Eight flights over eight hours.
Not eight planes at once eight hours before the attack.
Again I presume they were on patrol and would come by every hour or so and have a look to update their intelligence.
I have read nothing that the attack planes zoomed around the ship a bit and then attacked. If you have something that the attack jets did flyby’s first I’d be curious to see it.
Doesn’t look that way to me if the below is true.
Why, it’s a good thing then that I didn’t provide the exact cite for the exact testimony and exact quotes from the captain of the Liberty showing that the torpedo boats only launched torps once they were fired upon.
This really is a game of whack a mole
Of course, even in the cite you just offered the conclusion is that it was accidental due to negligence.
I’m not quite sure why this topic always brings out the worst in every poster, but everyone can ratchet back the heat or watch this thread get closed.
Accusation of dishonesty are not permitted in this forum, (although the entire discussion has enough over-the-top nastiness that I am not sure that it will survive another hour, anyway.)
[ /Moderating ]
I take my number from the ETA given in the radio transcripts.
You shouldn’t because you are wrong.
http://www.thelibertyincident.com/docs/timeline.pdf
600 nautical miles away. Max speed of an A-1 is 280 knots i.e. a full 2+ hours away. Captain Tully was either given incorrect information by the navigator, misremembers what happened, or has magical A1s that can fly 1800 at knots.
And since both aircraft carriers were 500+ nautical miles from Israel this means, drum roll please, that Israeli radar couldn’t detect them. And since the max speed of an A-4 is ~585 knots that means they would have between 20-30 minutes max warning.
Dunno why the Clifford report said what it said.
Captain McGonagle did report ordering the machine guns to open fire when he saw the torpedo boats in what he felt was an attack attitude. He saw the Israeli flag on one of the boats and saw a Morse Code signal but could not make it out from the smoke of his burning ship. He ordered the machine guns to hold fire but in the confusion they fired anyway. The MTBs then fired torpedoes.
Not sure how much that should matter. The Liberty was flying the American flag. Her bow numbers were visible, English writing on the stern. Add in obvious antenna such as a big ass satellite dish should also add to identification that it wasn’t Egyptian.
Because, even worse than many threads on the ME, posters have a really, really bad habit of posting absolute fiction.
And after catching Treis in numerous (unretracted) factual errors and illogical claims, he went on to claim that my behavior, not my argument, was “retarded”. I pointed out that as he was alleging that catching his mistakes was acting “retarded”, that he quite obviously doesn’t like having his factual errors and irrational claims (eg. bullshit) pointed out.
I don’t think it’s that hard to empathize with, either. Most of the mistakes in this thread were rebutted in the other, or this one. (How many times have we seen people claim that the torpedo boats launched torps for some reason other than being fired on first?) So many arguments are… strange. Treis claims that American jets would have been flying for two hours, and then starts slinging absurd rhetoric about how I’d done something wrong and he’d said no such thing (after he wrote in huge text, all caps, exactly that.) Now he wants to support it again.
Mole says he doesn’t know how many inquiries there were or that there were more than one, and then claims I was distorting his claims because I repeated what he said… while he again quotes himself saying the exact thing he was denying.
Lantern claims that the CIA inquiry tat the CIA states was culled from all available sources wasn’t really an “enquiry”.
Etc, etc etc…
If you really do want to know why this stuff gets ugly, it’s because 99.9% of the thread has to be spent simply fighting fiction instead of ignorance. It’s actually roughly equivalent to a 9/11 Conspiracy thread in terms of making people frustrated with bullshit, except here there’s a whole pack of posters repeating the same stuff. Imagine if, instead of the 100th time of hearing that the NIST report was bought off by the evil conspiracy, hearing yet again that a self-admitted liar’s claims that an entire Naval report was fabricated and nobody realized for 36 years.
I am claiming this because it is right, and I “am slinging absurd rhetoric” because you are wrong.
No. It gets ugly because posters on both sides choose language that is inflammatory and then get bent out of shape when their opponent replies in kind, with each poster trying to one up his opponent while staying fractionally behind the lines demarking the rules of this forum.
Go back and read the first page. You and Whack-a-mole have an exchange, both of you pointing to the same previous thread, that was fairly civil and could even have been considered jocular. Later, the first personal attack is launched. Go see who posted it.
[/Modding ]
This always gets heated because of the emotions involved:
Military vets don’t like that US sailors were killed with no retaliation. They don’t like the hidden medal ceremonies. They don’t like the pictures of one of our ships shot up by an ally. They don’t like the fact that Israel never punished her pilots.
Anti-semites have taken the Liberty incident as a way to attack the evil Jews. This brings out the…
Pro-Israel folks who will defend almost anything (if not everything) that Israel does. Some of them start painting all of the Liberty consipracy buffs as anti-semites. Jim Ennes, who has tried to keep this issue in the public eye, has dealt with years of character attacks from the Israel defenders. I have had a passing aquaintance with Jim for years, and he stopped doing speeches for awhile, tired of being called a Nazi.
Most of the issues on this have been covered here. In 2003 there was an article in Naval Institute Proceedings on the subject that also triggered a firestorm of letters. You can go to www.ussliberty.org and read some additional informationl
Yep.
I can understand if the rules of the forum permit people to repeatedly post false claims. But having to deal with them really is why it these threads go down the same tracks repeatedly. It’s hard to point out that someone is repeating fiction when without using language that will be seen as inflammatory.
You may want to claim that I posted the first “personal insult”, but you’ll also note that even after having all of his claims thoroughly rebutted, Mole just went on to play whack-a-mole and repeat them, again. Much like his claim that the Israeli forces shot life rafts even though all the actual testimony says the exact opposite. Then, the response is that a self-admitted liar claims that the entire report was fabricated, nobody noticed for 36 years (including the self-admitted liar who claims that his own testimony was changed)… but how this would even theoretically be possible is never answered.
And it’s offered up again in this thread as if it’s not an absurdity that won’t ever be supported. (Think I’m wrong? Want to place bets on when Mole will provide a detailed analysis of how exactly every single person who was at all associated with the report was in on the coverup and that Painter himself either didn’t realize or didn’t comment on it until many of the relevant figures were dead? I’ll give you good odds.)
Or the fiction that the US, in its nefarious coverup, issued a gag order. Despite numerous public interviews that are a matter of record. And after debunking that fiction with the facts… it gets repeated in this thread. I can bet on whether or not it’ll be repeated in the next one. It’s hard to, within forum rules, point out that someone is posting a debunked claim yet again without raising hackles.
And of course now we have the inevitable claim that “pro-Israel folks” will defend absolutely anything Israel ever does. 
Israel is a funny ally. While I generally support them, they do spy on us. As we do them. There’s simply too many documented instances of transgressions for at least a few of them to not be true.
Look up your own cites.
Which is NOT what I said. Of course, since you did not quote me, you can just use that anyway. Gee, I wonder why emotions get raised.
Either incompetent or criminal Israeli pilots murdered US sailors. That raises emotions among a few people who have worn the uniform.
The ETA’s were 1.5 hours and 3.
Still no 2.
You can say you were talking about prep time, but as you were kind enough to supersize your all caps text, it’s clear you weren’t.
Nice.
However, the time-stamp you’re quoting is two hours before the attack even started. It was another 20 minutes until the Saratoga got a report. By roughly 10 minutes later, the Saratoga was already right by the America. So the distance then is not the same distance as it was at 1420.
Further, Tully had access to a supercarrier worth of fighters, not only the A-1’s he was limited to by orders hours later. An F-4 would’ve closed the distance in, yep, about 20 minutes assuming it was 500 miles away by then. Again, I’d trust Tully’s navigator over your argument that the Saratoga should be considered to be at the same position it was in two and a half hours previous.
Check the timeline (and , use the time things occurred at)
America launched A-4’s (ETA 1.5 hours) at 1545.
At 1640 Martin transmits the order for all planes to return to carriers. By that point, America’s A-4’s would have been well within Israeli radar range. And, as my original point went, they hadn’t scrambled interceptors to vector in on them.
I suppose I should have calmly pointed all this out to fight your ignorance instead of just snarking at you and your irrational claims, but eh, low hanging fruit.
Clarify then, since Tom and I were discussing these threads on the Dope and you responded by saying that the discussions included “Pro-Israel folks who will defend almost anything (if not everything) that Israel does.” I haven’t seen a single person like that in real life, and certainly not on the Dope. I figured that you were talking about one of more posters here.
Were you not responding to the subject of these threads and instead talking about discussions in general?
Even if that’s the case, the idea that there are people out tere who’ll support every action any country takes is a bit loopy. Heck, I don’t know of any Israelis who approve 100% of every action their nation takes, especially since it’s governed by coalition style politics.
Would you also say that the US has engaged in the murder of our allies when we hit them mistakenly?
You’ve caught me. I remembered it as two hours from the time line, but it was actually an hour and a half. Totally torpedos my argument.
It was cruising at 22 knots, so after 2 hours it was 44 nm closer. Still no closer than 550 nm to the Liberty. Doesn’t really change anything.
Again, impossible. Max speed for an F-4 is ~1500 mph. A F-4 would have had to taken off at maximum speed for it to make it there in 20 minutes and climb to 20-30,000 feet without slowing. Since it is impossible to do that we are right back where we started. Tully is either misremembering or was given incorrect information.
I trust the laws of physics and math over Tully’s navigator.
No, they wouldn’t have. At best they would have been 35/90 of the distance from Liberty. Since they launched at ~510 nm that puts them ~200 nm away from Liberty. Liberty was ~50 nm away from Israel that means at absolute best they were at the edge of Israeli radar. However, since the sortie would have to fly slower immediately after take off and while gaining altitude, that means they were certainly further than 250 nm away. Hence out of range of Israeli radar.
Do you even consider the possibility that you are wrong?
I have to say this has been a very interesting thread and I have enjoyed reading it.
Thanks.
Whoa- I seem to be inspiring (unintentionally) some “challenging” threads lately. Thanks to the mods for their patience and to previous posters for the input. This will teach me to watch documentaries when I am doing the ironing.
I have only seen the doco and read wiki (plus this thread of course). I think that the most likely thing is (as a previous poster pointed out) that there was a huge screw up and a larger cover up.
However there are still a few points I’d like to clarify.
The Israelis estimated that the Liberty was travelling at 28 - 30 knots which was twice as fast as it could possibly make. This seems a huge error.
McNamara was extremely evasive when interviewed on the documentary (yes, he was still alive then- I think it was made in 2002). He virtually said he knew nothing and then just refused to say anything about the Liberty. Point blank.
The threat of court martial to the crew plus them being split up and all assigned to different vessels after (is this standard- maybe one of the members who has experience in the US Navy can enlighten me).
And also- the awarding of the Congressional Medal of Honour to the captain.(McGonagle). I understand this is normally awarded by the President but in this instance the award was carried out by the Secretary of the Navy. This is more confusing than signalling anything to me- if they didn’t want to attract attention why award a medal at all? Could it be seen simply as “hush money”? If so it didn’t work.
I’m sure there are other parts that will come back to haunt me.
No, all your factual errors and fallacies do that.
Like, for instance, your claim that the US couldn’t have kept its jets going since it might’ve spooked Russia and angered them since we’d be moving towards their allies… except of course at 1700 we notified them that we had jets en route.
Yet again, you’re alleging that you know more about military aviation and navigation than the people who actually do it for a living. Of course, as you’ve had to revise your position over time you are quite likely still wrong and your guess of “550” is about as accurate as your previous guess of 600. What that means, in a nutshell, is that you have no idea where the ship actually was at 1420, let alone where it would be by the time the captain made his determination to engage or how much closer it would have been by the time the F-4’s were ready to launch. You’re just guessing. The navigator, on the other hand, knew.
And no, the math doesn’t support your claim as you’ve offered precisely no actual numbers as to exactly how fast the F-4 gets to maximum velocity (which is approx 1600, btw). Never mind the fact that the F-4 would be able to carry AIM-7s which would allow it to engage roughly 30 miles away from its target.
Rather than believing that a ship’s navigator had no idea where they were or that a captain had no idea how his own jets worked, I’m simply going to take the craaaaaaazy step of figuring that the Navy brass knows how planes work a supercarrier’s navigator knew where the ship was, and your claims about it being “physically impossible” are wrong.
How many minutes would that take… exactly?
All this is just nitpicking though and it’s boring me. It’s like arguing with a 9/11 truther about why “the government did it and covered it up!” makes no sense and then getting bogged down in a discussion about exactly how many pounds of concrete were in each floor slab of the WTC. Your entire logical chain was specious and made no sense and the facts you might’ve tried to use to support it were, generally, non-factual. You’ve offered no rational reason why Israel would risk going to war with the most powerful nation on the planet in order to accomplish something it didn’t need to, why the US would cover it up, etc…
And you won’t, because it makes absolutely no damn sense, much like any conspiracy theory.
I was referring to debates regarding Israel in general, and there have been boards/discussion groups where some posters would never critique their personal issue / group / nation. I also knew a few fervent defenders in my undergraduate days who would not utter a single negative either. So, yes, there are some people in this world who will not admit any level of fault in whatever their area of interest is. In this case, I was not speaking of you, or I would have called you out by name. I was trying to answer the question of why this particular debate seems to hit the heat so fast.
I would admit that the US military has, at times, killed through incompetence. There was a case in the First Gulf War where (as I recall) a US chopper pilot took out a US armored vehicle, for example. In that case the pilot and his crew were tried, information was released, complete audio tapes were released, etc.
I am not aware of the US doing multiple attacks on an ally’s forces that is analogous to the assault on the USS Liberty, however.
I would also admit that there have been US forces who have committed criminal actions - Mai Lai in Vietnam, for a well known example.
Israel could have easily cleared this up by releasing the gun camera footage, and providing both sides of the radio conversations for the day. Israel could have held an inquest of her own. McCain’s daddy could have done a real investigation, instead of a hurried one.
Hell - the fact that the Liberty’s Captain received his Medal of Honor in a small ceremony at the US Navy Yard, and not at the White House shows that this entire affair was sordid and that various people wanted to move on and try to pretend that the assault never happened.
Israel conducted three inquests of its own, one of which specifically dealt with whether there was negligence sufficient by anyone concerned to bring charges against anyone involved or whether the officers involved acted reasonably, and the US conducted seven investigations.