was the Israeli attack on USS Liberty only an accident

Great Debates
41

“Make of it what you will” is another lie? You’re beginning to sound like a frothing at the mouth Israeli apologist who can brook no indication, no matter how good, that Israel might have done this intentionally.

How is it I am relying on “second hand accounts”? I quoted the very guy (Captain Boston) charged with investigating the incident at the time and who has put out a signed affadavit saying the investigation was seriously hobbled from the beginning and that the final report on record was not the report he submitted. Captain Boston also states repeatedly that Admiral Kidd, who oversaw the investigation, agreed the Israelis knew what they were doing.

I have provided quotes from highly placed senior staff and military individuals who were involved. Among the people who at the time think the Israelis knew what was going on (and said so) are the then Secretary of State, Director of the CIA, Director of the NSA AND Lyndon Johnson (yep…him too).

If you think all this is big time anti-Israeli try this:

The “lie” you seem so keen to bust me for is apparently a well held belief among many. Of course you might say the survivors of the Liberty have an axe to grind but we have Captain Boston claiming the “investigations” were bogus. We also have James Bamford making the same claim (Duckster provides Bamford’s bonafides earlier in this thread).

And…

As noted the Naval Court of Inquiry report (mentioned at the end of that last quote) is called into serious doubt by Captain Boston.
I have provided numerous quotes from respectable sources all over this thread. So far you (Finn Again) have provided very few sources or direct evidence rebuttals rather being content to shriek about me being a liar on one or two narrow aspects of all this (for instance the shooting of the lifeboats is mentioned consistently by eyewitnesses nearly anywhere they talk about this).

Is there a coverup here? Almost certainly. Conspiracy? Maybe. Certainly there is abundant evidence that simply does not add up as stated in the official records.

42

TWEEEEET!!

This is another hot button topic on which various people will never agree. That being the case, there is no point in anyone accusing posters on the opposite side of the discussion of dishonesty. You are arguing for the peanut gallery at home (since no one with a firm conviction on this point will ever be swayed by the opposing arguments or citations) so stop hurting your own positions by resorting to the “you’re dishonest” defense.

Cool down, everyone.

[ /Moderating ]

43

Simply for the record, I have called his cites dishonest, as in many cases their claimes are simply out and out falsehoods.

44

Speaking of which, for those playing along at home, these are some pretty good sources.

Including, but not limited to: why the Conspiracy Theory of a ‘total news blackout’ is a lie.
The actual Navy Inquiry record, proving that claims of the sailors being prohibited from talking about the attack and its motives are a lie.
Nowiki stating that the tapes did not support a deliberate attack with malice against a known American target.
And the email that he sent Bamford, whose content Bamford lied about, claiming that it said the exact opposite of what it actually did.
A piece on misidentification of targets at sea, check out the PDF as well.

Etc, etc, etc…
Like all Conspiracy Theories, this is patched together from distortions, misunderstandings, and outright fabrications. Read the documents for yourself, and see if the Conspiracy Theorists who describe them do so accurately.

45

Whoa! That one is a 728 page, 60+MB PDF file.

I’ll read that one in detail if I decide to publish a book on it. Till then it is a bit much to wade through on behalf of a SDMB thread.

Since you seem to have read it if you’d be willing to point out relevant parts that’d be great. Otherwise I will rely on analysis of others.

I’m looking at the other links and will get back.

46

Yes, it is.

But not if you’re going to accuse many different governmental agencies of conspiracy and coverup and an ally of our of a deliberate attack which was totally unnecessary if they could jam the ship’s communications anyway? Seems that if you’re making such serious charges, it might be worth your while to actually read the source material, first.

Research. Aint it a bitch.

Check page 39 of the inquiry 144 of the PDF to see the Cmdr talk about how he ordered the torpedo boats fired upon, and how they signaled before returning fire. Check page 40 of the inquiry, page 145 of the PDF where the Cmdr not only states that the torpedo boats did not machine gun life boats, or attempt to further sink the ship, but offered assistance. Or page 42 of the inquiry, 147 of the pdf where the Cmdr states that there were no bodies in the water and only lists the torpedo explosion as a possible source of those bodies and mentions nothing about the life boats being fired upon.
Check page 57 of the inquiry, 152 of the PDF where Lt. Painter says that not only did they not get into the life boats but that they had already been strafed while on board, and were then kicked overboard. He also specifically states, rather than the lie that the torpedo boats were firing on the life boats, that the torpedo boats backed off and, in his opinion, were waiting for the Liberty to sink.
Check page 59 of the inquiry, 154 of the PDF where Painter says that the flag was flying, again contradicting lies that the crew wasn’t allowed to testify as to whether or not the Israelis could have identified them and if it was malicious
Check page 137 of the inquiry, 242 of the PDF to see the testimony directly talking about Israeli claims of it being accidental. This contradicts the lie that you have cited that he was prohibited from doing so.

Etc, etc, etc…

47

I’ll start with this one.

I do not think anything in that post contradicts what sailors report being told aboard the ship which amounts to this:

So it seems all the details in the link FinnAgain provided do not contradict this piece nor does it contradict testimony given by crew members. The report given aboard the aircraft carrier seems to have been before the crew was warned and the two pieces cited allowing crew to speak to reporters does not change that they may have been warned initially as well as the directive that when they did talk about it they had to abide by the exact terms stated by the court.

The bit about Admiral Kidd giving an interview seems to be no part of that. Admiral Kidd was not a member of the crew and was the Admiral who seems to have given the order.

In short, the crew may well have been wanred as they said they were and then a few weeks later the restrictions were removed or lightened.

48

Yeah…it is a bitch:

This document is central to the whole issue and is what is being called into serious doubt. Rather than defending its veracity you are using it to defend itself. When someone points out that a particular piece if that document is wrong pointing to that same document and saying it is right cuz it said so doesn’t really work.

49

By that I mean the official naval inquiry.

50

Again you hold your sources to standards which are laughably ephemeral. And you allow them to lie and distort with impunity but still take them as valid cites. For instance:

There was a window of about two weeks during which they weren’t allowed to talk, as the Inquiry had not been resolved. After it was, they were free to spread “The Truth[sup]tm[/sup]” Your cite is deliberately distorting the facts in order to cleave to an agenda.

Your own quote says

Againk this obfuscates the fact that they were only prohibited from talking before the inquiry, and that after it they were free to ramble on all they liked.

Oh, I’m sorry, am I “shrieking”? :rolleyes:

Again, the same problem. They did not ‘feel compelled to’ “silence” anybody, this is just a distortion. They simply had them not speak their stories before the Inquiry, and then they were free to talk to whomever they wanted.

51

No, it isn’t. It’s hearsay spoken nearly 40 years after the fact centered around supposed quotes of a man who is already dead. Besides, they would have taken oaths to see justice done. Was he lying then, or is he lying now?

I’ll get my tinfoil hat out later. The simple fact of the matter, that not one single sailor said “Hey, they made stuff up, I didn’t say that!” that not one single aide, or what have you, came forward, puts this ‘revelation’ highly into doubt.

Pardon me for “frothing” but you seem to have missed the fact that the man telling you these things is a self admitted liar. Claiming hearsay “evidence”. From a dead man. That he lied about for close to fourty years, even if he is to be believed.

But sure, if you really want you can believe someone who tells you that he’s a liar and tries to convince you that a man who is already dead told him that someone else told him something.

52

  • If you read Boston’s sworn statement he says that what he turned in to the court is not the document that became part of the official court record.

  • They were given one week to investigate when they told Admiral McCain it would take six months for a proper investigation.

  • Some 60 affidavits collected from the crew were not entered into the record.

  • Boston (and anyone else) was prohibited from going to Israel for this investigation. The Israelis were apparently allowed to investigate themselves and submit that to the court of inquiry (note that when the USS Cole was attacked or the Marine Barracks bombing in Lebanon occurred US investigators went to those countries).

I’d say the above throws the official inquiry into serious doubt and that is not even adding in things like spy plane intercepts that were not included or listening post intercepts that an Ambassador says never made it in and so on.

I think that is their point. No one said, “I didn’t say that!”, because they have not been allowed to formally (in a Congressional hearing for instance) say anything. They want their day in court so to speak.

Sorry Admiral Kidd is dead and cannot answer to this. Much of what Boston relates are conversations he had with Kidd personally. Is that hearsay? I suppose it is (hearsay rules always confused my neophyte understanding of law). The part about Johnson ordering the inquiry to a specific result definitely seems to be hearsay.

53

Because someone retyped it, and, evidently, The Conspiracy not only cut out a part where Painter says that the life boats were fired upon, but adds in some stuff that has Painter saying that the life boats were already shot up and that the torpedo boats didn’t fire on them. And nobody noticed. For 36 years.

Moreoever, even if Painter’s testimony was changed, somehow without anybody realizing at all, McGonagle’s testimony still supports Painter’s “conspiracy” testimony of the torpedo boats not firing on the life boats. Funny that Boston would claim one was “conspiracy” tampering, but not remark on the other. Or was McGonagle ‘in on it’?

Who is ‘they’? What confirmation is there for this other than by a self admitted liar like Boston? Even if true, one hurried investigation does not negate the fact that there were nine others.

Cite? (A real cite, not a conspiracy page) Moreover, even if they weren’t entered into the record, why is that necessarily important? Do you need 60 people saying the same thing if you have officers who can testify to it, anyways?

So back during Gulf War I, when American A 10 pilots killed British troops by accident, and then Britain didn’t insist on interviewing them and America wouldn’t give their direct testimony to the coroner’s inquest… it was a diabolical coverup, too? America meant to murder British soldiers, for no reason at all, and then Britain helped cover it up?

And, also, note that your analogy is worthless. You’re comparing a friendly fire incident with terrorist attacks where we didn’t know all the details, and couldn’t exactly ask the terrorists.

The spy plane interecepts, which you’ve already handwaved away, were the major piece of evidence that the IDF had mistaken the identity of the Liberty.

Riiiiight… so they can get up in front of the History Channel to give testimony directly at odds with their previous stories, but they can’t say that they didn’t say what they’re on record as saying? And nobody else, in 36 years, happened to notice that the testimony was forged? Nobody?

Ya don’t say? Maybe Boston was lying about Kidd’s relationship with the ‘judge turned scholar’? Why, it looks like he was. I am shocked. Just shocked. Awful shame that Boston could only mis-remember certain things after Kidd happened to die. Funny that he waited 36 years to claim that, earlier, he was lying.

Doesn’t it strike you as odd, at all, that Kidd told nobody other than Boston, or that Boston waited 36 years, till after Kidd was dead, to say a word about it?

54

Just saw this very long thread, about something that happened decades ago.

But this part of the original quote struck me as odd:

So you can bounce microwave signals off the moon at 8am?

That makes me real skeptical about all the rest of the quotes from this guy.

55

Of course you can, the Moon doesn´t show up only at night.