Later in a phone interview from his home in Coronado, Calif., Boston said Johnson may have worried the inquiry would hurt him politically with Jewish voters. That was the first air assault, the so-called “Kursa” mission of two Mirage IIIC’s. Johnson then said to press secretary George Christian, “George, if this attack is by the Russians, this means war.”. The “Israel Lobby?” Please. –The imaginary recall by McNamara at 2:35pm—40 minutes before the NSA in Washington learned of the attack, 64 minutes before the President was informed of the attack by Walt Rostow, and several hours before McNamara was even in the Pentagon that day, thus also rendering it impossible for the President and CIA director Richard Helms to have been monitoring the attack while it was in progress and “receiving the radio intercepts in near real time.”. What they recorded at that time, however, was not the MTB’s communications, but those of rescue helicopters sent out to pick up survivors from the stricken ship, as some were reported to be in the water. 1) The radio frequencies of the USS Liberty were jammed by the Israelis, they were monitoring U.S. Sixth Fleet communications, and thus the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship, as documented by the BBC Documentary, “Dead in the Water” (2002). If so, in the four days between the attack and the convening of the Court of Inquiry, there was certainly a lot of log doctoring going on. Through a series of miscalculations, the Israelis then misidentified the Liberty as an enemy vessel at 1:51pm, and the American ship was first … The opinions, facts and any media content in them are presented solely by the authors, and neither The Times of Israel nor its partners assume any responsibility for them. Bamford omits this crucial information, implying that the MTB’s and the fighter aircraft were both launched to attack the Liberty at 12:05pm when no such attack had been ordered, and the Israelis were in fact still uncertain about the vessel’s identity. I wish I could say I was pleased. The sailors on the ship, he said, quickly hoisted another American flag, a much bigger one, to show Israel it was a U.S. vessel. –The fiction that USS Liberty crewmen were machine gunned in their life rafts, when the Liberty OOD who testified at the Court of Inquiry stated “We filed out to our life rafts which were no longer with us because they had been strafed and most of them burned so we knocked most of them over the ship.”. On June 8, 1967, an Israeli torpedo tore through the side of the unarmed American naval vessel USS Liberty, approximately a dozen miles off the Sinai coast. The truth, of course, is that they were not ordered to attack the Liberty at 12:05pm. The USS Liberty Incident of 1967 was a result of Operation Cyanide, a failed false flag attack intended to sink the USS Liberty, a lightly armed US Navy signals intercept ship. As a non-Jewish American who strongly supports Israel, I believe it is very important for Americans not to believe that Israel would knowingly attack an American ship and lie about it. The complex radar, radio, and navigational calculations (much of it guesswork or dead reckoning and done on primitive equipment) are rife with opportunities for errors. Bamford neglects to mention this. The simple truth, known to just about anyone but Chuck Hagel, is that the American State Department, like the British Foreign Office, has always had a strong Arabist bent. –The fiction that the Israelis attacked the Liberty to hide its attack on Syria from the US, which is contradicted by diplomatic cables showing that Israel informed Washington of its intention to do so before the Liberty attack, and that Washington had not objected. Then, at 11:24, a terrific explosion rocked the shores o… The Israelis thus did NOT attack the ship “for an hour and fifteen minutes.” (Some versions, James Bamford’s, for example, have the attack lasting over two hours—it depends on the conspiracy theorist, I guess) The combined air attacks lasted all of about nine minutes (1:58—2:02pm + 2:06—2:11 pm), and the following naval attack about 3-4 minutes (2:31—2:35 pm).