for over 2 years, many Korean young people would be quite happy to see a China allied ROK. After all, many young people blame the US for starting the Korean War. However if China ever does occupy the DPRK it would be interesting to see how quickly the South Koreans beg the US to help them.

Wow. Your post has just made my day.

Greater US efforts to balance China seem likely to worsen US-China relations. Is that a risk worth taking?

Also, is balancing inherently confrontational?

Thanks,
Max B.

and maintain our commitments in the ME. Can we afford to support all of these potential allies in a confrontation against China and continue our ME wars? I don't think so. We have already sunk a trillion into the Iraq war and about a quarter of that into Afghanistan. Those commitments are not over. Any attempt to draw down in Afghanistan will be perceived as weakness by our enemies so that dollar drain must continue.

I think our limited resources will make it impossible for the US to assume the role in East Asia that Walt is outlining here. That I do not believe is a bad outcome but then I think the US should be focusing its resources on solving problems here at home.

We need to internationalize our navy. This really gets to the reality of mutual respect. These countries will be offended by our paternalistic instincts. Only by creating a multinational navy can we off-set the costs among the coalition while not offending them. Only by creating a new ISP navy can we maintain our goals. ISP--Indian Ocean/South Pacific.

You can talk theoretically, we can use abstract terms and alliances; but only an international navy is a concrete demonstration of a strong alliance. Most important of all is that this will throw a bone to war contractors, which is likely the only way to scale back our defense spending.

"Japan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and South Korea have all begun significant defense modernization programs..." Professor Walt, is there a specific source for this? Very interesting, and I would like to follow up.

This broad brush approach to problems of intimate interest to the South Koreans seems of little value to them. If all else fails, the perfesser can revert to complaint about food service on Korean Air.

- Sell more Hyundai in China, and overtake Toyota, Volkswagens & beat out GM in China
- Sell more Hyundai in US, why can’t people in US recognize that Hyundai is better than Honda or Toyota with 100000 miles warranty??
- Prepare for onslaught of millions of China tourists,
- Go to China for bargain hunting on just everything,
- Get China to lean on North Korea to be less bellicose and keep pumping aids on North Koreans to be less of burden to all otehrs, that is all best hope for today & tomorrow, unifications may come someday whenever it comes naturally; every peaceful day will always follow by another day.

What it is, any outsiders trying to tell Koreans what to do??

South Koreans are gearing up to become big international players and investing in Africa & Middle East, and means to edge out Japna to become dominate International name brands, Samsung rules!!!

what are you trying to tell South Koreans what to do again??

academic busybody, You got to have better things to do than just insulting Korean Food,

Today I went to the conference named "Korea Questions - Balancing Theory and Practive" and met Stephan Walt. He was surrounded by many college students and took pics with them.....I was one of them :P
It wasn't that fierce discussion but had a little tension. Issues about Korea are all too tricky and we left more questions, not solutions...
But as he showed realistic views on security environment of north east asia, it was really "wake up call" for koreans who wants to keep status quo strategy ; seeking security protections with U.S alliance and also taking advantage of China to get economic interests. Also John Mearsheimer was there.. he asserted his view quiet strongly...:);
Koreans and also other Asian countries really don't want to face horrible time when they have to make choice between U.S and China. we hope two great powers understand that and Everyone knows it's up to U.S - China relationship. Prof. Walt suggested that korea needs to do effective balancing strategy with some cooperation with other asian countries and pool prudent diplomacy skills.

Prof. Walt got many questions and I was moved by he tried to answer every questions including undergraduate student's questions. But several questions still left for me. I agreed that Koreans need to see the dynamics of this region in realistic and cool headed way and we have a keen eye on China as well. High dependency on China economy is worrying too. But if asian countries try to make balancing strategy to China and fail to do it, then it will expose more problems. Asian countries will be disappointed about each other's selfishness and China will not stand that moves and will be more assertive and U. S would not want to be entangled those tensions.
You said it needs "smart policy", but what if balancing strategy itself is too risky to try?

and it forces Korea to choose U.S's help even though we cannot sure about U.S's commitment. If U.S returns to focus on domestic problems.

And what about the result? Balancing China cannot give this region fully sustainable stability and peace. you told that no Asian countries want to break status quo situation YET. But even if Asian countries suceed balancing China, it will be temporary and not gonna remain in the long term because it has only hard power resources to pool.

International relations in Asia-Pacific will no doubt be super tricky for the next fifity years. I would rather attribute the complexity of the region to US interference than to China's rise. China has belonged to this region for thousands of years. China, indeed, is just too large a country to play low profile. Therefore its rise, peacefully or not, must have something to do with the region, regardless of China's own will or other countries' wills. For United States, it has come a long way to this region just because it clamis national interests over the whole globe. After all, China never claims national interests off coast of California.

BTW, I really think Dr. Steve Walt should be considered for the National Security Advisor, as I've said several times in my comments. He is intelligent, wise and prudent, and can therefore represent your national interests better than any self-admiring hawkish advisor who is inclined to be enchanted to absolute power and force, in this complicated and fast changing world.

Professor Walt,

A few days ago I was on Mondoweiss, a blogsite, whose editors and bloggers, you should know, all speak of you and the co-author of your most controversial opus with the highest regard and affection. I attempted to register a reply in an ongoing debate with a commenter there named “Shingo” over the controversial subjects of the Six Day War of June 1967, and whether or not Israel had deliberately attacked the USS Liberty on June 8, the fourth day of that war. Unfortunately, my reply to the arguments of Shingo, who has argued that Israel committed an unprovoked act of aggression in the 1967 War, and deliberately attacked the American ship, the USS Liberty during that war, was inexplicably banned on Mondoweiss, so I have decided to register my comments here. Hope you don’t mind!

My reply post to Shingo is in two parts: Part I: The Six Day War, 1967, and Part II: The Attack on the USS Liberty

In this post, I concentrate on the Six Day War.

***

PART I: THE SIX DAY WAR, 1967

--SECTION I: The origins of the Syria-Israel border dispute, which was one of the events leading to the war

--SECTION II: The legality of Nasser’s closure of the Straits of Tiran in 1955 and 1967.

--SECTION III: Was the Soviet warning to Nasser and the Syrians that Israel had mobilized 15 brigades on the Syrian border accurate, and did this justify Nasser’s closure of the Straits in 1967?

--SECTION IV: Whether there was an existential danger to Israel in late May and early June 1967, and whether she was justified in launching a pre-emptive strike.

***

SECTION I: The origins of the Syria-Israel border dispute, which was one of the events leading to the war

Said Shingo:

“Israel had no right to cultivate the Demilitarized Zone,
which is why it was called the Demilitarized Zone, and
even then, Moshe Dayan’s admission illustrates to the
world what Israel had in mind when it said “cultivate”. Of
course, when it comes to Israel discourse, “disputed” is
taken to mean Israel’s for the taking.”

“Dr. R. Bunche the UN Acting Mediator finally arrived
at a solution by issuing what is known as the
“authoritative statement.” Three weeks before the
signing, on 26 June 1 949, Dr. Bunche (Dr. R. Bunche
the UN Acting Mediator) sent a letter to both the Israeli
\and Syrian sides. This letter is part of the official record.
It specifically excluded Israel’s claims of sovereignty
over the area to be included in the Armistice Agreement .
“Questions of permanent boundaries, territorial
sovereignty, customs, trade relations and the like
must be dealt with in the ultimate peace agreement
and not in the armistice agreement” , he stated.”

Bunche merely said that the Armistice agreement did not address questions of permanent boundaries and sovereignty, which is not surprising considering that this was an armistice, and not a peace agreement. The Armistice agreement did, however, mark the demarcation lines which would, in the absence of a peace treaty, separate the borders of Israel from her neighbors. The agreement put a DMZ on Israel’s side of the demarcation line. The Israelis were therefore as free to cultivate the DMZ there as they were to do so in Haifa or Tel-Aviv.

Said Shingo:

“Two years after Dr. Bunche’s statement, the Security
Council, in its resolution on May 18, 1951 about Israeli
violations of the Armistice Agreement, affirmed his
statement and called upon the parties to give effect to
“the authoritative comment on article V of the Syrian –
Israeli Agreement”. The Armistice conditions were
clear. No political or military activity in the area, the
local population (Arab majority and Jews) have
freedom of living, work and movement, civil
administration and ‘Arab’ and Jewish local police
are to be set up, no heavy arms within 5 km of the
armistice line and full authority of UN Truce
Supervision to supervise the civil administration.”

In the first place, UNSC 92 does not single Israel out alone for condemnation. It speaks of the “fighting” between “the parties.” It states:

“Recalling its resolutions 54 (1948) of 15 July 1948,
73 (1949) of 11 August 1949, and 89 (1950) of 17
November 1950.

Noting with concern that fighting has broken
out in and around the demilitarised zone
established by the Israel-Syrian General Armistice
Agreement of 20 July 1949, and that fighting is continuing
despite the cease-fire order of the Acting Chief of
Staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision
Organisation in Palestine issued on 4 May 1951,
Calls upon the parties or persons in the areas
concerned to cease fighting, brings to the attention
of the parties their obligations under Article 2, paragraph
4, of the Charter of the United Nations and the Security
Council's resolution 54 (1948) and their commitments
under the General Armistice Agreement, and accordingly
calls upon them to comply with these obligations and
commitments.”

Secondly, your/Abu Sitta’s contention that the Armistice agreement stipulates that there was to be “no political or military activity in the area” is only half correct. Here is section 5 (V) of the Armistice:

“5. a. Where the Armistice Demarcation Line does
not correspond to the international boundary between
Syria and Palestine, the area between the Armistice
Demarcation Line and the boundary, pending final
territorial settlement between the Parties, shall be e
stablished as a Demilitarised Zone from which the
armed forces of both Parties shall be totally excluded,
and in which no activities by military or para-military
forces shall be permitted. This provision applies to
the Ein Gev and Dardara sectors which shall form
part of the Demilitarised Zone.

b. Any advance by the armed forces, military or
para-military, of either Party into any part of the
Demilitarised Zone, when confirmed by the United
Nations representatives referred to in the following
sub-paragraph, shall constitute a flagrant violation
of this Agreement.”

It therefore does not exclude “political activity,” whatever that is supposed to be, but “military or paramilitary” activity. The Israelis therefore had every right to cultivate the DMZ on their side of the demarcation line. Demilitarized zone does not mean de-cultivated zone. The Syrians, in any event, would have disputed the border wherever it was. The real problem, as always, was Israel’s existence, not some obscure border dispute.

Said I:

“The Syrians rained fire on the Dan Kibbutz in
November 1964, and three more times throughout
1965, each time receiving a stinging response
from the IDF. In July 1966, another Syrian attack
was answered by an IAF strike which destroyed
some earth moving equipment and shot down a
Syrian MiG-21 that tried to interfere. Then, in January
of 1967, without any provocation or warning, Syrian
tanks fired some thirty one shells on the Almagor
Kibbutz and sprinkled a shower of light machine gun
fire on the Shamir Kibbutz that wounded two.

Said Shingo:

“Moshe Dayan already explained how this took
place. It was indeed Israel who provoked the
incident with Syria by using the tractors to provoke
a response from Syrian, In other words, the 1964
and 65 skirmishes were deliberately instigated by
Israel in order to secure control of the DMZ. Similarly,
the in January 1967 skirmishes were the result of
blatant Israeli provocation. What resulted from those
skirmishes may indeed have been “deplorable” and
“insidious” attacks and as “menaces to peace, but a
s Dayan amditted, Israel was responsible for at least
80% of those incidents.”

This “80%” figure is both unverifiable and is considered to be exaggerated by most historians, and the 1964-1965 skirmishes had less to do with the old dispute over the DMZ (though there was that, of course), and more to do with Syria’s attempt to sabotage Israel’s National Water Carrier.

In 1964, Israel’s National Water Carrier was inaugurated to transfer water from Lake Tiberias to the population centers to the south. The water allocation effort was based on the framework of the Johnston Plan, so called after Eric Johnston, the American water envoy sent by the Eisenhower administration to mediate the water dispute between Israel and her neighbors in the mid-1950’s. In the plan, water from the Jordan River and the Yarmuk River would be divided between Israel (40%), Jordan (45%) and Syria and Lebanon (15%). While the plan was judged fair by Arab water experts, it was rejected by the Arab states on the grounds that it was of benefit to the Israeli economy and was therefore unacceptable.

It was then decided at an Arab League Summit in Cairo in January 1964 to divert the waters of the Jordan and to frustrate Israel’s Water Carrier initiative. This counter-initiative, where a canal was dug to divert the waters of the Hazbani in Lebanon and the Banias in Syria into the River Yarmuk in Jordan, would deprive Israel of two-thirds of the water of the River Jordan, would have reduced the installed capacity of Israel’s carrier by about 35%, and Israel’s overall water supply by about 11%. The preamble to the decisions of the Summit read:

“The establishment of Israel is the basic threat that the
Arab nation in its entirety has agreed to forestall. And s
ince the existence of Israel is a danger that threatens the
Arab nation, the diversion of the Jordan waters by it
multiplies the dangers to Arab existence. Accordingly,
the Arab states have to prepare the plans necessary
for dealing with the political, economic and social
aspects, so that if necessary results are not achieved,
collective Arab military preparations, when they are not
completed, will constitute the ultimate practical means
for the final liquidation of Israel.”

Said Michael Comay, Israel’s permanent representative to the UN in a note to the Security Council:

“The clear purport of this proclamation is that 13 member
states of the UN have set themselves the aim of liquidating
another member state, have declared that to be a central
policy objective guiding their collective actions, and have
determined to concentrate all of their national potential on
the attainment of this aim.”

This unilateral attempt to divert the headwaters of the Jordan and the effort to prevent Israeli cultivation of the DMZ evacuated by Syria following the 1949 armistice agreements which were located on the Israeli side of the demarcation line were thus hostile, aggressive acts against Israel. Unlike many of the tit-for-tat border exchanges of the previous years, where, to some extent, both sides were provoking each other (the Arabs to gore and harass Israel, the Israelis in asserting sovereignty over the DMZ and responding in force to attempt to deter further border infiltrations and terrorism), this was a direct, Arab/Syrian provocation to which the Israelis responded in kind, not vice-versa. Following the Syrian attack on Dan Kibbutz in November 1964, every subsequent Israeli attack and counter-attack that occurred after this diversion-effort occurred in the context of this dynamic. The Israelis were now determined to thwart this sabotage-water diversion effort by force, and within a year of violent border exchanges between Syria and Israel, the Syrians dropped their diversion efforts after Nasser (in September 1965) told them to cool it until the Arab states were better prepared militarily to respond to Israel.

The January 1967 Syrian attack, following a spell of relative quiet on the Israel-Syria border, was completely unprovoked, as was openly acknowledged by Damascus, and it was the April 7 incident, you’ll recall, where the Israelis made a strategic decision to respond in force to the growing attacks, and used the occasion to deliver a punishing blow in an attempt to deter future attacks. The two tractors deliberately put into the DMZ to draw the Syrians out into the open can hardly be called an act of aggression, as they were unarmed and within the demarcation line. The Syrians, as in November 1964 and January 1967, fired the first shots onto Israeli territory, not vice-versa, and thus took the Israeli bait and brought it completely on themselves. If your neighbor shoots at you from his property while you are cultivating a garden on your property, who, ultimately then, is guilty of wrongdoing?

The Syrians, through sheer truculence, had sabotaged the Israeli-Syrian Mutual Armistice Commission meeting set up by U Thant in January to resolve the dispute, and the diplomatic consensus (later endorsed by U Thant) was that the Syrians were the aggressors in this matter. This was also confirmed by none other than the United Arab Command chief ‘Ali ‘Ali ‘Amer himself following the April 7 incident: “How many times have I pleaded with our Syrian brothers not to provoke Israel? We have begged them time and time again and yet they continue shelling Israeli settlements, in sending in al-Fatah cells to shoot up transport or to mine the roads, and all this hurts our military efforts.”

As for your dismissal of Michael Oren’s characterization of Dayan’s oft-quoted comment, even Avi Shlaim, while acknowledging some historical truth to Dayan’s remarks, has characterized them in a manner even more critical than that of Oren:

”Dayan’s 1976 comments on Israel’s behavior were
rather sweeping and simplistic. They may have been
colored by his disgrace and resignation as defense
minister following his failure to anticipate the Arab
attack in October 1973. The failure thrust him into the
political wilderness and led him to question the
official Israeli version of the conflict. Being a man
of extremes he now exonerated the Syrians and
placed most of the blame for the conflict on the
Israeli side.” (Avi Shlaim, “The Iron Wall: Israel
and the Arab World,” 2000, p. 236)

BTW, if you have evidence that the Israelis fired the first shots in November 1964 or in January 1967, please present it.

***

SECTION II: The legality of Nasser’s closure of the Straits of Tiran in 1955 and 1967.

Said I:

“So the 1957 agreement was null and void? And this
obscure legal article bore the imprimatur of the UN, was
binding and had de jure application? And the UN thus
judged Israel to be in violation of the 1957 agreement?
Was this “violation” ever addressed by the Security Council?
Please explain.

Said Shingo:

“I was going to until you did if for me. I must say, I
laughed when you accused me of pulling a dishonest
stunt about Ben Gurion’s speech, and then went on to
prove that my citiation was accurate. As you pointed out,
the first two points of Ben Gurioni’s speech declared that…”

Your dishonesty was three-fold: First, you omitted points 3-5, and 7 to make the speech seem more rejectionist than it was; second, you portrayed this as a lasting abrogation of the armistice lines, when this was not the case: the next day, on November 8, Abba Eban announced Israel’s acceptance of the UN Resolution demanding Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai, but merely stipulated a gradual withdrawal. The Israelis subsequently withdrew by March 11, 1957, fulfilling the requirements of the UN Resolution in full. Third, you tried to portray this alleged rejection of the armistice as proof positive of Israel’s alleged abrogation of the 1957 agreement.

In any event, you did not answer the question, which was to explain a) how Israel was in violation of the 1957 agreement, and whether the UN ever decreed it to be, b) how Nasser’s ejection of UNEF from the Sinai and his militarization of the peninsula were not a violation of the 1957 agreement.

When I said:

“What ultimately made the agreement that Meir spoke
of possible was that Dag Hammerskjold had promised
Nasser that Egypt could remove the UNEF force if the
General Assembly judged that the peacekeepers had
completed their mission, and John Foster Dulles had
promised Golda Meir that any Egyptian attempt to
re-militarize the Sinai and Gaza and/or impede Israeli
maritime rights in the Straits of Tiran would entitle Israel
to invoke Article 51 in its own self-defense.”

Shingo responded:

“False. The US never took this position, so the matter
is indeed disputed. Thus, any declaration by Meir that
any breach of the guarantees by Egypt would constitute
an act of war, and Israel’s argument about its rights
under Article 51 to defend itself have no validity.”

“[N]ever took this position?” This is completely, utterly false. A February 11, 1957 aide-memoire that Dulles handed to then-ambassador Eban read as follows:

“With respect to the Gulf of Aqaba and access thereto
the United States believes that the gulf comprehends
international waters and that no nation has the fight to
prevent free and innocent passage in the gulf and
through the Straits giving access thereto. We have in
mind not only commercial usage, but the passage of
pilgrims on religious missions, which should be fully
respected.

The United States recalls that on 28 January 1950, the
Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed the United
States that the Egyptian occupation of the two islands
of Tiran and Sanafir at the entrance of the Gulf of Aqaba
was only to protect the islands themselves against
possible damage or violation and that, "this occupation
being in no way conceived in a spirit of obstructing in
any way innocent passage through the stretch of water
separating these two islands from the Egyptian coast
of Sinai, it follows that this passage, the only practicable
one, will remain free as in the past, in conformity with
international practice and recognized principles of the
law of nations."

In the absence of some overriding decision to the contrary,
as by the International Court of Justice, the United States,
on behalf of vessels of United States registry, is prepared
to exercise the right of free and innocent passage and to
join with others to secure general recognition of this right.

It is of course clear that the enjoyment of a right of free and
innocent passage by Israel would depend upon its prior
withdrawal in accordance with the United Nations Resolutions.
The United States has no reason to assume that any
littoral State would under these circumstances obstruct the
right of free and innocent passage.

The United States believes that the United Nations General
Assembly and the Secretary-General should, as a
precautionary measure, seek that the United Nations
Emergency Force move into the Straits area as the Israeli
forces are withdrawn. This again we believe to be within
the contemplation of the Second Resolution of 2 February
1957.”

Dulles could thus hardly have been clearer:

--“With respect to the Gulf of Aqaba and access thereto
the United States believes that the gulf comprehends
international waters and that no nation has the fight to
prevent free and innocent passage in the gulf and through
the Straits giving access thereto.”

--“..the United States, on behalf of vessels of United States
registry, is prepared to exercise the right of free and innocent
passage and to join with others to secure general recognition
of this right.”

These sentiments in the aide-memoire were confirmed by none other than Eisenhower himself in a speech to the nation nine days later on February 20, 1957:

“With reference to the passage into and through the Gulf
of Aqaba, we expressed the conviction that the gulf
constitutes international waters, and that no nation has
the right to prevent free and innocent passage in the gulf.
We announced that the United States was prepared to
exercise this right itself and to join with others to secure
general recognition of this right.”

And..

“Egypt, by accepting the Six Principles adopted by the
Security Council last October in relation to the Suez Canal,
bound itself to free and open transit through the Canal
without discrimination, and to the principle that the
operation of the Canal should be insulated from the politics
of any country. We should not assume that if Israel
withdraws, Egypt will prevent Israeli shipping from
using the Suez Canal or the Gulf of Aqaba. If, unhappily,
Egypt does hereafter violate the Armistice agreement
or other international obligations, then this should be
dealt with firmly by the society of nations.”

Needless to say, Nasser’s May 1967 actions were not “dealt with firmly by the society of nations” and Israel, who had stipulated their withdrawal from the Sinai in 1957 on the promises of the U.S. and the UN to ensure the non-belligerent status of the Sinai and the Gaza strip, and to assure Israeli maritime rights to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Straits of Tiran, recognized to be international waterways, was left completely in the lurch. In May of 1967, in fact, Eisenhower reaffirmed the commitments made by the U.S. to Israel 10 years before, much to the embarrassment of the Johnson Administration, who was busy equivocating on that commitment.

In any event, so much for “The U.S. never took this position.”

With regard to the legality of Nasser’s closure of the Tiran Straits, you have further asserted:

1) “The navigation channels around the Straits were an
inland waterway that passed through Egypt’s territorial
waters. Egypt was not a signatory to any international
convention that imposed an “international servitude”
upon it at that time, and the 1958 convention (Convention
on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone) had not yet
obtained customary status.”

2) “The final settlement between Egypt and Israel
(in 1949) was based upon the old fashioned
(conventional) contract theory of “acceptance”,
not upon any changes in customary law.”

3) “Israel and the US were trying to enforce access
to the port of Eilat based upon a “prescriptive right”
to the acquisition of territory on which it was situated.”

All three of these assertions are false.

As for # 1, the fact of the matter is that the Gulf of Aqaba is surrounded by four states: Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and the navigation channels around the straits were thus international waters. The geographical location of the Gulf thus renders it non-territorial according to customary international law, which recognizes a gulf that is surrounded by four littoral states as being part of the high seas.

This had been previously emphasized in the Corfu Channel Case (UK v Albania, 1949, ICJ):

“It is ... generally recognized and in accordance with
international custom that States in time of peace have
a right to send their warships through straits used
for international navigation between two parts of the
high seas without the previous authorization of a
coastal State, provided that the passage is innocent.
Unless otherwise prescribed in an international
convention, there is no right for a coastal State to
prohibit such passage through straits in time of peace.”

The representatives from the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Denmark all concurred that the Tiran Straits were international waters at the 667th plenary meeting of the General Assembly in 1957.

This view was similarly expressed by Charles B. Selak, Jr. in “A Consideration of the Legal Status of the Gulf of Aqaba,” 52 American Journal of International Law 660, 673 (1958).

“The generally accepted principle with respect to gulfs and
bays surrounded by the territories of more than one state
has been set forth by Judge Lauterpacht as follows: . . . as
a rule, all gulfs and bays enclosed by the land of more
than one littoral state, however narrow their entrance may
be, are non-territorial. They are parts of the open sea, the
marginal belt (territorial sea) inside the gulfs and bays
excepted. They can never be appropriated; they are in
time of peace and war open to vessels of all nation ...”

This is further reinforced by an opinion expressed by Ann Ellen Danseyar 24 years later:

“Thus, one of the Arab nations' major justifications for
interfering with shipping in the Gulf was that the Gulf
constituted internal waters, which the Arabs could,
therefore, freely regulate. However, under customary
international law, the Arab claim was not well-founded.
The case of a bay surrounded by one state is
distinguishable from that of a bay bordered by more
than one nation. In the latter instance, the enclosed
waters do not constitute internal waters. The Arabs
attempted to overcome this distinction by arguing that
all three littoral states came under one Arab nation.
However, the fact that the peoples of the three littoral
Arab nations are all Muslims does not give single nation
status to a group of three independent states. Thus,
they could not claim the single nation exception to
characterize the Gulf as internal waters.”

(Ann Ellen Danseyar, “Legal Status of the Gulf of
Aqaba and the Strait of Tiran: From Customary
International Law to the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli
Peace Treaty,” 5 Boston College International
& Comparative Law Review, 127) (1982).

This principle of customary international law was later codified in the Convention on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone, which Selek had referred to as "the best consensus of present international opinion regarding the law of the sea."

Article 16), 4 of the convention reads:

“There shall be no suspension of the innocent passage
of foreign ships through straits which are used for i
nternational navigation between one part of the high
seas and another part of the high seas or the territorial
sea of a foreign State.”

On point # 2 (“The final settlement between Egypt and Israel (in 1949) was based upon the old fashioned (conventional) contract theory of “acceptance”, not upon any changes in customary law.”), you are simply incorrect. This also, btw, contradicts your previous assertion that “Israel had only occupied Eilat after it had signed a binding Chapter VII armistice agreement with Egypt.”

Can’t have it both ways. While it is clear that you advanced the latter assertion to support your spurious contention that Israel had abrogated the armistice, the latter assertion is the truth. The agreement was indeed a binding, international agreement, and bound Egypt to it as a matter of international law, not contract law, and the agreement did not purport to alter customary law in any way. The binding nature of the armistice agreement also denied Egypt her belligerent rights in closing the Straits in 1955 and 1967 and imposing a blockade.

As U.S. Ambassador to the UN Lodge said to the UN General Assembly on March 1, 1957:

“Once Israel has completed its withdrawal in accordance
with the resolutions of the General Assembly, and in view
of the measures taken by the United Nations to deal with
the situation, there is no basis for either party to the
armistice agreement to assert or exercise any
belligerent rights.”

As Ann Ellen Danseyar has written:

“Had the Arab nations successfully claimed an ongoing
state of war with Israel, they would have had a legitimate
legal basis to deny access to ships navigating toward the
belligerent state of Israel. The rules of customary
international law generally allow a littoral state to
suspend passage of belligerent ships in order to
protect itself…

The opinions expressed by various nations before
the General Assembly in 1957 seemed to further
weaken the Arab position, since the majority sided with
those theorists who would reject any contention of
continuing Egypt-Israel war. The U.S. delegate, with
whom the British representative concurred, expressed
the view that neither Israel nor Egypt could legally
assert any belligerent rights. The representative of
France, Mr. Georges-Picot, affirmed the U.S. position
by stating that no state of war existed among any of
the Gulf states. Furthermore, the Secretary-General
as well, in his Report of January 24, 1957, endorsed
the position of the Security Council, which had
concurred in its resolution of September 1, 1951,
"that since the Armistice regime, which has been
in existence for nearly two and a half years, is of a
permanent character, neither party can
reasonably assert that it actively is a belligerent."

Most nations, with the exception of India, implicitly or
explicitly affirmed the U.S. position that the Egyptian-Israeli
Armistice Agreement of 1949 precluded either signatory
from claiming that it was an active belligerent. Thus, a
majority of nations supported the conclusion that the
Arab states could claim no belligerent right to prevent
Israeli passage through the Gulf.”

As to point # 3, I have found no evidence that the U.S. or Israel were “trying to enforce access to the port of Eilat based upon a “prescriptive right” to the acquisition of territory on which it was situated.” Can you cite evidence of when or where either nation advanced such a claim?

Eilat was included in British Mandatory Palestine, was included in the
Jewish apportioned state by UN Resolution 181, and was included on Israel’s side of the demarcation line following the Armistice agreements of 1949. The Israelis thus had ample basis for their claim to Eilat, and thus did not need to base the inclusion of Eilat on their territory on any “prescriptive right,” and it seems clear that they did not attempt to do so.

***

--SECTION III: Was the Soviet warning to Nasser and the Syrians that Israel had mobilized 15 brigades on the Syrian border accurate, and did this justify Nasser’s closure of the Straits in 1967?

Said I:

On May 14 Levi Eshkol invited the Soviet ambassador to
Syria to inspect Israel’s side of the border; it was declined,
probably for the simple reason that the Soviets, not believing
their own lies, knew there was no buildup.”

Said Shingo:

“More likely it was declined because such an exercise
would have been pointless. First of all, Israel attacked
Egypt by air, and pretty much had the game sewn up with
air power. The Soviets knew the Israelis enjoyed air
superiority. Secondly, Israeli tanks and armored
personnel carriers could be easily mobilized in short
time. Israel were able to load it’s tanks and armored
personnel carriers onto huge lorries with trailers for
transportation to the north from the Sinai rapidly and
redeploy the North in a few days. Of course, they took
out the USS Liberty to provide cover for this rapid
redeployment.”

I am not sure how to address this frightful tangle of falsehood, evasion, and irrelevance, but I will give it a try.

As to your first point, how could the Soviets have credited Israel with air superiority when they informed Egypt and Syria of the alleged buildup on May 13, and when Israel only attained air superiority over the Arabs after the June 5 attack? The Israelis had some 300 combat aircraft and the Egypt, Syria, and Jordan had some 957 aircraft. On what possible basis could the Soviets have concluded that Israel possessed air superiority on May 13? I think the truth is that they, in fact, did not, and that this is another one of your improvised fabrications.

Secondly, the Soviets were not talking in terms of future potentialities; they were talking in terms of present-day actualities. Thus, whether Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers could be could be “easily mobilized in a short time” is irrelevant; what matters is whether there was a buildup of 15 Israeli brigades (some 65,000-80,000 men) mobilized on the Syrian border as the Soviets claimed, and the evidence is clear that there was not.

As I have noted before, according to former Egyptian Field Marshal Mohammed al-Gamsy, when Muhammed Fawzi, the Egyptian chief of staff arrived to consult in Damascus, he was surprised to find no evidence of any IDF buildup on the Syrian border: no reserve call-ups, and no unusual deployment of troops and armor. He later recalled:

“I did not find any concrete evidence to support the information
received {from the Soviets]. On the contrary, aerial photos
taken by Syrian reconnaissance on May 12 and 13 showed
no change in normal Israeli military positions.”

Fawzi also noted that the Syrians had not gone on alert. (See “The October war: Memoirs of Field Marshall el-Gamsy of Egypt,” American University of Cairo, 1993)

On May 14 Levi Eshkol invited the Soviet ambassador to Syria to inspect Israel’s side of the border; it was declined, probably, again, for the simple reason that the Soviets knew there was no buildup. The next day, Odd Bull, chief of the UN Truce Supervision Organization, noted that he “had no reports of any buildup” from any border observers.

Fawzi was also puzzled as to why ‘Amr did not respond to his reports that the Israeli buildup were incorrect, then drew the following conclusion:

“Consequently, I began to believe that from his perspective,
the business of the Israeli troop concentrations was not the
principal reason for mobilization or the troop movements
[in the Sinai] which we had been asked to undertake in
such a hurry.”

Both el-Gamsy and Fawzi believe that, given his knowledge of no Israeli buildup, Nasser had “decided to exploit the situation to annul Israel’s gains from the 1956 war: remilitarize Sinai, secure the withdrawal of UNEF, and again close the Gulf Eilat to Israeli shipping.”

Both Odd Bull and Fawzi both testified to the nonexistence of any Israeli buildup on the Syrian border. It comes down to this: either there was a buildup of 15 combat brigades mobilized on Syria’s 23-mile border with Israel, or there was not. And there was not. A forward deployment of 15 combat brigades along a 23-mile border is something rather like an elephant in a room; it’s either there or it is not. And it was not.

***

--SECTION IV: Whether there was an existential danger to Israel in late May and early June 1967, and whether she was justified in launching a pre-emptive strike.

One of the problems of discerning whether Nasser actually intended to attack Israel is from the number of contradictory public and private statements he made in the three weeks leading up to the war. Nasser’s actions, alas, were often the captive of his ever-shifting rhetoric, and do not betray consistency. In retrospect, it seems likely that Nasser saw in the Soviet warnings of May 13, however much he and ‘Amr knew them to be false, an opportunity to, in Fawzi’s words, “to exploit the situation to annul Israel’s gains from the 1956 war: remilitarize Sinai, secure the withdrawal of UNEF, and again close the Gulf Eilat to Israeli shipping.”

Two diametrically opposed beliefs seem to have been contesting each other for mastery in Nasser’s mind in the last few weeks before the outbreak before the war: 1) that by remilitarizing the Sinai, expelling UNEF, and closing the Tiran straits, to score a bloodless political victory short of war which would consolidate his prestige as the premier leader of the Arab world, and his belief that the UN and the superpowers would intervene like a boxing referee to separate Israel and he Arabs, and send them to their corners before things got out of hand, 2) a belief that that the time had come for the final showdown with the “Zionist entity” in order to finally wipe clean the humiliations of 1948 and 1956, that Israel, who had won her 1956 victory only with the help of Britian and France, could not resist the combined might of the Arabs by herself, and that only war could regain what was taken from the Arabs by war.

It is equally clear that he was acting out of no master plan, and just improvising his rhetoric and his actions according to events, of which he was often the servant rather than the master. By expelling UNEF and closing the straits he lit a fire that he could not easily put out without a humiliating loss of prestige—always a priority concern of his. No high pressure diplomacy, from the UN or anyone else would ever have caused him to withdraw. He must have known that it meant war, though it is possible that he deluded himself that it did not. Even the Soviets, who were always happy to fan the flames of the region but did not want a war, were taken aback and shocked by Nasser’s closure of the straits. They knew what it meant.

Whatever his misgivings and apprehensions, what can be stated beyond any doubt is that Nasser was now speaking and behaving like a man who wanted war, who was determined to wage it, who was mobilizing propaganda in the service of this intention into a hysterical frenzy of bloodcurdling rhetoric and imagery, who was enlisting allies, and who, along with him, were complementing their own openly declared intentions to wipe Israel off the map with an active, forward mobilization of their forces along Israel’s border.

The UN, of course, did absolutely nothing about Nasser’s open defiance of international law and his brazen advertising of his intentions to commit an act of unlawful aggression, save complaining aloud about his “unfortunate” and “unhelpful” behavior. Not for the last time, Israel had been completely flimflammed by the UN for accepting its assurances about its security, and utterly abandoned to its fate.

In Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq all reserves had now been called up, mobilized, and massed on the Israeli border

On the Egyptian border, the Egyptians now had forward deployments of three active divisions from the Erez checkpoint in northeastern Gaza all the way south to Al-Qusayma, one division on the border south of Kuntilla, three divisions behind the forward positions, and several assorted armored and artillery brigades in west and south Sinai—all told about 100,000 troops, 900 tanks and about 800 heavy artillery.

Jordan had massed some 56,000 troops organized into a forward deployment of nine infantry brigades, two armored brigades, a mechanized brigade and an Iraqi brigade. They had 294 tanks and 194 artillery pieces.

Syria fielded about 70,000 troops into a forward deployment of six infantry brigades, with two paratroop and special forces battalions, along with two armored brigades, one mechanized brigade, and one independent armored battalion. They had 300 tanks and 265 artillery pieces.

Against this, Israel could now mobilize about 250-264,000 men, about three-quarters reservists, and about 100,000 which could be placed on the borders. They were divided into 11 infantry brigades, two paratroop brigades, two independent units of special forces infantry, and three mechanized infantry brigades. They had about 1100 tanks and 400 artillery, divided into 12 artillery and 6 armored brigades.

On May 30 King Hussein of Jordan had signed a military pact with Nasser in Cairo. The same day Iraqi forces took up positions in Jordan. Said President Aref of Iraq on May 31: “Our goal is clear: to wipe Israel off the map.” He added: “There will be no Jewish survivors.”

Said Ahmed Shukairy, chairman of the PLO on June 1: “The Jews of Palestine will have to leave…Any of the old Jewish Palestine population who survive may stay, but it is my impression that none of them will survive.”

Said Damascus Radio: “Arab masses, this is your day. Rush to the battlefield…Let them know that we shall hang the last imperialist soldier with the entrails of the last Zionist.”

Said Hafez al-Assad to his troops in a frightening hint of what he would do to 20,000 of his own people 15 years later in Hama: “Strike the enemy’s [civilian] settlements, turn them into dust, and pave the Arab roads with the skulls of Jews. Strike them without mercy.”

Assad also said: "Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian Army, with its finger on the trigger, is united... I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation."

The number of nightmare scenarios now facing the Israelis were thus endless. First, there was the time factor. As Edward Luttwak and Daniel Horowitz have stated in their excellent study of the IDF: “There was a basic asymmetry in the structure of forces: the Egyptians could deploy their large army of long term regulars on the Israeli border and keep it there indefinitely; the Israelis could only counter their deployment by mobilizing reserve formations, and reservists could not be kept in uniform for very long. Egypt could therefore stay on the defensive while Israel would have to attack unless the crisis was defused diplomatically.” (“The Israeli Army: 1948-1973,” p.110)

Secondly, and most importantly, the Israelis, as in 1948, had a distinct geographical disadvantage. True, they had the advantage of interior lines, but this was negated by the length of the borders they had to defend, the vulnerable narrowness of the coastal plain, which impeded their ability to shunt forces from north to south and vice-versa, and the ability of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt to strike, or advance a combination of multiple feints and actual strikes at any time of their choosing that would have had the numerically inferior Israelis jumping up and down 545 miles of borders thwarting one contingency after another with no guarantee that they could ever bring decisive force to meet any of them. Their only advantage therefore lay in anticipation. The only way to effectively deter such an attack from ever occurring was to preempt it.

The consensus of American intelligence before the war was that, in a war, Israel would win against the Arabs whether they were attacking or defending. While it is clear that this view of an Israeli first strike was dead-on, the notion that Israel could have safely absorbed an attack by the Arabs within her 1949 Armistice lines looks, in retrospect, utterly implausible.

An attack by Egypt alone from the Sinai into the Negev could have given the Israelis some, though not much, cushion to absorb an armored strike and perhaps conduct a mobile defense at which the IDF’s superiority in tactics and leadership would have a marginal advantage, but this would be offset by the Egyptians’ superiority in mass and equipment, not to mention their ability to focus the entire forward weight of their attack in a single direction at various points along the 211 mile Egypt-Gaza border without any concern for their rear or flanks; the Israelis, on the other hand, who were numerically inferior, would have had to meet this force with less than half of their mobilized strength, while the rest of their reserves stood defensively along 334 miles of winding border with Jordan and Syria.

Given the total lack of strategic depth on the 204 mile long border of the West Bank where Israel’s wasp-like waist along the coastal plain could be severed by the blow of a few heavy, well-placed Jordanian armored columns, this scenario was particularly hellish. All of the main Israeli population centers were within close striking distance from the West Bank: Netanya—9 miles, Tel-Aviv—11 miles, Beersheva—10 miles, Haifa—21 miles, Ashdod—22 miles, and Ashkelon a mere 7 miles from Gaza, not to mention cities like Eilat and Jerusalem that were within direct striking distance, and vulnerable to encirclement and siege. Scattering their forces up and down their eastern border to meet multiple contingencies, and without any room to maneuver and retrench, their numerically inferior cadres could be smashed or bypassed, and their units to the north and south severed from one another, surrounded, and cut to pieces. Even the most ingenious tactical flair by the Israelis would be powerless to stop it. In this eventuality, geography, the Arabs’ superior numbers and equipment, and the advantage of timing, would put the Israeli superiority in tactics, leadership, and morale at a severe discount. Israel, in all likelihood, would have been destroyed.

It seems entirely plausible to me that Israel’s revisionist critics and antagonists, in their feverish attempts to rewrite the history of the 1967 war, can look upon the circumstances of May-June 1967 and conclude that there was not a real and imminent threat to Israel’s survival, but the Israelis did, and they chose to survive, rather than not to.

THE ATTACK ON THE USS LIBERTY: PART I, SECTION I

BACKGROUND:

On June 8, 1967, on the fourth day of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arabs, the USS Liberty, an American intelligence gathering vessel, was strafed and bombed by Israeli Warplanes and then converged upon by torpedo boats in an obvious effort to sink her. After a brief exchange of fire and a torpedo that slammed into the Liberty's starboard side, the Israeli vessels abruptly ceased attacking, and extended help and immediate medical attention to the Liberty's crew. 34 Americans died and 171 were wounded in the attack. The Israelis, who said they had mistaken the Liberty for the Egyptian warship El Quseir, immediately apologized to the US for the attack, and assumed full responsibility. They would eventually pay some $12 million in compensation to the victims and their families, to survivors, and to the US government.

A slew of American and Israeli inquiries, including a 1967 navy court of inquiry convened in Malta by Rear Adm. Isaac C. Kidd Jr., generally substantiated the Israelis' explanation that the attack was an accident. But the inquiries also raised more questions than they answered, and these questions were by no means limited to those hostile to Israel; they were also harbored by some of Israel's strongest supporters in the Johnson Administration. Why did the Israelis attack a neutral ship without provocation? How had they failed to see the Liberty's flag or the painted markings on her hull after several overflights by their aircraft? How could they confuse the Liberty with the El Quseir?

For the next three decades the absence of satisfactory answers to these questions would help spawn a cottage industry of books and conspiracy theories asserting that Israel had deliberately attacked the Liberty and that the US government had covered it up. And Israel's motive? It was asserted that the Israelis had done so to prevent the Liberty from revealing their impending seizure of Syria's Golan Heights, a move that Washington was said to have opposed. It was also asserted that the Israelis may have done so in an attempt to blame the Egyptians and thus draw America into the conflict. Another theory, posited by author James Bamford, asserted that the Israelis attacked the Liberty to conceal a massacre of Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai. The Israelis, all had argued, had thus killed 34 Americans in cold blood and the American government had covered it up, influenced, aided and abetted by the all-powerful pro-Israel lobby, at whose pleasure they serve.

In 1997, the Americans and the Israelis released a bushel of top-secret documents and other evidence in observance of the 30-year declassification rule on the Liberty attack, and these cleared up many of the mysteries that had long dogged the incident. It was shown that despite a warning from the White House to the American Sixth Fleet to keep its ships within a 250 mile arc from the Egyptian coast, the Liberty's handlers in the NSA disregarded the order and put the Liberty within 12.5 miles of the coast to eavesdrop on Egyptian military communications with the Soviet Union. Five communications were sent by the Navy's European headquarters to the Liberty for her to pull back at least 100 miles. However, due to the Six Fleet's bulky communications apparatus, the messages got diverted to the Philippines and did not reach the Liberty until the day after she was attacked. Furthermore, the request of the Liberty's skipper for a destroyer escort was denied by the Sixth Fleet CIC on the grounds that "the Liberty is a clearly marked US ship in international waters...and not a reasonable subject for attack." A request by the Israeli ambassador at the outset of the conflict that the US provide a naval liaison to coordinate communications between the two countries was refused by the US, and thus no one informed Israel of the Liberty's presence in the area.

Israeli aircraft spotted the vessel in the early morning of June 8. The pilot could not make out the flag, but spotted a hull marking that read "GTR-5" and the headquarters identified the ship as the USS Liberty. However, with the change in watch in the Israeli HQ at 11:00am, the officers, following standard operating procedure for removing old information from the board, had erroneously assumed that the Liberty had left the area. When an explosion rocked an Israeli arms depot at El Arish, the Israelis, spotting a vessel they incorrectly assumed was an Egyptian warship bombarding them, sent three torpedo boats to engage it.

The skipper of the Liberty then executed a 90 degree starboard turn to the south. The Israelis, pursuing what they thought was an Egyptian warship heading home, called in for air support, and two Mirage fighters raked the Liberty with bombs, napalm, and cannon fire. Transcripts of communications between the Israeli pilots and HQ show that after the second strafing run an Israeli pilot recognized the Latin markings on the hull of the ship and the American flag and reported it to HQ--who immediately ordered him and his wingmen to disengage. They also show a breakdown in communications between the torpedo boats and HQ, and that when the Israeli boat captain got close enough to identify the hull markings and the flag of the Liberty, he immediately broke off the attack and gave help and medical attention to the survivors.

The minutes of the 1967 Naval board of inquiry show that a lack of sufficient wind obscured the flag of the Liberty, thus hiding it from aerial observation and that the attack was "a case of mistaken identity." Audio tapes transcripts indicate that the Israelis did not know they were attacking an American ship and immediately disengaged when they did. Contrary to decades of conspiracy-mongering, there is, in all the hundreds of pages of declassified material from both countries, not a shred of evidence to support the contention that Israel deliberately sought to attack and sink the USS Liberty, as I hope to demonstrate in my rebuttal of commenter Shingo's spurious assertions on the matter, which are also widely believed throughout the anti-Israel community.

Said Shingo:

“[My version of the attack on the Liberty] is based
on first hand eye witness accounts and the
undoctored ship log. Your timeline cited from
the IDF, has been edited, censored and
doctored, thus flawed and studded with
outright lies.”

“Doctored,” “edited,” “censored,” these are the indispensable watchwords of the conspiracy theorist to refute documents and memoranda that foils and confounds their lurid fantasies. If the deck log that was entered into evidence at the Navy Court of Inquiry in June 1967 was doctored, then where is the undoctored one? The deck log of the Liberty runs to some ten hand-written pages, all on Department of the Navy deck-log book stationary. Are you really asserting that all of the entries in the entire deck log, including Captain McGonagle’s signature entries, were forged, by hand, in the four days between the attack and the inquiry? How was the original one obtained and tampered with, and the other forged within a few days? When? By who? On whose authority? Where, when, and how has this log been authenticated, and the one in evidence been discredited as forgery? And by who? Please provide a reference or a link to this “undoctored” log.

Of course, I think we both know that the real “undoctored” log is the one entered into evidence in June 1967 within a week after the attack. There is no “undoctored” log floating around out there. This lurid, fictional timeline and the equally lurid events it notes has been constructed and embellished on pure hearsay, courtesy of the former USS Liberty OOD, Lt. Lloyd Painter, who suddenly decided, many years after the event, that the log he prepared and allowed his skipper to sign off on, along with his testimony before the Court of Inquiry under oath, was false.

Thus Painter, if he is to be believed, and anyone else who did likewise, committed at least three court martial offenses in the Uniform Code of
Military Justice:

Article 123—Forgery

Article 131—Perjury

Article 134-40—Public record altering, concealing, removing, mutilating, obliterating, or destroying.

Btw, the deck log is not the only log on the Liberty. Other than the other technical logs not concerned with the timeline of events (the Radar Bearing Log, the Engineering Log, the Gyrocompass Log, the Bearing Log, the DRT Log) there is the handwritten Underway log. The timeline of events on both logs corroborate each other. Now, was the Underway log doctored too? If so, in the four days between the attack and the convening of the Court of Inquiry, there was certainly a lot of log doctoring going on.

(All of the logs and all other documents in the Naval Court of Inquiry referenced in this post can be accessed at http://www.thelibertyincident.com/documents.html)

Also, the timeline of events in the Israeli and the American Navy logs are a near perfect match. The timeline, btw, did not come just from the IDF investigation; if you look, you will also see that I also included the American timeline from the Navy Court of Inquiry, and both, though conducted apart from one another, essentially corroborate one another, with a few discrepancies here and there. If you are going to prove that the documentation that has been in evidence in both countries for 44 years, and which has been corroborated by the thousands of pages of declassified evidence that was released by both countries in 1997, has been “edited, censored and doctored, thus flawed and studded with outright lies” then the burden is on you to document how this is so, when this was done, and by who.

Said I:

“But the reason that they were unable to identify
the markings was because the jet was flying at
some 3-5 miles distance and, as Ensign John D.
Scott testified to the Court of Inquiry in 1967,
were therefore unable to identify any markings
and insignia.

Said Shingo:

“Rubbish. Photographs taken by the crew show
the first planes well within 3-5 miles of the ship.
The account was not in relation to the Nord recon
plane but the two unmarked, rocket-armed,
delta-winged jets that circled.”

There is no known record of any photos of the Israeli flights over the Liberty from 5am to 1:58pm. There are only four pictures of aircraft in all of the 139 pictures introduced in the two photo exhibits in the Court of Inquiry. The first (picture #26, Exhibit 9) shows a swept wing Super Mystere on the second air attack (code named “Royal”), the second (picture #29, Exhibit 9) shows a barely identifiable Mirage in the first attack (code named “Kursa”) at a considerable distance and the trajectory of cannon fire in the water approaching the bow of the ship. Pictures #22 and #30 of Exhibit 9 are pictures of the rescue helicopters after the attack. That’s it. Please produce a reference or a link to these alleged photos that positively ID the Mirages orbiting the Liberty “well within” 3-5 miles and that show an absence of insignia.

Said I: “The overflight of a Boxcar-like Nord was
spotted at 10:56 crossing the starboard side at
about a 3-5 mile distance. If Mr. Weaver and the
Israeli pilot did indeed exchange a wave and a
smile from an aircraft cruising at about 200mph
at about 3-5 mile distance, it can only be said
that they both must have had Superman-like
vision.”

Said Shingo: “Rubbish. As this photo reveals, the Nord was not 3-5 miles away.”

Who are you trying to kid with this picture? I don’t know where or when this picture was taken, but it wasn’t of an Israeli aircraft on the day of the attack. The plane pictured here in your link is not a Nord. It is a C-47/DC-3 transport. Neither the Israelis nor the Americans have any record of any C-47/DC-3 transport aircraft patrolling or being spotted at tree-top level.

Here is a Nord http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Noratlas

Here is a C-47/DC-3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_C-47_Skytrain

Said Shingo:

“Again, it was not the Nord that they identified as
being 3 unmarked, rocket-armed, delta-winged
jets circles Liberty three times at 2:00 in the
afternoon.”

You have confused the time signature with the event. At 2:00pm the two MirageIIIC’s of the Kursa mission were not reconnoitering the Liberty; they were strafing the hell out of her.

Said Shingo:

“You asked why in the world would the planes
be unmarked? The question is, why wouldn’t
they be unmarked if the plan was the sinking
of the ship with the loss, the murder, of all
hands on board?”

Of course. How silly of me. It is only natural that the Israelis, hours before they even had any knowledge of the Liberty’s whereabouts and destination, and while the Liberty was still hundreds of miles from the area, would nonetheless somehow, for some unfathomable reason, plan in advance to sink her. That, in lieu of this planning, they would, in special preparation for the important, necessary, and thoroughly rewarding task of destroying an intelligence freighter belonging to their strongest ally, scrub the insignia from all of their reconnaissance and fighter aircraft, despite the danger this would pose to their pilots, in a war zone in the midst of hostilities, no less, on the novel premise that they did not wish their craft to be ID’d by the Americans, so as to escape any possible blame for the attack in an area where everyone knew that Israel had just established complete air superiority. This, mind you, all so that they could then conduct nearly nine hours of over flights of the Liberty, thus giving the Liberty nine hours to transmit the very information that the attack was supposedly planned to silence, before finally attacking her.

And, as to why the Israelis, if they had foreknowledge of the Liberty’s whereabouts and destination, would not just simply notify the Americans and urge them to keep the ship out of an area where two belligerents were conducting hostilities, well, you see, the Israelis, for some utterly incomprehensible and unfathomable reason, obviously thought it more prudent to allow the Liberty into the combat zone, in order to attack a ship of their strongest ally, but not, of course, before scrubbing their planes of insignia and reconnoitering the ship for nine hours, thus giving the Liberty nine priceless hours to relay the very information that the attack was supposed to silence. And although there is not a shred of evidence that the Israelis positively ID’d the Liberty anytime before 9:00am, and thus had no reason to be flying unmarked aircraft for any such purpose before that, that’s unimportant. In any event, all of this redounded much more to Israel’s political, diplomatic, and military benefit. No doubt about it.

Said I:

“While Pinchasy had received the original
report at 9:00am identifying the Liberty, he
had, by the time the explosion occurred at
El Arish at 11:24am, assumed that the
Liberty, which had been heading westward
at about 15 knots when ID’d earlier…”

Said Shingo:

“Bullshit. The Israelis claimed that the ship
was moving at 28 knots (based on erroneous
calculations) which would have been
almost impossible for that ship, and
claimed that this suggested the ship
was trying to get away.”

You are confusing the loose ID the Israelis made at 9:00am with the ones made by the MTB’s of Oren’s Division 914 at 1:51pm. The one made by Pinchasy at 9:00am fixed the Liberty’s speed at 15 knots based on the first spotting at 5:15-5:45am, but even that could have been off by a few knots.

Said I:

“They were not “followed by Israeli air force
fighters, loaded with 30mm cannon
ammunition, rockets, and napalm.” No
such deployment was ordered.”

Said Shingo:

“Yes they were, which is why explains how
the napalm (that was used) got there. This
is beyond dispute. They took out the antennas
and then began dumping napalm on the deck.
The purpose of which was to keep the crew
below deck (where the torpedoes would have
greatest effect) and to prevent the crew
establishing any communications by repairing
the antennas.”

I see. Let me get this straight. The Israelis first go to the time and trouble of “taking out” the antennas, then, afterward, “dump napalm” on the Liberty in order to keep the crew below deck to prevent them from “establishing any communications by repairing the antennas?” This absurdly elaborate procedure was their plan of attack? This laughable operational absurdity from the much vaunted air force which had just destroyed the air forces of three nations in as many days? And they would do all of this rather then just simply drop a few 500 or 1000lb high explosive fragmentation bombs on the Liberty, which would have not only destroyed all their intelligence gathering hardware, but destroyed and sunk the entire craft in minutes, seconds even, all in one stroke? Are you serious?

Anyone who would ever plan such an attack should have been court martialed for gross incompetence alone.

In any event, I did not deny that the Liberty was attacked by planes with napalm; I said there was no such air deployment ordered at 12:15pm when Commander Oren’s Division 914 MTB’s were first ordered to the vicinity of El Arish.

The first deployment of aircraft occurred only after Ensign Aharon miscalculated the Liberty’s speed for a second time at 1:51pm. That was the first air assault, the Kursa mission of two Mirage IIIC’s. They were armed with 30mm cannon and possibly American Sidewinder air-to-air missiles; it is not clear if these missiles were used or were even on the planes during this mission. (See below)*

In any event, as any naval aviator will attest to, this was totally inadequate ordinance for an air assault on a naval vessel, indicating the haste at which the Kursa mission, whose Mirages were equipped with only air-to-air ordinance, were called off of a routine air-combat patrol into the attack. (Had they been allowed to return to base, they could have rearmed with bombs—much more effective for attacking a ship). The Kursa attack lasted from about 1:58pm to about 2:02pm, each Mirage completing three forward strafing runs each on the Liberty’s bow before their ammo was spent.

By this time Commander McGonagle, the Liberty skipper, though seriously wounded, ordered the ship to turn right full rudder 360 degrees to the north. The second air attack, by mission Royal, commenced at between 2:04-2:06pm, was by a squadron of two Super Mystere B-2 fighters returning from bombing Egyptian infantry. Hastily recalled from this ground support mission and, like the Kursa mission, with no opportunity to land and properly rearm, they raked the Liberty with what they had—napalm canisters (three missed, one may have hit), and 30mm cannon fire—again hardly appropriate ordinance for attacking a naval vessel.

At 2:11pm transcripts of communications between the Israeli Royal wing leader and HQ show that after the second strafing run the Israeli pilot recognized the Latin markings on the hull of the ship: “Pay attention! Ship’s marking is Charlie Tango Romeo 5” (i.e., CTR- 5—the Israeli pilot in fact misidentified the hull markings; they were GTR-5) and adds, “She looks like a minesweeper.” An air controller named Menachem, Chief air controller at Air Control South in the Sinai, then unhelpfully garbled the pilot’s misidentification of the ship’s markings even further as “Charlie Senator Romeo,” i.e., CSR.

When this is reported to HQ, Colonel Shmuel Kislev, the Chief air controller at the Kirya in Tel-Aviv, obviously now shitting himself with the prospect that they could be attacking a neutral vessel, now screams “Leave her! What ship is this?” He then immediately orders the Royal leader and his wingman to disengage, and cancels the third air attack deployment headed to attack the ship (which was named flight mission Nixon, consisting of two French-built Mystere IV’s armed with 500lb iron incendiaries that would surely blown the Liberty right out of the water, and with all hands). This second air attack had lasted about five minutes.

According to the IDF report on the Liberty attack, Colonel Kislev was told that the Royal mission was only “armed with napalm, not effective for attacking ships.” Kislev nonetheless “instructed the formation to join the attack with ‘whatever they have.’”

On the IAF transcripts, after the Kursa mission was completed (about 2:02pm), another one of the Israeli ground controllers, who was incredulous that napalm was actually going to be dropped by mission Royal on the ship, cried out, “What can napalm do?”

He had a point. FYI, the Royal flight mission used napalm not because of some deliberate attempt to “keep the crew below deck (where the torpedoes would have greatest effect) and to prevent the crew establishing any communications by repairing the antennas,” but because that was all the ordinance they had on board when they had just been recalled from a ground strafing run in the Sinai, and had no time to land, replenish, and reload (they had received the order to attack less than ten minutes before they arrived on the scene, and while they were in the midst of another attack). They were simply throwing everything they had at the ship indiscriminately to try and sink her.

Again, both the Kursa and Royal missions were hastily recalled mid-air without any opportunity to land and properly arm them for the attack, the Kursa from a routine air combat patrol, and the Royal from a ground attack mission in the Sinai. Also, there is simply no evidence in the IAF transcripts that the pilots in either mission knew that they were attacking an intelligence gathering vessel, or were targeting the ship’s electronic hardware, and that, in fact, the Royal mission leader, at the moment he broke off the attack, thought it might be a minesweeper. However, the Royal mission, after two forward strafing runs, one on the stern and one on the bow, did make its third and final run on the port side in an attempt to hit the boiler. That’s when he spotted the Latin hull markings.

In all of my reading and research, I am simply unaware of napalm canisters ever being used in an air-to-surface capacity as anti-ship ordinance. Possibly fragmentation bombs filled with napalm, though high-explosive is usually more effective. Certainly in an air-to-ground capacity (i.e., WWII in the Pacific, Vietnam). But canisters of napalm used on ships?

The reason for this seems simple: napalm can start and spread a fire, but fires can be extinguished. Bombs, torpedoes, and, in the post war era, rockets and anti-ship missiles, are far more effective, and cause much more damage. At Pearl Harbor, for example, the Japanese plastered the heavily armored USS Arizona with four amour-piercing incendiaries, the fourth of which detonated the forward magazine, killing 1177 of the 1400 Arizona crewmen who died in the attack. At the battle of Midway, on the morning of June 4, 1942, American dive bombers sunk three of the four heavily armored Japanese carriers there: Soryu, Akagi, and Kaga within a matter of minutes. On the Akagi, a single bomb slicing into the hanger deck ignited bombs and fuel there, causing a massive explosion, and another bomb exploded in the water astern of her, disabling the rudder; the Soryu took three bombs to her hanger deck, and the Kaga took four. All three had to be scuttled, and sank. (The fourth Japanese carrier, the Hiryu, was sunk later that afternoon).

The three Japanese carriers sunk on that morning, two of which displaced between 33,000 and 34,000 tons, the other at over 19,000, and all of which were between 700-800 feet in length, were all sunk by less than a dozen incendiary bombs in ten minutes. The USS Arizona, which was about 608 X 97X 29 feet and displaced over 29,000 tons, was eviscerated by four armor-piercing incendiaries within four minutes.

The Liberty, a much smaller and lighter craft lacking any armor plate, was 456 X 62 feet and displaced 7752 tons. With the damage already suffered by her on the two previous attacks, it is certain that the canceled Nixon mission of two Mystere IV’s loaded with 500lb bombs that were sent to improve on the efforts of the Kursa and Royal missions, would surely have sunk the Liberty; a single fragmentation bomb to the boiler would have detonated her like a hand grenade.

The point: If the Israelis, who had just destroyed the superior air forces of three countries on the ground and in the air in the past three days, had really been given an hour, or even a half-hour or so to plan for the attack, they would certainly have loaded their planes with the proper ordinance to attack and destroy the Liberty in a single sortie, probably within minutes, silencing her and her crew forever, and sending both to a watery grave. They first called in for an air-strike at about 1:51pm, the Kursa mission hitting the Liberty seven minutes later. The Royal mission was called in by the Kursa mission at 1:56pm, and they arrived at the scene sometime between 2:04-2:06pm, breaking off the attack at about 2:11pm. The inadequacy of the ordinance on the first two air attack missions betrays the evident lack of planning, clearly indicates the haste in which they were both recalled mid-air from their previous missions for the attack, and indicates even more clearly why they did not “plan” for a napalm attack on the Liberty for the reasons posited by you.

(* Whether or not the Liberty was hit by napalm canisters, rockets or heat-seeking air-to-air missiles is irrelevant to whether or not the Israelis attacked the Liberty deliberately. However, it has become one of the many controversies within the controversy. Shrapnel fragments on the Liberty were collected and evaluated by the Navy Scientific Intelligence Center. On June 28, 1967 they returned a report that found no fragments of rockets, missiles, or napalm canisters; only 20, 30, 40, and 50mm projectiles. The Israelis reported that at least one of the napalm canisters dropped by them hit the ship; they may or may not have been mistaken, or the remains of the canister might have been blown overboard on impact during the attack. While it is possible that a napalm canister did hit the Liberty in the second air attack, it is certain that the fires on deck were first started on the first air attack when 30mm cannon fire hit the two 55-gallon drums of gasoline stored by the whaleboat on the port side of the Liberty’s 01 level. One minute into the first air attack, the Kursa leader notices the fire, “she’s burning, she’s burning,” and thinks he sees oil in the water (there wasn’t). In any case, the NSIC found no evidence of napalm canisters in their report. Either way, there was unquestionably one hell of a fire on the deck of the Liberty.

Captain McGonagle had testified that the Liberty was hit with a missile in the first attack; he was unquestionably telling the truth. He may, however, have been mistaken; the 30mm canon shot used by the Israelis had a proximity fuse that explodes just before impact with considerable force, at least equal to that of a hand-grenade, and which consequently penetrates its point of entry with a caliber size two or three times of its own. This is the reason for the hundreds of large holes on the Liberty’s hull, deck, and superstructure, which was hit with 30mm fire in the air attack, and 20, 40, and 50mm cannon during the MTB attack. This also undoubtedly persuaded McGonagle and other Liberty crewmen that there were rockets and missiles fired on the ship. However, with regard to the air-to-air missiles, how could heat seeking air-to-air missiles lock on to a ship? I suppose it’s theoretically possible, at least. In any event, the Israelis insist that they did not fire any rockets or missiles at the Liberty, just cannon fire and the napalm canisters, and this is supported by the evaluation of the Navy Scientific Intelligence Center report. If they had them, they would have used them, but apparently they didn’t have them).

Said I:

“They were simply trying to sink what they
thought was an Egyptian ship before the
navy MTB’s arrived to hog the glory, and
were merely throwing everything they had
at the Liberty to accomplish this while they
were attacking.”

Said you:

“That’s the biggest load of rubbish I’ve eve
r heard. They were trying to sink the ship
because that’s what they’d been sent to do.”

No kidding. And I’m supposed to have said that differently? Please. I was merely commenting on the fact that the IAF fighters were throwing all of their ordinance at the ship and that they wanted to sink it themselves before the navy did. (The IAF transcripts show the intense rivalry between the air force and the navy). At 2:09pm, wishing their planes had bombs instead of just cannon and napalm, the Royal flight leader says,

“Homeland, if you had a two ship formation with bombs
in ten minutes before the navy arrives, it will be a mitzvah.”

Then, adding dejectedly, “Otherwise the navy is on its way here.”

Menachem, perhaps sniffing an opportunity to steal some glory from the navy, then adds, “Before the navy arrives, it will be a mitzvah!”

Said Shingo:

“They IAF transcripts prove that the Israelis
knew that they were attacking an intelligence
freighter or were deliberately targeting the
intelligence gathering equipment. Heat
seeking missiles were used to take out
all the tuning section of every transmitting
antenna on the ship and as an intelligence
ship, it was loaded with antennas and
carried a large satellite dish on an elevated
structure near the stern.”

This is simply an out and out lie. Nowhere on the IAF transcripts is the ship they were attacking identified as an intelligence gathering vessel and no mention is made of targeting any of her intel-gathering infrastructure. In fact, the transcripts show that the air controllers at Air Control Central were, incredibly, still speculating about the identity of the craft an hour and thirteen minutes after she had been targeted:

At 3:04pm:

Robert: Is there any ID yet?

Shimon: None yet.

Menachem: Is it American after all?

Shimon: That’s still not clear, Menachem.

Menachem: Then why did they blast a torpedo?

Shimon: They [the navy] probably can’t read English.

(They probably can’t read English—another dig at the navy!)

Said Shingo: “[The Liberty] was four times as
large as an old Egyptian freighter, and its
identification numbers were painted on the
bow in white letters 10 feet high.”

This is true, but the Liberty was not misidentified by the Israelis as the El Quseir until Commander Oren did so sometime between 2:24pm and 2:30pm from his MTB, at some 6000 yards distance while the Liberty was engulfed with black smoke. The air controllers and the pilots involved in both air attacks did not identify the craft as the El Quseir, they were only informed by the navy MTB’s at 1:51pm that the enemy warship shelling the coast at El Arish had been ID’d and were sent to sink her.

You are correct about the dimensions of the El Quseir compared to the Liberty, and if viewed from a few hundred yards distance, it might have been possible to discern the shape of one from the other. But, again, the ID was done at a distance of some 6000 yards—nearly 3 ½ miles. From that distance the silhouettes of the ships are very similar. Even the CIA report of June 13, 1967 stated: “Although the Liberty is some 200 feet longer than the Egyptian transport El Quseir it could easily have been mistaken for the latter vessel by an overzealous pilot. Both have similar hulls and arrangements of masts and stack.”

Commander Oren, arriving at the scene at 2:24pm, consulted his “Arab Navies” manual (only the Naval HQ had a “Jane’s Fighting Ships”) and, viewing the silhouette of a smoke-engulfed ship some six thousand yards distant and directed westward toward the sun at an elevation of 50 degrees and azimuth 88 degrees, concluded that the ship was the Egyptian freighter El Quseir, and the skippers on the other two torpedo boats reached the same conclusion themselves. Oren attempted to signal the ship, asking for identity; getting no response, he ordered the MTBs into battle formation. At about 2:30pm Naval HQ gave the go ahead to attack.

The Israeli MTB’s caught up with the Liberty as a sailor on board the Liberty opened up fire on them with .50 caliber machine guns (at 2:31pm according to the Liberty deck log), not receiving McGonagle’s order not to fire on the approaching craft. The MTBs then returned fire with 20mm and 40mm cannon, and at 2:37pm (2:43pm in the Israeli account) fired back torpedoes. Four missed but one hit the Liberty’s starboard side midship, killing 25 sailors.

At 2:47, after a few minutes of circling the craft, the MTB skipper cut off the attack. At 2:51 the IDF Navy log reads “May be Russian nationality, based on writing on aft”; the Israelis thought they might be attacking a Russian vessel. When the Israeli boat captain got close enough to identify the hull markings of the Liberty, now listing badly, he recognized the Latin markings on the hull, and, according to the deck log of the Liberty, offered help and medical attention to the survivors at 3:03pm. The attack was over, and there was no subsequent exchange of fire after 2:47pm.

Said Shingo:

“In fact, MTB’s would have gotten
close enough to that they would have easily
seen the markings on the ship. Nor does your
pathetic excuse explain why they fired on the
lifeboats deployed by the Liberty.”

And,

“Not only did the Israelis attack the ship for
over two hours with napalm, gunfire and
hundreds of rockets and missiles, but as I
already mentioned, Israeli torpedo boats
machine-gunned three life boats that had
been launched in an attempt to save the
crew a war crime. If they were able to get
close enough to machine-gun three life
boats, they were close enough to see
the US flag and markings on the ship.”

This is a complete fabrication. When the Israeli MTB’s got close enough to ID the hull markings at 2:47pm, they cut off the attack. They did not fire on the lifeboats of the Liberty with any sailors in them. The lifeboats were strafed on the ship during the air and sea attacks, and the sailors of the Liberty, seeing them so damaged, threw them into the sea. This is attested to by former Liberty OOD Lloyd Painter, who testified at the Court of Inquiry, “We filed out to our life rafts which were no longer with us because they had been strafed and most of them burned so we knocked most of them over the ship.”

The Israelis did not attack the ship “for over two hours” and they did not fire “hundreds of rockets and missiles.” The combined air attacks lasted all of about eight and a half minutes, and the following naval attack about ten minutes. The Liberty was attacked by four fighter aircraft, two armed with 30mm cannon and possibly a few air-to-air missiles, and two armed with 30mm cannon and four canisters of napalm, three of which missed, and one, possibly, on target. Each plane had about 250 rounds of 30mm ammo. How could four small aircraft, in any event, be armed with “hundreds of rockets and missiles?” Do you know what you’re saying? Again, it’s understandable that crew members associated the hundreds of several inch holes in the ship with rocket fire, but the Israelis insist they had no rockets, and the American NSIC report supports this. Again, if the Israelis had rockets and missiles, they would have used them.

(In 1991 USS Liberty Engineering Officer George Golden told AJ Cristol that Navy experts told him immediately after the attack that it would have taken at least 15 aircraft to put that many rockets into the ship. He also expressed his opinion, which he contradicted in later years, that Admiral Kidd had been quite vigilant about getting at the facts of the attack and very helpful to him in doing so. He further expressed his opinion, again contradicted in later years, that the attack “seem[ed] to be a foul up.” He made no mention then of the attack being deliberate).

Marvin Norwicki, a Hebrew linguist aboard an American EC-121M Hawkeye recon plane patrolling in the vicinity that overheard the aftermath of the attack, and whose view that the Liberty attack was mistakenly attacked was misrepresented by author James Bamford, also commented on the Israeli MTB attack:

“According to Ennes, the three MTBs left
the port of Ashdod at 1200 local, some
125 miles away, heading for the Liberty
at 35 plus knots. They commenced a
machine gun attack and launched
torpedos at 1435 local. Three minutes
later, the sabras mysteriously broke off
the engagement. If the boat commanders
had wanted to sink the Liberty, they could
have done so at this time. Instead, they
ceased fire and retreated, returning later to
offer assistance to the stricken Liberty. I
contend it was during the attack the
identification of the American ship became
known to the Israeli war planners. I also
believe our VQ-2 voice intercepts showed
this identification causing the cease-fire. “

Said Shingo:

“[Admiral Kidd, who headed the Court of Inquiry]
was a corrupt, self serving sleaze bag,
and neither brave nor patriotic. The crew
members recalled how he arrived and
removed his stars to try and act like one
of the boys, then when they had all given
him their account of the events, he put his
stars back on and threatened them with court
martial and worse if they talked to anyone
about the attack. Kidd warned them not to
discuss the attack among themselves
(as though that were even possible with
body parts lying all over the ship), not to
go ashore in Malta with the ships name
on their jersey or to wear only civilian
clothing. The crew were ordered not to
speak about the attack with their friends
and family (including their wives) and were
threatened that repercussions for violating
their silence.”

And,

“Kidd later confessed to Captain Ward Boston,
JAGC, U.S. Navy, that Johnson and McNamara
ordered him to falsely report that the attack was
not a mistake, and that he believed the attack was
deliberate.”

I have little doubt that Kidd was “a corrupt, self serving sleaze bag” to conspiracy theorists who need to slime and discredit him if their absurd theories are to be countenanced. This is simple, unsubstantiated character assassination based on nothing but hearsay, and totally contradicted by what George Golden had told Cristol in 1991.

Ward’s claim, made many years after the event, and in complete contradiction to his sworn testimony, btw, is not substantiated or corroborated by anything other than his hearsay concerning a man who had been dead for four years; not much to go on. AJ Cristol, a formal naval aviator, navy lawyer and bankruptcy judge who researched the Liberty attack for decades, wrote an authorative book on the subject, and was a close friend of “Ike” Kidd’s, eviscerated Ward’s slander, piece by piece:

“If President Johnson or Secretary McNamara sent
orders to Admiral Kidd, how were the orders
transmitted?

If the Court, as Boston alleges, did not faithfully
perform its duties, who was in on this infidelity?

Just Kidd? Kidd and Boston?

What about Captain Atkinson, Captain Lauff,
Lieutenant Commander Feingersch and the court
reporter, Chief Joeray Spencer?

Boston’s affidavit is accurate in its statement about
the investigation, “We gathered a vast amount of
evidence, including hours of heartbreaking testimony
from the young survivors.”

The entire Court of Inquiry record may be viewed
on this website. Go to Documents – Court of Inquiry.
The entire report is there including the “heartbreaking
testimony” of the crew, referred to by Boston, as well
as all the contemporaneous endorsements of the
report. The testimony and record do not support
the comments in Boston’s affidavit. If any reader
finds a discrepancy between the actual court record
and my book, The Liberty Incident, I would be glad to
acknowledge the appropriate correction upon being
advised thereof.”

And,

“As to the affidavit itself: the testimony of an admitted
liar under oath is generally not given much attention.
A few items in this affidavit are worthy of some
analysis.

CLAIM: Boston says “the evidence was clear”.

QUESTION: He never says what evidence.
What evidence?

CLAIM: He claims that both he and Kidd believed
(that’s an opinion regarding Kidd) with certainty
that the attack was a deliberate effort to sink an
American ship.

QUESTION: If the attack was a deliberate effort to
sink an American ship, why was it not sunk by a
military force that was capable of destroying all
Arab air forces in 80 minutes, defeating Arab
armies from more than five countries, conquering
the Sinai and the Suez Canal, the West Bank and
East Jerusalem, all in a few days?

CLAIM: Boston is certain that the Israeli pilots and
their superiors were aware that the ship was
American.

QUESTION: On what evidence does he base this
opinion?

CLAIM: He mentions killing 34 Americans sailors
and wounding 172.

QUESTION: The Court of Inquiry and all official
records reflect 171 wounded. Only in the last
few years has Joe Meadors of the Liberty
Veterans Association made the claim of 172
instead of 171 wounded. Where did Boston
get the number 172?

CLAIM: He “heard testimony that made it clear
that the Israelis intended there be no survivors.”

QUESTION: Where is that testimony in the transcripts
of testimony of the crew taken under oath on June
14 and 15, 1967? (See Court of Inquiry record and
transcript of testimony.)

CLAIM: He says “Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned
three lifeboats . . .”

QUESTION: Where is that testimony in the transcript of
testimony of the crew taken under oath on June 14 and
15, 1967? (See Court of Inquiry record.)

CLAIM: Boston says, “I am outraged at the efforts
of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim
the attack was a case of mistaken identity.” In
particular, Boston is outraged by my book, The
Liberty Incident, published in June 2002.

QUESTIONS: Why was Boston not outraged on
June 18, 1967 by the report of the Court of Inquiry
signed, according to his definition by apparent
apologists for Israel, Admiral Kidd, Captain
Atkinson, Captain Lauff and Captain Boston?

Why was Boston not outraged on June 18, 1967
when apologist for Israel, Admiral John C. McCain,
in Boston’s presence, endorsed the Court of Inquiry
with the comment “The foregoing comments by the
convening authority lead to an overall conclusion that
the attack was in fact a mistake”?

Why was Boston not outraged in July 1967 when
apologist for Israel, Defense Secretary McNamara
before Senate Foreign Relations Committee stated,
“In the case of the attack on the Liberty, it was the
conclusion of the investigatory body headed by an
Admiral of the Navy [Isaac C. Kidd, Jr.] in whom we
have great confidence that the attack was not
intentional. I read the record of investigation and I
support that conclusion, and I think . . . it was not a
conscious decision on the part of either the government
of Israel . . . [t]o attack a U.S. vessel.” Released by
U.S. Government printing office: 1967.

Why was Boston not outraged on February 27, 1978
when apologist for Israel, the CIA Director Admiral
Stansfield Turner, stated in a letter to Senator Abourezk,
“It remains our best judgment that the Israeli attack on the
USS Liberty was not made in malice toward the United
States and was a mistake.”

Why was Boston not outraged on September 19, 1978
when the Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral
Stansfield Turner, stated on ABC television in a
discussion about the Liberty incident: “. . .we released
an evaluated over-all document which said very clearly
that it was our considered opinion that the Israeli
Government had no such knowledge at that time.”

Why was Boston not outraged on July 11, 1983 when
apologist for Israel, the National Security Agency
released in its partially declassified 1981 report
“Liberty was mistaken for an Egyptian ship as a
result of miscalculations and egregious errors”?”

Also, it should be noted that Cristol also produced a letter from Kidd to him agreeing with Cristol’s belief that the attack was a mistake, and expressing gratitude to him for all of his investigative efforts.

So much for Ward Boston. Your witness.

Said I: “Is there any evidence that the Israeli
pilots could have known they were attacking
an American ship or that they could have seen
the flag, even if it were extended by wind?

Said Shingo:

“Sure. Like I said: The ship was a state of
the art, and loaded with antennas and
carried a large satellite dish on an elevated
structure near the stern. It was four times as
large as an old Egyptian freighter, and its
identification numbers were painted on the
bow in white letters 10 feet high.”

Another classic non-response. What has this
to do with anything?

Said I:

“In the first place the pilots were sent to attack
a ship, not to reconnoiter or identify it.”

Said Shingo:

“Irrelevant. They would have identified it easily
as they were attacking it. 600 mph may sound
fast, but speed is relative to distance.
Commercial jet airlines cruise at this speed,
and anyone who has ever flown would know
that at cursing altitude (ie. 5 miles) knows
that the ground barely moves relative to the
aircraft. Relatively stationary objects at half
a mile, especially a large ship, would be
easy to identify.”

Marvin Norwicki, who has himself commented on the flag identification issue, would beg to differ:

“In reconstruction of the attack, the Liberty
crew makes much of flying the American
flag, as if it would somehow protect them in
harm’s way (see Ennes, p. 152). Little does
the crew appreciate the difficulty of identifying
a ship from an aircraft merely on the basis of a
flag or even a hull number (GTR 5 displayed by
the Liberty). Based on my experience of flying
many “low and slow” reconnaissance flights
over ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic
with VQ2, unless the flights are almost
overhead, target identification is virtually
impossible. High-powered binoculars are
not much good in a bouncing low-level aircraft.
Even post facto photos do not always reveal
identification. See, for example, Ennes’ photo
of the ship on page 146. This crisp overhead
photo does not clearly show the identity of the
American ship. So how could the attacking
Israeli forces conclude this was a friendly ship?”

Indeed. In the first air attack (Kursa) the two Mirages made three forward strafing runs each on the bow of the Liberty at 600mph. In the attack run it had 2-3 seconds at most to fire its guns and pull off the target before getting closer than 3000 feet. This involved split-second timing. Each plane pulled off at about a 3000 foot distance from the front of the bow, giving them no opportunity to view the side, or to even see a flag, even if it was extended, which, at a 5 knot speed in calm waters, it probably wasn’t. The second attack (Royal) made similar forward strafing runs on the stern and then the bow, and then made a run on the port side in an attempt to hit the boiler. That’s when he spotted the Latin hull markings. The ground may not move much from 25,000 feet, but when you are strafing a ship in diving runs at 600mph from 7,500 feet and pulling up sharply at 3000 feet (i.e., 4 ½ seconds reaction time), it most certainly does, and at breakneck speed. And all of this, mind you, occurred within a 3 ½ minute time frame for the first attack, and about a 5 minute time frame for the second attack.

Said Shingo:

“Needless to say, torpedo boats traveling
at a few dozen knots would have had no
problem identifying the ship, but they
continued their attack for over an hour.
In any case, both the IDF pilots and the
crew of the MTB’s radio’d back to Israeli
HQ that they could see the US flag and
that the ship was American. They were
told to proceed with orders to attack the ship.”

The naval attack occurred for 10 minutes at most, and there is nothing in any communication transcripts anywhere that prove that the Israelis saw a US flag either before or during the attack. Please, at long last, produce evidence of this beyond the usual hearsay (and double and triple hearsay) by those many years after the event.

(END OF SECTION I)

THE ATTACK ON THE U.S.S. LIBERTY, SECTION II

Said Shingo:

“Intelligence expert James Bamford revealed in
his book Body of Secrets, that unknown to Israel,
a US Navy EC-121 intelligence aircraft was flying
high overhead the ‘Liberty,’ electronically recorded
the attack. The US aircraft crew provides evidence
that the Israeli pilots knew full well that they were
attacking a US Navy ship flying the American flag.
Bamford interviewed 3 of the crew members of the
plane and all agreed that what they heard were
comments from the pilots and torpedo boats
mentioning the US flag.”

Bamford’s source, Marvin Norwicki, who was then a chief petty officer aboard an NSA aircraft spying on Israel, wrote Bamford a letter in which he stated in no uncertain terms his belief that the attack on the Liberty was a mistake. Said Norwicki in a March 3, 2000 e-mail to Bamford:

“In this correspondence, I am concentrating on a
single event that involved the USS Liberty in June
1967. As you know, Jim Ennes and members of
the Liberty crew are on record stating the ship was
deliberately attacked by the Israelis. I think otherwise.
I have first hand information, which I am sharing with
you. I was present on that day, along with members
of an aircrew in a COMFAIRAIRRECONRON TWO
(VQ-2) EC-121M aircraft flying some 15,000 feet
above the incident. As I recall, we recorded most,
if not all, of the attack. Further, our intercepts, never
before made public, showed the attack to be an
accident on the part of the Israelis.”

In a letter to the Wall street Journal on May 16, 2001, Nowicki wrote:

“In regard to Timothy Naftali's review of James
Bamford's book "Body of Secrets" (Leisure &
Arts, May 9): Mr. Naftali doesn't quite have it right
concerning the book portion dealing with the Israeli
attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. I know because
I am the person to whom Mr. Natfali [sic] refers as
the "chief Hebrew-language analyst" aboard the
U.S. Navy (not Air Force) EC121 aircraft. He says
that I recall one of my teammates telling me of
hearing references to "a U.S. flag" from Israeli
pilots.

For the record, we (my teammate and I) both heard
and recorded the references to the U.S. flag made
by the pilots and captains of the motor torpedo
boats. My personal recollection remains after
34 years that the aircraft and MTBs prosecuted
the Liberty until their operators had an opportunity
to get close-in and see the flag, hence the
references to the flag.

My position, which is opposite of Mr. Bamford's,
is that the attack, though terrible and tragic
especially to the crew members and their families
on that ill-fated day in June 1967, was a gross
error. How can I prove it? I can't unless the
transcripts/tapes are found and released to
the public. I last saw them in a desk drawer
at NSA in the late 1970s before I left the
service.

MARVIN E. NOWICKI, PH.D.
Ashley, Ill.”

It should be noted that Norwicki’s recollection is confirmed by the release of the IAF transcripts of the attack, and the NSA tapes declassified in 2003.

Also, in addition to Norwicki and his teammate, mentioned by him above in the WSJ letter, there was a third Hebrew linguist on board the EC-121M recon plane, who, following the declassification of the NSA tapes in 2003 was revealed to be one Richard W. Hickman, and who testified to his own thoughts on the Liberty attack in 1981, when interviewed for the NSA report on the attack:

“From the SIGNET picture I witnessed, I would tend to
say that the Israelis did not know that they attacked a
US vessel…”

Also, James Bamford’s assertion that the Israelis attacked the Liberty to conceal a massacre of 1000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai is unsubstantiated by any evidence whatsoever. Journalist Gabi Bron and IDF historian Aryeh Yitzhaki, the two sources Bamford cites to prove this “massacre” contradict him completely, and have both stated that no such massacre ever took place. Along with Norwicki, Bamford thus knowingly and deliberately misrepresented the very sources he has cited to “prove” his conspiracy theories. He stands thoroughly discredited. Your witness.

Said Shingo:

“1. The ship was easily identified as USS
LIBERTY by Israeli Naval Headquarters,
by referring to “JANE’S FIGHTING SHIPS”
1966 OR 1967 issue, which showed a
photograph of the ship and listed in detail
its characteristics. In fact, an identification
“tower” was placed on their Battle Plot with
an “A” on the tower to identify the ship as an
American ship.

2. If the immediately they disengaged when
they identified Latin markings on the Liberty’s
hull, why did the torpedo boats continue
attacking the ship for another hour after
they had issued an apology and assured the
Pentagon that they had ceased the attack?

3. A US Airforce intelligence analyst who followed
intercepts of the attack says on camera that…”

To which I answer:

1. The Liberty was so identified by them at 9:00am. And, as I said in my previous post, when the explosions occurred at El-Arish, Commander Pinchasy was of the opinion that the Liberty was at least 75 miles west of the point at which it had been first spotted 5-6 hours earlier, steaming at 15 knots. Also, as he later commented, it did not occur to him at the time that an American intelligence gathering vessel that had been traveling westward for more than several hours would likely be shelling El Arish. For these reasons, he, like the others, assumed that an enemy vessel was bombarding them.

When positively ID’d at 9:00am, the Liberty was at the extreme southwest end of the control board, and steaming west at 15 knots. According to these calculations, this would have put the Liberty in the direct vicinity of Port Said—about 70 miles west of the point at which the Liberty was first attacked at 1:58pm. The green marker (for neutral) representing the Liberty was removed with the change in watch at 11:00am, and there is no record of an ID “tower” or an “A” being placed on it on the control board. Another fabrication of yours, pure and simple.

Btw, every IAF pilot was not equipped with his own “JANE’S FIGHTING SHIPS” and the problems of proper ID have been explained to you by Marvin Norwicki and, of course, me.

2. For the simple reason that there is no record of any such attack after 2:47pm occurring, and which is corroborated by a) the IDF investigation drawn from IDF Navy logs, b) the declassified NSA tapes of 2003 which monitored the chatter of the Israeli helicopters and naval craft between 2:29pm and 3:28pm, c) both the Deck log and the Underway log of the USS Liberty, and d) the IAF transcripts .

3. You have to be kidding with this. You’re citing this as proof to refute me?

Besides being flatly contradicted by the release of the IAF transcripts, and the declassified NSA tapes in 2003 which show that there was no such surveillance by the NSA of the attack while it was in progress, only the direct aftermath of the attack, this account is wholly uncorroborated by any evidence aside from Capt. Block’s very convenient 3 ½ decade delayed recollection.

Reading like a scene from an Oliver Stone screenplay, here is an excerpt from an article published by “The USS Liberty Cover-Up” titled “Capt. Richard Block Breaks Silence about the Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty!”:

(http://www.uss-liberty.com/2010/02/04/capt-richard-block-breaks-silence-about-the-israeli-attack-on-the-uss-liberty/)

“Like others who were material witnesses to the
act of war that took place that day, Capt. Block
was told in crystal clear terms that he was to
keep his mouth shut concerning what he saw
and heard. Shortly thereafter, individuals
unknown to him showed up at his post,
gathered up any documentation dealing
with the Israeli intercepts and hauled them
away to be destroyed. And lest anyone
fall victim to the typical business that
Israel’s defenders employ when
attempting to cover up her crimes–
namely that one man’s testimony is
‘insufficient’ evidence in refuting
what has been the standard explanation
for the last 40 years–keep in mind that
he is not alone.

Two other individuals contacted by American
Free Press for this story have related
circumstances identical to those of
Capt. Block, although (for obvious
reasons) they insist upon remaining
anonymous…”

Anonymous. Always anonymous. Lest the CIA and the Mossad, well, you know…

The article also relates an incident where Capt. Block, for whom “silence is no longer an acceptable option,” intruded himself into a book signing event being attended by “The Liberty Incident” author AJ Cristol, described in the article as one whose “drooling support for the Jewish state is well-known.” Capt. Block then heatedly denounces Cristol’s book as a “pack of lies,” and, evincing an inspired flair for metaphor, screams at the author, “I got the raw milk of the intelligence and all you got was the processed cheese!”

The article further said:

“When asked about what he thought Israel’s
motives were, Capt. Block’s answer was
simple–That Israel wanted to drag the United
States into the war against the Arab countries
so that the blood of America’s Christians would
be spilled rather than that that of Israel’s Jews.”

Nice. Your witness.

The article further speculates that another motive for the attack was an effort by the Israelis to prevent the Liberty from revealing their impending seizure of Syria's Golan Heights, a move that Washington was said to have opposed.

The theory that Israel attacked the ship in order to blame the Egyptians and thus pull America into the war is belied by the fact that the Israelis were winning the war and, most importantly, that they made no effort to blame anyone and took responsibility for the incident moments after the attack.

The notion that Israel struck the Liberty to hide its attack on Syria from the US is contradicted by diplomatic cables showing that Israel informed Washington of its intention to do so before the Liberty attack, and that Washington had not objected. Israel may have attacked Egypt on June 5, but Jordan and Syria were the first to attack Israel. The White House was well aware of this. Michael Oren has noted:

“Like the other claims for Israel's alleged motive in
attacking the Liberty, the one linking the assault to
the Golan Heights campaign cannot withstand the
scrutiny of the newly declassified documents. These

confirm that Israel made no attempt to hide its

preparations for an offensive against Syria, and
that the United States government, relying on
regular diplomatic channels, remained fully
apprised of them. Thus, on June 8, the American
consulate in Jerusalem reported that Israel was
retaliating for Syria's bombardment of Israeli
villages "in an apparent prelude to large-scale
attack in effort to seize Heights overlooking
border kibbutzim." That same day, U.S.
Ambassador Walworth Barbour in Tel Aviv
reported that "I would not, repeat not, be
surprised if the reported Israeli attack
[on the Golan] does take place or has already
done so," and IDF Intelligence Chief Aharon
Yariv told Harry McPherson, a senior White
House aide who was visiting Israel at the time,
that "there still remained the Syria problem and
perhaps it would be necessary to give Syria a blow.

The United States National Archives contain no
evidence to suggest that information obtained
by the Liberty augmented Washington's already
detailed picture of events on the Golan front and
of Israel's intentions there. The Israeli records, for
their part, reveal no fear whatsoever of American
opposition to punishing Syria, but only of possible
Soviet military intervention. (It was this fear that led
Israel to delay its decision to capture the Golan until
the morning of June 9.) Nor do they suggest that
there was any danger of an American ultimatum.
On the contrary, from his conversations with
presidential advisor McGeorge Bundy and other
administration officials, Foreign Minister Abba
Eban understood that "official Washington would
not be too aggrieved if Syria suffered some painful
effects from the war that it had started...."

Israel's intention to attack Syria was, in short, about the worst kept secret in Israeli and American diplomatic circles at the time.

There is simply no evidence that the Israelis positively identified the Liberty when it was “painted” (i.e., targeted), that they knew it was an intelligence gathering vessel, or that they intercepted any communications the Liberty was engaged in. And even if the Israelis were listening in, what could they have heard that supposedly pissed them off? Absolutely nothing. They could not have thought that the Liberty was monitoring their communications because they weren’t; the Liberty had no Hebrew linguists, only Arab and Russian.

Said Shingo:

“The pilot’s protests also were heard by radio
monitors in the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon.
Then-U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dwight
Porter has confirmed this. The CIA station
chief handed him intercepted messages
between the Israeli war room and their planes .
The pilots were ordered to attack the ship and
replied immediately that it was an American ship.
Israeli HQ responded , “you have your orders,
attack the ship”. The pilots tried again insisting
that it had an American flag. Israeli HQ responded
again, “you have your orders, attack it”.

Porter told his story to syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak and offered to submit to further questioning by authorities. Unfortunately, no one in the U.S. government has any interest in hearing these first-person accounts of Israeli treachery.”

It is more likely that Capt. Block drew inspiration for his tale, told by him in 2001, from the Evans-Novak article, published in the Washington Post on November 8, 1991, and the facts recounted below will only serve to put another nail into the likes of that obvious, transparent falsehood.

In the first place, the communications from the Israeli jets of the Kursa and Royal missions to their ground control in Tel-Aviv were on UHF radio, which are transmitted within line of sight, in this case from 10,000 feet. According to calculations based on those from the USDOT that informs pilots on the distances in which their UHF/VHF transmissions can be received and heard, UHF communications from the either mission to HQ could only have been heard within a 123 mile radius from a plane transmitting at 10,000 feet. The embassy in Beirut was 180 miles away. Also, UHF transmissions can only be heard within line of sight, not over the horizon, meaning both the IAF HQ and the Beirut embassy were at sea level, and that even if the embassy was within the 123 mile radius and might have somehow heard the pilot’s transmissions, they could not possibly have heard the transmissions from the IAF HQ supposedly ordering them to attack a US Ship.

Secondly, Porter told AJ Cristol in an interview on November 19, 1991, 11 days after the Evans-Novak article the following:

“AJC: Basically, the article was unclear. At one time
it talked about intercepts and other times it seemed
to refer to decoded messages.

DP: Well, I’m sorry about that. That was not what I
said. I’m quite sure that these were battlefield
messages. They couldn’t have been anything else
in ‘67, because I do not believe that even the Israeli
Air Force or ours were, at that point, using coded
messages for battlefield transmission, but what I
heard, where, where, was direct battlefield talk,
was probably, had originally been in Hebrew and
clearly had been translated into English.

AJC: I see, so . . .

DP: Now I have no idea where the intercepts
occurred and by whom they were made.

AJC: I see, but you heard it in English?

DP: All different possibilities of course. There
was the Navy, there was, there’s NSA, there’s
all sorts of possibilities, but the coding I think was
probably a mistake. I did not say that, and that
crept into the story, and I had nothing to do with
the use of that word.

DP: A couple of date time groups, no to or from,
or anything else. And I must say to you, the day all
this happened, if my memory serves me right, was
the day the embassy was under a mob attack. And
the mob attack very nearly succeeded in overrunning
the embassy. So these messages were put under my
nose to read in a moment of real, real tension, but there
wasn’t any question about it. I clearly, clearly remember
them, and the embassy then burned, burned practically
every piece of paper in the whole embassy, because,
as I say, we were under attack and the embassy was
being prepared for evacuation.”

It is clear from this interview that the account given by Evan-Novak of the Ambassador’s words are quite different from the words spoken by the ambassador 11 days later to Cristol. What is also clear from this interview is that the ambassador’s memory of an event 24 years past is far from perfect—which is understandable. It should be noted that declassified cables sent to the State Department indicate that the American embassy in Beirut was attacked on June 6, 1967, not June 8, and that whatever the ambassador saw (or thinks he saw or heard) could not have been the attack on the Liberty for this reason alone, not to mention the impossibility of intercepting such UHF transmissions between the Kursa and Royal missions and Air Control Central in Tel-Aviv.

Said Shingo of another alleged witness to a deliberate Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, one Seth Mintz:

“Mintz attended the 1991 Liberty reunion. He was
video-taped by LVA member Bob Casale stating
emphatically that: (a) the Israelis knew the Liberty
was an American ship. “You could read the
numbers on the side of the ship. It was no big
secret.” and (b) Americans at the embassy said
Liberty was not a U.S. Ship c) “By all rights that
ship should have gone down in 1-5 minutes with
everybody aboard,” and “[two] Israelis spent 18
years at hard labor because they refused to attack
the ship.”

Please. Mintz first told the Liberty Veteran’s association in 1984 that he was a “former Israeli Major who had observed the attack from the Israeli war room.” When Rich Bonin, a CBS producer interviewed Mintz for a program in 1984, he declined to air the program because of problems with Mintz’s credibility. Bonin then passed his research on to Adrian Pennink of the British Thames TV, who also interviewed Mintz for himself, and who also declined to include Mintz’s testimony in their documentary “Attack on the Liberty.”

Mintz has stated that while he was at the Kirya in Tel-Aviv, he “remembers seeing the Liberty marker on their operation board stay throughout the day. It was not removed.” The problem: there was no ship plot at Army or Air Force HQ; only at Naval HQ in Stella Maris, Haifa.

When Evans and Novak published their article, Mintz completely contradicted their account in an article published in the Washington Post titled “Attack on the Liberty: A Tragic Mistake,” dated November 9, 1991, in which he blasts both columnists for misquoting him:

“The columnists quote me as saying that the
Israelis ‘had doubts whether they had done
the right thing,” as if I were referring to a
deliberate attack on an American ship
when, in fact, I was talking about uncertainty
regarding the ship’s identity that lingered
among some of the officers…”

Evans and Novak then blasted Mintz, and claimed, without evidence, that Mintz had been intimidated into recanting.

Yet even this tale told by Mintz is almost certainly false. Mintz claimed that he was an IDF Major under the pseudonym of Giora Dagan, to prevent the loss of his US citizenship. According to IDF personnel records researched by AJ Cristol, the Giora Dagan with the serial number provided by Mintz was an enlisted motor pool driver, and not an IDF Major or intelligence officer. As Bonin and Pennink, (and Evans, and Novak, if they were still alive) could all tell you: Mintz has some serious credibility problems. Said Bonin: “Mintz is a troubled soul.” .

Seth Mintz. Your witness.

Said Shingo:

“Entries in the ship’s log were tampered with.

1. Nobody knew who was wounded or how
severely.

2. The log minimized the duration of the attack
by an hour and a half, conveniently fitting the
Israeli version.

3. It documented the wounded not as 172, but as 75.”

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Said the Liberty Deck log: “The number of injured was 170.” It then lists all of the wounded, and detailed their wounds. The log miscounted by one—a minor error that was corrected in the Court of Inquiry. The documented number of wounded is 171. The Deck log, which is also corroborated by the Underway log, did not minimize “the duration of the attack by an hour and a half, conveniently fitting the Israeli version” because the authors of both logs, even if they had been feverishly re-forging the logs in the four days between the attack and the inquiry for whatever unfathomable reason, along with the Court of Inquiry and every other investigative body that would examine the incident over the next 30 years, did not have access to the “Israeli version” until 1997.

Said Shingo:

“you know very well that 2:50 pm was the
second round of jets that were sent after the
first four F-4 Phantom jets had been
dispatched at 14:09 and then recalled
at 2:35pm. They were ordered to return
by Robert McNamara.”

I “know” this “very well?” You know, it’s becoming perfectly obvious to me that you just make this up as you go along.

In the first place the communications records of the Sixth Fleet record the following message from the USS Saratoga to COMSIXTHFLEET, i.e., Admiral William Martin Sixth Fleet Commander in Chief: “This station received attack report from station Rock Star [The Liberty] at 1210zulu” (2:10pm Sinai time). This is also corroborated by the Liberty’s radio logs, marked exhibits # 23 and # 24 in the Court of Inquiry. How then could there have been a launch at 2:09pm when the Saratoga didn’t even get the first distress signal from the Liberty until 2:10pm? The skipper of neither carrier could have commenced a launch into hostilities on their own initiative, and when Admiral Martin sent the order to the USS Saratoga and the USS America to launch aircraft to cover the Liberty at 2:50pm, he commanded that the launch commence at 3:39pm—giving them 50 minutes to execute the launch for the simple reason that commencing a launch of four fighter aircraft into potential hostilities from an aircraft carrier is a rather involved process. And even then, the Saratoga didn’t even get its birds in the air until 4:01pm—71 minutes after the order.

Also, as noted above, I was actually in error when I said in my previous post that the jets had been launched at 2:50pm. They were not. 2:50pm (3 minutes after the Israeli MTB’s broke off the attack) is the time at which, according to Sixth Fleet communications records, the carriers USS Saratoga and USS America received the order from Admiral Martin for a launch to cover the Liberty. The order commanded the USS America to launch four A-4 Skyhawks, and the USS Saratoga to launch four A-1 Skyraiders to cover the Liberty at 3:39pm, with ETA 1 hour and 30 minutes after launch. (There were no F-4 Phantoms launched from either carrier, and no record of any so ordered in the 2:50pm transmission—just four Skyhawks and four Skyraiders ). The Deck log of the America does not record when after 3:39pm the launch from her took place; the Deck log of the Saratoga records a launch at 4:01pm. COMSIXTHFLEET records show that Admiral Martin (not McNamara) issued the recall of the craft at 4:40pm: “Recall all strikes. Repeat recall all strikes.”

This means that the order for the launch was issued at 2:50pm, the actual launch was ordered for 3:39pm with ETA 1 ½ hour, and the aircraft were recalled at 4:40pm. That means that neither in the Deck logs of the USS Saratoga and the USS America, or the in the COMSIXTHFLEET communications records is there any record of any order to launch before 2:50pm, and no record of any launch from either carrier until 4:01pm.

Stumped again. Sometimes it’s hard to be an unhinged, rabidly anti-Zionist conspiracy theorist, eh Shingo?

Said I:

“Martin received the message long before the
White House even learned about the attack.”

Said Shingo:
“False. Johnson, like Richard Helms, was
receiving the radio intercepts in near real
time. The telexes were sent to all intelligence
agencies and the White House at the same
time. McNamara gave the first recall order
at 2:35 pm. If the planes dispatched at 2:09
had arrived, the Israelis would have been
driven off. Washington took the Israelis at their
word, but they were lying. They said they had
recognized their error and apologized. The
attack then continued for another hour and
20 minutes, during which another 25 sailors
were murdered.”

This is a complete fabrication and a physical impossibility. The COMSIXTHFLEET records show that Admiral Martin ordered both the launch at 2:50pm and the recall at 4:40pm on his own initiative. The NSA in Washington received word of the attack at 9:11am (3:11pm Sinai time). National Security Adviser Walt Rostow, according to his own notes, informed the President at 9:49am (3:49pm Sinai). Johnson then said to press secretary George Christian, “George, if this attack is by the Russians, this means war.”

McNamara issued the recall at 11:25 (5:25pm Sinai time)—1 hour and 45 minutes after Admiral Martin had already done so. McNamara was not even in the Pentagon on the morning of June 8; he issued the order from the situation room at the White House. That was the extent of McNamara’s involvement, and he had no communications with Sixth Fleet at all that day.

Said I:

“There is no evidence that Johnson or McNamara
ever believed the attack on the Liberty was anything
but an accident, thus negating any motive to cover
up anything in the first place.”

Said Shingo:

“Umm really? Johnson’s belief that the attack
was deliberate is preserved in the minutes of a
White House meeting the day after.”

Like hell it is. There was of course shock and incredulity expressed by Johnson and his cabinet upon learning of the attack. But the President and McNamara, after they got the report from the Court of Inquiry, accepted that the attack was a mistake. CIA director Helms told Johnson the same thing. Repeat, there is no evidence that Johnson thereafter thought the attack to be deliberate.

Said McNamara in July 1967 testifying before the Committee on Foreign Relations:

“In the case of the attack on the Liberty, it was the
conclusion of the investigatory body headed by an
Admiral of the Navy [Isaac C. Kidd, Jr.] in whom
we have great confidence that the attack was not
intentional. I read the record of investigation and
I support that conclusion, and I think . . . it was not
a conscious decision on the part of the
government of Israel to attack a U.S. vessel.”

Said Clark Clifford in his memoir “Counsel to the President”:

“The best interpretation from the facts available
to me was that there were inexcusable failures
on the part of the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Said McGeorge Bundy to AJ Cristol on April 19, 1993:

“We came to the conclusion that it was an
interlocking collection of errors rather than
an interlocking plot that was the cause of
the tragedy.”

As for Richard Helms, the declassification of the redacted sections of the 1981 NSA report on the Liberty attack released in 2003 read as follows:

“In part because of the press speculation at the time,
President Johnson directed the Director of Central
Intelligence, Richard Helms, to prepare a report by
June 13, five days after the attack, assessing the
Israeli intentions. The CIA report drew heavily on
the Signet reports referred to above. While these
reports revealed some confusion on the part of
the pilots concerning the nationality of the ship,
they tended to rule out any thesis that the Israeli
Navy and Air Force deliberately attacked a ship
they knew to be American.”

Said Shingo:

“Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, commander
of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, was told
over the phone by Johnson that “he didn’t care if the
ship sunk, he would not embarrass his allies.” The
evidence is in the form of testimony from Lt.
Commander David Lewis, head of the Liberty’s
NSA group.”

In the first place Admiral Geis was not the Commander of Sixth Feet; Admiral William Martin was. Admiral Geis was a two-star rear admiral and skipper of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Saratoga.

In any event, here's what we have here. A two-star rear admiral bypasses the chain of command, and goes over the head of Commander of Sixth Fleet Vice Admiral William Martin, Commander in Chief of Naval Forces in Europe Admiral John McCain, Chief of Naval operations David McDonald, the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, and the Secretary of Defense to talk directly to the President? And how did he do this, on his cell-phone? My God, do you know what you’re saying here?!

There is, needless to say, not a shred of evidence whatsoever to corroborate this including any direct testimony Admiral Geis himself. His widow told AJ Cristol that she had no knowledge of any such conversation between her husband and the President. In any event, as Cristol has pointed out, in 1967 the US Navy simply did not have the ability to make a telephone link from the White House to a ship at sea in the Mediterranean. So much for David Lewis.

***

The entire notion that Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty is, in short, a flimsy, fraudulent house of cards resting on shaky edifice buttressed by an assortment of lurid, conspiratorial fictions. To wit:

--The fiction that the Israelis planned in advance to attack the Liberty, despite the absence of any evidence that they even knew of the Liberty before 9:00am, the preposterous notion that they knowingly allowed the Liberty into the combat zone, in order to attack a ship of their strongest ally, that they scrubbed their planes of insignia and reconnoitered the ship for nine hours, thus giving the Liberty nine priceless hours to relay the very information that the attack was supposed to silence, before finally attacking her in broad daylight.

--The unsupported, undocumented fiction that the Liberty Deck log is a doctored forgery and is “edited, censored and doctored, thus flawed and studded with outright lies.”

--The fiction that the Israelis “knew” that they were attacking an American ship and that they “knew” that it was an intel-gathering vessel despite the lack of any such mentioned in the NSA and IAF transcripts, and the fact that the transcripts of the IAF tapes indicate that the Israelis did not know they were attacking an American ship in both air attacks and, five minutes into the second air attack, immediately disengaged when they saw the Latin markings on the ship.

--The fiction that the attack continued for “over two hours” when the evidence shows that the air attacks lasted a total of 8 ½ minutes and the naval attack lasted about 10 minutes, that both took place within a 49 minute (1:58pm-2:47pm) time frame, that there is no record of any such attack after 2:47pm occurring, and which is corroborated by a) the IDF investigation drawn from IDF Navy logs, b) the declassified NSA tapes of 2003 which monitored the chatter of the Israeli helicopters and naval craft between 2:29pm and 3:28pm, c) both the Deck log and the Underway log of the USS Liberty, and d) the IAF transcripts .

Also that all available evidence, including IDF Navy logs and the Deck log of the Liberty, indicate that the Israeli boat captain misidentified the ship, then engulfed with smoke, at 6000 yards distance at about 2:30 pm, incurred fire from the Liberty as they approached her, returned it, cut off the attack at 2:47pm pending further ID, got close enough to identify the Latin hull markings of the Liberty, and offered help and medical attention to the survivors at 3:03pm.

--The fiction that USS Liberty crewmen were machine gunned in their life rafts, when the Liberty OOD who testified at the Court of Inquiry stated “We filed out to our life rafts which were no longer with us because they had been strafed and most of them burned so we knocked most of them over the ship.”

--The fiction that the Israelis deliberately attacked the Liberty with napalm “to keep the crew below deck (where the torpedoes would have greatest effect) and to prevent the crew establishing any communications by repairing the antennas” instead of doing so because they had no other ordinance, as evidenced by the IAF tapes.

--The fiction that Admiral Kidd told Ward Boston that he believed the attack was deliberate when AJ Cristol, who was a close friend of Kidd’s produced a letter from Kidd completely discrediting this slander.

--The fiction that David Lewis had been told by Admiral Geis, that he, a two-star rear admiral, had three times bypassed the entire chain of command: Commander of Sixth Fleet Vice Admiral William Martin, Commander in Chief of Naval Forces in Europe Admiral John McCain, Chief of Naval operations David McDonald, the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, and the Secretary of Defense, and the President of the United States in order to a) launch combat aircraft into a theater of hostilities on his own initiative, a task the Constitution places with the President, b) receive a direct phone call from the Secretary of Defense, who similarly bypassed the entire chain of command, to order Geis, a two-star rear admiral, to recall the launch, c) to again bypass the chain of command and directly phone the President who allegedly told him that “he didn’t care if the ship sunk, he would not embarrass his allies.” All of this frantic phone calling, mind you, at a time when US Navy did not even have the capability to make a direct telephone link from the White House to a ship on the high seas in the Mediterranean.

--The discredited fictions of Capt. Block, Seth Mintz, and James Bamford.

--The imaginary, undocumented launches of the aircraft at 2:10pm from the USS Saratoga toward the Liberty when they had not even received the first distress signal from the Liberty until 2:11pm.

--The imaginary recall by McNamara at 2:35pm—40 minutes before the NSA in Washington learned of the attack, 64 minutes before the President was informed of the attack by Walt Rostow, and several hours before McNamara was even in the Pentagon that day, thus also rendering it impossible for the President and CIA director Richard Helms to have been monitoring the attack while it was in progress and “receiving the radio intercepts in near real time.”

--The fiction that Johnson or McNamara, when apprised of the facts by the CIA, the NSA, and the Naval Court of Inquiry that the attack was a mistake, ever thereafter believed that the attack was intentional.

--The fiction that the Israelis attacked the Liberty to blame the Egyptians and lure America into the war, when the Israelis took responsibility for the attack moments after it happened.

--The fiction that the Israelis attacked the Liberty to hide its attack on Syria from the US, which is contradicted by diplomatic cables showing that Israel informed Washington of its intention to do so before the Liberty attack, and that Washington had not objected.

--The fiction that any of the nine official investigations, including those by the NSA, and the CIA ever concluded that the attack was anything but a mistake.

A conspiracy to fabricate the evidence denying and disproving a deliberate attack would have involved superhuman prodigies of effort in record time, not to mention a considerable staff of forging experts to accomplish the task, none of whom has yet to step forward with the “undoctored” originals: The re-forging of the COMSIXTHFLEET communications records showing Admiral Martin’s launch order at 2:50pm and his recall order at 4:40pm, the Radio log, the Deck log, and the Underway logs of the USS liberty, and the Deck log of the USS Saratoga, all in the four day period between the attack and the convening of the Court of Inquiry in June 1967. Who were these people, and how did they do it?

Any conspiracy for a cover up would have involved not only Johnson and McNamara, but Chief of Naval operations David McDonald, US Naval CIC John McCain, Sixth Fleet Commander William Martin, and president of the US Navy Court of Inquiry, Admiral Isaac Kidd. All would be guilty of treason, and nothing less. To sully and defame the honor of these officers with such a heinous, unsubstantiated slander, is a calumny.

The notion that the United States government and military would, over the course of 44 years and 9 administrations all cover up what they knew to be a deliberate attack killing 34 American sailors and wounding 171 by any nation is preposterous. What sinister, far-reaching power was forcing their hand? The Jewish vote? The "Israel Lobby?" Please.

The American State Dept., under George Marshall, strongly urged President Truman not to recognize the state of Israel in 1948 to avoid angering the Arabs. Indeed, anyone who knows anything about the contentious history of the relationship between the State Dept and Israel knows how true this is. The simple truth is that the American State Department, like the British Foreign Office, has always had a strong Arabist bent. Like Marshall, most of the subsequent Secretaries of State like John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, William Rogers, Cyrus Vance, James Baker, Colin Powell and others had all made perfectly clear their belief that America’s relationship with Israel was a drag on our relations with the Arabs, and injurious to our interests.

The relationship with Israel in the 1948-1967 period, unlike today, though friendly, was far from tension-free, and American diplomacy in general attempted balance its interests in the Middle East, and not always successfully. Johnson was certainly friendlier to Israel than his two predecessors, though that had limits: He gave Israel $52 million in civilian aid, but hedged on military aid; he would sell M-48 tanks and A-4 Skyhawk fighters to Israel, but only through West Germany, so as not to offend the Arabs. Certainly America never armed Israel to anywhere near the extent that the Soviet Union had been openly arming Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, among others. Between 1956-1967 the Soviets poured about $2 billion in military aid alone—1700 tanks, 2400 artillery, 500 jets, and 1400 advisers, 43% all going to Egypt.

The trajectory of U.S.-Israel relations in this period was hardly favorable to Israel, and was unlikely to convince them that American obeisance, or even goodwill, could be easily got, or taken for granted. Eisenhower was severely critical of Israel on a number of issues, condemned Israel's seizure of the Suez peninsula in the 1956 War in no uncertain terms, and threatened to sever relations with them if they did not return it, which they did in 1957. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy was sharply critical of Israel’s retaliation policy against Arab fedayeen raids, and its attempts to divert the Jordan River. He also criticized their refusal to repatriate Palestinian refugees—something the Arabs have never forgotten.

Johnson, though a friend of Israel, was not an uncritical one, often complaining that Israel was ungrateful for his support, and that their failure to support him on Vietnam was evidence of their ingratitude. He told Abe Feinberg “Israel gets more than it’s willing to give…It’s a one-way street.” The consequences of Israel’s disastrous Samu raid in late 1966, which did much to destabilize the regime of Jordan’s King Hussein, an Arab moderate whose goodwill and influence America had been cultivating to calm the tensions of the region, angered Johnson even more. Prior to 1967 Israel's primary military benefactors were Britian and France, not America. On the eve of the 1967 War, Israel asked America for assistance in the event of hostilities--and was refused. Even a modest, sensible request by the Israeli ambassador at the outset of the 1967 war that the US provide a naval liaison to coordinate communications between the two countries was refused by the US, and thus no one in Israel had been informed of the Liberty’s presence in the area—one of the reasons contributing to the tragic attack. At best, America gave Israel reluctant diplomatic cover both during and after the conflict--that was it. The nebulous charges of Jewish "power" here and elsewhere, lead where they always do when scrutinized--nowhere. It is a conspiracy so powerful that it leaves no trace of itself to be examined.

Of course the whole cottage industry of lies and fabrications about the attack on the USS Liberty are, and have long been, used as a tool to foment tension and discord between Israel and America on the part of haters and enemies of Israel, and, in the larger picture, are merely a bit part of the entire apparatus of long standing assault on, and deligitimization of, the Jewish state: The recasting of the events of the wars of 1948, 1956,1967, Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, and Gaza in 2009 into wars of unprovoked aggression; the denial of the concessions of the Oslo peace process (1993-2000); the denial of the rejection of far reaching concessions offered at Camp David in 2000, Taba in 2001, and by Olmert to Abbas in 2008; the release of the one-sided blood libel of the Goldstone Report in 2009; the recasting of the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 into a vicious, unprovoked attack on “peaceful” club and knife wielding activists—it’s all a vast, sordid enterprise of brazen historical revisions, rewrites, distortions, and out and out lies in the service of the Big Lie: that this nation, Israel, is uniquely evil and whose antagonists are all, without exception, innocent, virtuous victims of the Jewish state’s unprovoked aggressions and unspeakable depredations.

***

And now, a special, personal note to commenter Shingo

In closing, I should like to say that I am a man who can admit to mistakes when he makes them. It appears that I was wrong when I accused you of paraphrasing and lifting whole sentences without attribution from longtime anti-Israel sewer veteran Alan Hart. I was wrong. You plagiarized it word for word.

Compare:

Alan Hart:

“Another summary truth about what happened in June
1967 is that there would NOT have been a war if Israel’s
prime minister, the much maligned Levi Eshkol, and his
Chief of Staff, General Yitzhak Rabin, had had their way.
After Eygpt’s President Nasser had closed the Straits of
Tiran to Israeli shipping, they wanted only a limited military
operation – to satisfy Israeli public opinion and, most of all,
to put pressure on America to lead the international
community in delivering on a promise President
Eisenhower had made – that in the event of Eygpt closing
the Straits of Tiran, the “society of nations” would be
mobilized to cause the Straits to be re-opened by all
means short of war. That was what Nasser was hoping
would happen. For reasons of face, he needed to be
able to say to the Arab world, “I backed down because
of international pressure.”

Shingo:

“Another summary truth about what happened in June
1967 is that there would NOT have been a war if Israel’s
prime minister, the much maligned Levi Eshkol, and his
Chief of Staff, General Yitzhak Rabin, had had their way.
After Eygpt’s President Nasser had closed the Straits of
Tiran to Israeli shipping, they wanted only a limited military
operation – to satisfy Israeli public opinion and, most of all,
to put pressure on America to lead the international
community in delivering on a promise President Eisenhower
had made – that in the event of Eygpt closing the Straits of
Tiran, the “society of nations” would be mobilized to cause
the Straits to be re-opened by all means short of war.
That was what Nasser was hoping would happen. For
reasons of face, he needed to be able to say to the
Arab world, “I backed down because of international
pressure.”

Alan Hart:

“So why didn’t Prime Minister Eshkol and Chief of
Staff Rabin have their way? The short answer is
that in Israel the week before the war there was
what amounted to a MILITARY COUP in all but
name and without a shot being fired.”

Shingo:

“So why didn’t Prime Minister Eshkol and Chief of
Staff Rabin have their way? The short answer is
that in Israel the week before the war there was
what amounted to a MILITARY COUP in all but
name and without a shot being fired.”

See the similarity? Isn't it remarkable?

Said you to me on October 1:

“While I admit that I have been sloppy with regard to citing sources in response to your voluminous diatribes, so it was the only appropriate way to debunk your BS. You could have chosen to reference links and accompany them with concise commentary, but it’s clear that you believed that by spamming this blog with lengthy cut and paste dumps no one would take the time to refute you.”

Sloppy? So your plagairizing of some 26 whole paragraphs in a single post was mere sloppiness? This is beautiful. And it was my lengthy posts that gave you no choice but to plagiarize some 26 whole paragraphs in your September 6 post? I drove you to it? Oh, please.

Btw, your vicious cruelty toward Richard Witty—a man of dissenting but moderately expressed views whose posts are savaged up and down Mondoweiss, is a disgrace. The gall of you to recommend that he be banned betrays not only your cruelty, but your commissar-like intolerance as well.