Killing All The Witnesses, Sunday Sermonette, USS Liberty
In four weeks is the anniverary of the June 8, 1967
zionist attack upon the USS Liberty.
Israel tried to kill all the witnesses that day, with this
anniversary the witnesses are a year older and the
truth continues to be buried.
The attack came in three waves.
First Israeli jets strafed and bombed the American flag waving
USS Liberty. Then torpedo boats came in, blowing a
39-foot hole in the starboard side.
But an Israeli torpedo boat, as testified, had
"methodically machine-gunned one of our life rafts".
The third wave had been designed to finish the job.
After the American flag waving USS Liberty was sunk
witnesses would have gone over the sides and
been floating in the water. To pick them off as they
swam is best done by helicopter.
The official Israeli re****t says the helicopters were
sent as a "rescue mission".
When the Israeli helicopters arrived the ****p was still
afloat thus their task was aborted.
There are new revelations about the Israeli attack
upon the American flag waving USS Liberty. This
re****t does not cover the aspect of the helicopters,
it does make clear that the Israelis knew full well
who they were trying to sink.
The article is lengthy, if you want to jump
to the meat I suggest you go to where it says:
["We deserve to have the truth," Pat Blue said. ]
http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/tuesday...
chicagotribune.com
Special re****t
New revelations in attack on American spy ****p
Veterans, do***ents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of
deadly '67 incident
By John Crewdson
Tribune senior correspondent
October 2, 2007
Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert,
recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister,
is shouting into the phone.
"I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething
with anger!"
Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ****p on
station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets
flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually
defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would
become known as the Six-Day War.
For Lockwood and many other survivors, the anger is mixed with
incredulity: that Israel would attack an im****tant ally, then
attribute the attack to a case of mistaken identity by Israeli pilots
who had confused the U.S. Navy's most distinctive ****p with an
Egyptian horse-cavalry trans****t that was half its size and had a
dissimilar profile. And they're also incredulous that, for years,
their own government would reject their calls for a thorough
investigation.
"They tried to lie their way out of it!" Lockwood shouts. "I don't
believe that for a minute! You just don't shoot at a ****p at sea
without identifying it, making sure of your target!"
Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors
located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack
without shouting or weeping.
Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government
do***ents and the recollections of former military personnel,
including some quoted in this article for the first time, which
strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's position
that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli
pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing
them,
that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval
vessel.
The do***ents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare
Israel's reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed
the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty
and seriously flawed investigation.
In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last
June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country's
chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker,
acknowledged that the attack had "become the center of considerable
controversy and debate." It was not the agency's intention, it said,
"to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can
be
drawn from a thorough review of this material," available
athttp://www.nsa.gov/liberty
.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, called the attack
on the Liberty "a tragic and terrible accident, a case of mistaken
identity, for which Israel has officially apologized." Israel also
paid reparations of $6.7 million to the injured survivors and the
families of those killed in the attack, and another $6 million for
the
loss of the Liberty itself.
But for those who lost their sons and husbands, neither the Israelis'
apology nor the passing of time has lessened their grief.
One is Pat Blue, who still remembers having her lunch in Wa****ngton's
Farragut Square park on "a beautiful June afternoon" when she was a
22-
year-old secretary for a law firm.
Blue heard somebody's ****table radio saying a U.S. Navy ****p had been
torpedoed in the eastern Mediterranean. A few weeks before, Blue's
husband of two years, an Arab-language expert with the NSA, had been
hurriedly dispatched overseas.
As she listened to the news re****t, "it just all came together." Soon
afterward, the NSA confirmed that Allen Blue was among the missing.
"I never felt young again," she said.
Aircraft on the horizon
Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared
on the horizon and circled the Liberty.
The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first
day
of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground.
America
was Israel's ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there.
The
****p's mission was to monitor the communications of Israel's Arab
enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications.
The
Liberty felt safe.
Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men
stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore
Arfsten,
a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw
the blue Star of David on the planes' fuselages. At first, crew
members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their
****p.
Thirty-four died that day, including Blue, the only civilian
casualty.
An additional 171 were wounded in the air and sea assault by Israel,
which was about to celebrate an overwhelming victory over the
combined
armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and several other Arab states.
For most of those who survived the attack, the Six-Day War has become
the defining moment of their lives.
Some mustered out of the Navy as soon as their enlistments were up.
Others stayed in long enough to retire. Several went on to successful
business careers. One became a Secret Service agent, another a
Baltimore policeman.
Several are being treated with therapy and drugs for what has since
been recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. One has undergone
more than 30 major operations. Another suffers seizures caused by a
piece of shrapnel still lodged in his brain.
After Bryce Lockwood left the Marines, he worked construction, then
tried selling insurance. "I'd get a job and get fired," he said. "I
had a hell of a time getting my feet on the ground."
With his linguistic background, Lockwood could have had a career with
the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI. But he was too angry at the U.S.
government to work for it. "Don't talk to me about government!" he
shouts.
U.S. Navy jets were called back
An Israeli military court of inquiry later acknowledged that their
naval headquarters knew at least three hours before the attack that
the odd-looking ****p 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula, sprouting more
than 40 antennas capable of receiving every kind of radio
transmission, was "an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ****p of the
U.S. Navy," a floating electronic vacuum cleaner.
The Israeli inquiry later concluded that that information had simply
gotten lost, never passed along to the ground controllers who
directed
the air attack nor to the crews of the three Israeli torpedo boats
who
picked up where the air force left off, strafing the Liberty's decks
with their machine guns and launching a torpedo that blew a 39-foot
hole in its starboard side.
To a man, the survivors interviewed by the Tribune rejected Israel's
explanation.
Nor, the survivors said, did they understand why the American 6th
Fleet, which included the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga,
patrolling 400 miles west of the Liberty, launched and then recalled
at least two squadrons of Navy fighter-bombers that might have
arrived
in time to prevent the torpedo attack -- and save 26 American lives.
J.Q. "Tony" Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy
relay station in Morocco that handled communications between
Wa****ngton and the 6th Fleet, remembered listening as Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara, in Wa****ngton, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence
Geis, commander of the America's carrier battle group, to bring the
jets home.
When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed
help,
Hart said, McNamara retorted that "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not
going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors."
McNamara, who is now 91, told the Tribune he has "absolutely no
recollection of what I did that day," except that "I have a memory
that I didn't know at the time what was going on."
The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel's claim
that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But
internal White House do***ents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson
Presidential Library show that the Israelis' explanation of how the
mistake had occurred was not believed.
Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from
Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson's
intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a
National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was
"inconceivable" that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.
The attack "couldn't be anything else but deliberate," the NSA's
director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.
"I don't think you'll find many people at NSA who believe it was
accidental," Benson Buffham, a former deputy NSA director, said in an
interview.
"I just always assumed that the Israeli pilots knew what they were
doing," said Harold Saunders, then a member of the National Security
Council staff and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern
and South Asian affairs.
"So for me, the question really is who issued the order to do that
and
why? That's the really interesting thing."
The answer, if there is one, will probably never be known. Gen. Moshe
Dayan, then the country's minister of defense; Levi Eshkol, the
Israeli prime minister; and Golda Meir, his successor, are all dead.
Many of those who believe the Liberty was purposely attacked have
suggested that the Israelis feared the ****p might intercept
communications revealing its plans to widen the war, which the U.S.
opposed. But no one has ever produced any solid evidence to sup****t
that theory, and the Israelis dismiss it. The NSA's deputy director,
Louis Tordella, speculated in a recently declassified memo that the
attack "might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai
Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the LIBERTY was monitoring his
activities."
Was the U.S. flag visible?
Though the attack on the Liberty has faded from public memory,
Michael
Oren, a historian and senior fellow at The Shalem Center in
Jerusalem,
conceded that "the case of the assault on the Liberty has never been
closed."
If anything, Oren said, "the accusations leveled against Israel have
grown sharper with time." Oren said in an interview that he believed
a
formal investigation by the U.S., even 40 years later, would be
useful
if only because it would finally establish Israel's innocence.
Questions about what happened to the Liberty have been kept alive by
survivors' groups and their Web sites, a half-dozen books, magazine
articles and television do***entaries, scholarly papers published in
academic journals, and Internet chat groups where amateur sleuths
debate arcane points of photo interpretation and torpedo running
depth.
Meantime, the Liberty's survivors and their sup****ters, including a
distinguished constellation of retired admirals and generals, have
persisted in asking Congress for a full-scale formal investigation.
"We deserve to have the truth," Pat Blue said.
For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be
reduced to a single question: Was the ****p flying the American flag
at
the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?
The survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the
Liberty was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the
attack, except for a brief period in which one flag that had been
shot
down was replaced with another, larger flag -- the ****p's "holiday
colors" -- that measured 13 feet long.
Concludes one of the declassified NSA do***ents: "Every official
interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that
indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag -- and, further, the
weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and
identification."
The Israeli court of inquiry that examined the attack, and absolved
the Israeli military of criminal culpability, came to precisely the
opposite conclusion.
"Throughout the contact," it declared, "no American or any other flag
appeared on the ****p."
The attack, the court said, had been prompted by a re****t, which
later
proved erroneous, that a ****p was shelling Israeli-held positions in
the Sinai Peninsula. The Liberty had no guns capable of shelling the
shore, but the court concluded that the U.S. ****p had been mistakenly
identified as the source of the shelling.
Yiftah Spector, the first Israeli pilot to attack the ****p, told the
Jerusalem Post in 2003 that when he first spotted the Liberty, "I
circled it twice and it did not fire on me. My assumption was that it
was likely to open fire at me and nevertheless I slowed down and I
looked and there was positively no flag."
But the Liberty crewmen interviewed by the Tribune said the Israeli
jets simply appeared and began shooting. They also said the Liberty
did not open fire on the planes because it was armed only with four .
50-caliber machine guns intended to repel boarders.
"I can't identify it, but in any case it's a military ****p," Spector
radioed his ground controller, according to a transcript of the
Israeli air-to-ground communications published by the Jerusalem Post
in 2004.
That transcript, made by a Post re****ter who was allowed to listen to
what the Israeli Air Force said were tapes of the attacking pilots'
communications, contained only two references to "American" or
"Americans," one at the beginning and the other at the end of the
attack.
The first reference occurred at 1:54 p.m. local time, two minutes
before the Israeli jets began their first strafing run.
In the Post transcript, a weapons system officer on the ground
suddenly blurted out, "What is this? Americans?"
"Where are Americans?" replied one of the air controllers.
The question went unanswered, and it was not asked again.
Twenty minutes later, after the Liberty had been hit repeatedly by
machine guns, 30 mm cannon and napalm from the Israelis' French-built
Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers, the controller directing the
attack asked his chief in Tel Aviv to which country the target vessel
belonged.
"Apparently American," the chief controller replied.
Fourteen minutes later the Liberty was struck amid****ps by a torpedo
from an Israeli boat, killing 26 of the 100 or so NSA technicians and
specialists in Russian and Arabic who were working in restricted
compartments below the ****p's waterline.
Analyst: Israelis wanted it sunk
The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance
to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the
sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve
Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air
Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic
planning office in the Air Force.
"The ground control station stated that the target was American and
for the aircraft to confirm it," Forslund recalled. "The aircraft did
confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.
"The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink
the target and ensure they left no survivors."
Forslund said he clearly recalled "the obvious frustration of the
controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target
quickly
and completely."
"He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was
frustrated with the pilots' responses that it didn't sink."
Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read
the transcripts. "Everybody saw these," said Forslund, now retired
after 26 years in the military.
Forslund's recollections are sup****ted by those of two other Air
Force
intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who
say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots'
communications.
One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then
serving with the Air Force Security Service's 6924th Security
Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.
"It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly
at USS Liberty," Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. "Later, around the
time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic
and urged the aircraft to 'complete the job' and get out of there."
Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete,
Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of
more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern
communications.
The transcripts Block remembered seeing "were teletypes, way beyond
Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack," Block said.
"The pilots said, 'This is an American ****p. Do you still want us to
attack?'
"And ground control came back and said, 'Yes, follow orders.'"
Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post
transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.
"There is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as
what
I saw," Gotcher said. "More to the point, for anyone familiar with
air-
to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn't the way
pilots and controllers communicate."
Block, now a child protection caseworker in Florida, observed that
"the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly identified the ****p as
American and asked for further instructions from ground control
appears to be a missing part of that Jerusalem Post article."
Arieh O'Sullivan, the Post re****ter who made the newspaper's
transcript, said the Israeli Air Force tapes he listened to contained
blank spaces. He said he assumed those blank spaces occurred while
Israeli pilots were conducting their strafing runs and had nothing to
communicate.
'But sir, it's an American ****p!'
Forslund, Gotcher and Block are not alone in claiming to have read
transcripts of the attack that they said left no doubt the Israelis
knew they were attempting to sink a U.S. Navy ****p.
Many ears were tuned to the battles being fought in and around the
Sinai during the Six-Day War, including those belonging to other Arab
nations with a keen interest in the outcome.
"I had a Libyan naval captain who was listening in that day," said a
retired CIA officer, who spoke on condition that he not be named
discussing a clandestine informant.
"He thought history would change its course," the CIA officer
recalled. "Israel attacking the U.S. He was certain, listening in to
the Israeli and American comms [communications], that it was
deliberate."
The late Dwight ****ter, the American ambassador to Lebanon during the
Six-Day War, told friends and family members that he had been shown
English-language transcripts of Israeli pilots talking to their
controllers.
A close friend, William Chandler, the former head of the Trans-
Arabian
Pipe Line Co., said ****ter recalled one of the pilots protesting,
"But
sir, it's an American ****p -- I can see the flag!' To which the
ground
control responded, 'Never mind; hit it!'"
****ter, who asked that his recollections not be made public while he
was alive because they involved classified information, also
discussed
the transcripts during a lunch in 2000 at the Cosmos Club in
Wa****ngton with another retired American diplomat, Andrew Kilgore,
the
former U.S. ambassador to Qatar.
Kilgore recalled ****ter saying that he "saw the telex, read it, and
passed it right back" to the embassy official who had shown it to
him.
He quoted ****ter as recalling that the transcript showed "Israel was
attacking, and they know it's an American ****p."
Haviland Smith, a young CIA officer stationed in Beirut during the
Six-
Day War, said that although he never saw the transcript, he had
"heard
on a number of occasions exactly the story that you just told me
about
what that transcript contained."
He had later been told, Smith recalled, "that ultimately all of the
transcripts were deep-sixed. I was told that they were deep-sixed
because the administration did not wish to embarrass the Israelis."
Perhaps the most persuasive suggestion that such transcripts existed
comes from the Israelis themselves, in a pair of diplomatic cables
sent by the Israeli ambassador in Wa****ngton, Avraham Harman, to
Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv.
Five days after the Liberty attack, Harman cabled Eban that a source
the Israelis code-named "Hamlet" was re****ting that the Americans had
"clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the
identity of the ****p and continued the attack anyway."
Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising Eban, who is
now dead, that the White House was "very angry," and that "the reason
for this is that the Americans probably have findings showing that
our
pilots indeed knew that the ****p was American."
According to a memoir by then-CIA director Richard Helms, President
Johnson's personal anger was manifest when he discovered the story of
the Liberty attack on an inside page of the next day's New York
Times.
Johnson barked that "it should have been on the front page!"
Israeli historian Tom Segev, who mentioned the cables in his recent
book "1967," said other cables showed that Harman's source for the
second cable was Arthur Goldberg, then U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations.
The cables, which have been declassified by the Israelis, were
obtained from the Israeli State Archive and translated from Hebrew by
the Tribune.
Oliver Kirby, the NSA's deputy director for operations at the time of
the Liberty attack, confirmed the existence of NSA transcripts.
Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts, Kirby replied,
"I sure did. I certainly did."
"They said, 'We've got him in the zero,'" Kirby recalled, "whatever
that meant -- I guess the sights or something. And then one of them
said, 'Can you see the flag?' They said 'Yes, it's U.S, it's U.S.'
They said it several times, so there wasn't any doubt in anybody's
mind that they knew it."
Kirby, now 86 and retired in Texas, said the transcripts were
"something that's bothered me all my life. I'm willing to swear on a
stack of Bibles that we knew they knew."
One set of transcripts apparently survived in the archives of the
U.S.
Army's intelligence school, then located at Ft. Holabird in Maryland.
W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel who spent eight years as
chief
of Middle East intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said
the transcripts were used as "course material" in an advanced class
for intelligence officers on the clandestine interception of voice
transmissions.
"The flight leader spoke to his base to re****t that he had the ****p
in
view, that it was the same ****p that he had been briefed on and that
it was clearly marked with the U.S. flag," Lang recalled in an e-
mail.
"The flight commander was reluctant," Lang said in a subsequent
interview. "That was very clear. He didn't want to do this. He asked
them a couple of times, 'Do you really want me to do this?' I've
remembered it ever since. It was very striking. I've been harboring
this memory for all these years."
Key NSA tapes said missing
Asked whether the NSA had in fact intercepted the communications of
the Israeli pilots who were attacking the Liberty, Kirby, the retired
senior NSA official, replied, "We sure did."
On its Web site, the NSA has posted three recordings of Israeli
communications made on June 8, 1967. But none of the recordings is of
the attack itself.
Indeed, the declassified do***ents state that no recordings of the
"actual attack" exist, raising questions about the source of the
transcripts recalled by Forslund, Gotcher, Block, ****ter, Lang and
Kirby.
The three recordings reflect what the NSA describes as "the
aftermath"
of the attack -- Israeli communications with two Israeli helicopters
dispatched to rescue any survivors who may have jumped into the
water.
Two of the recordings were made by Michael Prosti****, a Hebrew
linguist aboard a U.S. Navy EC-121, a lumbering propeller-driven
aircraft specially equipped to gather electronic intelligence.
But Prosti**** said he was certain that more than three recordings
were
made that day.
"I can tell you there were more tapes than just the three on the
Internet," he said. "No doubt in my mind, more than three tapes."
At least one of the missing tapes, Prosti**** said, captured Israeli
communications "in which people were not just tranquil or taking care
of business as normal. We knew that something was being attacked,"
Prosti**** said. "Everyone we were listening to was excited. You know,
it was an actual attack. And during the attack was when mention of
the
American flag was made."
Prosti**** acknowledged that his Hebrew was not good enough to
understand every word being said, but that after the mention of the
American flag "the attack did continue. We copied [recorded] it until
we got completely out of range. We got a great deal of it."
Charles Tiffany, the plane's navigator, remembers hearing Prosti****
on
the plane's intercom system, shouting, "I got something crazy on
UHF,"
the radio frequency band used by the Israeli Air Force.
"I'll never forget it to this day," said Tiffany, now a retired
Florida lawyer. He also remembers hearing the plane's pilot ordering
the NSA linguists to "start taping everything."
Prosti**** said he and the others aboard the plane had been unaware of
the Liberty's presence 15,000 feet below, but had concluded that the
Israelis' target must be an American ****p. "We knew that something
was
being attacked," Prosti**** said.
After listening to the three recordings released by the NSA,
Prosti****
said it was clear from the sequence in which they were numbered that
at least two tapes that had once existed were not there.
One tape, designated A1104/A-02, begins at 2:29 p.m. local time, just
after the Liberty was hit by the torpedo. Prosti**** said there was a
preceding tape, A1104/A-01.
That tape likely would have recorded much of the attack, which began
with the air assault at 1:56 p.m. Prosti**** said a second tape, which
preceded one beginning at 3:07 p.m., made by another linguist aboard
the same plane, also appeared to be missing.
As soon as the EC-121 landed at its base in Athens, Prosti**** said,
all the tapes were rushed to an NSA facility at the Athens air****t
where Hebrew translators were standing by.
"We told them what we had, and they immediately took the tapes and
went to work," recalled Prosti****, who after leaving the Navy became
chief of police and then town administrator for the village of Lake
Waccamaw, N.C.
Another linguist aboard the EC-121, who spoke on condition that he
not
be named, said he believed there had been as many as "five or six"
tapes recording the attack on the Liberty or its aftermath.
Andrea Martino, the NSA's senior media adviser, did not respond to a
question about the apparent conflict between the agency's assertion
that there were no recordings of the Israeli attack and the
recollections of those interviewed for this article.
U.S. inquiry widely criticized
Rather than investigating how and why a U.S. Navy vessel had been
attacked by an ally, the Navy seemed interested in asking as few
questions as possible and answering them in record time.
Even while the Liberty was still limping toward a dry dock in Malta,
the Navy convened a formal Court of Inquiry. Adm. John McCain Jr.,
the
commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe and father of Sen. John
McCain (R-Ariz.), chose Adm. Isaac Kidd Jr. to preside.
The court's charge was narrow: to determine whether any shortcomings
on the part of the Liberty's crew had contributed to the injuries and
deaths that resulted from the attack. McCain gave Kidd's
investigators
a week to complete the job.
"That was a shock," recalled retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, the
inquiry's counsel, who said he and Kidd had estimated that a thorough
inquiry would take six months.
"Everyone was kind of stunned that it was handled so quickly and
without much hullabaloo," said G. Patrick March, then a member of
McCain's staff in London.
Largely because of time constraints, Boston said, the investigators
were unable to question many of the survivors, or to visit Israel and
interview any Israelis involved in the attack.
Rear Adm. Merlin Staring, the Navy's former judge advocate general,
was asked to *****s the American inquiry's re****t before it was sent
to Wa****ngton. But Staring said it was taken from him when he began
to
question some aspects of the re****t. He describes it now as "a hasty,
superficial, incomplete and totally inadequate inquiry."
Staring, who is among those calling for a full congressional
investigation on behalf of the Liberty's survivors, observed in an
interview that the inquiry re****t contained several "findings of
fact"
unsup****ted by testimony or evidence.
One such finding ignored the testimony of several inquiry witnesses
that the American flag was flying during the attack, and held that
the
"available evidence combines to indicate the attack on LIBERTY on 8
June was in fact a case of mistaken identity."
There are also apparent omissions in the inquiry's re****t. It does
not
include, for example, the testimony of a young lieutenant, Lloyd
Painter, who was serving as officer of the deck when the attack
began.
Painter said he testified that an Israeli torpedo boat "methodically
machine-gunned one of our life rafts" that had been put over the side
by crewmen preparing to abandon ****p.
Painter, who spent 32 years as a Secret Service agent after leaving
the Navy, charged that his testimony about the life rafts was
purposely omitted.
Ward Boston recalled that, after McCain's one-week deadline expired,
Kidd took the record compiled by the inquiry "and flew back to
Wa****ngton, and I went back to Naples," the headquarters of the 6th
Fleet.
"Two weeks later, he comes back to Naples and calls me from his
office," Boston recalled in an interview. "In that deep voice, he
said, 'Ward, they aren't interested in the facts. It's a political
issue and we have to put a lid on it. We've been ordered to shut up.'
"It's time for the truth to come out," declared Boston, who is now
84.
"There have been so many cover-ups."
"Someday the truth of this will come out," said Dennis Eikleberry, a
NSA technician aboard the Liberty. "Someday it will, but we'll all be
gone."
James Ennes, now 74, who was officer of the deck just before the
attack began, and later spent two months in a body cast, is one of
the
more vocal survivors. Like the others, Ennes is tired of waiting.
"We want both sides to stop lying," he said.
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jcrewd...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(c) 2007, Chicago Tribune
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