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So Who’s
Afraid of the Israel Lobby?
By Ray McGovern
10/06/07 "ICH"
-- -- Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat—Conservative,
Liberal. The fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and
palpable. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)
brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying
organization on Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated that time and
again—and not only on Capitol Hill.
Seldom has the Lobby’s power been as clearly demonstrated as in
its ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967,
during the Six Day War:
o Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship
USS Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did
its best to sink it and leave no survivors;
o The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the
attack upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the
commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to
the scene; and
o By that time 34 of the Liberty’s crew had been killed and over
170 wounded.
Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known
this for years. That virtually all of them have kept a
forty-year frightened silence is testament to the widespread
fear of touching this live wire. Even more telling is the fact
that the National Security Agency apparently has destroyed voice
tapes and transcripts heard and seen by many intelligence
analysts, material that shows beyond doubt that the Israelis
knew exactly what they were doing.
The Ugly Truth
But the truth will out—eventually. All it took in this case was
for a courageous journalist (of the endangered species kind) to
listen to the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not
shrinking from naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S.
officials, from the president on down, off the hook for
suppressing—even destroying—damning evidence from intercepted
Israeli communications.
The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely
on interviews with those most intimately involved. A lengthy
article by Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter John
Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on
Oct. 2 titled “New revelations in attack on American spy ship.”
(http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/world/chi-liberty_tuesoct02,0,6015776.story)
To the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year:
“Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn’t tell full story
of deadly 1967 incident.”
Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have
known of the incident and cover-up for a very long time and have
tried to expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for
today. It has proved far easier, though, to get a very
pedestrian Dog-Bites-Man article published than an article with
the importance and explosiveness of this sensitive story.
A Marine Stands Up
On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an
overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield,
Missouri. A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of
Harvard titled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” The
study had originally been commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly.
When the draft arrived, however, shouts of “Leper!” were heard
at the Atlantic. The monthly wasted no time in saying
thanks-but-no-thanks, and the leper-study then wandered in
search of a home, finding none among American publishers.
Eventually the London Review of Books published it in March
2006.
I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of
courage as well as scholarship. That’s what I told the
questioner, adding that I did have two problems with the study:
o First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing
virtually all the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the
Israel Lobby and the so-called “neo-conservatives” running our
policy and armed forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed.
But of equal importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what
the Pentagon now calls the “enduring” military bases in Iraq,
which the White House and Pentagon decided were needed for the
U.S. to dominate that part of the Middle East.
o Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt
made no mention of what I believe to be, if not the most
telling, then perhaps the most sensational proof of the power
the Lobby knows it can exert over our government and Congress.
In sum, in June 1967, after deliberately using fighter-bombers
and torpedo boats to attack the USS Liberty for over two hours
in an attempt to sink it and kill its entire crew, and then
getting the U.S. government, the Navy, and the Congress to cover
up what happened, the Israeli government learned that it
could—literally—get away with murder.
I found myself looking out at 400 blank stares. The USS Liberty?
And so I asked how many in the audience had heard of the attack
on the Liberty on June 8, 1967. Three hands went up; I called on
the gentleman nearest me.
Ramrod straight he stood:
“Sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps,
retired. I am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir.”
Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell
us what happened.
“Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has
been almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening,
Sir.”
You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood
gave us his personal account of what happened to him, his
colleagues, and his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967. He
was a linguist assigned to collect communications intelligence
from the USS Liberty, which was among the ugliest—and most
easily identifiable—ships in the fleet with antennae springing
out in all directions.
Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with
the six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the
Israeli navy and air force on the morning of June 8. After the
air attacks including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three
sixty-ton torpedo boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing
their torpedo tubes at the Liberty’s starboard hull. Lockwood
had been ordered to throw the extremely sensitive cryptological
equipment overboard and had just walked beyond the bulwark
separating the NSA intelligence unit from the rest of the ship
when, he recalled, he sensed a large black object, a tremendous
explosion, and sheet of flame. The torpedo had struck dead
center in the NSA space.
The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness.
Around him were 25 dead colleagues; but he heard moaning. Three
were still alive; one of Lockwood’s shipmates dragged one
survivor up the hatch. Lockwood was able to lift the two others,
one-by-one, onto his shoulder and carry them up through the
hatch. This meant alternatively banging on the hatch for someone
to open it and swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the
water lest he float out to sea through the 39-foot hole made by
the torpedo.
At that Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very
hard—even after almost 40 years.
What Else We Know
John Crewdson’s meticulously documented article, together with
the 57 pages that James Bamford devotes to the incident in his
book “Body of Secrets” and recent confessions by those who
played a role in the cover-up, paint a picture that the
surviving crew of the USS Liberty can only find infuriating. The
evidence, from intercepted communications as well as testimony,
of Israeli deliberate intent is unimpeachable, even though the
Israelis continue to portray the incident as merely a terrible
mistake.
Crewdson refers to U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who was the
Navy lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Admiral Isaac C.
Kidd, named by Admiral John S. McCain (Sen. John McCain’s
father) to “inquire into all the facts and circumstances.” The
fact that they were given only one week to gather evidence and
were forbidden to contact the Israelis screams out “cover-up.”
Captain Boston, now 84, signed a formal declaration on Jan. 8,
2004 in which he described himself as “outraged at the efforts
of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this
attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity.’” Boston continued:
“The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with
certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an
American ship and murder its entire crew...Not only did the
Israelis attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles,
Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had
been launched in an attempt by the crew to save the most
seriously wounded—a war crime...I know from personal
conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon
Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to
conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’
despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
Why the Israelis decided to take the draconian measure of
sinking a ship of the U.S. Navy is open to speculation. One view
is that the Israelis did not want the U.S. to find out they were
massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, and wanted
to deprive the U.S. of the opportunity to argue against such a
move. Another theory: James Bamford, in “Body of Secrets,”
adduces evidence, including reporting from an Israeli journalist
eyewitness and an Israeli military historian, of wholesale
killing of Egyptian prisoners of war at the coastal town of El
Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was patrolling directly opposite
El Arish in international waters but within easy range to pick
up intelligence on what was going on there. And the Israelis
were well aware.
As for the why, well, someone could at least approach the
Israelis involved and ask, no? The important thing here is not
to confuse what is known (the deliberate nature of the Israeli
attack) with the purpose behind it, which remains a matter of
speculation.
Other Indignities
Bowing to intense pressure from the Navy, the White House agreed
to award the Liberty’s skipper, Captain William McGonagle, the
Medal of Honor....but not at the White House, and not by the
president (as is the custom). Rather, the Secretary of the Navy
gave the award at the Washington Navy Yard on the banks of the
acrid Anacostia River. A naval officer involved in the awards
ceremony told one of the Liberty crew, “The government is pretty
jumpy about Israel...the State Department even asked the Israeli
ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle
getting the medal.”
Adding insult to injury, those of the Liberty crew who survived
well enough to call for an independent investigation have been
hit with charges of, you guessed it, anti-Semitism.
Now that some of the truth is emerging more and more, others are
showing more courage in speaking out. In a recent email, an
associate of mine who has followed Middle East affairs for
almost 60 years, shared the following:
“The chief of the intelligence analysts studying the
Arab/Israeli region at the time told me about the intercepted
messages and said very flatly and firmly that the pilots
reported seeing the American flag and repeated their requests
for confirmation of the attack order. Whole platoons of
Americans saw those intercepts. If NSA now says they do not
exist, then someone ordered them destroyed.”
Leaving the destruction of evidence without investigation is an
open invitation to repetition in the future.
As for the larger picture, visiting Israel this past summer I
was constantly told that Egypt forced Israel into war in June
1967. This does not square with the unguarded words of Menachem
Begin in 1982, when he was Israel’s prime minister. Rather he
admitted publicly:
“In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations
in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President]
Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with
ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
Israel had, in fact, prepared well militarily and mounted
provocations against its neighbors, in order to provoke a
response that could be used to justify an expansion of its
borders. Israel’s illegal 40-year control over and confiscation
of land in the occupied territories and U.S. enabling support
(particularly the one-sided support by the current U.S.
administration) go a long way toward explaining why it is that
1.3 billion Muslims “hate us.”
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of
the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a
CIA analyst for 27 years and is now on the Steering Committee of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He spent
some time in Israel and the West Bank this summer.
This article was first posted in Consortiumnews.com
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