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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (20769)	3/6/2002 7:36:57 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

Since we are doing "Israeli Conspricies" here, I thought this book Review of "Spy Watch, behind the closed doors of the NSA" would be interesting. the whole article is at: reason.com Here is an excerpt about the sinking or our destroyer. Whatever its faults, the NSA has suffered a fair share of casualties in its relatively short history. The most costly episode, which Bamford describes in detail, was the Israeli attack against the NSA spy ship, USS Liberty, off the Sinai Peninsula during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The Liberty incident led to the death of 35 crew members, but was long ago swept under the rug of U.S.-Israeli relations. Bamford tears down the official explanation, that it was all an accident. He writes that NSA officials with access to secret intercepts from the episode "were virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was deliberate." Liberty crew members noted that during the attack, the Israelis first went after the ship?s communications apparatus, which required knowledge of its makeup. According to intercepted radio traffic, the Israelis positively identified the Liberty and the markings painted on the ship?s side. In contrast, the attacking airplanes were unmarked, undermining the Israeli claim that their pilots confused the Liberty with an Egyptian vessel, one that they, incidentally, knew to be much slower than the moving U.S. ship. Bamford?s hypothesis is that the Liberty recorded radio communications between Israeli units discussing the extensive execution of Egyptian prisoners-of-war. He believes the Israelis sought to destroy the ship to cover up their war crimes. Some have questioned Bamford?s allegation. For example, New York Times reviewer James Finder disingenuously wrote that the Egyptian POW theory was based on slender evidence, and mentioned a single Israeli journalist as Bamford?s source. In fact Bamford cites three sources, all Israelis. One of them was a participant in the attack and another was an eyewitness. The third, an Israeli military historian, concluded (on the basis of interviews with dozens of soldiers who themselves had killed prisoners) that as many as 1,000 Egyptians were shot. Bamford?s argument is surely plausible, as anyone who has surveyed a half-century of Israel?s wartime behavior will admit. The only part of Bamford?s theory that is dubious -- and here Finder?s protest is in order -- is that it would have been foolish for Israel to cover up one massacre by another. Yet where Finder sees this as evidence of Israeli blamelessness, readers will conclude that an explanation for the undeniably deliberate assault must lie elsewhere.