No one is guilty in Israel

WE WILL NEVER HAVE PEACE IN THE WORLD UNTIL THE BRUTAL REGIME IN ISREAL IS STOPPED.

for 50 years they have unleased their terror. The next time you hear the 'middl.e east peace process' on the news, you should just laugh. It is obvious to all who is behind the wars

 

So Who’s Afraid of the Israel Lobby?

By Ray McGovern

10/06/07 "ICH" -- -- Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat—Conservative, Liberal. The fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and palpable. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated that time and again—and not only on Capitol Hill.

Seldom has the Lobby’s power been as clearly demonstrated as in its ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967, during the Six Day War:

o Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did its best to sink it and leave no survivors;

o The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the attack upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to the scene; and

o By that time 34 of the Liberty’s crew had been killed and over 170 wounded.

Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known this for years. That virtually all of them have kept a forty-year frightened silence is testament to the widespread fear of touching this live wire. Even more telling is the fact that the National Security Agency apparently has destroyed voice tapes and transcripts heard and seen by many intelligence analysts, material that shows beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.

The Ugly Truth

But the truth will out—eventually. All it took in this case was for a courageous journalist (of the endangered species kind) to listen to the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not shrinking from naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S. officials, from the president on down, off the hook for suppressing—even destroying—damning evidence from intercepted Israeli communications.

The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely on interviews with those most intimately involved. A lengthy article by Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter John Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Oct. 2 titled “New revelations in attack on American spy ship.” (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/world/chi-liberty_tuesoct02,0,6015776.story) To the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year: “Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn’t tell full story of deadly 1967 incident.”

Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have known of the incident and cover-up for a very long time and have tried to expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for today. It has proved far easier, though, to get a very pedestrian Dog-Bites-Man article published than an article with the importance and explosiveness of this sensitive story.

A Marine Stands Up

On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield, Missouri. A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard titled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” The study had originally been commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly. When the draft arrived, however, shouts of “Leper!” were heard at the Atlantic. The monthly wasted no time in saying thanks-but-no-thanks, and the leper-study then wandered in search of a home, finding none among American publishers. Eventually the London Review of Books published it in March 2006.

I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of courage as well as scholarship. That’s what I told the questioner, adding that I did have two problems with the study:

o First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing virtually all the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the Israel Lobby and the so-called “neo-conservatives” running our policy and armed forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed. But of equal importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what the Pentagon now calls the “enduring” military bases in Iraq, which the White House and Pentagon decided were needed for the U.S. to dominate that part of the Middle East.

o Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt made no mention of what I believe to be, if not the most telling, then perhaps the most sensational proof of the power the Lobby knows it can exert over our government and Congress. In sum, in June 1967, after deliberately using fighter-bombers and torpedo boats to attack the USS Liberty for over two hours in an attempt to sink it and kill its entire crew, and then getting the U.S. government, the Navy, and the Congress to cover up what happened, the Israeli government learned that it could—literally—get away with murder.

I found myself looking out at 400 blank stares. The USS Liberty? And so I asked how many in the audience had heard of the attack on the Liberty on June 8, 1967. Three hands went up; I called on the gentleman nearest me.

Ramrod straight he stood:

“Sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired. I am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir.”

Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell us what happened.

“Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has been almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening, Sir.”

You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood gave us his personal account of what happened to him, his colleagues, and his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967. He was a linguist assigned to collect communications intelligence from the USS Liberty, which was among the ugliest—and most easily identifiable—ships in the fleet with antennae springing out in all directions.

Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with the six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the Israeli navy and air force on the morning of June 8. After the air attacks including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three sixty-ton torpedo boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing their torpedo tubes at the Liberty’s starboard hull. Lockwood had been ordered to throw the extremely sensitive cryptological equipment overboard and had just walked beyond the bulwark separating the NSA intelligence unit from the rest of the ship when, he recalled, he sensed a large black object, a tremendous explosion, and sheet of flame. The torpedo had struck dead center in the NSA space.

The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness. Around him were 25 dead colleagues; but he heard moaning. Three were still alive; one of Lockwood’s shipmates dragged one survivor up the hatch. Lockwood was able to lift the two others, one-by-one, onto his shoulder and carry them up through the hatch. This meant alternatively banging on the hatch for someone to open it and swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the water lest he float out to sea through the 39-foot hole made by the torpedo.

At that Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very hard—even after almost 40 years.

What Else We Know

John Crewdson’s meticulously documented article, together with the 57 pages that James Bamford devotes to the incident in his book “Body of Secrets” and recent confessions by those who played a role in the cover-up, paint a picture that the surviving crew of the USS Liberty can only find infuriating. The evidence, from intercepted communications as well as testimony, of Israeli deliberate intent is unimpeachable, even though the Israelis continue to portray the incident as merely a terrible mistake.

Crewdson refers to U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who was the Navy lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, named by Admiral John S. McCain (Sen. John McCain’s father) to “inquire into all the facts and circumstances.” The fact that they were given only one week to gather evidence and were forbidden to contact the Israelis screams out “cover-up.”

 

Captain Boston, now 84, signed a formal declaration on Jan. 8, 2004 in which he described himself as “outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity.’” Boston continued:

“The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew...Not only did the Israelis attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had been launched in an attempt by the crew to save the most seriously wounded—a war crime...I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

Why the Israelis decided to take the draconian measure of sinking a ship of the U.S. Navy is open to speculation. One view is that the Israelis did not want the U.S. to find out they were massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, and wanted to deprive the U.S. of the opportunity to argue against such a move. Another theory: James Bamford, in “Body of Secrets,” adduces evidence, including reporting from an Israeli journalist eyewitness and an Israeli military historian, of wholesale killing of Egyptian prisoners of war at the coastal town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was patrolling directly opposite El Arish in international waters but within easy range to pick up intelligence on what was going on there. And the Israelis were well aware.

As for the why, well, someone could at least approach the Israelis involved and ask, no? The important thing here is not to confuse what is known (the deliberate nature of the Israeli attack) with the purpose behind it, which remains a matter of speculation.

Other Indignities

Bowing to intense pressure from the Navy, the White House agreed to award the Liberty’s skipper, Captain William McGonagle, the Medal of Honor....but not at the White House, and not by the president (as is the custom). Rather, the Secretary of the Navy gave the award at the Washington Navy Yard on the banks of the acrid Anacostia River. A naval officer involved in the awards ceremony told one of the Liberty crew, “The government is pretty jumpy about Israel...the State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal.”

Adding insult to injury, those of the Liberty crew who survived well enough to call for an independent investigation have been hit with charges of, you guessed it, anti-Semitism.

Now that some of the truth is emerging more and more, others are showing more courage in speaking out. In a recent email, an associate of mine who has followed Middle East affairs for almost 60 years, shared the following:

“The chief of the intelligence analysts studying the Arab/Israeli region at the time told me about the intercepted messages and said very flatly and firmly that the pilots reported seeing the American flag and repeated their requests for confirmation of the attack order. Whole platoons of Americans saw those intercepts. If NSA now says they do not exist, then someone ordered them destroyed.”

Leaving the destruction of evidence without investigation is an open invitation to repetition in the future.

As for the larger picture, visiting Israel this past summer I was constantly told that Egypt forced Israel into war in June 1967. This does not square with the unguarded words of Menachem Begin in 1982, when he was Israel’s prime minister. Rather he admitted publicly:

“In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

Israel had, in fact, prepared well militarily and mounted provocations against its neighbors, in order to provoke a response that could be used to justify an expansion of its borders. Israel’s illegal 40-year control over and confiscation of land in the occupied territories and U.S. enabling support (particularly the one-sided support by the current U.S. administration) go a long way toward explaining why it is that 1.3 billion Muslims “hate us.”


Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is now on the Steering Committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He spent some time in Israel and the West Bank this summer.

 

Im so glad i read this thread.

It reinforce's my veiw, that the entire middle east is a basket case, and anyone residing there is a brainwashed psychopath, and the entire joint should be turned into a sea of glass, before its too late.

well if that doesnt stir things up, nothing will, israel has no overwhelming right to exist, by any assesment, nor do muslims, one fake god after another, one bullshit prophet after another-all equally correct, and all pure BULLSHIT

 

In 1986, a professor suggested to A. Jay Cristol that his U.S. Navy, international law and judicial backgrounds uniquely qualified him to examine the facts of the case. He then began an investigation that spanned 14 years.

A retired U.S. Navy Captain A. Jay Cristol, accessed every living and written source he could locate, including more than 500 witnesses he interviewed in four nations. He reviewed five television productions, more than 100 books, hundreds of articles, and more than 3,087 documents--including all those from at least ten official U.S. investigations and three official Israeli ones.

Throughout, Cristol focused on the one (right) question--whether the attacking Israelis knew that their target was an U.S. ship. In 1986, Cristol did not know the answer. Nor did he, like many discredited conspiracy theorists, assume that Israel maliciously premeditated the attack against a vessel they knew to be American.

Every official investigation had concluded that while intentional, the attack was also clearly a case of mistaken identity. After conducting the most extensive research ever on this topic--Cristol agreed. Several Israeli and American mistakes caused Israeli forces to mistake the USS Liberty for an Egyptian vessel.

Cristol spells out precisely how and why the Liberty was mistaken. The attack was not pre-planned or covered up. None of the seamen aboard the USS Liberty could have known all the facts surrounding the case.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...r/105-2204493-3585231?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance


"Only those with an ulterior motive can still cling to the conspiracy theories after Judge Jay Cristol's excellent coverage documents each detail that led to the tragic mistaken attack."
- ADM. LEON A. (BUD) EDNEY, USN (Ret.);
former NATO supreme allied commander, Atlantic;
and commander-in-chief, U.S. Atlantic command

"This is a story of mistakes in war as old as history and as current as today's headlines. Jay Cristol is well qualified to write this exhaustive history after analyzing, collecting, and cross-checking decades of interviews and reams of written material."
- ADM. DAVID E. JEREMIAH, USN (Ret.),
former vice chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

"A. Jay Cristol, with his background as a chief federal judge, lawyer, naval officer, and carrier pilot, has brought unprecedented credentials to his investigation--and account of--The Liberty Incident."
- NORMAN POLMAR,
naval analyst and author of
The Naval Institute Guide to the Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet

"Judge Jay Cristol has completed exhaustive research, an accurate reconstruction of events, and persuasively reasoned analysis of the tragic circumstances which led to the Israeli attack on the Liberty.... A great book, I couldn't put it down!"
- ADM. JERRY JOHNSON, USN (Ret.),
former vice chief of naval operations

"The name I want you to remember is Jay Cristol.... He knows more about the Liberty than anybody else in the world.... He's got the most balanced view of anybody I've ever known."
- The late DONALD ENGEN,
former director, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

"The book convincingly sets the record straight."
- CDR. DOUG SIEGFRIED, USN (Ret.),
Journal of Carrier Aviation, "The Hook", Fall 2002

"His book clears up the multiplying confusion."
- PETER STANFORD,
National Maritime Historical Society, "Sea History", Winter 2002-03

"It is by far, the most thorough, even handed and accurate account."
- CAPT. ERNEST E. CASTLE, USN (Ret.),
United States Naval Academy Alumni Association, "Shipmate", Nov 2002

"The most comprehensive account likely to be written."
- NORMAN POLMAR,
Navy League of the United States, "SeaPower" Almanac, Jan 2003

"...provides a painstaking, comprehensive and what I believe to be definitive view of what happened. This reviewer found The Liberty Incident to be comprehensive and convincing."
- RODERICK S. SPEER,
Military History, August 2003

"Jay Cristol...has done the U.S. government a service...." [An] "insightful book."

- JOHN DARRELL SHERWOOD,
Historian, U.S. Naval Historical Center
International Journal of Naval History, December 2003
http://www.libertyincident.com/book.html#comments

 

I am sorry to hear that you don't see the difference between terrorism and response to terrorism, between attempts to wipe a country off the map and that country's struggle to survive and defend its population, between unfortunate innocent arab victims of a war that their own countries had started and deliberate targeting of civilians, between a case of mistaken identity that took place 40 years ago and multiple cases of deliberate attacks on american troops and civilians that happened quite recently:

Beirut, Lebanon, Marine Barracks, 1983
the death toll - 241 American servicemen: 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and 3 Army soldiers.
Sixty Americans were injured.
In the attack on the French barracks, 58 paratroopers were killed and 15 injured,

 

-First of all the country did belong to them, a long time ago, about 2,000 years ago but the country was theirs. After that it belonged to the Romans, the Crusaders, the Turks, the Brits... but there never was an arab country there.

-a significant number of jews (30-35% of the population) lived there in 1948 when the country was partitioned. Claiming that the jews stole the land is like claiming that the Pakistanis stole the land from India or vice versa when that country was partitioned into India and Pakistan. You could of course say that many jews had just recently moved to that land and that's correct but that does not deny the fact that they were there legally and that they moved there in full compliance with the law of the land at that time. Moreover a lot of palestinian Arabs were also recent migrants as their number more than tripled between 1927 and 1947.

-the land was not stolen, it was partitioned by the UN. Don't you have any respect for important international bodies like the UN? Shame on you if you don't.

-the Palestinians never had their own country so it could not have been stolen. Individual land owners jews and arabs were not supposed to lose their land according to the plan, they were supposed to retain their private property. Of course when the arab world refused to honor the partition and 7 arab armies invaded Israel all bets were off.

-Despite all that, disagreeing with the partition and fighting for whatever they believe in is indeed OK. What's not OK is this constant non-stop whining by the Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and their blind or anti-semitic supporters every time arab aggressors get their ass handed to them by the IDF. They attack israeli civilians, they hide behind innocent women and children and then whine like little girls to the UN (which decision to create Israel they refuse to honor) about Israeli brutality. They can't defeat Israel militarily, if their and your idea of fighting is this never-ending whining about the Little Satan - they are pathetic, and so are you.

PS thanks for the opportunity to explain a few pretty popular (among ignorant people) misconceptions.

 

how come basically the entire planet views israel's occupation as unnecessarily violent, oppressive, most brutal and above all unjust...it's The ultimate moral judgment... as by definition moral values or morals, contrast to ethics that are personal values or criteria for own individual credo only, are standard of conduct or principles to which the majority have agreed upon.....eh, can we say that the world has spoken the truth?.

 

First of all I disagree with the premise, according to virtually all public opinion polls at least half of the Europeans (even in France) favor Israel in this conflict, the support of Israel is significantly stronger in the US, Canada and Australia. If by "the entire planet" you mean 1.5 billion muslims and hundreds of millions of poor ignorant Africans then you do have a point. Don't confuse the UN with public opinion though.




Second, could you define occupation, is it the West Bank and Gaza (prior to 2005) as Israel and the west define it or is it the entire Israel including Tel-Aviv and Haifa as the arab/muslim world sees it?

Other than that you're basically right, the constant whining I mentioned in my previous post does win the Palestinians a lot of sympathy and support. I did not say they were not good at PR, did I? They talk about the occupation meaning the entire Israel while gullible useful idiots think they are talking about the West Bank and want peace and a two state solution. Israel keeps their kids in bomb shelters, they keep their kids in front of Qassam rocket launchers. Of course the Israeli kids are safe and TV screens worldwide are plastered with images of dead palestinian children. Good PR for them, don't you think, fools a lot of people.

And of course it's all a matter of perspective, it's easy enough to be moralistic and self-righteous in London or Paris. If you or your loved ones lived in Sderot, Israel under daily barrage of rockets from Gaza and if you knew that these rocket attacks started the very day the occupation of Gaza ended, you would have a totally different prespective on the occupation, oppressiveness and brutality.

PS How many of these people that you are talking about remember that in 1967 Israel offered to withdraw from all of the land in captured during the war in exchange for peace and recognition, in full compliance with UN Resolution 242, the arab world's response was "No peace, no recogntion, no negotiation with Israel".

 

Moe my friend. You chose the wrong picture. dddooo is trying to assert a new lie! What is so different about these zionist criminals is that, every once in a while, a criminal will feel remorse. Not these ones. They are the masters of killing en- mass and then blaming the loved ones for the killing. This pattern is known to repeat itself over and over and over again! The pattern goes as such. They will commit a heinous crime, the whole world will go in uproar, they will weather the storm and few years later they will come back to revisit their crime only to seep in their lies which is by now so sophisticated due to the tens of years of experience.

This is another redline they do not mind to cross. This lying zionist is posting a report cooked by his criminal IDF which committed the crime in the first place.