The Massacre of the USS Liberty

While it took 30 years for the truth to come out about the massacre of the USS Liberty, few Americans know that the treachery was a collusion of the US President, Lyndon Johnson, and Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, both men war criminals of the highest order.

 

We apologize to those who know the story, but for new comers to the case, we rehearse its salient points to clarify later remarks. We urge readers to read the full account in the references cited below, including the documentary, from which we constructed this story.

 

The USS Liberty was a World War 2 era ship which had been retrofitted with the most advanced surveillance equipment which the US military had at the time. For all practical purposes it was unarmed but had 4 50 caliber machine guns for token defense.

 

In early June 1967 the ship was dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean to monitor activities of the Israelis whom the US had provided significant intelligence support in their planned war against Egypt. US planes actually flew the Israeli flag in order to provide photographic evidence pinpointing the location of Egyptian military forces – the reason the IDF was able to wipe them out so quickly.

 

However much Johnson wanted Israel to invade the entire Middle East, he also knew that world political opinion would tolerate only so much. So he and Dayan created a plan as efficient as possible to take as much territory in as short a time as possible, including the Golan Heights which had belonged to Syria. The complex agreement involving the US, Israel, and Syria required Syria to attack Israel in a feigned show of support for Egypt, put up token resistance, then retreat. They never imagined that the Israelis would double cross them as they did.

 

In order to enforce that part of the deal, Johnson sent the Liberty to the Middle East to track Israeli communications to insure that the IDF did not shift their troops to Syria in violation of the stated aims of the American-Israeli-Syrian pact. Johnson figured that he could intercept any communications within the IDF ordering redeployments to Syria. The greatest fear he had was escalation of the war with the USSR which was a firm Syrian ally.

 

On June 2d, the Liberty and its crew of 286 Americans set sail to the eastern Mediterranean to monitor Israeli actions and most likely to provide additional intelligence to the IDF. On June 8, Dayan issued orders to sink the Liberty in a carefully planned attack which even took the crew of the Liberty by surprise as they had erroneously assumed that the Israelis were allies.

 

Israeli planes initially sent sorties to photograph the ship for follow up attacks which lasted for about 2 hours during the early afternoon of the 8^th. Israeli air forces fired heat seeking missiles, torpedoes, and Napalm to destroy the ship. One antenna miraculously survived the unprovoked attack allowing the ship to send a mayday signal which was picked up by the USS Saratoga of the 6^th fleet.

 

The commander of the Saratoga ordered Skyhawk jets launched to aid the Liberty but were recalled within minutes after Johnson ordered McNamara to return them to ship, insisting that the Liberty be sunk. When the Israeli-American attack on the Liberty was complete, 34 Americans were dead along with 171 wounded, numbers which are much higher than the lies propagated by the Pentagon.

 

Alan Hart provides abundant evidence that Dayan had warned Washington far in advance of the attack that the he would sink it if Johnson did not order the removal of the ship. Not only did Johnson back a foreign aggressor, but this evidence proves the official story of a case of mistaken identity a preposterous, laughing-my-butt-off lie.

 

The evidence also shows that Dayan was acutely aware of the presence of the Liberty and that it was there for reasons other than monitoring IDF’s intents on Syria. As noted, we believe that it was also supplying intelligence to the IDF.

 

Hart surmises that Johnson was shamed into reversing his recall of the jets, but only after he let Walter Rostow know so that he could warn his colleagues in Tel Aviv to terminate the attack before it turned into an aerial dogfight with an alleged ally.

 

After the crew returned to port in Norfolk, Admiral Isaac Kidd, an accomplice to the murders, ordered the crew of the Liberty to keep silent forever or risk being murdered by Marine and Delta Force assassination squads.

 

Even the revisionist history, vastly improved over the lies of the murderers, has problems. We don’t buy the story that the Liberty was off the Egyptian coast to keep tabs on the IDF. If anything, it was there to support the attack.

 

Why did the Liberty need to be in the region at all? There were US intelligence planes flying over the region monitoring the war whose crews knew exactly what was happening in the Sinai and over the Liberty. They would have most likely alerted Washington of troop redeployments. Nevertheless, we grant that the ship probably had capabilities not available to the planes.

 

The main point is that the Liberty had more of a mission than alerting Johnson to threats to Syria.

 

Why didn’t the air force pilots call for help for the Liberty? They knew it was under attack.

 

Certainly Johnson knew that Israel would invade Syria – it was the most reasonable outcome to the war which it helped the Israelis plan. More information has since surfaced which probably explains the real reason why Johnson and Dayan wanted the Liberty sunk.

 

The main crew of the Liberty was an NSA team whose quarters not even the captain of the Liberty was allowed to enter. Given their proximity to the fighting, we believe that they had picked up transmissions that the Jews were butchering Egyptians by the truck load, holocaust style. We further believe that they reported this information back to Johnson, who then panicked about the fallout from such revelations.

 

Walter Rostow then ordered Johnson to sink the Liberty which he authorized via Dayan. This then is the reason Johnson was so adamant that the Liberty and its witnesses be sunk. Only when he realized that the core of the NSA crew had been murdered did he relent to save the ship from total sinking.

 

But how did the Ziocon Rostow have so much power over Johnson? Johnson was a Ziocon himself who shared loyalties to Israel over those to the US. But the ties which bind were deeper. Rostow is the individual who engineered the incarnation of the Warren Commission after Johnson initially refused. A full court press was waged against Johnson, with Rostow being the primary instigator behind the intense lobbying.

 

But why did Rostow insist so heavily on the commission? He wanted an elaborate whitewash to pin the blame on Oswald, much as Mossad agent James Angleton planned. The heavy apparatus of the Warren Commission would guarantee that finding the truth to the Kennedy murder would be nearly impossible.

 

The reason Rostow was so heavily involved is that Israel and David Ben Gurion were the leading partners with the CIA in the murder of John Kennedy, and Rostow, who no doubt was involved, knew that Johnson was up to his eyeballs in the crime, and thus very blackmailable. So when the master barked, the dog Johnson jumped.

 

Consequently there would be no revelations of the butchering of the Egyptians by the Israelis. The Israelis had no way to handle the many prisoners of war they suddenly had on their hands and still take the Golan Heights; so they murdered the survivors as quickly as they could in order to move their tanks to Syria.

 

While our view is perhaps the most extreme of any we have encountered, it is not necessary to accept it in order to understand the massacre of the USS Liberty. The facts are plain: the Israelis attempted to sink an unarmed ship without provocation either to obscure intentions to attack Syria, to hide war crimes, or both.

 

We salute the men of the USS Liberty who have come bravely forward to tell the truth. Doing so required even more courage than facing down the brutal assault by the Israelis on June 8, 1967.

Reference

Alan Hart, Israel’s Attack on the USS Libert, Veterans Today, June 7, 2012, accessed March 8, 2014
The Loss of Liberty, Howard Films, undated

Copyright 2014 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.