[Peace-discuss] Israel is no stool pigeon…

[Morton K. Brussel]

This is old news, but still sensational.

So Who’s Afraid of the Israel Lobby?
by Ray McGovern

Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat-Conservative, Liberal. The  
fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and palpable. The  
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) brags that it is the  
most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol  
Hill, and has demonstrated that time and again-and not only on  
Capitol Hill.

Seldom has the Lobby’s power been as clearly demonstrated as in its  
ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967, during the  
Six Day War:

Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship USS  
Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did its best  
to sink it and leave no survivors;
The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the attack  
upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the commander of the  
U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to the scene; and
By that time 34 of the Liberty’s crew had been killed and over 170  
wounded.
Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known this  
for years. That virtually all of them have kept a forty-year  
frightened silence is testament to the widespread fear of touching  
this live wire. Even more telling is the fact that the National  
Security Agency apparently has destroyed voice tapes and transcripts  
heard and seen by many intelligence analysts, material that shows  
beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.

The Ugly Truth

But the truth will out-eventually. All it took in this case was for a  
courageous journalist (of the endangered species kind) to listen to  
the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not shrinking from  
naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S. officials, from the  
president on down, off the hook for suppressing-even destroying- 
damning evidence from intercepted Israeli communications.

The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely on  
interviews with those most intimately involved. A lengthy article by  
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter John Crewdson appeared  
in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Oct. 2 titled “New  
revelations in attack on American spy ship.” To the subtitle goes the  
prize for understatement of the year: “Veterans, documents suggest  
U.S., Israel didn’t tell full story of deadly 1967 incident.”

Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have known of  
the incident and cover-up for a very long time and have tried to  
expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for today. It has  
proved far easier, though, to get a very pedestrian Dog-Bites-Man  
article published than an article with the importance and  
explosiveness of this sensitive story.

A Marine Stands Up

On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an  
overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield,  
Missouri. A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John  
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard  
titled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” The study had  
originally been commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly. When the draft  
arrived, however, shouts of “Leper!” were heard at the Atlantic. The  
monthly wasted no time in saying thanks-but-no-thanks, and the leper- 
study then wandered in search of a home, finding none among American  
publishers. Eventually the London Review of Books published it in  
March 2006.

I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of  
courage as well as scholarship. That’s what I told the questioner,  
adding that I did have two problems with the study:

First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing virtually all  
the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the Israel Lobby and  
the so-called “neo-conservatives” running our policy and armed  
forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed. But of equal  
importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what the Pentagon now  
calls the “enduring” military bases in Iraq, which the White House  
and Pentagon decided were needed for the U.S. to dominate that part  
of the Middle East.
Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt made no  
mention of what I believe to be, if not the most telling, then  
perhaps the most sensational proof of the power the Lobby knows it  
can exert over our government and Congress. In sum, in June 1967,  
after deliberately using fighter-bombers and torpedo boats to attack  
the USS Liberty for over two hours in an attempt to sink it and kill  
its entire crew, and then getting the U.S. government, the Navy, and  
the Congress to cover up what happened, the Israeli government  
learned that it could-literally-get away with murder.
I found myself looking out at 400 blank stares. The USS Liberty? And  
so I asked how many in the audience had heard of the attack on the  
Liberty on June 8, 1967. Three hands went up; I called on the  
gentleman nearest me.

Ramrod straight he stood:

“Sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired. I  
am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir.”

Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell us  
what happened.

“Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has been  
almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening, Sir.”

You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood gave  
us his personal account of what happened to him, his colleagues, and  
his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967. He was a linguist assigned  
to collect communications intelligence from the USS Liberty, which  
was among the ugliest-and most easily identifiable-ships in the fleet  
with antennae springing out in all directions.

Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with the  
six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the Israeli  
navy and air force on the morning of June 8. After the air attacks  
including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three sixty-ton torpedo  
boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing their torpedo tubes at  
the Liberty’s starboard hull. Lockwood had been ordered to throw the  
extremely sensitive cryptological equipment overboard and had just  
walked beyond the bulwark separating the NSA intelligence unit from  
the rest of the ship when, he recalled, he sensed a large black  
object, a tremendous explosion, and sheet of flame. The torpedo had  
struck dead center in the NSA space.

The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness. Around  
him were 25 dead colleagues; but he heard moaning. Three were still  
alive; one of Lockwood’s shipmates dragged one survivor up the hatch.  
Lockwood was able to lift the two others, one-by-one, onto his  
shoulder and carry them up through the hatch. This meant  
alternatively banging on the hatch for someone to open it and  
swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the water lest he float out  
to sea through the 39-foot hole made by the torpedo.

At that Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very hard- 
even after almost 40 years.

What Else We Know

John Crewdson’s meticulously documented article, together with the 57  
pages that James Bamford devotes to the incident in his book “Body of  
Secrets” and recent confessions by those who played a role in the  
cover-up, paint a picture that the surviving crew of the USS Liberty  
can only find infuriating. The evidence, from intercepted  
communications as well as testimony, of Israeli deliberate intent is  
unimpeachable, even though the Israelis continue to portray the  
incident as merely a terrible mistake.

Crewdson refers to U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who was the Navy  
lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, named by  
Admiral John S. McCain (Sen. John McCain’s father) to “inquire into  
all the facts and circumstances.” The fact that they were given only  
one week to gather evidence and were forbidden to contact the  
Israelis screams out “cover-up.”

Captain Boston, now 84, signed a formal declaration on Jan. 8, 2004  
in which he described himself as “outraged at the efforts of the  
apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a  
case of ‘mistaken identity.’” Boston continued:

“The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with  
certainty that this attack…was a deliberate effort to sink an  
American ship and murder its entire crew…Not only did the Israelis  
attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo  
boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had been launched in an  
attempt by the crew to save the most seriously wounded-a war crime…I  
know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that  
President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara  
ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken  
identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

Why the Israelis decided to take the draconian measure of sinking a  
ship of the U.S. Navy is open to speculation. One view is that the  
Israelis did not want the U.S. to find out they were massing troops  
to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, and wanted to deprive the U.S.  
of the opportunity to argue against such a move. Another theory:  
James Bamford, in “Body of Secrets,” adduces evidence, including  
reporting from an Israeli journalist eyewitness and an Israeli  
military historian, of wholesale killing of Egyptian prisoners of war  
at the coastal town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was  
patrolling directly opposite El Arish in international waters but  
within easy range to pick up intelligence on what was going on there.  
And the Israelis were well aware.

As for the why, well, someone could at least approach the Israelis  
involved and ask, no? The important thing here is not to confuse what  
is known (the deliberate nature of the Israeli attack) with the  
purpose behind it, which remains a matter of speculation.

Other Indignities

Bowing to intense pressure from the Navy, the White House agreed to  
award the Liberty’s skipper, Captain William McGonagle, the Medal of  
Honor….but not at the White House, and not by the president (as is  
the custom). Rather, the Secretary of the Navy gave the award at the  
Washington Navy Yard on the banks of the acrid Anacostia River. A  
naval officer involved in the awards ceremony told one of the Liberty  
crew, “The government is pretty jumpy about Israel…the State  
Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had  
any objections to McGonagle getting the medal.”

Adding insult to injury, those of the Liberty crew who survived well  
enough to call for an independent investigation have been hit with  
charges of, you guessed it, anti-Semitism.

Now that some of the truth is emerging more and more, others are  
showing more courage in speaking out. In a recent email, an associate  
of mine who has followed Middle East affairs for almost 60 years,  
shared the following:

“The chief of the intelligence analysts studying the Arab/Israeli  
region at the time told me about the intercepted messages and said  
very flatly and firmly that the pilots reported seeing the American  
flag and repeated their requests for confirmation of the attack  
order. Whole platoons of Americans saw those intercepts. If NSA now  
says they do not exist, then someone ordered them destroyed.”

Leaving the destruction of evidence without investigation is an open  
invitation to repetition in the future.

As for the larger picture, visiting Israel this past summer I was  
constantly told that Egypt forced Israel into war in June 1967. This  
does not square with the unguarded words of Menachem Begin in 1982,  
when he was Israel’s prime minister. Rather he admitted publicly:

“In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in  
the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser  
was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We  
decided to attack him.”

Israel had, in fact, prepared well militarily and mounted  
provocations against its neighbors, in order to provoke a response  
that could be used to justify an expansion of its borders. Israel’s  
illegal 40-year control over and confiscation of land in the occupied  
territories and U.S. enabling support (particularly the one-sided  
support by the current U.S. administration) go a long way toward  
explaining why it is that 1.3 billion Muslims “hate us.”

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the  
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a CIA  
analyst for 27 years and is now on the Steering Committee of Veteran  
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He spent some time in  
Israel and the West Bank this summer.

This article was first posted in Consortiumnews.com

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