Ten to one odds that this same claim gets brought up in the next thread.
Three to one odds it gets brought up again in this one.
Someone cites Boston (whose claims about Kidd’s beliefs are falsified by Kidd’s own handwritten letter to Cristol anyways) saying that Kidd thought something, that Kidd himself never publicly stated and that Boston waited to reveal until Kidd was dead and couldn’t comment on it… and Boston claims it in such a manner as to falsify his own claim by both saying that an investigation would take half a year and that the investigation could actually be completed in a tiny fraction of that time. Or, of course, that Boston was admitting he was prejudiced to the matter and had made up his mind before he was able to conduct the kind of investigation that he himself said was necessary. And this is used as proof!
And, of course, it proves that virtually the entire US government, the Navy, and our intelligence services were all in on it and despite their public statements ‘everybody’ at those agencies really knew the truth (but still signed off on everything anyways) and never issued a contradictory report, ever.
So they are liars? All of them? All of those NSA Directors, CIA Directors, Deputy NSA Directors, Admirals and so on? It is inconceivable to you that they have access to information you do not? Your opinion trumps their expert opinion why?
Technically, as the conspiracy theory requires its perpetrators to be Genius Fools, they’re arguing both sides of the issue.
Genius: Israel knew that they could neutralize the ship and that one of the world’s two superpowers would not only roll right over, they’d institute a massive coverup to suppress the truth.
Fools: But they could have actually sunk the ship in the first place, killed all its crew and used unmarked planes to hide their true identity and there’d have been no need for the massive conspiracy in the US to hide their actions. Instead they chose to let the crew survive and let the US know that exactly what had happened.
Genius: The IAF was so awesome that friendly fire and the fog of war cannot effect them and pilots who aren’t used to naval ID can still nail it bang on .
Fools: But in deciding to kill the ship, the elite IAF forgot to bring anti-Ship weaponry and used anti personnel weaponry instead.
Genius: The IAF overflew the Liberty and must have conclusively identified it at once and even though it was several hours after their last overflight, they still would have definitively known what the ship was despite the fact that the intel was stale.
Fools: But they didn’t take the time to get a special squadron of pilots who were in on the evil plot and who could be trusted to lie about it later.
Genius: The Israelis could have totally neutralized the Liberty’s ability to intercept communications by totally jamming their comms system.
Fools: But they were too stupid to know that this would render the ship useless and decided to destroy it anyways. And back to 1.
Obviously the key to the whole conspiracy was thermite.
We can even see some evidence of this in Captain McGonagle’s Medal of Honor citation. To my knowledge he is the only living recipient who was not given his medal by the President personally and was relegated to a navy yard to receive it (at the least by the time McGonagle received his medal this was tradition).
Further, his citation makes no mention of the Israelis. I have not read every Medal of Honor citation there is but all I have read explicitly mention who the person was fighting against.
See if you can find the word “Israel” in the above quote.
Odd behavior when the captain is receiving our highest honor for protecting his ship and doing everything right himself. Usually we trumpet our MoH recipients and proudly display them to the country and the world. We are saying these are the people we are most proud of. Why hide it?
I am not seeing the contradiction here at all. It is perfectly possible to see powerful evidence early which convinces you of a position and still believe that conducting a full formal investigation with all the bureaucratic and procedural hoops involved will take months. What is the contradiction?
Boston’s article is powerful evidence of the abysmal quality of the Navy enquiry, coming as it does from the chief counsel of that enquiry.You are right that it will be mentioned in the next thread because it’s highly relevant to understanding this story.
As pointed out, this isn’t necessarily a fallacy under every circumstance (authority can add weight to an argument). Only where authority is cited, as here, as absolute and trumping all other argument and logic.
Excluded Middle/False Dilemma:
As in, ‘either all of these authorities are correct, or they are all liars’.
If the evidence is “powerful” enough that you can be “convinced” of a conclusion, then half a year isn’t required, as you’d just have said yourself that the evidence was powerful enough to be convincing.
Or, Boston was prejudiced and the evidence was not strong enough, but he’d already made up his mind.
Also notice that Boston did not claim that due to bureaucracy and procedural hoops that the investigation would take half a year, but to be done right it’d take half a year. If his objection was to red tape, then why’d he object to the Navy doing away with the red tape and conducting a speedy investigation? Or does it only require vastly more time when it comes to a different conclusion than he did?
No, it isn’t. Not even close. To start with, he held this under his hat for years. And years. And years. And by his own admission he swore an oath to see justice done and then willfully violated that oath, but we should totally trust him now. And luckily enough, he just so happened to wait until the only person who could confirm or deny his claims happened to die. And we have proof that he lied about Kidd’s beliefs in any case.
Yes, I know you don’t think that a handwritten letter in which Kidd praises Cristol and his findings means that he really had any admiration for Cristol or his findings, but…
You misspelled “because this topic is a game of whack a mole and even when a source is shown to be contradictory, false, or irrational it’s just put on the back burner and reposted a bit later on again.”
I know what “appeal to authority” is and I will remember to debunk any expert you ever cite as worthless because it is an appeal to authority.
That is absurd of course because that is exactly what we do in GD. We provide cites to people who have some reason to be considered expert in their field.
Now, of course they could be wrong. But unless you’ve got better info to provide or you can show these people are either knowingly lying or misguided then I’d say their opinion far and away trumps the likes of FinnAgain’s rants.
It would be one thing if I provided one cite from one low level weenie. Instead I provided cite upon cite upon cite from pretty much as top level people as you can get for this thing, including many directly involved and in a position to get the good info, and they all agree this was more than a mere mistake.
Your only answer to that is “appeal to authority” so it somehow doesn’t count in your world.
Did you forget the cites from Lantern on the first page regarding the testimony of Gotcher and Forslund?
Is it an “appeal to authority” to cite testimony from people who actually read transcripts?
Well remember that an inquiry would deal with more issues than just that of Israeli culpability. A formal inquiry properly done would investigate every aspect of the attack including for example the appropriateness of the actions of the sailors. Secondly it is quite possible the evidence A,B,C is sufficient to establish a conclusion but the interests of completeness you also investigate D,E and F which add to our understanding of the issue without being strictly necessary. You want to gather all the possible evidence even if you feel the evidence you have is sufficient. So there is no real contradiction and certainly not enough to establish that Boston is some kind of massive fabricator.
The same goes with that letter that you are so excited about. At most it suggests that Boston was perhaps wrong about the relationship between Cristol and Kidd: hardly that central an issue. It certainly doesn’t show that Kidd agreed with everything Cristol believed. Like I said it was quite vague about what exactly it was that Kidd was agreeing to. Without the relevant context it doesn’t really tell you much. And certainly that letter doesn’t prove that Boston was just making up stuff about what happened at the Navy inquiry.
Not that your little game of “I can’t heaaaaaaar you but I’m going to keep taling about you” isn’t cute and all, but how about you either retract or substantiate the bit of creative writing in which you claimed that while the NSA and CIA actually went on record as saying that the attack was an accident, that (according to the secret evidence you have), they really said the exact opposite.
Still waiting for those official agency cites where the NSA and CIA claimed that the attack wasn’t an accident.
Wouldn’t want to rant at you though and get you to prove your claims or retract them if they’re fictional. That’d be just awful of me.
Just awful.
And hah, Gotcher? Do I really need to lay odds on how quickly this one will be reposted again or if you’ll retract that mistake either?
And yet more conspiracy lunacy. The Israelis were adamant that the target be sunk and no trace left, but too damn stupid to use anti-ship weaponry. And, of course, the NSA as actually said that no such recordings exist and have never released anything of the sort for any FOIA request. But Forslund saw something that doesn’t exist and he’d like to tell us about its contents.
If you take off the spin that is exactly what happened according to the Secretary of State:
Officially we accepted the story that it was an accident but unofficially we told Israel that we thought they were full of shit. Why did we accept it officially? Probably because high level officials didn’t see any benefit from making an issue out of it. That’s the best I can come up with.
Can you explain why a bunch of high level officials would, for no discernible reason, all make the same basic claim unless they had good reason to believe it to be true?
Boston’s complaint wasn’t that the inquiry was right about its findings or that it should have studied more about the appropriateness of the actions of the sailors, but that they were wrong in their conclusion about whether or not it was an accident. A finding which he, himself, admits was perfectly possible to arrive it given much less time than he demands.
Again you’re putting words into his mouth and spinning hat he actually said.
Boston didn’t claim that the Navy inquiry had taken the appropriate time to come to a conclusion but needed more time in the interest of completeness" but that they hadn’t taken enough time to reach the correct basic conclusion. Even though he did so himself in a fraction of the time he claimed was required.
Obviously, if Kidd supported and endorsed Cristol’s work and his findings, then he didn’t feel that they were wrong.
:dubious:
What are you unclear on? You think all those loose ends he pulled together were really a knitting project?
Of course you’re right. Why would Kidd endorsing the results of the Navy inquiry and Cristol’s analysis of the incident have anything to do with Boston’s claims that Kidd did not endorse the results of the Navy inquiry or Cristol’s analysis of the incident?
It is entirely possible for a slew of government and military officials from the President on down to supposedly lay out the available evidence and swear up and down that there was a deliberate, dastardly attack on our navy - and for it to be found out later that they “cooked the books” and were utterly mistaken or lied.
The star example is the Tonkin Gulf Incident, where purported unprovoked attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats on U.S. vessels were used as the prime justification for getting us deeply embroiled in the Vietnam War.
I’ll leave aside the new cites you have attached (I see that Gotcher at least is somewhat dubious), and address the argument.
An “appeal to authority” can indeed add value to an argument, where that authority has some expertise on point. Thing is, most of your “high level” cites are mere expressions of incredultity. For example, you have quoted the President as expressing incredulity, and the reason allegedly given is not some superior knowledge on his part, but the mere gut feeling that the Israelis were too darn smart to mess up so badly.
Where you end up using “appeal to authority” in a fallacious manner, is where you insist that we accept your cites as trumping logic that points in the other direction, with the ‘threat’ that if we disbelieve your cites we must assume that all of these honourable gentlemen are “knowingly lying”.
This is the sort of black-an-white thinking that is a perfect example of the ‘false dilemma’. There is lots of other positions between “these guys are all correct” and “these guys are all lying”. They can, for example, like the President, be expressing a gut feeling based on a dubious premise (i.e., that the highly skilled Israeli armed forces could not make such a mistake) subsequently disproved (i.e, actual inquiry into the facts demonstrates that it was most likely a mistake).
Well, here is one error that I can clearly correct.
The Liberty was actually a Victory Ship, not a Liberty Ship. (The Victory class was the follow-up to the Liberty class and is notable for the raised fo’c’sle readily seen in every photo of the USS Liberty.)
That said, this is wandering back into the realm of personal jabs and everything useful (and much that is useless) has been posted, so I am closing it before I have to strart handing out Warnings.
In response to the appeal in ATMB, I have re-opened this thread. I do so with a gnawing feeling that the “additional” information will be a bit incendiary.
Please remember that this thread has already been closed, once, for edging toward more heat than light and do try to keep it civil.
Still waiting for those cites about how the NSA and CIA ever, at any point, said, implied or conveyed via smoke signal that the attack was deliberate rather than an accident.
On one side, we have the actual reports which say the exact opposite.
And yet, Mole want to assure us (and has, in fact, repeated several times) that the NSA and CIA said that the attack was deliberate rather than accidental. I know that Mole has made quite a point of ignoring all of the factual refutations (any retraction on Gotcher yet, either?) while mentoning me quite often, but facts have a stubbornness that can not be done away with by ignorning the person relating them.
So, how about that cite as to the NSA and CIA saying the exact opposite of what they actually, clearly, and unambiguously stated.
Or are we back at Conspiracy Central whereby ‘everybody’ at those agencies were In On The Truth but issued not one official statement or report?
A real cite would be nice, not more non sequitur incredulity or claims that “everybody” felt a certain way as backed up by… nothing.
Still waiting.