The Great Betrayal of June 8, 1967: Israel’s Attack on the USS Liberty is Never Mentioned by the US Political Establishment and the Mainstream Media
Question is Why?
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Fifty-Six Years Ago, June 8, 1967
With a very few exceptions, it’s barely mentioned in the mainstream media whether it’s CNN, MSNBC, FOX news, The New York Times, or the Washington Post. It is never mentioned in public school history books and forget Hollywood, no movie would ever be produced on that tragic day since Zionists conspirators run the movie industry. And of course, the most treasonous people to their own country, the Israeli-controlled US political establishment would never dare mention what happened on June 8th, 1967 when America’s most treasured ally, the ‘Jewish State’ of Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a US Navy technical research ship which was basically a spy ship, killing 34 and injured over 171 crew members including marines, US Naval personal including officers, seamen and even a civilian employee from the National Security Agency (NSA).
The attack on the USS Liberty happened during the height of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab world that included Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and to an extent Iraq, however, the US had claimed ‘neutral status’ and was in international waters towards the north of the Sinai Peninsula before the war had even started.
Then the USS Liberty was ordered to sail towards the eastern Mediterranean Sea to collect intelligence close to the north coast of Sinai, Egypt. During their mission, the Israel Air Force (IAF) had flown over the USS Liberty supposedly searching for Egyptian submarines that was previously located near the coast. At around 2 pm, the IAF sent two Mirage III fighter jets to monitor the USS Liberty which the Israelis say had no “distinguishable markings” or any flag on the ship which was a lie and then the Mirage fighters opened fire on the USS Liberty.
Here is where it gets complicated, right before the attack, the Mirage fighter jets, codename Kursa had communicated with an Israeli command post weapons systems officer, air controllers and a chief air controller who reportedly questioned whether there was a US ship in the area, so at around 1:57 pm, the chief air controller, Lieutenant-Colonel Shmuel Kislev gave the orders to attack the USS Liberty.
The Israeli fighter jets unleashed 30-mm cannons, rockets, and napalm thus killing and injuring many of the US crew members. The Israelis even managed to jam-up the US communications systems right before the attack which means that the Israelis knew that it was an American Naval ship. On top of the Israeli fighter jets already attacking the USS Liberty, there were three additional Israeli torpedo boats who also launched an attack on the ship with cannons, mounted machine guns and torpedoes. One of the torpedo’s killed 25 crew members instantly. The Israeli torpedo boats also targeted life rafts as the crew tried to abandon the ship.
It was clear that Israel and the Lyndon B. Johnson regime wanted no witnesses who could have exposed Israel’s attack to the American public.
How do we know this?
At 3:15, two Israeli helicopters armed with IDF soldiers were most likely supposed to kill the remaining US naval survivors, for whatever reason, that did not happen. Meanwhile, the ship was still under an immense attack as the crew called for help through open lines of communications. Two US Naval ships, the USS Saratoga and the USS America received the message and ordered US fighter jets to rescue the ship from the attack, but in a rather strange move, the mission was called off by Washington.
Israel also knew that the US fighter jets were ordered to stop the attack from an intercepted transmission. So they immediately called off their attack and recalled their torpedo boats and helicopters. Then the Israeli government notified Washington that they “mistakenly” attacked an American ship and told them that they had ordered its fighter jets to return back to their airbase.
Call it what you want, but it is a legitimate conspiracy fact that US President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara halted a rescue mission to save the remaining survivors.
It seems that it was a false-flag operation to get the US to enter the conflict and support Israel at all costs against several Arab countries. A high-ranking official by the name of Admiral L. R. Geis, who was the commander of the Sixth Fleet carrier force told Lt. Commander, David Lewis of the USS Liberty that he challenged McNamara’s orders to cancel the rescue operation. It was reported that McNamara responded by saying that “President Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.” A communications officer, J.Q. “Tony” Hart from a U.S. Navy communications relay station in Morocco oversaw the entire transmission, also gave the same testimony.
There were multiple investigations on what happened to the USS Liberty, and of course, both the US and Israeli governments declared that it was a “mistake”, but crew members said it was deliberate. Who was right? The crew members of course, but no one knows about their experiences because these same politicians who claim they care about their military veterans never mention what happened on that day.
It’s an important day to remember. So, the question we must ask is why most people in the US don’t know what happened on June 8th, 1967? Every single politician, whether they are presidents, senators, the US congress, governors, etc., no one ever mentions the Israeli attack on the USS liberty. Do these same politicians and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) consider it “Anti-Semitic” to mention what happened on that day? I would have to say, yes.
The Chicago Tribune’s 2007 Article
On October 7th, 2007, The Chicago Tribune published a controversial story called ‘New Revelations in Attack on American Spy ship‘, although there was nothing to suggest that it was a “new revelation” since the veterans or shall we call them victims of the USS liberty attack have been speaking out since the day it happened. However, the Chicago Tribune did report on the anger and betrayal felt by the USS Liberty veterans by their government on behalf of their most treasured ally, Israel “that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots — communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.” Was there a joint cover-up by Washington and Tel Aviv? You decide, “The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel’s reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation.” The National Security Agency (NSA) also made itself conveniently neutral on the matter:
In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country’s chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had “become the center of considerable controversy and debate.” It was not the agency’s intention, it said, “to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material,” available here.
One of the most absurd explanations on the USS Liberty attack was published in the Jewish Virtual Library by a New York born and former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren who published ‘The USS Liberty Incident: “The USS Liberty: Case Closed’. Of course, Oren’s claims that the media, journalists and even websites who exposed the attack on the USS Liberty are anti-Semitic hatemongers and Arab propagandists:
The claim that Israel’s attack on the Liberty was premeditated has also appeared persistently in the press. In 1992, nationally syndicated columnists Roland Evans and Robert Novak dedicated a column, “Twenty-Five Years of Cover-Up,” to this charge. Similar accusations have been aired on television programs such as ABC’s 20/20 and Geraldo Rivera’s Now It Can Be Told. The claim is particularly widespread on the Internet, where a search for the “USS Liberty” yields dozens of sites, from those of Arab propagandists (Birzeit.edu, Salam.org, Palestine Forever) and anti-Semitic hate mongers (The Tangled Web, Jew Watch) to the award-winning USS Liberty Homepage, posted by Ennes and other veterans. But while the tenor of these pages may differ – the veterans abjure any anti-Semitism, stressing that several of their crewmates were Jewish – their conclusions are indistinguishable: Israel wantonly attacked the Liberty with the intention of killing every man on board, and then thwarted attempts to investigate the crime.
Refuting this accusation was difficult if not impossible in the past when the official records on the Liberty were designated top-secret and closed to the general public. With the recent declassification of these documents in the United States and Israel, however, researchers have gained access to a wealth of primary sources – Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and U.S. military records, Israeli diplomatic correspondence, and memoranda from both the State Department and the White House. With the aid of these materials, the attack on the Liberty can now be reconstructed virtually minute-by-minute and with remarkable detail. The picture that emerges is not one of crime at all, nor even of criminal negligence, but of a string of failed communications, human errors, unfortunate coincidences, and equipment failures on both the American and Israeli sides – the kind of tragic, senseless mistake that is all too common in the thick of war
In Oren’s conclusion, he does blame Israel, but for numerous “errors” it had committed at the height of the attack. “The Israelis, too, committed their own share of fateful errors, as the Yerushalmi report points out: The erroneous reports of bombardment at El-Arish, the failure to replace the Liberty’s marker on the board after it had been cleared, the over-eagerness of naval commanders, and worst of all, Ensign Yifrah’s miscalculation of the ship’s speed.” Now that’s a lame excuse:
Though Yerushalmi’s report suggested reasons for these errors – inflexible naval procedures, the inaccuracy of speed-measuring devices – one is still left with a sense of poor organization and sloppy execution. Moreover, there were breakdowns in communications between the Israeli navy and air force stemming from inadequate command structure and the immense pressures of a multi-front war. To these factors must be added Israel’s general sensitivity about its coastal defenses, and the exhaustion of its pilots after four days of uninterrupted combat. Yet none of these amount to the kind of gross negligence of which the Israelis have been accused.
And then there were “bad breaks” that are unfortunately commonplace in war: The U.S. planes that were called back because of their nuclear payload (their mere presence might have warded off the torpedo boats); the Liberty’s inability to signal the approaching Israeli boats, and the machine gunner who fired on them; and the smoke that hid the identities of both the attackers and the attacked.
All of these elements combined to create a tragic “friendly fire” incident of the kind that claimed the lives of at least fifty Israeli soldiers in the Six Day War, and caused 5,373 American casualties in Vietnam in 1967 alone.53 Obviously, these findings can do little to lessen the suffering of those American servicemen who were wounded in the incident, nor can they be expected to offer comfort to the families of the dead. But they should at least permit us to bring to a close what has for a generation remained one of the most painful chapters in the history of America’s relationship with the State of Israel
Michael Oren says the attack was not a crime, but a timeline of failures that included failed communications to human errors as an unfortunate coincidence, in other words, he concludes that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was a “friendly fire” incident.
In an article from April 22nd, 2021, I mentioned an interesting research project published by the US Army War College called the ‘Assault on the USS Liberty: Deliberate or Tragic Accident?‘ by Colonel Peyton E. Smith. Colonel Smith concluded that the attack on the USS Liberty was a deliberate act, “The attack was most likely deliberate for reasons far too sensitive to be disclosed by the US (or) Israeli government and that the truth may never be known.” According to Smith, the US and Israeli governments need to release the data, “Based on the testimony of many eyewitnesses and the memoirs of senior government officials, the attack on the USS Liberty was most likely deliberate. Unfortunately, this issue may go to the grave unresolved unless the US government and the government of Israel release all data related to the incident” but as we all know, that won’t never happen.
The truth is that Israel attacked the USS Liberty as a false-flag operation to get the US into the Six-Day War just like they did many years later with their relentless propaganda for the US to lead the war against Iraq. And as we all know, the big lie on the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had in his arsenal by the Israel-backed Bush regime led to the tragic war killing and injuring countless Iraqis. Israel has a plan to dominate the Middle East as it attempts to destroy another major country in the Middle East and that country is Iran, a major obstacle to its long-term plan to ultimately control the Arab world.
Make no mistake, Israel wants the US to continue to sacrifice its sons and daughters as cannon fodder in another Middle East conflict to defend and protect ‘God’s chosen people.
As we all know, the US political establishment is bought and paid for by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and we must include the US Bible Belt fanatics who support Israel at all costs. But there is another unique problem for the former US president, Donald J. Trump who said that Israel does not control congress anymore and for 2024 GOP candidate, that’s a problem.
The US political establishment, both Democrats and Republicans and of course, the Zionist controlled mainstream media never talk about what happened on June 8th, 1967. No politicians from Lyndon B. Johnson to Joe Biden, none of them would ever dare to mention what happened on that day because all of them are financed and controlled, and that’s not a conspiracy theory.
Listen to the words of Ron Grantski, USS Liberty Survivor: ‘Attack on the USS Liberty Recalled’:
*
Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from SCN