Evidence that Israel attacked the Liberty? Sure, that’s not disputed in the slightest. I meant that there is very little evidence on two crucial questions: WTF was the Liberty doing there in the first place, and what did the Israelis think was going on? What was public was that Israel had announced an “exclusion zone” within which any unidentified ships would be presumed hostile, which was perfectly standard in war time (Britain and Germany in both World Wars had such “exclusion zones” as did the US during the Civil War), and it is now declassified that the US did, indeed, assure Israel that we would not send any of our fleet anywhere near there.
It was, of course, also perfectly standard for countries to lie about their espionage activities; we can pretty much take it for granted that the Liberty was sent into the exclusion zone to spy on signal traffic, although we do not have hard evidence that this is so. Did Israel understand that this was a US spy ship, or did they take the US assurances that no US ships would be there at face value, and think it was an Egyptian ship flying a false flag? The latter is the official explanation, which many have considered dubious. But if the Israelis did know it was a US ship, what I am saying is that they surely concluded it was assisting the Egyptian side-- and they may have been correct in that assumption.
Why would the US intervene on the Egyptian side? Remember that we had not been pro-Israeli up until then (had been pro-Egyptian in 1956, and had only lifted the arms embargo against Israel recently); LBJ, though officially neutral, had pro-Arab connections in the oil business. And Egypt had just accused the US at the UN of having assisted Israel in some way: a possible scenario (we have a shortage of evidence here-- that is what I was saying) is that Egypt knew what they were talking about, that some pro-Israeli person in the Johnson administration had leaked some intel to the Israelis, so the Liberty was dispatched to “even things out” by giving intelligence to the Egyptians. LBJ, of course, did not want to admit that the Liberty was intervening on the Arab side, which is why the whole matter was brushed aside.
USS Liberty was - at the time - a most unique ship ever built and confusing him for anything other than US ship by a warlike nation simply does not make any sense. Unless, of course, we are talking about “incompetence”.
As for US-Egypt relationships, you’re simply factually wrong:
Which is why it would not be recognized. Ships of several standard styles would be known to pilots, but not oddities; nobody was going to expect pilots to stare at pictures of every ship ever built.
Given the specific reassurances by the US that no US ships would be anywhere near there, the first assumption would be that it would have to be ANYTHING BUT an American ship.
While we were no longer pro-Egypt as in 1956, we did try to maintain a strict balance: when we sold arms to Israel for the first time (under JFK) we sold equal amounts to the Arabs.
In 1967, Johnson’s official position was that we would be “neutral in thought, word, and deed”, see here. In response to an accusation by Egypt that somebody in the administration had helped Israel, LBJ may easily have thought that the best thing to do was to give Egypt some intel likewise. Whether or not that actually happened, I do not know; but even if it did not, Israel might well have thought it was happening-- if, that is, they ever did realize that the ship was really US and not a “false flag”, which is also something we don’t know.
Look, you seem to have a firm dogmatic intention to view the case one particular way. All I am trying to say is that there are many possible scenarios here, and that it would be best to keep an open mind about what happened, given that the key information remains concealed. LBJ’s unwillingness to talk about the matter suggests that there was something going on which would not have been politically palatable to reveal.
Could anyone provide a link to a free account of this incident, or at least give us a few key words so we could try to track one down ourselves? Thanks.
/* this was very common accusation by political elites at the time when someone kept thinking “differently”
Couldn’t agree more.
So, in the absence of hard evidence one is allowed to promulgate dynamics of the event and then entertain probabilities of outcomes.
It’s just that you don’t seem to be “buying” that one of the possibilities I entertain includes collusion of White House and Israel and the idea that the attack was not a mistake. That’s mostly because I rarely buy “incompetence” argument. You seem to be rejecting that outright. And then, accuse me of being dogmatic :o
OK, at this point I do not even understand what scenario it is that you are proposing. LBJ and Moshe Dayan put their heads together and decided “hey, let’s kill a few American sailors”? What was in it for Johnson, and what was in it for the Israelis? Or is this just “motiveless malignancy”?
Strategic shifts require extraordinary events. Extraordinary events destroy paradigms and new ones are created.
If you keep thinking about events like this from the perspective of an average person you will never be able to get anywhere because avarege person is limited in its grasp of power.
What did the Israelis have on Johnson? The interesting thing was how Johnson clammed up-never said anything about the incident. A corrupt politician like LBJ probably had lots of skeletons in the closet-was there anything that could have forced him from office?
So the attack on the Liberty was responsible for some kind of new paradigm? That was 45 years ago, so in retrospect that shift should be easy to spot. Uh, what happened? I don’t see anything discontinuous right after that event. If anything, the trends since that time seem to be the opposite of anything that a planned conspiracy would be trying to do.
You’d think that an Israeli attack on our ship would cause the US to be less supportive of Israel. Now I don’t see any paradigm shifts like you mentioned, but the US war hawks certainly seem to take Israel’s side in the conflicts. Was this one of those through-the-looking-glass kind of conspiracies?
There is nothing secret about what forced him from office: it was his stupid tendency to put American boys in harm’s way for poor reasons and with inadequate ability to defend themselves. Most people were far too angry at him for getting huge numbers of boys killed in Vietnam to care too much about the other incidents of his recklessness, but the Dominican intervention was a stupidity, and so was the Pueblo incident: North Korea declared territorial waters out to 50 km but the US considered everything past 12 km to be international waters, so one part of the Pueblo’s mission aside from spying was to deliberately flout the North Korea claims, a stupid thing to do with a ship that could not defend itself, and was carrying valuable technology that we really shouldn’t have wanted the enemy to capture.
The stupidity of sending the Liberty into the middle of a warzone, when it had been announced that any unidentified ship going there would be shot at, then specifically denying that the US would send any ships in there, has to be understood in the context of LBJ’s general recklessness and stupidity. I do not find it particularly mysterious that he did not want to talk about it in his memoirs.
Yes, you’ve outed me newcomer. I’m an agent of ZOG charged with spreading biased and intentionally misleading contributions to interwebs threads in order to further the Jewish conspiracy to control the world. And I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids.
Not that I expect it to sink in, but you drawing such wild conclusions with little to no basis in reality speaks volumes about you, not me. I haven’t made any biased or intentionally misleading contributions, and you haven’t outed me as a fraud. Again, that you imagine that what you wrote exposes me as a fraud, while cute, demonstrates the disordered and muddled activity that passes for thought that goes on in your brain.
It’s not that hard to find. That you don’t like the conclusions doesn’t mean the investigations weren’t conducted.
Um… what? Put down the crack pipe, I asked a question. It rather invites people to respond with their views. That you can’t come up with an answer to the question but instead reply with a bizarre implication that I’m trying to prevent the truth™ from getting out there speaks volumes about you, not me.
Cute how you slip in “warlike nation” in there. By the by, ships are feminine, not masculine, so the USS Liberty would be ‘her’ not ‘him’. But you are correct, mistaking the Liberty for any other ship makes as little sense as confusing an oiler for an aircraft carrier, and God knows that’s never happened.
You’re a 9/11 truther convinced Jews did 9/11 so this is what passes for a funny, right?
