SURVIVORS PROTEST COVER-UP

Angry exchange at USS Liberty session




Tempers flare over US spy-ship inquiry

By GUY DINMORE

The Financial Times, London Sunday, January 12, 2004

WASHINGTON**Survivors of one of the most hotly disputed
incidents in American military history**the Israeli attack on the
USS Liberty spy-ship in 1967**on Monday accused the U.S.
authorities, past and present, of a cover-up in backing Israeli
claims that it was a tragic mistake.

Emotions boiled over in the basement of the State Department
as the Office of the Historian opened a public conference on the
six-day Arab-Israeli war with heated debate over newly released
intercepts from the archives of the secretive National Security
Agency.

Most of the basic facts are undisputed. On June 8 1967, Israeli
aircraft and later torpedo boats struck the Liberty just off the
Mediterranean coast, killing 34 crew and wounding 172. The ship,
one of the world's most sophisticated listening vessels but only
lightly armed, limped into port.

From there the controversy begins. An immediate U.S. Navy court
of inquiry backed the Israeli claim that it had been mistaken for
an Egyptian warship. The U.S. accepted $12m in compensation.

While some historians have accepted this, survivors and a varied
group of academics and former military officials insist the attack
was deliberate.

"You're trying to whitewash it," one survivor shouted from the
audience as Marc Susser, the State Department's historian,
acted as moderator and sought to keep order, refusing to allow
speeches from the floor. Even debate on the panel of invited
historians descended into acrimony with one contributor
accused of being an Israeli agent.

Two recent developments added fuel to the controversy.

Last week Ward Boston, a naval captain who acted as senior
legal counsel for the Navy's court of inquiry in 1967, signed an
affidavit declaring that the late Admiral Isaac Kidd, president of
the court, had told him that President Lyndon Johnson and
Robert McNamara, defense secretary, had ordered a cover-up.

And on Monday, David Hatch, the National Security Agency's
own historian, elaborated on the recently declassified NSA
material, the first time the eavesdropping agency had released
real voice intercepts.*

Mr Hatch confessed that the information "doesn't settle much".

But his analysis of the conversations between an Israeli air
controller and two helicopter pilots "suggested strongly" that the
Israelis did not know at first they were attacking a U.S. vessel,
although there was mention of a U.S. flag flying.

He also regretted that the new NSA material did not clarify why
the Liberty had not received orders sent to it to leave a war zone.

Joseph Lentini, a survivor who has spent the past 36 years
researching the tragedy, told reporters he remained convinced
that the attack was deliberate.

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentSe.../FullStory&c=S
toryFT&cid=1073280974558&p=1012571727162

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Remember the LIBERTY**
and all those who perpetrated this foul atrocity