Loss Of Liberty: Israel's Attack On The USS Liberty During The Six Day War
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The Middle East War of June of 1967 caused major changes to the maps, the people, and the governments in the Middle East.
Early morning of June 5th exploded the surprise attack of the Israeli Air Force on the Egyptian airplanes on the ground.
80% of the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed.
By June 7th, Israel had destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.
They had control of the Sinai Peninsula, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.
On June 8th, the USS Liberty, America's most sophisticated intelligence ship in 1967, was attacked by Israeli air and naval forces in international waters, 13 miles off of El Arish in Sinai.
34 Americans were killed.
172 were wounded.
The Israeli and American governments pronounced the attack as a case of mistaken identity.
Issey Rehar was the chief of Israeli naval operations.
He reported a ship had shelled the port city of El Arish.
So I think around 12 o'clock, I decided to order three MTDs, motor torpedo boats, from the port of Ashdor.
Are you sure you can't see any kind of an identification?
And all the words came back, move.
If you want to be sure that it is a military ship, you can hit it.
The first Mirage pilot radioed, oil is spilling out into the water.
Another added, great, wonderful, she's burning, she's burning.
And El Arish commander reported, he's hit her a lot.
There's an oil slick in the water.
Then headquarters asked, Menachem, is he screwing her?
The next wave was supermastares with thousand-pound bombs and canisters of jelly gasoline.
Someone in southern command called, he's going down low with napalm all the time.
The flight leader noted, it would be a blessing if we could have iron bombs.
Otherwise, our Navy is going to get here and do the sinking.
A pilot interrupted, pay attention.
The ship's markings are Charlie Tango Romeo 5.
There's no flag on her.
And headquarters ordered, leave her.
The time now is 1412, and he says, I see CTR-5, and the minute we hear that, the Air Force stops all operations and says, all our aircraft allowed attack Africa.
Please stop.
I must say that at that point in time, in my mind, it was a metal ship.
But that opinion was not shared by the commander of the torpedo boat squadron.
He believed it to be a small Egyptian freighter, the El Kassir.
We told him, there are some doubts about identification.
These doubts incredibly did not reach the commanding officer who ordered the torpedoes launched.
That order did not reach the commanding officer on the bridge while he launched the torpedoes at about the range of 1,000 yards or a little bit more than 1,000 yards.
I ordered to prepare the torpedoes and ordered that all commanders will take the action of firing torpedoes.
This is the story of the attack on the Liberty told by Israeli and U.S. government sources.
Now, we are going to show you what really happened.
The survivors of the 294-man crew of the USS Liberty will tell you their story.
I'm Tito Howard, the producer of The Loss of Liberty.
The host for this program about the attack on the USS Liberty will be Dr. Richard Kiefer, one of the many heroes that day.
Dr. Kiefer was the only doctor aboard Liberty.
He had a gunshot wound, he had a burn, he had a broken right kneecap, and he had 11 pieces of shrapnel in his abdomen, which he kept together with a life jacket.
That man stood on those legs for 28 consecutive hours, saving American lives and limbs.
This film should shock decent Americans.
Above all, men and women who've served in America's armed forces.
It will shock particularly, as it was an attack not by terrorists, implacably opposed to the United States, as is the case of the USS Cole.
The Liberty is the most decorated ship in the history of the United States Navy.
840 medals, including the Medal of Honor for her skipper, the Presidential Unit Citation for her crew, two Navy crosses, 11 Silver Stars, and 204 Purple Hearts.
The day before, I was top side when Israeli planes came by and very close where we could wave to the pilots and they were that close where we could wave back.
It was a very clear day.
It was a warm day.
Sunshine was shining brightly out, nice breeze blowing, and I distinctly remember hearing the flag flapping in the wind.
There was approximately 13 sorties of our ship from 6 o'clock till 12 o'clock in the afternoon.
We had a general quarters drill.
It lasted 45 minutes or so.
Our captain, like me being an engineer, really believed in watertight integrity and making sure our people were equipped and knew how to fight fires and repair damage.
I was coming to go back to the Truscom area.
I stepped out on deck.
That plane came by and looked right in the cockpit.
He waved, I waved.
That's how close they were and they know where we were.
Well, all the recon flights that they had that morning looking at our ship for approximately six to seven hours, they had a good idea of what they were doing.
And they hit us hard and fast with everything they had.
Commander William McGonagall, the ship's captain, although he had been badly wounded, most of his bridge crew were killed.
He stayed on the bridge throughout the attack of the long night that followed.
Admired and respected by his crew, he received the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry.
When the plane struck, it was without provocation and certainly unexpected.
And they seemed to descend on us from all directions at the same time.
Those rockets and machine guns tore the ship.
It killed men on deck.
And we were defenseless.
I heard this big bang and there was bullet holes all behind in the cushions of the couch that I'd just left.
And by the time I got to the door of the wardroom, the skipper was on the PA system that we had gone to attack their unknown forces, menu battle stations.
Then the regular general quarter sound alarm went off.
And right across the hatch from the wardroom, that's where I would go through down through decks to my station.
When I went through there, there was one block that came through and helped me to get down to two floors in a bad burn courage.
When I got up off my knees down there, we were well under attack.
And the skipper again was on the phone system telling, observing the radio to get word out to anyone that we could that we were under attack by unknown forces and we were in the need of help.
My own record station was Radio Central.
It was my responsibility to keep up ship to ship, ship-to-shore communications.
And out on that, in Radio Central, we were taking rounds through the bulkheads.
There was two 55-gallon drums of gasoline just outside the bulkhead on the O-1 level that had caught fire from the strafing run.
And that was heating that outside bulkhead and peeling the paint off on the inside.
There was a lot of smoke in the compartment.
There's holes where we were taking rounds where the sunlight shining through and it was a real surrealistic look.
I was topside fighting fires and doing other damage control work throughout the duration of the attack.
At the same time I was able to observe the jets flying overhead and I also observed the American flag flying from the mast.
At no time did that flag hang up from the mast.
I was one of the two signalmen on the USS Liberty when the ship was attacked and my only job during the attack was to make sure that the flag was flying so every few minutes I would walk out at the signal bridge up at the mast.
And fighting what fire we could with what little water I could give the people topside for the fire.
It was really a problem.
On the first pass they knocked out our ability to call for help.
The one remaining antenna, which I had shut down because it had some problems in the tuner, is probably why it didn't get hit.
I had to jury rig a coaxial cable directly from the transmitter to the antenna.
So we were working feverishly to try to get a signal out at that time and then finally there was that we were able to get a signal to the sixth fleet and then they I was listening to monitoring that communications and they said that they would be sending aircraft and so at that point we just felt overjoyed knowing that there was going to be aircraft coming to our rescue.
The initial strike by the planes on the ship commenced at about five minutes after two in the afternoon of 8 June and the attack lasted about 20 minutes.
The ship was fired at from port to starboard, starboard to port, spin to stern and there was not a single compartment above the water line that did not have one or more direct penetration by a rocket, machine gun, and they also dropped napalm on the bridge of the ship.
At 2.35 p.m., Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, we called the 12 Navy fighters that had been sent to our defense by the carrier Saratoga.
At that time, no one aboard the Liberty had identified the attacking Israelis.
It was one and a half hours later that our embassy in Israel first told Washington that Israelis had attacked a ship, possibly a U.S. Navy ship.
How then did McNamara know to recall the help sent to defend the Liberty?
When the ship came under attack, now hear this, General Quarters, this is no drill.
The ship is under attack by unidentified aircraft.
And there were ping-pings.
We heard a lot of pinging, which were bullets running across the deck, and then we heard explosions.
We didn't know what was going on, but of course General Quarters had sounded, so we battened down the hatches and we started doing what we were trained to do.
We were under attack.
We could hear these shells hitting the ship.
The whole ship would ring.
It was like you're on the inside of a huge bell and someone beating on it with a sledgehammer.
The aircraft take pictures as they fire their guns.
These are used for analysis of their tactics, and these are used for confirmation of the damage that they've done.
These pictures have never been publicly presented.
Lieutenant Ennis was sitting on the deck, and there was blood coming out of his mouth, and his knee was damped.
He had an injury in his knee, and it was blood coming out a bit.
Lieutenant Koff had got blown off, I think, the 04 level, but I come across him, and he was just peppered from head to toe with shrapnel.
And I covered him up with a blanket.
My brother, he was sent on the bridge of the ship to find out who the planes were, where they came from.
They had no markings.
That's against the view of the rules of war right there.
He received a silver star for his efforts, and he was cut down by the planes.
The captain, initially, after the attack, sustaining shrapnel wounds in his knee, and somebody put a tourniquet around his leg, and I got coffee.
I think about five cups of coffee went down the cabin to keep him going.
It was impressive because with all the blood loss and everything, it was going all night long.
A short time after the air attack had been completed, the three torpedo boats approached us from our starboard quarter at high speed and in an apparent torpedo launch attitude.
The three Israeli torpedo boats fired six torpedoes at the Liberty.
Because of Captain McDonough's hand into the ship, five missed.
Intelligence base was destroyed.
25 American sailors died almost instantly.
This hole at the side was in excess of 40 feet in diameter.
You could put your whole house in a hole.
And we were right in the middle of it.
We couldn't believe what we saw.
You couldn't walk around that part of the deck without stepping on a piece of someone.
In fact, Phil Turney and myself had found a shoe with a foot still in it.
I do remember the arm for standby to abandon the ship.
Told the Lego station that they were getting preparing to, and then that was called off because apparently the life rafts had been shot up.
So there was, if you went in water, you were on your own.
And the list on the ship was considerable.
You could tell, it looked like at first we were going to maybe roll over.
The lights went out, the ship rolled over, and I figured it out.
Saying the torpedo had hit the side of the ship, but the room I just stepped out of killed every man in my division that was in there.
This fellow, first class, that I mentioned, he was on the phone at the time, just outside the door, that took off the back of his head.
It broke my lower left leg, both bones, collapsed my lung, broke ribs, fractured my skull, blew out my eardrums.
We took the guy down below, and I don't know how many runs I made up and down, you know, carrying wounded.
I saw all the bodies laying there on the tables that where Dr. Kiefer had been working on.
I was told that he was in the officer's wardroom operating on more people.
34 were killed, another 172 were wounded.
The care of these people was done by myself with the assistance of two corpsmen.
The corpsman did many things of minor surgery and I just had so much to do keeping people together, keeping their limbs attached to their body.
We were in international waters.
It was a beautiful day.
You couldn't mistake us and our flag was flying for crying out loud.
They were going to dare to kill us and it just didn't register.
Here they were, Israeli people, and they were going to try to kill us.
It's just a very, very appalling situation.
A strange quiet descended on the Liberty crew.
After the explosion, the pounding of machine gun bullets slowed and stopped.
Fires were put out.
The stunned, angry, and exhausted crew caught their collected breath.
Limping at five knots towards sanctuary several hundred miles to the north, they had somehow survived one of the most ferocious sustained attacks ever on an American ship.
34 were dead, 171 were wounded.
All survivors had mental scars.
There is not one single life left.
The wounded are treated.
Sailors remember that they were promised help.
They expected that help.
That help in the form of Phantom jets from the USS Saratoga was on its way.
It never arrived.
It would be the next morning, 17 hours after the attack began, before they would see an American face.
Finally, the USS Davis and later the USS Nasse came alongside the Liberty.
Many of their sailors wept as they boarded the Liberty, saw open decks stained with American blood, and parts of American bodies on the deck.
Helicopters from the USS America arrived several hours later to medevac the most seriously wounded Liberty sailors back to that carrier.
The air attack by two squadrons of Israeli aircraft, French-built Mirage 3s and Supermistairs, 821 rocket and cannon holes were found in the Liberty.
Canisters of napalm approached the ship.
After the ferocious air attack, Liberty was pounded by three Israeli torpedo boats.
One of their six torpedoes struck the Liberty, left the gaping hole at the waterline.
There were thousands of holes from armor-piercing machine gun bullets.
They sank life rafts, shot at firefighters and stretcher bearers at the bridge and into the engine room.
Dr. Cooper and his promise was made, perform in heroic fashion, as would all of the crew.
About the same time, Israeli land and air forces attacked the Golan Heights in a well-planned and executed strike.
The attack, the recall, the jamming, pounding, the torpedoes, somehow the Liberty survived.
And almost immediately, the second part of the outrage, the cover-up by the Israeli and the American government, began.
I had to go work at midnight and I'm trying to sleep.
You know, just thinking about how we had been so shafted by our government, the Israeli government, told us shut up.
No chance to talk to one another.
And it just, it angered me.
It really, really angered me.
On the day of the attack, I tried to coordinate communications.
The Israelis had taken out all of our transmitting antennas.
My RMs, not knowing any better during the strafing runs, were stringing long wires so that we could get an SOS out.
And thanks to them, the ones that survived, we did get an SOS out to the USS America.
Without George Golden, the ship would have sunk.
Had it sunk, I assume when debris washed ashore the next day, it would have been blamed on Egypt.
Many, many miracles that day.
I shouldn't be here.
After watertight integrity had been established and the hatch had been sailed, they reopened it as I floated by.
Buddha Schnell, Bud Schnell, went down and pulled me out.
What was this supposed to be?
None of us shiped it alive.
Much to my dismay, I personally witnessed the machine getting of light rafts as they floated back with Israel to a few boat crew members.
Great we light rafts, thoroughly with the king there, making sure that if there had been anyone in the light raft, it would have got into the water.
After the Israeli torpedo blew a huge hole into Liberty, the last three light rafts were put over the side.
Israeli torpedo boats sank two of those rafts, took the third aboard.
We were left with no rafts, nothing that could float.
Shooting light rafts on the ship in distress is a war crime.
Worst of all is what our government is doing to cover all this whole thing up.
And I heard that Johnson, in the heat of the battle, was telling the Admiral Geis of the 6th Fleet that he didn't give a damn if every man drowned and the ship sinks.
He said, I don't give a jam, if every man drowns and the ship sinks, I don't want to embarrass our allies.
That made me sort of wonder with unmarked planes.
How did he know it was our allies?
He should have had planes on site 45 minutes into this two-hour attack, and they never showed.
So did Israel apologize and then continue to attack us for an hour and 15 more minutes?
Or were we being lied to as to the conditions and why they've been called upon?
Because of the top-secret operation of Liberty and it being the sensitivity of it being Israel, our closest ally, who accidentally attacked the ship, that we are ordered not to grant any interviews.
You know, don't discuss this among yourselves, referring to the attack.
Don't get over on the beach drinking in the bars and running your mouth.
And he says, in fact, if you go ashore in Malta, you will remove your ship's name from your jersey or go ashore in civilian clothes.
Well, another light goes off in my mind.
Here's a flag admiral in the middle of the Gung-Ho 6th Fleet telling enlisted men to go ashore in civilian clothes that we're not even authorized to possess.
And he says, you know, so that we won't be singled out and be asked questions about it.
And he says, don't discuss the attack among yourselves.
Don't write your friends back home about it.
He says, in fact, when you get back home, don't even discuss it with your wife and family.
And he said quite sternly, just forget it ever happened.
And he says that repercussions for violating these orders to silence could result in your court-martial, imprisonment for violating national security, or worse.
I noticed a very large helicopter with Israeli markings hovering very close to us.
I looked in the door of the helicopter, which was open, and I could see a number of Israelis carrying automatic weapons.
They had just heard that the six-leader climate large aircraft had come to our assistance.
So they just left the scene.
Helicopter gunships, I'm sure in my mind, would have picked off survivors if we'd abandoned the ship.
They were sent there to finish us off.
The aircraft were sent to make us incommunicado so we couldn't send an SOS out.
The torpedo boats were sent to sink us, and the helicopters were sent to pick out survivors, so there'd be no choice.
It was a perfectly executed military operation.
If you look at the photographs of the Liberty after the attack, on the first strafing run, they used heat-sinking missiles that took out the tuning section of every transmitting antenna on the ship.
In less than two seconds, they had taken out all our communication capability.
The attack on the USS Liberty lasted as long as the attack on Pearl Harbor, about two hours.
You've heard the outrageous and plausible Israeli version of the attack on Liberty told by their first-hand observers.
You've heard what actually happened, told by the valiant Liberty crew.
Now, here what some of America's greatest heroes and leaders have to say.
Colonel Mitchell Page was the last Marine standing after repulsing a Japanese regiment on Guadalcanal.
We all know that this was in international waters.
It was an unprovoked, intentional attack on a U.S. vessel with one objective, to sink it and kill all aboard.
Unprovoked attack.
I think it was dastardly.
I think it was a betrayal of any friendship that we may have had with that nation.
And I think that it should be exposed to the entire world and all brought out so that the whole world would know the actual truth about that.
That particular day in 1967.
And very widely could see this was an American ship.
And not only did the Israelians attack, they did this with their Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Though badly wounded, Navy Master Chief Bob Bush held off a Japanese advance while saving his commanding officer's life.
You know, it's impossible for me to figure out why maybe I would sit here and attack you when we're friends.
I mean, they're getting our money to buy those French airplanes.
And then they turn around and attack our ship when they can see that it's our ship.
It's absolutely uncalled for.
Army Colonel Lou Millett led the last bayonet charge against vastly superior Chinese forces in Korea.
I was in World War II.
I studied all the different types of aircraft so that when I shot at a plane, I made sure I shooting at the enemy and not out.
They know what those ships look like.
And if they don't, I can't conceive that they don't know it.
I do know this.
It was a criminal act.
It was an act of war.
It's as bad as Vietnam, allowing people who would try to save people from tyranny to die for nothing.
Admiral Thomas Moore is the longest serving active four-star admiral in American history.
He is the only American Admiral to have commanded both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.
He was head of NATO forces, served as chief of naval operations and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for two terms.
The Navy's chief fighter, the F-14 Tomcat, was named after Admiral Tom Moore.
The question is, if the Israelis thought the frequencies they jam were in fact broadcast by the Egyptian ship, why did they jam the American frequencies?
There's no question about the fact that the jamming of the Liberty frequencies was deliberate and was undoubtedly ordered by high authority.
That a large part of the cashiers were caused by torpedo boats, should have been prevented from making those attacks by the aircraft that were on their way to help when they were recalled.
Admiral Arley Burke was known as Mr. Navy.
His long and illustrious career was kept by him becoming the chief of naval operations.
The high-tech modern American Navy destroyers were named the Arleigh E. Burke Fascinus Troll.
And don't know yet why we didn't protect that ship.
I don't know why the Israelis would take such terrific chances.
It must have been something that was very important to them to decide to attack without considering the probability of war.
Recuperating from serious throat surgery, the Saratoga skipper Joe Tully spoke about the launch and recall of protective aircraft.
I had launched ready at that time, 12 aircraft, conventionally armed, and I immediately launched them.
And to my surprise, the American did not launch.
About the same time, a message came from Rear Admiral Live Geis, who was the carrier division commander and who was not the officer in tactical command, but who was senior to me, who had somehow been given tactical command or assumed it, ordering the tight aircraft to return to Dynota.
And it was the first time that the hot line, the red line between Washington and Moscow, had been activated.
And the message from the United States to Chairman Kosegan at the time was, advise General Nasser that the American planes are going to be launched to determine what the status of the Liberty was.
I have spent a large part of my life flying over the oceans and identifying ships.
And this ship was perhaps the easiest ship to identify that was listed in the United States Navy.
Equipped with antenna from bow to stern, pointing in every direction.
It reminds one of a large, vigorous lobster and a look that made it extremely easy to recognize.
And so I will never, never mind the idea that the pilots thought this was some other ship.
And it appeared from the ferocity of the attack that the intent of the attackers was to sink the ship.
Maybe they hoped to have no survivors so that they would not be held accountable for the attack after it occurred.
We didn't know who was attacking this.
They didn't know who was attacking us.
Well, I'm not Washington saying, don't go because they're friends of ours.
So that's the thing that's always bothering me right there.
I never myself accepted the Israeli-purported explanation.
Accidents don't occur through repeated attacks by surface vessels and by aircraft.
It obviously was a decision taken pretty high up on the Israeli side because it involved combined forces.
The ship was flying an American flag.
Even if it had been unidentified from an Israeli point of view, it was a reckless thing for them to do.
Suppose it had been a Soviet ship.
That could have produced very large problems indeed.
George Bowl, the brilliant and courageous Under Secretary of State at the time of the 67 war, wrote about the attack on the Liberty subsequently.
He said, The ultimate lesson of the Liberty attack was that it had far more effect on policy in Israel than in America.
Israel's leaders concluded that nothing they might do would offend the Americans to the point of reprisal.
If America's leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.
The Fleet Drive Papa Girl will be our escort into Malta.
The divers rigged a large canvas over the torpedo hull.
It was secured in places and ropes that were passed under the hull and over the main deck.
Once the canvas was in place, the liberty could proceed under its own power towards Malta.
Once we were in dry dock in Malta, then came the gruesome task of removing the bodies and the debris from the research races.
I was unfortunate enough to draw the first shift as part of our division, which would be used to cut the debris away from the bodies of the research races.
The first body to come out was almost unrecognizable.
Due to being in salt water for six days, the body was almost completely hairless.
Fingerprinted the body, put it in a body bag, and moved it out of the spaces.
This continued through the night and on into the next day.
After 33 days in Malta and the Liberty was repaired, we brought the ship back to Northumber.
Now it was open.
The Liberty was home.
Over.
It will never be over until the truth is known.
The cover-up began with the report of the casualties.
The first word that we get out was before the torpedo attack that we had nine dead and 75 wounded.
This has been the number that has almost invariably appeared in the newspapers as an attempt to minimize the nature of the attack, the ferocity of the attack, and the unjustifiable nature of the attack.
There was no Pratt's campaign to summon this in its entirety for the benefit of the American people.
As a matter of fact, in many cases, the Press supported the Israeli campaign.
Future Judge Advocate General of the Navy, Rear Admiral Merlin Starring, was given less than 24 hours to review the 600-page court of inquiry report.
In the course of my career as a Navy lawyer, I have been called upon to review and take actions upon hundreds of investigations of various degrees of importance and volume.
This is the only instance in which a record of such an investigation has been withdrawn from me after I had been asked to review it and I had not been given an opportunity to complete my advice to the Canadian Authority.
As you know, it's a voluminous document.
One of the things that I initially had difficulty with and still do is the fact that the very first statement of fact that the court arrived at and presented was this.
Available evidence combines to indicate the attack on Liberty on 8 June was in fact a case of mistaken identity.
Now that is the sort of thing in this record that I found great difficulty in supporting from the evidence that was included.
I'm convinced that it was withdrawn from me in this instance because of my statement to Captain Boston that I was having serious problems with the evidence that was available to support the statements of fact.
In the subsequent cover-up, the Israelis maintained that they thought the Liberty was the small Egyptian freighter, the Al-Quser.
This is not credible.
Not only was the Liberty flying a large American flag, but it was five times as large as the Al-Quser, and its profile was unique.
It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the Egyptian ship.
Tordella was the deputy director at the time of the attack.
Tordello, when he received the copy of the Israeli mistake explanation, wrote across the top of it a nice white one.
He didn't believe it at all.
And he later wrote another memorandum for the record indicating that he thought that the most likely explanation was that the Israelis attacked the Liberty because they didn't want the Liberty to hear what was going on in the Sinai.
And this is the highest professional at NSA.
In addition, the director of NSA at the time, Marshall Carter, told me that he thought it was deliberate.
In addition to that, he was very offended in another memorandum he wrote that it appeared that the Johnson administration wanted to cover up the whole thing.
They actually wanted to sink the ship so that Israel wouldn't be embarrassed.
Admiral Kidd, when he came aboard our ship to interview the survivors, he got us in small groups, three or four or five sailors, and he would ask us questions.
The first thing he did is he took off his stars, laid them on the table, and said, listen, open up to me and talk to me just like her.
I'm just like you, one of you.
So we did.
We trusted him.
We opened up with our hearts.
We told him exactly the way we felt, what happened, what we saw.
And when that was done, he put his stars back on on his lapel, and he ordered us not to say anything to anybody, our families, friends, shipmates, anyone.
If we did, we faced the possibility of a court-martial, penitentiary, or worse.
And everyone knew what worse meant.
Actually, he scared the death out of me.
I didn't talk about the attack to anyone for almost 20 years.
Not knowing why they did this and what and not having our government back us then and now.
It's an open source.
It's festering to this day.
It's not going away.
I think it's important that we do have an investigation.
I would never give up on that until I have told to come to these things.
It needs to be done.
Pete Bucker from Pueblo said he wouldn't even have gone if he could have known what really happened to us.
All he knew was some idle little thing he heard about on the news.
In late 1991, Dwight Porter, who was ambassador to Lebanon during the 1967 war, told columnists Evans and Novak that immediately after the attack on the Liberty, the CIA station chief handed him intercepted messages between the Israeli war room and their planes.
The pilots were given orders to attack the ship, and they replied immediately that it was an American ship.
The Israeli headquarters responded, you have your orders, attack the ship.
The pilots tried once again, but it's an American ship.
We can see its flag.
And headquarters insisted, you have your orders, attack it.
And attack it they did, and the consequences are well known.
But one of the things I found out was that had never been discovered before was the fact that at the time the Liberty was attacked, the NSA also had an eavesdropping plane flying high above the scene of the action.
It was an EC-121 and during the entire course of the war, the U.S. had eavesdropping planes going over the area collecting signals, eavesdropping on what was going on below.
And this plane was flying right over the scene of the attack.
And I talked to two of the crew members of the plane, and both of them agreed that what they heard were comments from both the pilots and the torpedo boat personnel mentioning the U.S. flag.
Now that flies in the face of what the Israeli explanation says.
The Israeli explanation says nobody on either the planes or the ships ever saw a U.S. flag.
Evans and Novak got further confirmation of the Israeli attack from an American-born Israeli major, Seth Mintz, who was in the Israeli war room at the time of the attack.
He told the reporters, quote, everyone felt that it was an American ship and that it was the Liberty.
There were comments about the markings, about the flag.
Everybody in the room was convinced it was an American ship, unquote.
Mintz told Evans and Novak that the Israelis were guilty of an outrage.
True.
But the American suppression of the truth was an equal outrage.
Well, at the time, the Liberty was off the coast of the Sinai, off the coast of where El Arish was on the Sinai Peninsula.
According to Israeli military historians who wrote reports of it at the time and other eyewitnesses, the Israeli military was killing prisoners, Egyptian prisoners, committing war crimes, desperate acts of war crimes in order to, so they wouldn't have to transport the prisoners because they had no place to put the prisoners.
They decided to take the most expedient method and just kill them.
If the planes dispatched by the Saratoga had continued to the rescue, the Israelis would have been driven off.
But Washington took the Israelis at their word.
They said they had recognized their error and they apologized.
And the attack had already stopped, they said.
But they were lying.
The attack continued for another hour and 20 minutes, during which 25 more American sailors died and 110 more were wounded.
All would have been spared if the American planes sent to help them had not been recalled by Washington.
The point was the attack did take place.
There were a lot of reasons that the Israelis would have wanted to hide things from the U.S.
And that's why there is a need for an investigation.
I mean, you're not going to take the word of somebody who was the principal person who caused it.
That'd be like taking the word of a defendant in a shooting.
Every one of the thousand odd clashes between Syria and Israel between 1948 and 1967 was examined by the UN Supervisory Commission, which found out that only a very, very few had been caused by the Syrians.
A few dozen of the clashes were ambiguous, and all of the rest were caused by Israel.
Well, there were many officers of many nations, and they all reported the same thing.
Could they all have been lying?
Still, we no longer have to rely only on the UN documentation.
Hoshe Diane, who commanded the Israeli forces in 1967 and had given the order to occupy the Golan, gave an interview to an Israeli journalist in 1976.
The interview was kept secret until April 1997, when it was published in an Israeli newspaper.
It's been authenticated by Israeli historians, and General Diane's daughter, Yael, a member of the commencement, insisted that it be published.
Why did he give the order to invade?
Essentially, it was because of pressure from the would-be settlers in Golan who convinced Levi Eshko, the Israeli prime minister, to occupy the heights and the fertile lands beyond.
And when asked if that were all there was to it, Diane replied, I can tell you with absolute confidence that they were not thinking about security.
They were thinking about the heist land.
I saw them.
I spoke with them.
They didn't even try to hide their greed for that land.
The best one is the one where they wanted the Golan Heights.
And Johnson said, that's enough, that's enough.
And they needed another day to get the Golan Heights, which they still have, which I didn't think you were supposed to do, take land from another country and keep it.
If we could get the truth of Liberty out, that it would change history, I think, in this country.
I cannot absolutely can't say why our American newspapers and TV people have helped to cover this up, but not covering some of our stories.
The Navy Board of Inquiry would not admit testimony about the jamming, the recall, the unmarked planes, the shooting of life rafts, and other material that we tried to present.
They asked questions.
We were allowed to answer those questions.
Period.
They put me into a ward with 12 to 13 other patients.
And within 30 minutes, they removed me from that ward and put me into a single room.
I noticed that I had a name tag with Smith on.
And right after I noticed that, an officer came in and told me that from now on, my name is Smith.
I was never on the Liberty, and I was never ever to talk about it to anyone.
I still have 53 pieces of shrapnel in me today.
Never before has the U.S. Navy ignored eyewitness testimony of American military to accept on faith the story told by their attackers.
Certain entries in the ship's log of June 8th have raised serious questions.
Nobody knew who was wounded or how severely.
This had not been established until days after reaching Malta.
The log also minimized the duration of the attack by over an hour and a half, conveniently fitting the Israeli version.
It then documented the number of wounded, not as the actual 172, but at the widely published media figure of 75.
There should be a congressional committee, both Senate and the House, to examine all of the data available.
And it's getting late to do this because Lake McGonaco, Douglas's soul, is gone.
I know that Bill was on board the USS Liberty and his ship was off the coast at Gaza Strip, as I recall.
And yet, our government, Brenner, put it in writing in a United States Senate book of Congressional Medal of Honor recipients that he received his medal for action in Vietnam.
Now, to me, that is one of the worst cover-ups in American history.
How low can our government go?
And it's something that I'd like to see totally investigated and a closure of this issue because I think President Johnson was the villain on it.
I think he recalled the people that were to defend this ship.
I have never accepted the Israeli explanation, and so far as I'm concerned, the affair of the USS Liberty remains a scar on the relations between Israel and the United States.
Things like this don't happen.
Things are caused to happen.
There must be some reason, some reason why more is not known.
There must be some reason why we didn't react more deliberately, more directly, more positively, as we have reacted many times in our history before and since.
As a Marine, I'm proud to say that three members of the Liberty crew were Marines.
Two of them died that day.
But Bryce Lockwood was decorated for saving sailors' lives.
And Bill McGonagall, the skipper of the Liberty, was awarded the Medal of Honor for action above and beyond the Call of Duty.
And I firmly believe after review of the documentation of this film that an in-depth, honest investigation, inquiry into what really happened that day is owed to the members of the crew, their family, and all Americans.
We need to take some very serious efforts to bring out the full story.
And on that basis, I would certainly recommend that we pursue this with diligence.
We go to the Congress and urge them to conduct a formal, complete investigation to get the full story about the loss of our great ship, the Liberty.
In case of the Liberty, this is the first time to my minds, where a United States warship had been attacked without warning and no action whatever was taken to investigate this situation on the part of the Congress.
I have urged this over and over again, and I still think that the attack on the Liberty warrants a full-fledged investigation on the Congress of the United States.
Those murdered that day must not have died in vain.
A plea for justice by the Navy's most decorated crew should forever haunt us.