The USS Liberty bombing

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The day Israel attack the United States.

The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, during the Six-Day War, on 1967/06/08.  The combined air and sea attack killed 34 crew members (naval officers, seamen, two marines, and one civilian), wounded 171 crew members, and severely damaged the ship.

Israel apologized for the attack, saying that the USS Liberty had been attacked in error after being mistaken for an Egyptian ship.  Both the Israeli and U.S. governments conducted inquiries and issued reports that concluded the attack was a mistake due to Israeli confusion about the ship's identity.

In May 1968, the Israeli government paid US$3.32 million (equivalent to US$23.9 million in 2018) to the U.S. government in compensation for the families of the 34 men killed in the attack.  In March 1969, Israel paid a further $3.57 million ($24.4 million in 2018) to the men who had been wounded.  In December 1980, it agreed to pay $6 million ($18.2 million in 2018) as the final settlement for material damage to Liberty itself plus 13 years of interest.  (That's a total of $66,500,000 in 2018 currency.)

The incident occurred, blame was assigned, guilt was admitted, settlements were made, 52 years have passed, and still the conspiracy theorists are obsessed over it, especially those who hate Israel and Israelis.

Watch the video. It was no accident. There were US flags waving. There's transcripts from the jets with the pilots asking if they should fire as it's a US ship. The jets had flown over the ship earlier on and the crew had waved at them. You're just repeating garbage conspiracy theories ironically.

Israel originally tried to pin it on Egypt, but there was a problem, the American crew survived. Anyone covering for Israel really must hate America.

Um, quite a few of those "conspiracy theorists" are honorably discharged American service members who were on the the deck of the Liberty when 34 of their crewmates were killed. You owe it to them - and history - to at least acknowledge what they said, especially since that testimony is consistent with the physical evidence and has never been contradicted by anyone onboard.

Are you suggesting that the entire 324-member surviving Navy crew conspired to smear Israel? For what?

It's actually a pretty interesting incident, and parts of it can be argued both ways:

The case against the Israeli air force and navy is that the Liberty had a very different appearance from the ship they claimed to have initially mistaken it for. It was twice the size, had large radio and radar antennae that weren't common on civilian ships in the 1970s, and had a distinctive US Navy color scheme and numbering. (Those visual features are all indisputable as far as I know.) Some members of the crew also claimed that the US flag was flying in a decent wind at the time, but there is some dispute about the wind conditions.

I think that both sides acknowledged that Israeli airplanes overflew the ship multiple times over a period of hours. The crew claimed that Israeli torpedo boats fired from close range and continued to fire on lifeboats as the crew tried to abandon ship. (Liberty was hit by one torpedo, which caused most of the deaths.)

It would be really hard to argue that the torpedo boat crews didn't know who they were firing on: The fastest torpedo boats I'm aware of go about 40 mph, and the Israeli boats were approaching something the size of a 40-storey building. They fired from less than 20,000 feet, so they had several minutes to figure out what it was that they were shooting at.

It's also hard to believe that they didn't see the Navy markings on the bow. (Those are so distinctive that even an untrained civilian can easily tell a Navy transport from a civilian cargo ship.)

The arguments in Israel's defense are that they had no obvious motive for firing on the Liberty (true), the Liberty's crew fired on the torpedo boats (I believe also true, but only after a prolonged attack by Israeli aircraft), that the Israeli crews had standing orders to assume that any fast-moving ship in that area was an enemy warship (irrelevant because it was obvious by the time the boats fired that the Liberty was definitely not an Egyptian transport or destroyer), and that Liberty's use of a small signal lamp to identify themselves as a US Navy vessel made it seem that they were Egyptian (ridiculous).

I think the most innocent construction is that it began as a genuine mistake caused by pilots and coordinators (most or all of them officers) following blanket orders and ignoring what was in front of them. The boat crews knew who they were firing on, so the best excuse you could make for them is that they fired reflexively.

By the way, the grand prize for a USS Liberty-related conspiracy theory belongs to two pro-Israel commentators (John Loftus and Mark Aarons) who claimed with straight faces that the Liberty was secretly placed under the sole command of the NSA and told to ignore orders from the Navy in order to support the Arabs' war against Israel. Presumably the US decision the following year to sell weapons to Israel was just part of an elaborate cover-up. And of course the entire crew is lying

They were ordered to fire on the US ship. The intelligence ship would have been able to clarify that Israel's claims about how the 6 day war started were garbage.

The jew cries out in pain as he strikes you.

Israel not the Jew.

You may be correct:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-libe ... tml#page=1

In particular:



That fits with accounts that had been published earlier:



...and also the assessment of nearly the entire Johnson administration:



And regarding whether the ship was identifiable as American:



So at this point the supposed 'conspiracy to smear Israel' includes the crew of the Liberty, Israel's own foreign minister and Israel's ambassador to the US; the US secretary of state, both the director and deputy director of the NSA, President Johnson's intelligence advisor; and multiple officers and analysts who were reliable enough to be handling red-hot signal intelligence about an ally in wartime.

Also, the Israelis had reportedly protested the presence of the ship in the previous days. If they thought it was an Egyptian ship, then why would they protest to the US about the ship?

Hard to argue that they didn't know?

In other words: "its easy to argue that they did know".

But then you tell us that the Israeli PT boats fired torpedoes at a 455 foot long ship at a range of four miles.

Dude... a "story" of a building IS indeed rougly ten feet. So yes a ship that size is, in a sense, "as big a forty story building". But it is as big a forty story building lying on its SIDE. Not one a standing building that size.

From a small boat the horizon itself is little more than four miles away. So a 455 foot ship four miles away would be just a barely visible smudge on the horizon. A horizon chopped by waves.

They would barely see it all. Much less be able discern identify marks or features on it.

So.. it was hard for them know ...therefore it was easy for them to know? WTF?

Nope, I said less than 20,000 feet, and I was being generous to the Israelis. Six-thousand meters (19,685 feet) was the absolute maximum plausible distance, based on an account in an Israeli-American publication that cited an Israeli Defence Force report on the incident:


https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/qu ... losed-quot (See citation 29)

Furthermore, according to another IDF report, (which I hadn't seen earlier) the first torpedo was fired from 1,000 yards (half a mile).

This Associated Press account, written by a member of one of the torpedo boat crews, also puts the firing range at less than 2,000 yards:

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid= ... 2193&hl=en

A further piece of evidence is that the Liberty's only guns at the time were Borwning M2 machine guns, which have a maximum effective range of 2,000 meters. Both the Israeli and US seamen claim that the Liberty put up an effective defense before the Israeli boats fired, so the distance between them can't have been much farther than that.

Finally, the 40 mph figure I used was the maximum speed that a planing-hull torpedo boat could go on perfectly smooth water. They would have been going a lot slower in the open Mediterranean. If they were going 30 mph (very fast on water "chopped by waves," as you put it), then they had 6 minutes from the time they admitted sighting Liberty at 6,000 meters to the time they admitted firing on her from a range of 1,000 yards.


No, four miles is the distance from which a ship's waterline is visible to an observer standing in a small boat. Liberty's entire superstructure and raised bow were both more than 40 feet above its waterline and would have been visible from more than 7 miles away. The masts and radio antennae would have been visible from at least 15 miles away.


I think you're confusing detection with identification. Both objects would be completely above the horizon when viewed from a distance of 20,000 feet. Whether the object is a building, a ship or a blimp, it's going to be identifiable at that range.

Most navy ships are also equipped with binoculars for identifying other ships. Given that all of the Liberty's distinguishing features were visible from 7 miles out, the torpedo boat crews had 12 to 14 minutes to identify it before they fired.


No kidding. Who shoots at an ally's ship in broad daylight under clear skies from only a half mile away?

The US ship had US flags and the crew were waving to the pilots earlier in the day. There's transcripts from the jets.