Lieberman pulls "Israel" card on Dean......

PornoDoggy · 09-10-2003

Quote:

USS liberty - even if wasn't accident like claimed and being (for some hulicinagenic reason) a deliberate attack of some strange sort - is (imho) an dwarfish issue compared to the events (and immnse life loss) of those days.

First of all, perhaps by some grand geopolitcal standard the 35 sailors on the Liberty are insignificant. To THIS veteran of the U. S. Navy, at least, they remain every bit as important as the 2,000 on the Arizona or the 17 on the Cole. I firmly believe the attack was deliberate, and not based on "hulicinagenic reason[ing]" but instead on protecting vital national secrets. And MAYBE the air attack was an accident - the subsequent WAVES of attacks by Israeli gunboats makes that just about impossible.

I believe that the treatment of those men and the survivors by the U.S. Government was despicable, and that the response by the Israeli government has been most unsatisfactory. I don't think the Liberty is a "defining" issue in the relationship of the two countries, nor should it be.

The USS Liberty was an intelligence ship monitoring battlefield communications during the '67 war. Of particular interest to the U.S. were Egyptian & Syrian tactics and procedures, since the equipment they were using mirrorred what U.S./NATO forces would face in the event of a confrontation in Europe. We were also monitoring for evidence of Soviet personnel involved in combat. In all probability we were feeding much of that information we obtained to Israel (in the same way we provided Intel to Saddam when he fought the Iranians); maybe not all of it, maybe not as quickly as was desired. HOWEVER ...

Obviously, it was not only Arab League communications we were capturing, monitoring, and interpreting. The early days of the '67 war did not go well for Israel.

I tend to think the attack on the Liberty was designed to cripple U.S. ability to pre-detect certain strategies/weapons choices that the Israeli's thought might have to be made/deployed.

It is as close as I come to buying into wild conspiracy theories.