MSD

Upon my initial encounter with this thread, I had assumed it to be an anti-Israel troll (there have been many in the past,) but something in the back of my mind convinced me to look further into the situation. I was surprised to find that this is a serious topic that still merits discussion 38 years later, and proceeded to engage in several hours' worth of research. I've drawn a few conclusions and found myself left with many more questions than answers.

It appears almost entirely indisputable that this was an intentional attack intended to destroy a US surveilance ship. For those who didn't read the report, here is a brief summary from both the report and my research:

Preceding the incident, Israeli aircraft circled the area and flew over the ship every 40 minutes during daylight hours, making visual identification and reportedly waving to crewmen on the deck. Several hours after Israeli commanders positively identified the ship as the USS Liberty, a number of Israeli planes (the planes flew at least 30 sorties) and three torpedo boats began an attack on the ship.

The attack lasted for several hours, during which aircraft and torpedo boats fired hundreds of rockets that targeted communications equipment and the four .50-cal deck guns, attacked the ship with constant machine-gun fire that strafed the entire ship and was directed toward any personnel who appeared on the decks as well as lifeboats that were deployed to evacuate the injured, and fired at least two, and possibly three torpedos, one of which impacted the ship and opened a 39-foot hole at the waterline.

When communication equipment was able to be used once Israeli jamming equipment was out of range, US aircraft were sent; these aircraft broadcast an unencrypted message over channels known to be monitored by all militaries indicating that the attacking aircraft and ships would be intercepted at which point the aircraft left the area and the torpedo boats ceased firing and offered assistance to the USS Liberty. At one point, armed Israeli helicopters carring numerous uniformed troops approached the Liberty, but left after the captain ordered the crew to man the deck guns (the ship's only armaments, intended only to prevent hostile forces from boarding the ship.)

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the US investigation concluded that the Israeil report that claimed the incident was due to misidentification was accurate, and the subject was all but dropped. One US official who submitted a report for the investigation has stated that the portion of the final report attributed to him is not what he submitted and is a false account intended to agree wtih the official story.


After researching, I am left with more questions than answers. Here are some of the major ones, with speculation and comments. I am asking these after drawing the conclusion that it was an intentional attack and that no misidentification occured.

-What did Israel have to gain by attacking an unarmed ship of their strongest diplomatic ally?

Taking a step backwards into a more general question, why would someone attack a ship during a time of war? Possibilities include:

--prevention of attack (unlikely as it was unarmed and neutral in the war)
--capture of cargo or technology (this was a research ship, and nothing of strategic military value would survive such an attack. Communications and surveilance equipment would be damaged beyond repair and be worthless to researchers, and the ship was powered by a conventional engine, so acquisition of nuclear material is not a possible motive,)
--deterrence (again, a neutral ship owned by a friendly nation would not be a logical target)
--termination of the target's nonagressive activities (this seems to be the only possibility, as the Liberty was monitoring communications at the time and none of the other strategic motivations make sense.)
--revenge (for what?)

This leaves me with yet another question, why would Israel's military want to stop a friendly nation who supported their actions from monitoring communications, and most likely passing on intelligence?

If we were to assume that this was an official, legitimate order from the top of the chain of command, the only reason that they would engage in what would be considered an act of war if done by most countries is that they were planning to do something to get ahead in the war that even the US would not allow them to do. The only thing that serious is the use of nuclear weapons, which they did not subsequently use, leaving this question unanswered.

The answer with which I am most comfortable is that this is a real-life case of the cliché from war movies of a crazed rogue commander acting on his own paranoia and delusion.


-Why did the United States Government act to cover up the incident?

This is the only question that I can answer with relative confidence. The most likely answer is that they did not want to turn public sentiment against Israel. At the time, we had one strong ally in the Middle East, an area in which it is advantageous to have allies, and we did not want to risk losing that ally due to a lack of public support. I can't envision any other reason for us to cover up such an atrocity; perhaps someone else can come up with something (preferably not relying on paranoid visions of a Zionist world government.)


The last of the three I'm going to throw down is a multi-part question
-Where in the chain of command did the order to attack originate, and how did this commander convince dozens of military personnel to launch an attack on hundreds of a friendly nation's servicemen and tens of millioins of dollars of equipment owned by that nation?

The first part is the only answer that can really offer a solution to this mystery. If the person who initiated the attack could be found, and his motivations determined, this could be sent to the history books and left to rest.

The second part is similarly important, as it is important to uncover the disturbing reality of how dozens of people could be convinced that a friendly vessel (a fact confirmed by numerous patrols over several days by the same people who carried out the attack.)

The fog of war would not cause enough confusion for dozens of people to take actions that contradicted logic and proven facts. While military training teaches people to follow orders without question, such an order is too unusual and counterintuitive for people to simply follow it without question. It is almost completely implauisble that anyone of high rank would be capable of locating and arranging groups of so many people from several branches of the armed forces who are united by an ideology so radical that they would be willing to take such actions.

The last possiblity I can think of at the moment is that a person with access to the military units involved (maybe an extremist from an intelligence service psy ops division,) was able to use some sort of drug-induced brainwashing to convince the attackers that they had not been observing a US ship, but rather a disguised enemy. The use of psychoactive drugs in military operations goes back decades, with some notable examples being the testing of extremely high doses of LSD on British troops (some disturbing videos of the results have been made public,) the use of fear-inhibiting drugs on WWII Japanese kamikaze pilots, and various tests of judgement-altering substances by US intelligence services.