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Call for uss liberty investigation { July 8 2003 } >Subject: Call for investigation of Liberty
>
> >From the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Magazine
>July/August 2003 Page 42
>----------------------------------------------------------
> NAVY CAPTAIN, OTHER OFFICIALS CALL FOR INVESTIGATION OF
> ISRAEL'S ATTACK ON USS LIBERTY
>
> By Delinda C. Hanley
>
> Nearly every former senior government and military official
>who has examined Israel's 1967 attack on the USS LIBERTY agrees
>it was deliberate. Now, thanks to the publication of Judge A.
>Jay Cristol's book, THE LIBERTY INCIDENT: THE 1967 ATTACK ON A
>U.S. NAVY SPY SHIP, they are going public. Cristol's book tour
>included a December 2002 presentation at the Naval Historical
>Center in Washington, DC, where he touted his version of the
>attack which, based primarily on Israeli sources, he says was
>unintentional. Ironically, it looks like what actually was un-
>intentional is that Cristol's efforts to quell the debate have
>had exactly the opposite effect.
> Reading reports of Cristol's whitewash of the devastating
>attack, which killed 34 American crewmen and wounded 172 others,
>was the last straw for Captain Ward Boston, senior legal counsel
>for the Navy's Court of Inquiry. Commander-in-Chief Naval Forces
>Europe, Boston and the late Rear Admiral Isaac "Ike" Kidd were
>given just one week by Admiral John McCain (father of Sen. John
>McCain) to investigate the attack and gather testimony from
>survivors still on board the crippled ship. Captain Boston asked
>each witness to tell his story for a court stenographer.
> "There is no question in my mind that those goddamned bastards
>tried to kill everyone on board," Boston told the WASHINGTON REPORT.
>"I was the counsel. I put witnesses on. I talked to kids never
>exposed to combat who'd seen their friend's head blown off. Kids
>who were crying as they told me what they'd gone through. Those
>boys who had their heads blown away were not out fighting [the
>Israelis]. They were sunbathing. They weren't even given a
>chance to get to their machine guns."
> Boston also watched the bodies of the dead carried out of
>the hold, and saw boys throw up as they retrieved body parts
>and mopped up after the shelling and torpedo attack. He recalled
>seeing the shot-up U.S. flags that had clearly marked the ship
>as an American vessel. Boston flatly dismisses the claims of
>Cristol and Israel that Israeli fighter pilots mistook the
>electronically advanced spy ship, complete with an 18-foot-wide
>satellite dish, a microwave dish, and antennae, for the EL
>QUSEIR, a 1920s-era Egyptian horse transport ship.
> The Navy captain heard survivors' testimonies that the
>Israelis even shot up the LIBERTY's lifeboats after they were
>lowered into the waters to save the crew. That testimony was
>excised from the official record at some point after it left
>Boston's hands. (The tattered rafts now are proudly displayed
>in an Israeli museum.) Boston recalls shaking hands with
>LIBERTY skipper Commander William McGonagle, who had a big hole
>in his leg. "He thanked me later for that handshake," Boston
>recalled, "because it made some shrapnel pop out of his hand."
>When Boston suggested going to Tel Aviv to have the Israelis
>tell their side of the story, he was told, "You can't do it.
>Come on home and present the evidence you have."
> Armed with a gun to protect the evidence, which he had
>attached to himself with handcuffs, Admiral Kidd, along with
>Captain Boston took the records to London. As the week allotted
>for gathering testimony came to an end, the team gathered 20
>people to type up the report, which ended up being three inches
>thick. After all the evidence painstakingly collected was turned
>over to the U.S. Embassy there, the report may have been
>altered. "I made lots of corrections which are no longer in the
>report," Captain Boston told the WASHINGTON REPORT. "There are
>even pages missing."
> A U.S. Embassy official in London told Kidd that he and his
>men must keep quiet. Ten days after the attack, the Navy's Court
>of Inquiry, despite all the evidence to the contrary, somehow
>exonerated Israel and ruled the attack was a case of mistaken
>identity. Following the Court proceedings in London, Admiral
>Kidd returned to Washington, DC and called Boston, with whom
>he was very close. "We have to be quiet," he said. "We can't
>talk to the media."
> "LBJ [President Lyndon B. Johnson] had ordered us to put
>the lid on it. Don't talk about it," Boston told the WASHING-
>TON REPORT. "And after 35 years of active duty, when I get an
>order, even from a yellow-bellied superior, I follow those
>orders. All this time I've kept quiet until this [explicative
>deleted, Cristol] book came out."
> After years of obeying those orders, Captain Boston broke
>his silence on June 26, 2002, when he told MARINE CORPS TIMES
>reporter Bryant Jordan the attack was deliberate (see "Israel
>Attack on USS Liberty 'No Accident' Says Helms" published in
>the Navy Times July 2, 2002).
> Boston said he just had to speak out after reading
>Cristol's claim that Kidd, in interviews conducted in the early
>1990s, had said Israel's attack was not intentional. The captain
>told the WASHINGTON REPORT that he finds it hard to believe
>Cristol's version of interviews with the now deceased Admiral
>Kidd, a man Boston greatly admired. "Admiral Kidd called me two
>hours after an interview with Cristol," Boston related, "and
>said, 'I think Cristol's an Israeli agent.'"
> According to Boston, both he and Admiral Kidd always be-
>lieved that, despite the Court's official conclusion, the
>Israelis knew the ship was American. "I have strong patriotic
>feelings," he explained. "I believe the CIA slogan, 'the truth
>will out,' and hate the Israeli Mossad's motto: 'Win By
>Deception.'"
>
> "Madder Than Hell"
>
>"Cristol now says I recanted my interview with the NAVY TIMES.
>That makes me madder than hell," Boston said. "I have not
>recanted one thing. If anything, now I'm going to speak out
>louder than before and tell people what Admiral Kidd told me.
>He and I were very close. He said, 'those sons of bitches
>knew what they were doing when they killed innocent sunbathing
>kids. They tried to sink that ship.'" Cristol may now be
>kicking himself for waxing so eloquently about Boston's quali-
>fications and skills, calling him a "man of integrity" on pg.
>149 of his book.
> LIBERTY survivor James Ennes, author the groundbreaking
>book ASSAULT ON THE LIBERTY, also had numerous conversations
>with Admiral Kidd over the years. Kidd never characterized the
>attack as an accident. In fact, Ennes says Kidd told him many
>times, "You are on the right track, Jim. Just keep on probing.
>Keep on doing what you're doing."
> When asked why he thought the U.S. government has covered
>up the attack for 36 years, Captain Boston replied: "Iraq,
>Vietnam, the LIBERTY -- it's the same old story. When people
>are in power they don't want to upset people who may help them
>get reelected. Maybe people didn't want the world to see that
>Israelis were slaughtering Egyptian prisoners of war. Maybe
>Johnson was afraid of upsetting potential voters."
> As a captain and staff legal officer in London, retired
>Admiral Merlin Staring reviewed the Court of Inquiry's report
>in 1967. Before he could finish, however, the report was taken
>away. Based on what he read however, Staring, who later became
>the top JAG officer, has said the evidence did not support the
>"accidental" attack contention.
>Last year Richard Helms, CIA director at the time of the attack,
>agreed that "it was no accident." Helms also told MARINE CORPS
>TIMES correspondent Jordan on May 29, 2002, "I've done all I can.
>I don't want to spend the rest of my life in court testifying
>about the incident."
> Helms' book, A LOOK OVER MY SHOULDER, written in collabo-
>ration with William Hood, describes the LIBERTY attack as "one
>of the most disturbing incidents in the six days [war]...Israeli
>authorities subsequently apologized for the accident, but few in
>Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified
>as an American naval vessel."
> Admiral Rufus Taylor, Helms' deputy, told his boss, "To me,
>the picture thus far presents the distinct possibility that the
>Israelis knew that LIBERTY might be their target and attacked
>anyway..."
> A fine article by David Walsh was released in the NAVAL
>INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS on June 3, 2003, (available on the USNI
>Web site at ). Walsh's well-documented
>article notes that even Clark Clifford, chairman of President
>Johnson's, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a great sup-
>porter of Israel, called Israeli claims that the attack was
>accidental "unbelievable." Clifford told the president, "Some-
>thing had gone terribly wrong and then it had been covered up.
>I never felt the Israelis had made adequate restitution or
>explanation for their...unprovoked actions."
> U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Walsh's article adds,
>had said there was "every reason to believe that the USS
>LIBERTY was identified, or at least her nationality deter-
>mined...one hour before the attack." Finally, Walsh notes,
>former NSA and CIA director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, based
>on his talks with NSA seniors at the time, "flatly rejected"
>the Cristol/Israel thesis.
> Former Chief of Naval Operations and Joint Chiefs of
>Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer has been on the record
>for some time as saying the attack on the LIBERTY was delib-
>erate. Among those agreeing with him are then-NSA Director
>Marshall Carter, Carter's deputy, Louis Tordella, NSA
>"LIBERTY Incident" analyst Walter Deeley, and Hayden Peake,
>professor of intelligence history at the Joint Military
>Intelligence College and a retired CIA officer.
> Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control,
>Communications and Intelligence John Stenbit told an audi-
>ence at a conference on "Transforming National Security and
>Protecting the Homeland," held April 15 to 17 in Vienna, VA,
>that the Israelis had warned the U.S. to move the USS
>LIBERTY or they would sink it. His comments appeared in the
>Israeli daily JERUSALEM POST and elicited a letter to the
>editor in the online section of the magazine. Both the
>letter and the article have mysteriously vanished from the
>Web site.
> In addition to the many Americans noted above, Israelis
>and even Russians are adding to the public record on the attack.
>Nikolay Cherkashin, who has spent years investigating the
>LIBERTY tragedy, quoted a recently published Russian trans-
>lation of Joseph Daichman's HISTORY OF THE MOSSAD, which states
>that it was perfectly clear to Israelis that the LIBERTY was an
>American ship and that the attack was committed to deprive the
>U.S. "of its eyes and ears."
> Daichman also argues that Israel had every right to attack
>the American ship. If the LIBERTY had reported that Israeli
>troops had moved from the Egyptian borders to the Syrian front,
>the Soviets, if they were eavesdropping on the U.S., could have
>warned the Arabs. Eliminating any eyes and ears, Israel was
>able to attack Syria and capture the Golan Heights.
> Daichman also speculates that Israel may have tried to sink
>the ship and blame Egypt, and thus provoke a lethal U.S.
>response. That theory is the theme of the documentary "DEAD IN
>THE WATER," nominated for Best Documentary at the Vancouver Film
>Festival, and the new OPERATION CYANIDE book by Peter Hounam.
> Despite overwhelming new testimony, however, Cristol's
>version of the attack on the LIBERTY is gaining notoriety.
>Michael Oren's SIX DAYS OF WAR won an award for best history book
>at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. According to Ennes,
>Oren's chapter on the treacherous attack echoes Cristol's version,
>which Ennes describes as "pure Israeli spin and truth distortion."
> That's not surprising, of course, since in his book's
>acknowledgements Oren thanks the Shalem Center, where he is a
>senior fellow and "under whose auspices this book was researched
>and written." The center describes its senior fellows program as
>"promoting the research and writing of agenda-shaping work."
>Its journal, AZURE, with editorial offices in Jerusalem and Wash-
>ington, DC, "champions...a strong, free and Jewish State of
>Israel for the future of the Jewish people."
> "Cristol, though discredited at every turn, continues to
>hawk his book," Ennes says, "arguing endlessly that the attack
>was a tragic accident and that we who say otherwise are simply
>either anti-Semites or blinded by blood and what he calls the
>'fog of war.' Cristol will be promoting his book in August
>and speaking at a large veterans' forum in Pigeon Forge, TN,"
>Ennes told the WASHINGTON REPORT. He added, "Knowing the
>views of most veterans who know about the LIBERTY, I cannot
>imagine that Cristol will be well received."
> "Will the LIBERTY remain a sort of 'Flying Dutchman,'
>sailing forever around her poor men's souls?" Walsh concludes
>his LIBERTY article by asking. Until a congressional investi-
>gation gives survivors the opportunity to tell their stories
>before they die, and Americans can examine top-secret reports
>still shrouded in secrecy, the LIBERTY's ghost will not rest.
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the WASHINGTON REPORT ON
>MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS.
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>Note: The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs is one of
>the few magazines in the world that supports the Liberty
>survivors and where you can get the truth about the Middle
>East. It supports the UN resolutions and traditional American
>support for human rights, self-determination, and fair play.
>If you've never seen this magazine, call 1-800-368-5788.
>They'll send you a free sample copy, and hope to welcome you
>as a subscriber.
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>_______________________________________________________________
>
> o__ I'll tell you the truth about the USS LIBERTY, visit
> _.>/)_
>(_) (_) http://home.cfl.rr.com/gidusko/liberty/
>
>_____________________(updated constantly)______________________
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