A Travesty of War – Killing of Allies!
October 4, 2007
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
The following report by Haaretz Correspondent Yossi Melman, from the Chicago Tribune, just happens to be true.
However, both the U.S. and Israel want it to be buried, and I think they are right in doing so. The old expression, “War is Hell,” certainly applies to the episode of the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967. Had they been my s ons or brothers
on the Liberty, I confess I would feel differently about what happened, but I wish they would stop opening old wounds. I retired from the USAF Branch of the National Security Agency at Fort George G.
Meade in 1971, and this is an old wound I would just like to forget.
The essence of what happened was this – We had asked the Israelis not to go deep into Syrian territory on their pre-emptive strike, but they knew we could pick up electronic chatter between tank commanders, which would reveal their intent to disregard our request, so the USS Liberty was attacked to prevent this from happening. I could tell you more, but this episode in history needs to be forgotten. To revive it now would harm relations between us, making great propaganda for the forces of Islam, and most of those living at that time in the military are dead.
Whatever the U.S. was going to do about this action of needless slaughter should have been accomplished in 1967 – Not more than 40 years after it occurred.
Begin Haaretz Article
Israeli communications said to prove IAF knew Liberty was U.S. ship
By Yossi Melman, Haaretz Correspondent
Oc tober 4, 2007
The Israel Air Force warplanes and Israel Navy warships that attacked the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, at the height of the Six-Day War, were aware that the vessel was an American spy ship, according
to new testimony published Thursday in the Chicago Tribune.
The report stated that the U.S. National Security Agency – to which the intelligence gathering ship belonged – was able to intercept IAF communications according to which, at some stage, the pilots identified the ship as American but were nonetheless instructed to push ahead with the attack.
According to the report, some of the transcripts and intelligence information have disappeared, while the rest can be found in U.S. government archives.
Oliver Kirby, the NSA’s deputy director for operations at the time of the Liberty attack, is quoted by the Tribune as confirming the existence of the transcripts, saying he personally read them.
“They said, ‘We’ve got him in the zero,'” Kirby was quoted as saying, “whatever that meant – I guess the sights or something.
And then one of them said, ‘Can you see the flag?’ They said ‘Yes, it’s U.S, it’s U.S.’ They said it several times, so there wasn’t any doubt in anybody’s mind that they knew it.”
Kirby told the newspaper that the transcripts were “something that’s bothered me all my life.
I’m willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew.”
The report also states that then U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara ordered jets that had been dispatched to assist the Liberty turned around.
The Tribune quotes J.Q. “Tony” Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco that handled communications between Washington and the 6th Fleet, as saying that he listened in as McNamara said, “President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.”
McNamara, who is now 91, told the Tribune he has “absolutely no recollection of what I did that day,” except that “I have a memory that I didn’t know at the time what was going on.”
Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mark Regev told the Tribune that the attack on the Liberty was “a tragic and terrible accident, a case of mistaken identity, for which Israel has officially apologized.”
The USS Liberty was came under attack, first by IAF jets and then some 15 minutes later by Israel Navy warships, while patrolling off the shores of El-Arish in the Sinai Peninsula. 34 American sailors perished in the attack, 26 of them in the naval assault.
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