I haven’t the time to research all of this, but on its face the first cite you provide is problematic.
As far as I know, no board of inquiry has ever made the “finding” that “… there could be no doubt that the Israeli’s knew exactly what they were doing in attacking the Liberty”. Yet Mr. Helms is seemingly basing his opinion on that very finding.
Perhaps I am mistaken. Is there such a “finding”?
First notice the bait and switch: most of the quotes simply say that they don’t buy Israeli claims of non-malice, very few even hint at the coverup and conspiracy that would have had to go on in our own military, intelligence services and government.
And, heh, just check out some of those tinfoil hatters.
America didn’t have the “courage” to deal with Israel? Not enough courage, is that a joke? I guess we were terrified of the Zionist Menace. A claim that the NSA didn’t dispute that it was deliberate despite their report which said exactly that, that it wasn’t deliberate. And of course we have Mole, yet again, citing Boston’s fiction about Kidd (that lucky he only voiced once Kidd just happened to be dead) that I’ve debunked several times. I’m not going to comb through the rest. ~shrugs~
This, by the way, iswhat Kidd actually thoughtdespite Boston’s lies.
This, by the way, is the record of actual official correspondence.
But of course, we’re still on the appeal to authority fallacy, and it still makes no sense as we’ve got the Genius Dunderhead Conspiracy, yet again.
Not to mention the fact that they weren’t armed with anti-ship weaponry at all. This conspiracy theory fails just as many do, the conspirators both have to be utterly brilliant and powerful (and know for sure that attacking a superpower with well marked planes/boats and leaving survivors alive won’t bite them in the ass) but also comically stupid not to know that when you’re attacking a ship you use anti-ship weaponry.
It’s the evil government conspiracy that is smart enough to secretly rig the entire WTC with explosives while nobody notices but then stupid enough to fly planes into it on live national TV instead of just detonating the explosives and saying terrorists did it.
Cite?
I read that they were found not guilty and there ended up being confusion as to who exactly shot the Russians. Was that cite wrong?
Nope. I’m saying that some were reservists without much experience, that the battle shifted quickly and dramatically and that the fog of war was in full effect. Are you confident, for example, that all reservists would’ve been able to ID each of these?
The torp boats, in fact, didn’t fire and tried to confirm that the ship was in fact friendly, they were then fired upon and/or had round on the deck cook off which made them think they were being fired on. If you think a ship may be friendly and then it shoots at you it’s generally a good bet that it aint friendly.
No.
It’s more fiction.
Not one American investigation ever found anything of the sort.
But it sounds impressive, so you can bet that it’ll be reposted by someone sooner or later.
And this is the problem with this scattershot game of whack a mole we’re playing. Boston lies about Kidd? It gets debunked. It’ll get posted later. Someone else lies about an investigation? It’ll get posted later. It’s like throwing enough shit at the wall in the hope that something will stick. And having it shown that there are numerous lies and liars who the conspiracy theory is based on will do nothing, they’ll just be reposted.
Ok, what about the USS Peary, a destroyer, which was attacked in early evening? It was bombed by three Lockheed Hudson bombers off the coast of the Philippines. True, it was early evening, so the visibility probably wasn’t as good in in the case of the Liberty incident, but I think you’re being overly discriminating here. Friendly fire incidents are actually quite common, and if you didn’t restrict this to just cases where ships were bombed by friendly or neutral forces, I could come up with many more. Planes bomb ships, ships shoot at other friendly ships, planes bomb friendly troops, and troops fire at each other and at friendly planes. These all come from misidentification due to keyed up nerves in a stressful situation. As you said, it’s possible the Lebrecht Maas wouldn’t have been bombed had it not begun shooting at the plane, but remember, that was itself a friendly fire incident due to misidentification. A Heinkel bomber doesn’t look anything like a British scout plane. People make mistakes-sometimes mistakes that have horrible consequences.
I don’t understand why anyone would make an argument from authority, when the authority at issue is making a glaring and obvious factual error on the face of his statement on which he’s clearly basing his opinion.
Am I misreading the quote somehow?
This is the best I can find on that:
The quote is cited often though and clearly he did not feel the attack was an accident.
Oh, and interestingly, a day before the attack on the Liberty, Israeli planes mistook an Israeli armor column in the Sinai for an Egyptian one and bombed that. So you even had a related friendly fire incident in the Six Day War.
Try this:
So, it is still a classified report so we cannot read it for ourselves. Apparently they came to the conclusion Helms’ referenced.
Is Helms a liar?
What about all the other quotes?
Different militaries, different priorities.
Pilots undergo extensive ship identification training when their country and their enemies’ posses significant navies, and warfare takes place overseas. Israel’s enemies at the time were right across the border, and neither side had anything more formidable than a destroyer, if that. Naval warfare, I’m sorry to say, isn’t much more than a footnote to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Add to that the fact that this was something like the third day of the war, and the pilots had been flying an average of seven sorties a day - a world record, incidentally - with very little down time, mistakes were not just likely, they were probable.
There are numerous other high level officials quoted in those two articles. It’s clear that they reject the explanation that this attack was an accident, and believe that Israel intentional attacked the ship.
To my knowledge the attack pilots did not recon the Liberty. They flew in and attacked straight away (this was talked about up thread).
The Liberty however was overflown by recon planes many times in the hours leading up to the attack. Some coming down so close enough to “rattle the deck plates”. Supposedly getting so close the Liberty crew and recon pilots waved at each other.
Israel has plenty of coastline. Betting the recon flights are trained to identify ships. Kinda their job afterall.
Not to mention the Liberty was a one-of-a-kind ship back then (well, there were two, Liberty had an identical sister ship also run by the US Navy). Satellites were a newish thing back then. The 16’ satellite dish stick waaay up on the back of the Liberty is hard to miss. Kind of distinctive. I strains credulity to suppose eight recon flights misidentified the Liberty.
I don’t know. I view this one the way I look at most “conspiracy” claims - are there questions that are not sufficiently answered by the official reports?
In this case, I have problems with the official report of “it was all just a big accident.” That was one hell of a multi-wave assault on a US ship to be an accident. My personal issues are around ship ID claims, because they do not fit my experience and the experience of combat pilots from that era that I have spoken to.
The Liberty site I linked to does a good (though ugly as sin) job of presenting their side, and there are a few books out there that cover the story as well.
Without the gun camera film or interview with the Israeli military - I doubt we will ever get the full story. For now we have to depend on the partial reports and the statements of the US military survivors of the attacks.
My fault (working from memory instead of checking).
Broughton burned the gun camera film so that his pilots could not be tried.
Broughton himself was court martialed for destruction of government property, though later that was set aside. He then retired to write Thud Ridge and Going Downtown (great books, btw). I was trying to remember the chain of events from reading Going Downtown years ago.
In context for this discussion - who is the Israeli Broughton court martialed for the assault? Who are the pilots tried for their role in the attack?
BTW here is an articleby Ward Boston who served as the Chief Counsel in the Navy Enquiry about the Liberty incident:
Interestingly, your cite has no hesitation in labelling the Pesident of the United States and the secretary of Defense as “liars” and worse:
Myself, I think there is no need to conclude that the people quoted are “liars”, since in most cases the quotes are nothing more than expressions of incredulity, with nothing more to back them up.
For example:
This is an opinion premised on the alleged skills of the Israeli Defense Force - one wonders how these sampe people reacted to (say) the Israelis being caught napping in '73!
Extrapolating from an overall opinion of competence to allege that an accident could not have happened strikes me as highly unwise under any circumstances.
Lantern, wtf?
It wasn’t even a dozen posts up where it was proven (yet again) that Boston is lying about Kidd. Why have you yet again reposted it, along with the inane suggestion that the Navy’s report was changed and nobody, not even the people whose testimony was changed noticed or spoke up for 36 years?
Evidently now it’s morphed into a claim that someone who by his own admission was violating classified secrets was also telling the truth about them, but (what luck!) nobody else would discuss them and they weren’t public record. But of course the CIA itself has never supported such a claim.
And of course this brings us back to a dastardly conspiracy whereby even the CIA has been infiltrated by those tricky Zionists and refuses to speak the truth.
It should also probably be noted that Helms was a proven liar (caught lying to Congress about CIA activities) for which he received a suspended two year prison sentence. He was also close with the Shah and his support for him later landed him a position as ambassador.
We should trust whatever he says about secret CIA investigations and political judgments, though.
My approach to such claims is to ask whether the participants had anything to gain worth the risk, and to attempt to put myself in the shoes of the plotters and reason how they intended to go about it successfully.
In this case, the conspiracy fails the test of logic.
Logically, either the conspirators informed the pilots of the identity of the target - or they did not; it has to be one or the other.
If the conspirators informed the pilots of the target in advance, the evidence that the pilots questioned the identity of the Liberty and that at least one refused to attack it (and was arrested for so doing) must be false. We can in fact rule out any radio traffic allegedly questioning or confirming the target, since the pilots would gave no reason to do either.
On the other hand, if the conspirators did not inform the pilots, the plan makes no sense - if the Liberty was in fact distinctive. In that case, the conspirators were relying on the pilots to attack what was obviously a US ship, in broad daylight, without question. Would combat pilots you have spoken to attacked an obviously friendly or neutral target, just because home base identified it as a target? Allegedly, the Israelis knew already that the Liberty was distinctive, through over-flights.
In either case, the existence of a conspiracy would require someone to have either acted quite irrationally (in the case of not informing the pilots), or there must be fabricated pro-conspiracy evidence (in the case of informing the pilots), or some of the main assumptions (i.e., that the ship was easy to identify) must be wrong.
Given this, the logical conclusion is that it was no conspiracy.
Lots of people called Johnson a liar about this (or effectively a liar). We have Captain Boston alleging Johnson ordered a coverup to Admiral Kidd. We have undisputed evidence that McNamara and then Johnson himself recalled the sorties sent to save the Liberty. That by itself is shocking. Clearly Johnson was willing to sacrifice all those sailors presumably for some realpolitik purpose we will never know.
Obviously others would be in on the coverup so the “official” investigation that is public is decidedly in question. We then have a “final” CIA report which Helms implies finds that Israel did this as a pre-meditated attack. Of course we cannot assess that assertion since it is a secret document. One has to wonder though why it is secret? If it backed up the official report I cannot see a problem with releasing it. The only reason not to I can guess it so as to not inflame anti-Israel feelings.
The IDF is certainly one of the most professional militaries on the planet. Are they infallible? Of course not. But they are damn good.
I would guess when the President felt the Israelis did it on purpose he was not solely saying that because the IDF are professional but in conjunction with all the other stuff he knew.
Anyway, it is a data point and one of many I cited which included a cite that the CIA/NSA think it is not a “mistake”.
Circumstantial evidence is, well, circumstantial. However, enough of it can add up to convict someone (indeed in US courts most people are convicted on circumstantial evidence). I cited numerous highly placed government officials, many personally involved during the incident, and they are all of the opinion (basically) that this was not an accident.
I don’t think Kidd’s letter proves much; it’s quite vague really. At most the issue is Kidd’s relationship with Cristol. It’s quite possible that Kidd was perfectly polite to Cristol while attacking him in private. Who knows? I don’t see this as a reason to doubt Boston’s comments on the naval enquiry on which he served as chief counsel.
That situation makes no sense. If the “fix was in” at the highest levels, what was the CIA doing conducting yet another investigation? Why would the President not order them to STFU?
Moreover, if the report is kept secret for important reasons of state, why is this CIA dude offhandedly referring to it in his autobiography?
I for one cannot believe that a report of a more that 40 year old incident is kept secret to “avoid inflaming anti-Israel feelings”.
However, that’s the reason the President allegedly gives (and the only one) for his incredulty - that they are damned good (my paraphrase) and so he doesn’t believe it could possibly be an accident.
Such an opinion, seems to me, is worth about the breath used to expel it. Damn good or not, Israel has made plenty of military screw-ups.