- 论剑谈棋 豪杰尽聚 - 华岳论坛 - http://washeng.net/

40年前美国所谓的盟友以色列光天白日下在地中海公海袭击美国情报舰USS LIBERTY，
40年来一直不许调查，幸存水兵终于敢讲出来：

October 6, 2007
So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?
by Ray McGovern

Who's afraid of the Israel Lobby? 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 come out – eventually. All it took in this case was
for a courageous journalist (an endangered species) 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 "neoconservatives" 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."

This article was first posted on Consortiumnews.com