, NSA director from 1977-1981, said he "flatly rejected" the Cristol/Israeli thesis. "It is just exceedingly difficult to believe that [the Liberty] was not correctly identified." He said this was based on his talks with NSA seniors at the time having direct knowledge. All four were unaware of any agency official at that time or later who dissented from the "deliberate" conclusion.

back to top

Tell a Friend about This Page

posted 10-24-2003 03:15 PM            

Israel would never be terrorists.

It's only those "brown people" that worship Allah.

Israel would never do that.

YEAHH.....RIGHT!!!!

Mossad doesnt exist either.

posted 10-24-2003 06:03 PM            

Israel was concerned because we were doing intel alright. Only we were finding out what they were really doing ( an unlawful massacre)and they were intercepting the Liberty less the truth be reported.

posted 10-25-2003 03:30 AM            

The ZIONIST Israeli government should FRY for killing our sailors.

posted 10-25-2003 06:15 AM            

Why did Israel attack?

2. It is possible that they were afraid that Liberty might learn and report to the United States that Israeli forces were executing up to 1,000 Egyptian Prisoners of War at El Arish at the very moment that Liberty was just 13 miles off shore.

We are frequently asked, "Why did Israel attack?"
The fact is, we may never know until they tell us, and what they tell us may or may not be true. We know it was deliberate. We know they knew they were killing Americans. We must speculate about the reasons for that decision. But some distinct possibilities are frequently presented by experienced and knowledgeable people.

We were an intelligence ship and they were doing something that they did not want the US to know about. One popular writer of Jewish fear-literature, John Loftus, writes in "The Secret War Against the Jews" that Israel attacked deliberately because Israeli authorities believed that USS Liberty was relaying Israeli war plans to Egypt in order to assure the destruction of the Jewish State. That is patently ridiculous, but widely accepted even in Israel. Loftus claims to have documented his position through interviews with long lists of "retired old spies" whom he refuses to identify. While Loftus may be correct about Israeli paranoia, he is totally wrong about Liberty's mission. Liberty's primary mission was to collect intelligence on the Soviet forces in the area. The ship didn't even have a qualified Hebrew linguist aboard. So why did they attack?

Intelligence analysts agree that they attacked because they feared we might learn something that they did not want the United States to know. That could have been

1. The planned invasion of the Golan Heights which was set to start a few hours after Liberty's arrival in the area. When Liberty arrived, the invasions was postponed for 24 hours, Israel was attacked, and the invasion took place the next day, or,

2. It is possible that they were afraid that Liberty might learn and report to the United States that Israeli forces were executing up to 1,000 Egyptian Prisoners of War at El Arish at the very moment that Liberty was just 13 miles off shore.

Israeli apologists dismiss this story as untrue. Israeli historian Michael Oren in his book "Six Days of War" and in published articles has dismissed the claim as untrue claiming that, if it were true, there would be mass graves and great outcries from Egypt for justice.

Behold! There are mass graves and there are cries for justice.

Attention is invited to

CNN reporting on the subject which reports mass the mass graves
http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/9509/mass_graves/

and a TIME Magazine story which reports the outcry
http://www.time.com/time/international/1995/951002/middleeast.html

More on the atrocity can be found at

/washrp96.txt

posted 10-25-2003 12:06 PM            

One popular writer of Jewish fear-literature, John Loftus, writes in "The Secret War Against the Jews" that Israel attacked deliberately because Israeli authorities believed that USS Liberty was relaying Israeli war plans to Egypt in order to assure the destruction of the Jewish State

posted 10-25-2003 01:48 PM            

I've always found you reasonable. And there are other issues concerning the sovereignty of the U.S that I've wanted to discuss with you. G.W Bush is no friend of conservatives. My background is ultra conservative (once upon a time republican)it took a lot of research and evidence for me to come around to the realization that there is real truth to this NWO conspiracy and left/right is not what it seems.

Please just keep looking for truth, and don't let the insanity of the left close your mind to it. That was the biggest hurdle for me, I mean...those lefties are so wrong we must be right, right?. Not so. Constitution is the only litmus test and the way to go, the rest is just so much window dressing. Individualism (true conservatism) is still preferred to collectivism (true socialism) but Republicans and Democrats are simply different passengers on the same ship on the same path to globalization. Research CFR, Trilateral Commission, Fabians, UN agenda. John Birch Society has some great documentation.

posted 10-25-2003 08:41 PM            

Speaking of the John Birchers they are a decent society that aims to inform in every community the voting history and intentions of every sitting representative. I use to be one but I'm more of an individual with different ideas on how to do stuff. I actually turned down a salary job going around and speaking and informing U.S. citizens on all their constitutional rights and so on. I don't have the patience to deal with a lot of nitwits face to face. I had people accuse us of being a racist orginization if you can believe that which turned me off to educating some mighty stupid folk. I eventually left because I hammer on other things now and don't really like to follow anybody, isn't individualism great.

posted 10-25-2003 08:48 PM            

Then related what he had discovered in the archives after Clinton opened them up to public access.

Now onto another (on topic author)

James Bamford's authorized history of the NSA.
ISBN 0-385-49908-6

Relates in pages 182-184 the illegal trip into The Republic of the Congo by the USS Liberty.
When the government of that nation realized an unathorized visit by a spy ship was in progress they atttempted to blockade the Congo river.
PP184:
(paraphrased)the ship went dark, the anchor was raised,
the ship headed downstream towards the legal blockade,
engines were started;
the ship gathered speed:
"..ramming the fragile boats and sending Congolese men and women tumbling into the dark dangerous river."

Dozens of law abiding Congolese citizens were crushed under the bow of the USS Liberty or killed by the churning propeller as they swam for their lives.

Whatever damage, or however many lives were lost, by the Isralie attack on the Liberty.
They didn't do enough to repay these murderers.

The USS Liberty was surely cursed by God after the Congo river murders

and deserving of any retribution exacted by an equally guilty israel.
(who were executing hundreds of unarmed Arab POW's at the time of the attack)

BTW professor.
Although Welsh and native american in ancestry/ I'm more "black" than "Oreo's" Colin Powell or Condi Rice could ever be.

I still recommend a book by a good friend:

Beaches Blood and Ballots
ISBN 1-57806-278-0
Gilbert R. Mason, MD, with James Patterson Smith http://www.upress.state.ms.us/catalog/fall2000/beaches_blood_ballots.html

And still proud I got the last copy autographed by both, at their last Christmas party/ in an exchange of presents.
(at the home of a former Tuskegee airman/ gulfport MS)

also:
A "true conservative' today would either be a Libertarian
or Like Barry Goldwater in his last days a Democrat.

"I didn't leave them; they left me." Barry Goldwater commenting on why the 'Republican Party' had cast him out.

You a'll consider me a Liberal.

posted 10-26-2003 07:42 AM            

Prof, I'm not a John Bircher either but find them a valuable resource.

Shatoga, the two party system is a trap. The following is just an excerpt, the link contains much more. Of course, a google search would keep you busy for days. Regarding the crew of the USS Liberty being murderer's... I don't know enough about the situation in the Congo to comment. I'll do some reading.

Since its inception, the CFR has served as an intermediary between high finance, big oil, corporate elitists and the U.S. government. The executive branch changes hands between Republican and Democratic administrations, but cabinet seats are always held by CFR members. It has been said by political commentators on the left and on the right that if you want to know what U.S. foreign policy will be next year, you should read Foreign Affairs this year.

The CFR's claim that "The Council has no affiliation with the U.S. government" is laughable. The justification for that statement is that funding comes from member dues, subscriptions to its Corporate Program, foundation grants, and so forth. All this really means is that the U.S. government does not exert any control over the CFR via the purse strings.

In reality, CFR members are very tightly affiliated with the U.S. government. Since 1940, every U.S. secretary of state (except for Gov. James Byrnes of South Carolina, the sole exception) has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and/or its younger brother, the Trilateral Commission. Also since 1940, every secretary of war and every secretary of defense has been a CFR member. During most of its existence, the Central Intelligence Agency has been headed by CFR members, beginning with CFR founding member Allen Dulles. Virtually every key U.S. national security and foreign policy adviser has been a CFR member for the past seventy years.

Almost all White House cabinet positions are occupied by CFR members. President Clinton, himself a member of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, employs almost one hundred CFR members in his administration. Presidents come and go, but the CFR's power--and agenda--always remains.

When it was founded in 1921, the CFR was dominated by J.P. Morgan. Morgan is a Rothschild tentacle. This simply reinforces the obvious, that the CFR is a Rothschild instrument operated by the Rockefellers. The CFR is the immediate progeny of Rhodes' Round Table, which was underwritten by the Rothschilds.

David Rockefeller is the chairman emeritus of the CFR. Rockefeller also founded in 1973, and is honorary chairman of, the Trilateral Commission. In 1979, Barry Goldwater published this treatise on the subject:

from http://www.ptialaska.net/~swampy/illuminati/cfr_2.html:

Goldwater Sees Elitist Sentiments Threatening Liberties
By U.S. Senator Barry M. Goldwater (1979)

In September 1939, two members of the Council on Foreign Relations visited the State Department to offer the council's services.

They proposed to do research and make recommendations for the department without formal assignment or responsibility, particularly in four areas - security armaments, economic and financial problems, political problems, and territorial problems. The Rockefeller Foundation agreed to finance the operation of this plan.

From that day forward, the Council on Foreign Relations has placed its members in policy-making positions with the State Department and other federal agencies. Every Secretary of State since 1944, with the exception of James F. Byrnes, has been a member of the council.

Almost without exception, its members are united by a congeniality of birth, economic status and educational background. The organization itself began in 1919 in Paris when scholars turned their attention to foreign affairs after the end of World War I. It remains a non-governmental private grouping of specialists in foreign affairs.

A number of writers, disturbed by the influential role that this organization has played in determining foreign policy, have concluded that the council and its members are an active part of the communist conspiracy for world domination.

Their syllogistic argument goes like this: the council has dominated American foreign policy since 1945. All American policy decisions have resulted in losses to the communists. Therefore, all members of the council are communist sympathizers.

Many of the policies advocated by the council have been damaging to the cause of freedom and particularly to the United States. But this is not because the members are communists or communist sympathizers. This explanation of our foreign policy reversals is too pat, too simplistic.

I believe that the Council on Foreign Relations and its ancillary elitist groups are indifferent to communism. They have no ideological anchors. In their pursuit of a New World Order, they are prepared to deal without prejudice with a communist state, a socialist state, a democratic state, a monarchy, an oligarchy - it's all the same to them.

Their goal is to impose a benign stability on the quarreling family of nations through merger and consolidation. They see the elimination of national boundaries, the suppression of racial and ethnic loyalties, as the most expeditious avenue to world peace. They believe economic competition is the root cause of international tension.

Perhaps if the council's vision of the future were realized, it would reduce wars, lessen poverty and bring about a more efficient utilization of the world's resources. To my mind, this would inevitably be accompanied by a loss in personal freedom of choice and re-establishment of the restraints that provoked the American revolution.

When we change presidents, it is understood to mean that the voters are ordering a change in national policy. Since 1945, three different Republicans have occupied the White House for 16 years, and four Democrats have held this most powerful post for 17 years. With the exception of the first seven years of the Eisenhower administration, there has been no appreciable change in foreign or domestic policy direction.

There has been a great turnover in personnel, but no change in policy. Example: during the Nixon years, Henry Kissinger, a council member and Nelson Rockefeller protegé, was in charge of foreign policy. When Jimmy Carter was elected, Kissinger was replaced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a council member and David Rockefeller protegé.

Starting in the '30s and continuing through World War II, our official attitude toward the Far East reflected the thinking of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Members of the institute were placed in important teaching positions. They dominated the Asian affairs section of the State Department. Their publications were standard reading material for the armed forces, in most American colleges, and were used in 1,300 public school systems.

The Institute of Pacific Relations was behind the decision to cut off aid to Chiang Kai-Shek unless he embraced the Communists, and the Council on Foreign Relations is the parent organization of the Institute of Pacific Relations.

In 1962, Nelson Rockefeller, in a lecture at Harvard University on the interdependence of nations in the modern world, said: "And so the nation-state, standing alone, threatens in many ways to seem as anachronistic as the Greek city-state eventually became in ancient times."

Everything he said was true. We are dependent on other nations for raw materials and for markets. It is necessary to have defense alliances with other nations in order to balance the military power of those who would destroy us.

Where I differ from Rockefeller is in the suggestion that to achieve this new federalism, the United States must submerge its national identity and surrender substantial matters of sovereignty to a new political order.

The implications in Nelson Rockefeller's presentation have become concrete proposals advanced by David Rockefeller's newest international cabal, the Trilateral Commission.

Whereas the Council on Foreign Relations is distinctly national, representation is allocated equally to Western Europe, Japan and the United States. It is intended to act as the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States.

Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller screened and selected every individual who was invited to participate in shaping and administering the proposed New World Order.

In the late 1950s, Brzezinski, an accepted member of the inner circle of academics, asserting the need for global strategies, was openly anti-communist. By 1964, he had modified his criticism of communism.

In his prospectus describing the Trilateral commission, David Rockefeller said that he intended to bring the best brains of the world together to bear on the problems of the future.

I find nothing inherently sinister in this original proposal, although the name he gave his new creation strikes me as both grandiose and presumptuous. The accepted definition of a commission is a group nominated by some higher authority to perform a specific function.

The Trilateral organization created by David Rockefeller was a surrogate - its members selected by Rockefeller, its purposes defined by Rockefeller, its funding supplied by Rockefeller.

Whether or not the approximately 200 individuals selected for membership on the commission represent the "best brains" in the world is an arguable proposition.

Examination of the membership roster establishes beyond question that all those invited to join were members of the power elite, enlisted with great skill and singleness of purpose from the banking, commercial, political and communications sectors.

Nor was the governmental community over-looked, Invitations to join were extended to Sen. Walter Mondale, Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia, George Ball, Cyrus Vance, Paul Warnke and Reps. Donald Fraser and John Brademas, among others.

In my view, the Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power - political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical.

All this is to be done in the interest of creating a more peaceful, more productive world community. I have no hesitancy about judging its wisdom and the results of its actions.

A report presented at the plenary meeting of the Trilateral Commission in May 1975, at Kyoto, Japan, called for an enlargement of central authority and expressed a lack of confidence in democratically arrived at public decisions.

It also suggested that it would be helpful to impose prior restrictions on the press and to restructure the laws of libel to check the power of the press.

I've suffered as greatly from an abusive press as any man in public life, but I get an itchy, uncomfortable feeling at the base of my spine when someone suggest that government should control the news.

The entire Trilateral Commission approach is strictly economic. No recognition is given to the political condition. Total reliance is placed on materialism. The commission emphasizes the necessity of eliminating artificial barriers to world commerce, tariff, export duties, quota - an objective that I strongly support. What it proposes to substitute is an international economy managed and controlled by international monetary groups.

No attempt has been made to explain why the people of the Western world enjoy economic abundance. Freedom - spiritual, political, economic - is denied any importance in the Trilateral construction of the next century.

The Trilateral Commission even selects and elevates its candidates to positions of political power.

David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski found Jimmy Carter to be an ideal candidate, for example. They helped him win the Democratic nomination and the Presidency.

To accomplish their purpose, they mobilized the money power of the Wall Street bankers, the intellectual influence of the academic community - which is subservient to the wealthy of the great tax-free foundations - and the media controllers represented in the membership of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

It was no accident that Brzezinski and Rockefeller invited Carter to join the commission in 1973. But they weren't ready to bet all their chips on Carter.

They made him a founding member of the commission but to keep their options open, they also brought in Walter Mondale and Elliot Richardson, a highly visible Republican member of the Nixon administration, and they looked at other potential nominees.

After his nomination, Carter chose Mondale as his vice president. He chose Brzezinski as his foreign affairs adviser and Cyrus Vance as his secretary of state.

Accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in New York, Carter denounced those "unholy, self-perpetuating alliances that have formed between money and politics."

The outsider, Carter, had been co-opted by the insiders in the power elite.

the following is an abridged version of a speech given by Senator Jesse Helms (on the Senate floor) on 1987-Dec-15, from the Congressional Record 1987-Dec-15 p.S18146 (et seq), from http://users.itsnet.com/~foodnow/jesse.htm:

This campaign against the American people -against traditional American culture and values - is systematic psychological warfare. It is orchestrated by a vast array of interests comprising not only the Eastern establishment but also the radical left. Among this group we find the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, the money center banks and multinational coporations, the media, the educational establishment, the entertainment industry, and the large tax-exempt foundations.

Mr. President, a careful examination of what is happening behind the scenes reveals that all of these interests are working in concert with the masters of the Kremlin in order to create what some refer to as a New World Order. Private organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, the Dartmouth Conference, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the Atlantic Institute, and the Bilderberger Group serve to disseminate and to coordinate the plans for this so-called New World Order in powerful business, financial, academic, and official circles. . . .

The psychological campaign that I am describing, as I have said, is the work of groups within the Eastern establishment, that amorphous amalgam of wealth and social connections whose power resides in its control over our financial system and over a large portion of our industrial sector. The principal instrument of this control over the American economy and money is the Federal Reserve System. The policies of the Industrial sectors, primarily the multinational corporations, are influenced by the money center banks through debt financing and through the large blocks of stock controlled by the trust departments of the money center banks.

Anyone familiar with American history, and particularly American economic history, cannot fail to notice the control over the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency which Wall Street seems to exercise....

The influence of establishment insiders over our foreign policy has become a fact of life in our time. This pervasive influence runs contrary to the real long-term national security of our Nation. It is an influence which, if unchecked, could ultimately subvert our constitutional order.

The viewpoint of the establishment today is called globalism. Not so long ago, this viewpoint was called the "one-world" view by its critics. The phrase is no longer fashionable among sophisticates; yet, the phrase "one-world" is still apt because nothing has changed in the minds and actions of those promoting policies consistent with its fundamental tenets.

Mr. President, in the globalist point of view, nation-states and national boundaries do not count for anything. Political philosophies and political principles seem to become simply relative. Indeed, even constitutions are irrelevant to the exercise of power. Liberty and tyranny are viewed as neither necessarily good nor evil, and certainly not a component of policy.

In this point of view, the activities of international financial and industrial forces should be oriented to bringing this one-world design - with a convergence of the Soviet and American systems as its centerpiece - into being. . . . All that matters to this club is the maximization of profits resulting from the practice of what can be described as finance capitalism, a system which rests upon the twin pillars of debt and monopoly. This isn't real capitalism. It is the road to economic concentration and to political slavery.

an excerpt from How you became the enemy: America's Military Looks Inward, by Sam Smith, from The Progressive Review:

Of course, just as people really can be out to get paranoids, so even a rampantly misguided military establishment can really face some serious threats. This fact raises America's military myopia from absurdity into the realm of justifiable concern.

An open discussion of such threats, however, is virtually impossible. Even the right to talk about such things is a tightly held prerogative of the mandarin class. The Council of Foreign Relations, a cult-like like organization that journalist Richard Hardwood approvingly calls "the nearest thing to a ruling establishment in America," routinely holds meetings at which participants (including guests) are prohibited from speaking about what transpired.

It's not that one would really want to listen to much of it. The men and women who have designated themselves the guardians of America's future policies are among the most boring and unimaginative folk one finds in Washington. Many are like those described by LBJ as having gone to Princeton and ended up in the CIA because their daddies wouldn't let them into the brokerage firm. Still it is not too comforting to realize that in the quiet places of Washington, the first half of the 21st century (as they never tire of calling what the rest of us call the future) is in the hands of the conceptually dyslectic.

And the media is not about to challenge these folk. One good reason may be found in a 1995 membership roster of the Council on Foreign Relations as reported by Public Information Research. Here are just a few of the media CFRers:

Roone Arledge, Sidney Blumenthal, David Brinkley, Tom Brokaw, William F. Buckley Jr., Hodding Carter III, John Chancellor, Arnaud de Borchgave, Joan Didion, Leonard Downie Jr., Elizabeth Drew, Rowland Evans Jr., James Fallows, Leslie Gelb, David Gergen, Katharine Graham, Meg Greenfield, Jim Hoagland, Warren Hoge, David Ignatius, Robert Kaiser, Marvin Kalb, Joe Klein, Morton Kondrake, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, Jim Lehrer, Anthony Lewis, Michael Lind, Jessica Matthews, Jack Nelson, Walter Pincus, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Rather, Stephen Rosenfeld, A. M. Rosenthal, Diane Sawyer, Hederick Smith, Laurence Tish, Garrick Utley, Katrina vander Heuval, Milton Viorst, Ben Wattenberg, Lally Weymouth, Roger Wilkins, and Mortimer Zuckerman.

Ask any of these people what went on at their last CFR tête-à-tête and you'll probably find their concern for a free press rapidly evaporating. Katherine Graham, for example, once told a CIA gathering: "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't."

There are substantial implications to all this. If, for example, the CFR puts out a report decrying restraints on the CIA, may we infer that the aforementioned concur? If not, how many have publicly stated their disagreement? How, in fact, can we tell what is going on if foreign policy discussions are handled in the manner of meetings of the Masons, Montana Militia, or Skull & Bones?

From The Roundtable Pages, here is a complete list of all 3000 CFR members as of 1992.

Also from The Roundtable Pages, here is a complete list of all 337 Trilateral Commission members, as of 1992.

excerpt from http://www9.pair.com/xpoez/money/shadow.html, "The Shadow Government of the United States and the Decline of America" by Richard D. Eastman (November 1994):

CFR control in government actually began in earnest in 1939 by establishing within the U.S. State Department a "Committee on Post-War Problems", the group (staffed and funded by the CFR) which designed the United Nations. (the story of which is contained in State Dept. Publication 2349-"Report To The President On The Results of the San Francisco Conference").

Since WWII, the CFR has filled key positions in virtually every administration since then. Furthermore, since Eisenhower, every man who has won the nomination for either party (except Goldwater in 1964 and Reagan in 1980) has been a member of the CFR:

Democrats

John W. Davis(1924)
Adlai Stevenson (1952,56)
John F. Kennedy (1960)
Hubert Humphrey (1968)
George McGovern (1972)
Jimmy Carter (1976,80)
Walter Mondale (1984)
Michael Dukakis (1988)
Bill Clinton (1992)
Republicans

Herbert Hoover (1928,32)
Wendell Wilkie (1940)
Thomas Dewey (1944,48)
Dwight Eisenhower (1952,56)
Richard Nixon (1960,68,72)
Gerald Ford (1976)
George Bush (1988,92) (who was also a director of the CFR 1977-1979)
[...]

posted 10-27-2003 02:15 AM            

USS Liberty Attack Was US Operation
From J B Campbell
JBC@wealthkeeper.net
10-25-3

Of course, the attack on the USS Liberty was deliberate. The point is that the attack was designed by Johnson and his Zionist handlers. The Liberty was sent to Gaza to be sunk. This is even hinted in Ennis' book, Assault on the Liberty. Ennis kicked me off the USS Liberty forum in 1997 for pointing this out.

Who can doubt this after learning of not only the cover-up but the actions of Johnson during the attack? He was quoted by a UPI reporter in the war room as saying, "I'd rather they sink the goddamned thing than go against our friends."

The Liberty was deliberately placed in the hot war zone with no protection so that she could be sunk quietly with no witnesses and the massacre blamed on the Egyptians, who could then be attacked not only by Israel but by the US on behalf of Israel.

Israel would have had the green light to attack in all directions with the full support of an enraged American people. If the Liberty had been sunk we can bet the Zionist propaganda mills would have exploded with the news of Egyptian treachery. But when the combined efforts of the Israeli air force and navy failed to sink this unarmed tub, the mills were silent, the atrocity was classified and the Liberty's personnel threatened with prison for talking about the attack.

A cover-up of this magnitude was meant to protect the treacherous American Zionists who planned this war crime - not so much the Israeli butchers.

How could Johnson's orders to allow the ship to be sunk possibly be justified in an investigation? Ordering jet fighters recalled twice while the attack was ongoing? Johnson and McNamara could have been hanged for treason. It's not too late for McNamara.

People, especially the Liberty survivors, do not understand the catastrophic setback for Israel that this botched massacre represented. If the American people could have been told that Egypt sank the Liberty, Eretz (Greater) Israel would have been a reality by 1970. That was the whole idea behind sending the USS Liberty to her fate off Gaza. Zionist rule would have stretched from the Nile to the Euphrates with the full support of the bamboozled American public.

Is there a statute of limitations for treason?

J. B. Campbell

____

From Prof. Sam Hamod
shamod@cox.net
1-25-3

Dear friends,

Another thing that will bolster JB Campbell's position on President Johnson, that he knew of this and let it happen, or even wanted the ship sunk (which I doubt, but even that is possible) is:

1. Nasser wanted to attack israel, but Johnson called him and told him that he'd keep Israel from attacking. Nasser had all of his planes lined up on runways ready to go; his tanks, also. Unfortunately, for history, and for the sake of America and the Arab world and world history, Nasser listened to Johnson and trusted him.

2. The Israelis then attacked shortly after the phone call after Nasser had his people stand down; it was a turkey shoot with the Egyptian military almost entirely destroyed on every front.

3. The USS Liberty would have radioed this information and it would have obligated the Amerians to intervene - but with the ship out of the way, there was no intelligence coming in to the military.

4. Also, someone at the hghest order of command, namely the President, countermanded the military men and called the US planes back that were to go help the Liberty while it was under attack.

I had always admired johnson for his social concerns as a senator and as President, but his behavior in this matter and his behavior in the Viet Nam War show that he was completely in the hands of the military industrial complex and the Zionists.

Sadly,

Prof. Sam Hamod

posted 10-27-2003 06:02 AM            

FROM: James Bamford
TO: Steve Aftergood
DATE: July 25, 2001
SUBJECT: Response to charges made in Secrecy News on July 17, 2001
An item by Steve Aftergood in the July 17, 2001 issue of Secrecy News concerned my new book on the National Security Agency, Body of Secrets. It related to my chapter on Israel's massive, unprovoked, daylight attack on the NSA spy ship USS Liberty in 1967. Thirty-four Americans were killed and another 171 were wounded when Israeli fighters poured into the ship more than 800 rounds of cannon fire, rockets, heavy bombs, and even burning napalm. That was followed by three Israeli PT boats, which fired five torpedoes at the ship, hitting it with one and virtually destroying the vessel. Israeli gunners then fired at the rubber life rafts thrown into the sea by sailors attempting to flee the burning ship. Machine-gun fire was also targeted against the escaping sailors, leading many of them to believe that it was Israel's intention to sink the ship and kill everyone on board. (The casualty rate was nearly an incredible 80 percent). Israel clamed the attack was a mistake -- the Liberty, they said, was mistaken for an Egyptian ship. But throughout the attack, which lasted more than an hour, the Liberty was flying a large American flag, had its name painted in English in five-foot letters across the stern, never fired a shot, and was virtually unarmed.

To say the least, Mr. Aftergood's piece was a model of poor reporting. What is most surprising is that it comes from someone who has spent a great deal of ink and many electrons piously chastising reporters from The New York Times and other publications for their reporting. For example, Aftergood never bothered to call me -- the subject of his attack -- for any comment prior to publication. This despite the fact that we are both located in Washington and have spoken many times both in person and on the phone. This violates the most basic rule of journalism.

Aftergood's piece was basically a regurgitation of an article on the USS Liberty published that same week on the web site of The New Republic magazine. What is curious is that for months he ignored all the new information in Body of Secrets, including the many new details about Israel's attack, but then quickly rushed into print the minute he saw an article by an Israeli sympathizer criticizing my chapter on the Liberty. Could Aftergood himself have an agenda?

Nor did Aftergood, in his breathless attempt to get details of the offending article into print and on the web as soon as possible, bother to tell his readers where the writer was coming from -- another violation of good journalism. For example, it would be important to know whether the author of the article, Michael Oren, who was harshly critical of my chapter on the Israeli military's role in the attack on the Liberty, has any ties to Israel himself. I am a totally independent writer and have no ties to either Israel or any organization involved with the USS Liberty.

Oren, however, is a reserve officer and war veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces as well as a former advisor to the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin -- who was Army chief of staff at the time the Liberty was attacked. He now works for a small right wing, pro-Benjamin Netanyahu Israeli think tank in Jerusalem, the Shalem Center. It is run by its founder, Yoram Hazony, one of former Prime Minister Netanyahu's closest aides (he also ghost wrote a book by him). During the race for prime minister, the political party of Ehud Barak even accused the center of illegally funneling money to Netanyahu -- a charge denied by the center. The Israeli Education Ministry has called the center "a research institute whose leanings are extreme right-wing and even fascistic."

The principal mission of the center, where Mr. Oren is a senior fellow, is the cause of extreme Jewish nationalism -- Israel for the Jews -- i.e. apartheid. That is hardly surprising given that the center's intellectual guru, Yoram Hazony, is an admitted admirer of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. He is the racist, fanatic founder of the violent Jewish Defense League in the U.S. and the rabid anti-Arab Kach movement in Israel, which is now outlawed there and listed as a terrorist group in the U.S. In 1984 Kahane was elected to the Israeli Knesset on a platform calling for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel.

Typical of the comments uttered by Hazony's demagogic idol: "I want the Israeli Arabs out of here because I don't want to kill them every week, as they multiply and demonstrate"; "They are germs that are poisoning us. They will not leave us be until they have raped all our women and murdered all our men"; and "I recognize the submachine gun's right to speak and the knife's right to speak."

Soon after hearing one of the rabbi's fiery, bigoted speeches, Hazony began quoting him in political debates. Eventually he wrote a fawning obituary about his slain hero in the Jerusalem Post. "We were mesmerized," he said. "We listened in astonishment, and finally in shame, when we began to realize that he was right." He then expressed "gratitude to someone who changed our lives, thrilled and entertained us, helped us grow up into strong, Jewish men and women. Many of us found other ways of doing what he asked." One of those ways was by opening his Shalem Center, where Oren, a close associate of Hazony, works, writes, and studies. So much for Oren's "independence."

Thus it was not surprising that Oren's article on the Liberty was published by The New Republic -- long the U.S. propaganda arm of the Israeli far right -- they also published Hazony's book in which he espouses his extremist views. Among these is erasing references in Israeli history books, Soviet style, to many of the most unsavory aspects of Israel's past and instead emphasizing its glories. This may be why Oren, in his article, seems to have deliberately forgotten about the Israeli war crimes that I write about in Body of Secrets.

Aftergood mimics the charges made in Oren's article. "In his new bestseller 'Body of Secrets,'" Aftergood writes, "Bamford proposes a motive for the attack: Israel, he says, was in the process of murdering several hundred Egyptian prisoners of war at nearby El Arish and wanted to prevent the Liberty from preserving recorded evidence of the massacre.

"But [Aftergood continues,] there appears to be no verifiable evidence that such a massacre ever took place, and Bamford's description of events at El Arish doesn't hold up. Thus, he attributes to Israeli journalist Gabi Bron a claim that 150 prisoners were executed there. But Bron himself denies that and says 'there were no mass murders.'"

Where Aftergood relied on Oren's selective view of Israeli history, I relied on such news organization as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Jewish Telegraph Agency, and many other respected press organs both in the U.S. and Israel. Below are some examples:

The following is from an article ("ISRAEL REPORTEDLY KILLED POWS IN '67 WAR: HISTORIANS SAY DEATHS OF HUNDREDS OF EGYPTIANS WAS COVERED UP") in The Washington Post on August 17, 1995:

"Israeli soldiers killed hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war during the 1967 Middle East war - deaths that commanders who are now prominent leaders have known about for years, historians said today. The controversy involves some top politicians, including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and legislator Rafael Eitan [who also gave us U.S. Navy spy Jonathan Pollard, and then lied about it], a former army chief. The allegations dominated news shows, shocking many Israelis who have long prized the notion that their army maintained high ethical standards throughout decades of warfare with the Arab world and military rule over Palestinians. The Army spokesman, Brig. Gen. Amos Gilad, refused to comment. Rabin, who was chief of staff when some of the 1967 killings allegedly were committed, walked away today when a reporter shouted a related question. His office later issued a statement denouncing the killings and calling them isolated incidents.
"Military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki said today that Israeli troops carried out several mass killings in 1967 in which about 1,000 Egyptian prisoners were slain in the Sinai. Yitzhaki, who worked in the army's history department after the war, said he and other officers collected testimony from dozens of solders who admitted killing POWs. He said a report on the killings submitted to his superiors has been locked in a safe at military headquarters.

"Another Israeli historian, Uri Milstein, said there were many incidents in the 1967 war in which Egyptian soldiers were killed by Israeli troops after they had raised their hands in surrender.

"It was not an official policy, but there was an atmosphere that it was okay to do it," Milstein said. "Some commanders decided to do it; others refused. But everyone knew about it."

The following is from an article ("HISTORIAN ALLEGES POW DEATHS IN 1956, 1967") posted by the Jewish Telegraph Agency on August 17, 1995:

"An Israeli military historian has said he knew of hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war who were killed during the 1967 Six-Day War by Israel Defense Force troops, including a unit headed by the current Israeli housing minister. Military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki of Bar-Illan University told Israel Radio on Wednesday that the killings involved a crack unit led by now Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer. Yitzhaki said the executions of 300 to 400 Egyptian commandos in El Arish was the worse case he knew, given that many of the Egyptians had surrendered. They were killed by members of the Shaked commando unit under the command of Ben-Eliezer, a lieutenant colonel at the time, he said. Ben-Eliezer said he was unaware of any prisoner killings.
"Referring to the Six-Day War, Yitzhaki said not only were the executions known, but a report he prepared in 1968 on the deaths was not released under instructions from higher authorities. Responding to the reports, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said he thought such incidents were exceptions to the norm and that they should be condemned by all."

The following is from a front page article ("DEBATE TAINTING IMAGE OF PURITY WRENCHES ISRAELIS: A MORE OPEN SOCIETY TAKES UP KILLING OF POWS DURING WARS") in The Washington Post on August 19, 1995:

"This week, as more soldiers came forward to say they saw fellow Israelis kill unarmed enemies in decades past, a long-suppressed public reckoning began. The stakes are profound for an army whose "purity of arms" has been the core of its self-image through five wars. . . . Also Wednesday, military historian Arye Yitzhaki of Bar Ilan University accused a storied reconnaissance unit, known as Shaked (Almond), of killing hundreds of Egyptians who had abandoned their weapons and fled into the desert in the 1967 Middle East war. . . . One day after Yitzhaki's charge came a first-person account by Gabi Brun of Yedioth Aharonoth, the country's most widely read tabloid. He wrote of watching Israeli troops execute five Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai Desert town of El Arish in 1967. The first of the five, he wrote, was forced to dig the grave. Each of them in turn was shot dead in it. "For a Jew to read this description, I don't know what to say," said left-wing activist Uri Avinery, who is demanding prosecution of Israeli war criminals. "This is the typical SS technique. This is a Nazi story in the most literal sense of the word." . . . . [Ariel] Sharon, interviewed at home today, [described] the sudden debate of old war crimes as "a kind of national suicide. Israel doesn't need this, and no one can preach to us about it - no one," he said. "The Israeli armed forces are a model and symbol of high moral values . . . We speak about an event that took place 40 years ago. Now, when all of us live in a different condition, it's very hard sitting in armchairs and air-conditioned rooms to try and understand what happened on those battlefields. . . . I'm not justifying things like that." . . . . Rabin, too, described this week's traumatic debate as akin to 'national suicide.'"
The following is from an article ("RABIN REFUSES TO PROBE ALLEGED ISRAELI WAR CRIMES") in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on August 21, 1995:

"Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin rejected calls Sunday to investigate long-suppressed allegations of Israeli war crimes against Egyptian prisoners of war, saying both sides were guilty of aberrations.
"I'm not saying there were no aberrations," Rabin told the Cabinet in his first substantive remarks on the alleged atrocities. "There were aberrations on both sides. There is no purpose in raising events of the past, not on our side and not on theirs. . . . Cabinet Secretary Shmuel Hollander said Rabin stressed Sunday that "these events were real exceptions." Israel is reeling from two weeks of revelations that its soldiers killed prisoners and civilians in at least three Mideast Wars. The disclosures have shaken the widely held conviction among Israelis that their citizen-soldiers were morally superior to other armies. . . Military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki charged that Israeli troops carried out mass killings in the Sinai in 1967 in which 1,000 Egyptian prisoners died . . . Many questions remain unanswered, including the extent of the alleged crimes, why details were censored for so long and the involvement of senior Israeli officials, including Rabin, who was Army chief of staff during the 1967 war."

The following is from an article (AFTER A GENERAL TELLS OF KILLING POWS IN 1956, ISRAELIS ARGUE OVER ETHICS OF WAR) that appeared in The New York Times on August 21, 1995:

"At the same time, a reporter for Yediot Ahronot, Gabi Bron, described atrocities that he witnessed in the 1967 war: "The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death. I witnessed the executions with my own eyes in the morning of June 8, in the airport area of El Arish."
The following is from a front page article (EGYPT SAYS ISRAELIS KILLED POWS IN '67 WAR) in The New York Times on September 21, 1995:

"Egypt said today that it had discovered two mass graves in the Sinai [near El Arish] containing the remains of Egyptian prisoners of war and unarmed civilians shot by Israeli soldiers during the 1967 war. . . . At the same time, an Israeli historian said that as many as 300 unarmed Egyptian were killed in both the 1967 war and in the war of 1956. Those reports led to other allegations and revelations. . . . "I saw a line of prisoners, civilians and military, and they opened fire at them all at once," Mr. [Abdelsalam] Moussa was quoted as saying. "When they were dead, they told us to bury them. . . Al Ahram [an Egyptian newspaper] also quoted a bedouin, Suleman Moghnem Salameh, who said he saw Israelis kill about 30 Egyptian soldiers and officers after they surrendered, leaving them for the Bedouins to bury. . . . President Mubarak has called for an investigation in Israel and punishment of those responsible. Israel responded by sending Elli Dayan, a Deputy Foreign Minister, to discuss the matter. During his visit here, he offered compensation to the victims but noted Israel's 20-year statute of limitations."
Next, again parroting the Shalem Center's Mr. Oren, Aftergood charges:

"Meanwhile, Bamford infers that the Israelis must have known that they were attacking an American ship because, as he discovered, an American surveillance aircraft was flying overhead at the time and it recorded Israeli pilots' references to a U.S. flag.
"But Bamford's source, the American airman and linguist who recorded those communications, reached an 'opposite' conclusion. Marvin E. Nowicki wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal (16 May 2001) that the Israeli military forces 'prosecuted the Liberty until their operators had an opportunity to get close-in and see the flag, hence the references to the flag.' The attack, he believes, 'was a gross error.'"

In fact, I specifically noted in my book that Nowicki came to the opposite conclusion: "At the time, based on the fractured conversations he heard on the intercepts, Nowicki just assumed that the attack was a mistake." (Body of Secrets p. 221). In an e-mail to me, Nowicki states in no uncertain terms that I never misquoted him. So what is Aftergood complaining about? I also say in the book that Nowicki "is an enthusiastic supporter of Israel, who originally assumed his information would help clear Israel."
Mr. Nowicki's conclusion is just that - his conclusion. But there are a number of serious problems with his logic. First, the linguists picked up comments about the flag from both the fighter pilots and the crew of the torpedo boats. If, as Nowicki suggests, the Israeli pilots broke off as soon as they saw the flag, then why didn't they warn the torpedo boats, who were still at least twenty minutes away, to also break off? And if the crew of the torpedo boats broke off immediately after seeing the flag, then why try to shoot up the life rafts and escaping crewmembers, and where is the recording of their shocking discovery back to headquarters?

Ultimately, the most serious problem with Nowicki's theory is that if what he speculates is true, than why was it that the crew of both the fighters and torpedo boats denied under oath to investigators that they saw an American flag? The most logical reason is that they saw the flag, knew it was an American ship, atta