It is human nature to believe that whoever harms you, does so deliberately.
Especially when they are shooting at you from a distance of 50 feet, despite the 6-foot high identifying marks on your ship.
I usually put little reliance on "but he must have seen me!" testimony coming off a battlefield. There is little must have been seen in the fog of war, particularly if it was not what one party was expecting to see.
Don’t be ridiculous. The Liberty survivors reported almost continuous surveillance by Israeli maritime patrol aircraft for hours before the attack. They say the aircraft flew as close as 200 feet, and that the pilots were clearly visible. These accounts are not coming from Popeye and Bluto, they are coming from the officers and crew of what was at the time the most sophisticated surveillance vessel in the US Navy. I don’t think they would crew such a ship with a bunch of ignorant guttersnipes. Are you trying to suggest that the entire surviving crew of the ship lied about this surveillance, or that they hallucinated it in some sort of retroactive collective PTSD episode?
We aren’t talking about a street gunbattle sparked by an unexpected accidental encounter, but about a coordinated assault on a lone vessel on a clear day after close and extended observation.
The commander of the Liberty reports that the Israeli aircraft that carried out the attack were unmarked, an observation that appears in many of the survivor’s accounts. That means somebody took the time and trouble to remove the identifying markings. Why do you suppose they did that? Will you say that Capt. MacGonagle, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions that day (the award was made at a shipyard, instead of the White House, without press coverage), simply failed to notice the markings on the aircraft that were attacking his ship? One does suppose he would have looked.
I’m not the only one who doesn’t buy the official story on this one. Dean Rusk, who was Secretary of State at the time and was certainly in a position to review all available data, had this to say:
“I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous."
Lt. Cmdr. David Edwin Lewis, another survivor:
"The Israelis obviously had sufficient time to plan their armament load. There were apparently heat-seeking missiles used to take out the tuning coil of every antenna, there were fragmentation bombs used to take out the parabolic dish fore and aft. On the first strafing run virtually all communications and all means of survival were destroyed. If it was an accident, it was the best prepared accident on Earth."
I’m inclined to take Lt. Cmdr. Lewis at his word. I expect that he knows a good deal more about munitions than you or I.
There simply was no motive for this attack that passes the laugh test.
So if somebody shoots you full of holes and you can't figure out why, it must have been an accident?
Since the Liberty’s sole function was to listen to signals, there is the possibility that there were signals going around that somebody didn’t want heard. The unmarked aircraft suggest the possibility that if the attack had succeeded, it would probably have been blamed on someone else. We don’t know. The only people who do know are the ones who ordered the attack, and they aren’t likely to tell us. What we do know is that the detailed, voluminous, and consistent testimony of the survivors is totally incompatible with the officially reported story.
How about the torrent of anti-Americanism pouring out of our good buddies Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for which we paid dearly on 9/11? Can you say, "who else would get away with that?"
Anybody can get away with it. We don’t go to war with people because they say nasty things about us. It seems a bit silly to me to keep sending aid to Egypt, given the circumstances, but I really don’t know much about Egypt, and there might conceivably be some obscure logic to it.
None of this suggests that any significant double standard is being applied to Israel, except in Israel’s favor. |
