In the first place, the Liberty was simply not in the vicinity of the Gaza-Sinai area at the time that the authors put her there. The Liberty arrived at the nautical/geographical destination known as “Point Alpha” on June 8. Point Alpha was located at coordinates 31-27 .2 North 34-00 East (i.e., about 20 miles due west of Gaza City and about 65 miles east of Port Said and the Suez Canal) at about 8:49am Suez time. From there the Liberty worked her way westward and was attacked at 1:57pm about 25 miles west of Point Alpha (45 miles west of Gaza City, and 40 miles east of the Suez Canal, and about 15 miles north of the Sinai shore.

The Liberty could only monitor communications in line of sight range, i.e., about a 25 mile area around the ship. This means that between 8:49am and 1:57pm the Liberty, which was 12.5 miles from the coast, surveiled an area about 12.5 miles inland stretching from southwest Gaza west to El Arish, and ending at about 43 miles west of El Arish, and a full 40 miles east of the Canal—all areas in firm control of the IDF at this stage.

The Liberty could thus not be monitoring Arab communications because there were none in this area to monitor, and they could not be monitoring Israeli communications because the Liberty had no Hebrew linguists on board. That, more than anything else, is why this simply could not have happened.

Also, it is not clear what information they could have gathered even if they were able to monitor Egyptian communications; most likely, they would have been eavesdroppers on the chaos and confusion of a thoroughly routed army desperately attempting to escape annihilation by getting across the canal. By the time the Liberty was attacked, both the Sinai and the West Bank were firmly in Israeli hands. Any information culled at this stage would thus have been utterly useless.

In any event, the authors adduce not a shred of evidence, except hearsay, to support their wild allegations. (One of their footnotes reads: “Confidential interviews, former liaison NSA; former analyst, Naval intelligence”)

Ships logs and other official records do indeed get played with and forged on occasion, but in this particular instance, I think its very unlikely.

An Israeli transport aircraft spotted the vessel in the early morning of June 8 at 5:00 am, unable to ID it. At 9:00 am another plane spotted her again. Flying low at tree-top level and slow, the pilot could not make out the flag, but spotted a hull marking that read “GTR-5″ and the headquarters identified the ship as the USS Liberty. However, with the change in watch in the Israeli HQ at 11:00am, the officers, following standard operating procedure for removing old information from the board, had erroneously assumed that the Liberty had left the area. Why? Because when the Liberty was spotted earlier at 5:00am she was identified at the further south west end of the control board and headed westward at 15 knots, and it was only natural that they assumed six hours later that she was some 90 miles further along that course by that time, and thus far away from the area encompassed by the control board. When an explosion rocked an Israeli arms depot at El Arish at 11:24am, the Israelis, spotting a vessel in the vicinity, incorrectly assumed it was an Egyptian warship bombarding them, and sent three torpedo boats to engage it. They thus had no reason to think it was the Liberty, and that an American vessel would be firing on them.

Through a series of miscalculations from the motor torpedo boats sent to engage the vessel, including that of the vessel’s speed, the Israelis concluded, from about 20 miles distance, that the ship was an enemy vessel at about 1:51pm. That is when they ordered the first air strike on the Liberty, which they thought to be an Egyptian vessel shelling them.

They therefore did have ample time to ID the ship after the shelling at El Arish and they mis-ID’d it, each time from a considerable distance at sea. As for the attacking pilots, the IAF transcripts betray their confusion, especially as to why the Liberty, which they AGAIN misidentified as a minesweeper, was not firing back on them; the high speed at which they were doing their strafing runs also indicates the potential danger they felt at being fired upon by AA guns. When one of the pilots spotted Latin markings on the hull at 2:11pm (which he AGAIN misidentified as “CTR-5” when it was GTR-5) they immediately disengaged, and HQ cancelled the next air mission headed out that would have thrashed the Liberty with 500 lb iron bombs, putting her and crew into a watery grave. If they were attacking deliberately with the intent to sink the ship they would not have disengaged the attacking planes and cancelled the mission of two fighters armed with 500 lb bombs; it makes little sense.

Also, there is nothing to indicate that the Israelis were copying signals from the Liberty in the days before. Why would they be doing that? The Liberty was hundreds of miles away to the west at that time, and the Israelis had no naval presence in that area. Even if they had been listening, they would hardly have heard anything to concern them, for the Liberty had no Hebrew linguists.

Nobody to this day has produced a remotely plausible motive for the Israelis to have knowingly attacked a ship belonging to their strongest ally–probably for the simple reason that no such motive exists. The attack on the Liberty was a classic case of friendly fire, which the Arab-Israeli wars have seen plenty of. During the 1956 War the Israelis attacked a British destroyer, the HMS Crane, that it had mistaken for an Egyptian Z-class destroyer. The largest tank battle of the 1956 War occurred at Abu Ageila where two Israeli tank units fought each other to a standstill. On June 5, 1967 The IAF bombed a column of IDF Sherman tanks in the battle for Jerusalem, and did so again on June 8, just a few hours before the attack on the Liberty. Many, many more instances could be cited.

Thank you for your comment.

The 1967 US Navy Court of Inquiry stated that “the calm conditions and slow ship speed may well have made the American flag difficult to identify.”

The Liberty was indeed steaming at about 5 knots in a windless sea at the time of the attack.

But let’s say this was not the case, and that there was sufficient wind. Is there any evidence that the Israeli pilots could have known they were attacking an American ship or that they could have seen the flag, even if it were extended by wind? No, there is not.

In the first place the pilots were sent to attack a ship, not to reconnoiter or identify it. Secondly, the strafing runs on the first attack were a head-on attack of the Liberty’s bow. The Liberty was cruising at about five knots westward and the Mirage fighter was approaching it head-on eastward at about 600mph, or at about 1000 feet per second. In the attack run it had 2-3 seconds at most to fire its guns and pull off the target before getting closer than 3000 feet. Was it really possible to positively identify a 5×8 foot flag in the proscribed time of 2-3 seconds (at most), and at the speed of 600mph and a distance of in excess of 3000 feet? Hardly.

Audio tapes transcripts indicate that the Israelis did not know they were attacking an American ship in both air attacks and, five minutes into the second air attack, immediately disengaged when they saw Latin markings on the hull.

All available evidence, including IDF Navy logs, indicate that the Israeli boat captain then misidentified the ship, then engulfed with smoke, at 6000 yards distance at about 2:24 pm, incurred fire from the Liberty as they approached her at 2:31pm, returned fire, cut off the attack at 2:41pm pending further ID, told Naval HQ they might have hit a Russian vessel, got close enough to identify the Latin hull markings of the Liberty, and then offered help and medical attention to the survivors at 3:03pm.

Those are the facts. The air attacks occurred in minutes, not hours, of intense combat at high subsonic speeds and long distances, rendering positive ID difficult to say the least, and the naval attacks lasted about ten minutes from distances of thousands of yards while being fired on, making positive ID also difficult. The only logical inference that can be drawn from them is that the attack was a case of mistaken identity. There is, in all the hundreds of pages of declassified material from both countries, not a shred of evidence to support the contention that Israel deliberately sought to attack and sink the USS Liberty. None whatsoever.

Also, LBJ did NOT impede the investigation. The 1967 Court of Inquiry was thorough, running to hundreds of pages and dozens of witnesses and exhibits. Several subsequent investigations in congress have followed, all reaching the same result: the attack was a case of mistaken identity.