u.s.s. liberty - new revelations on 1967 attack by israel

ever heard of the nuremberg trials?

 

oh, i understood that it was sarcasm. it really wasnt as clever as you and space ghost obviously think it was. ill go out on a limb and guess that space ghosts point was that there are people who will always criticize the government b/c of an irrational hatred of bush. space ghost thinks that many are simply "blame-bush-firsters" and it isnt due to the actual actions of bush, but rather an irrational hatred of him. even though this incident obviously had nothing to do with bush, he thought he would make the point again here.

something like that.

 

you mean conspiracy theorists like ALL of the people who were actually on board the liberty? as the article states "To a man, the survivors interviewed by the Tribune rejected Israel's explanation."

since you obviously didnt bother to read the article, do me and yourself a favor and just read these comments by your so-called "conspiracy theorists".

Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert, recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister

Nor, the survivors said, did they understand why the American 6th Fleet, which included the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga, patrolling 400 miles west of the Liberty, launched and then recalled at least two squadrons of Navy fighter-bombers that might have arrived in time to prevent the torpedo attack -- and save 26 American lives.

J.Q. "Tony" Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco that handled communications between Washington and the 6th Fleet, remembered listening as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis, commander of the America's carrier battle group, to bring the jets home.

When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors."

The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel's claim that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But internal White House documents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library show that the Israelis' explanation of how the mistake had occurred was not believed.

Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson's intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was "inconceivable" that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.

The attack "couldn't be anything else but deliberate," the NSA's director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.

"I don't think you'll find many people at NSA who believe it was accidental," Benson Buffham, a former deputy NSA director, said in an interview.

"I just always assumed that the Israeli pilots knew what they were doing," said Harold Saunders, then a member of the National Security Council staff and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs.

The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.

"The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it," Forslund recalled. "The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.

"The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors."

Forslund said he clearly recalled "the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely."

Forslund's recollections are supported by those of two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots' communications.

One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then serving with the Air Force Security Service's 6924th Security Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.

"It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty," Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. "Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to 'complete the job' and get out of there."

Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete, Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern communications.

The transcripts Block remembered seeing "were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack," Block said. "The pilots said, 'This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?'

"And ground control came back and said, 'Yes, follow orders.'"

The late Dwight Porter, the American ambassador to Lebanon during the Six-Day War, told friends and family members that he had been shown English-language transcripts of Israeli pilots talking to their controllers.

A close friend, William Chandler, the former head of the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Co., said Porter recalled one of the pilots protesting, "But sir, it's an American ship -- I can see the flag!' To which the ground control responded, 'Never mind; hit it!'"

Oliver Kirby, the NSA's deputy director for operations at the time of the Liberty attack, confirmed the existence of NSA transcripts.

Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts, Kirby replied, "I sure did. I certainly did."

"They said, 'We've got him in the zero,'" Kirby recalled, "whatever that meant -- I guess the sights or something. And then one of them said, 'Can you see the flag?' They said 'Yes, it's U.S, it's U.S.' They said it several times, so there wasn't any doubt in anybody's mind that they knew it."

Kirby, now 86 and retired in Texas, said the transcripts were "something that's bothered me all my life. I'm willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew."

 

and as i already stated, the definition of anti-semitic is a hatred of jews.

please answer the question i asked...
are you saying that when the term "anti-semitic" is thrown around these days it is not referring to a bias against jews or are you just feeling a little nit-picky today?

 

i didnt ask what you "think" it should mean. i asked what it meant. specifically what it means when thrown around in an accusatory manor, as it often is. if you want to argue just for the sake of arguing that is fine, but this is getting silly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitic
Antisemitism (alternatively spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is discrimination, hostility or prejudice directed at Jews. While the term's etymology may imply that antisemitism is directed against all Semitic peoples, it is in practice used exclusively to refer to hostility towards Jews as a religious, racial, or ethnic group.[1][2]

http://dict.die.net/anti-semitism/
anti-Semitism
n : the intense dislike for and prejudice against Jewish people

http://www.yourdictionary.com/anti-semitic
anti-Semitic (səmitik, səmitik, sə mit′ik)

adjective

1. having or showing prejudice against Jews
2. discriminating against or persecuting Jews
3. of or caused by such prejudice or hostility

 

good...than you must have seen the entry for antisemitism, right?

http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/antisemitism

in and of itself, i dont trust wikipedia either, but when cited along w/ four other sources (including your preferred Merriam-Webster) all confirming the definition as i have stated, than it would seem to me to be valid.

no they dont. per the m-w definition of "antisemitism", which i kindly provided a link to above.

One entry found.

anti-Semitism

Main Entry:
Pronunciation:
\ˌan-tē-ˈse-mə-ˌti-zəm, ˌan-ˌtī-\
Function:
noun
Date:
1882

: hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group

actually, based on the five or so definitions i provided from independent sites (including your preferred merriam-webster), the principal and most obvious meaning would be "hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group".

my point didnt need clarifying. by all definitions (including from your preferred source) and common usage of the term, "antisemitism" means a hostility towards jews. you seem to be the one who is either very confused or just argumentative for the sake of being so - either way is fine - im happy to indulge. but i dont see how me simply responding to your posts makes me pugnacious. playing the persecuted card now, huh? you're sounding a bit like new yorker yourself.

 

point taken...winners write history - very true.

 

which "allies" in the past have knowingly attacked one of our ships and knowingly killed americans (including by strafing their lifeboats and machine gunning sailors in the water, a war crime by the way) while not only does our government do nothing, but they actually cover it up?

call me crazy, but at the least it seems like we should not be giving tens of billions of dollars to israel for their military and we should not be allowing their lobbyists to have so much influence in our government.