"The Day Israel Attacked America" Al-Jazeera.com

"Earlier this year, I acquired a copy of the audiotape of the attack as it had unfolded, the real time conversations between Israeli Air Force pilots and their controllers back at base. It had never been broadcast before." Richard Belfield speaking of his Al-Jazeera production.

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I quote below from my Athenaeum post written in 2010 and entitled "What I know About the USS Liberty.

It appears that Belfield, an Englishman,  (chapeau) has obtained through FOIA the tapes of the in flight conversations among the Israelis concerning the strikes on USS Liberty.  I wrote in my post quoted below of having read transcripts in the Spring 0f 1968 that were of exactly the same material.  It seems likely that this is the same material now released by NSA.   My wife has a contemporary memory of me mentioning the existence of this material. 

pl

 "Dear Jim

I was a student in the Military Intelligence Officer Advanced Course at Ft. Holabird, Maryland (Baltimore) in 1967-1968.  The course lasted about ten months.  We students were required to take several electives from a group offered and I took a course in Cryptology.  This was taught by people from the NSA School at nearby Ft. Meade.    This course was taught in the winter or early spring of 1967-1968.  There were several sub-courses, one of which had to do with voice intercepts.  In the course of this, the instructor introduced a booklet produced at Ft. Meade as material for the course.  It contained various course materials.  Among them were transcripts of the translated intercepts of radio conversations between the Israeli strike commander and his base before and during the attacks on USS Liberty.  The instructor, a retired cryptologic warrant officer or NCO identified the transcript as being of the Liberty incident.  It was also so marked in the booklet.

In the transcript, the flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship in view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that it was clearly marked with the US flag.  I think he said that the ship was displaying the US flag on an upper deck, but my memory of that might be inexact.  He asked for confirmation of his orders to attack the ship and seemed reluctant (understandably) to attack the ship.  He asked more than once and was told to carry out his orders and attack the ship.

There was some further discussion of damage to the ship.

That is all I remember."   pl

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2014/10/day-israel-attacked-america-20141028144946266462.html

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/uss-liberty/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JRgXie2teo 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40111.htm 

 

Comments

[Walrus]

Thank you Col. Lang. Now watch who crawls out from under the rocks to denounce the film.

[Haralambos]

Col.,
I think I recall reading of this incident more than once over the years: http://consortiumnews.com/2014/08/17/a-uss-libertys-heros-passing/ I believe Ray McGovern puts up an annual piece. This remembers one of the heroes and mentions you rather prominently in the follow-up comments.

[John Adamson]

In 1971-72 I attended the University Of Maryland at Baltimore County along with a fellow veteran, Mark Kram.

Somehow one of our conversations turned to the Liberty. I was dumbfounded when Mark said, "I was on the Liberty. That was a deliberate attack - not an accident."

I'll never forget the conversation because it was like a "loss of innocence" for me.
Up to that time I bought government propaganda without a thought.

After that conversation, I started thinking.

[Cee]

Col. Lang,

Thank you for posting this. Someone told me that it was going to be on Al Jazeera last night. It wasn't.

James Baker was the only person on all of the Sunday programs who took Israel to task for their ungracious attitude and for all they have done to harm this nation.

And in case you missed this threat from Netanyahu

" “When there are pressures on Israel to concede its security, the easiest thing to do is to concede. You get a round of applause, ceremonies on grassy knolls, and then come the missiles and the tunnels.”

It reminds me of the claims that Israel played a role in the assassination of JFK which you can also find below

Bush & Obama? Israeli assassinations and US Presidents

By Alison Weir
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30362.htm

[BabelFish]

As an old Liberty Ship, it is a miracle she didn't break her back during the attack. Being an old Navy Petty Officer, this whole thing always makes me both angry and sad. I believe the Navy has never doubted the intentional nature of the attacks. A 2009 sliver star was awarded to one of the petty officers stated that Israel was the attacker.

[Farooq]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JRgXie2teo

Looks like someone has uploaded it on Youtube. Might get taken down though.

[confusedponderer]

The article with video can be found here:

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2014/10/day-israel-attacked-america-20141028144946266462.html

[John Measor]

There is currently a copy of the AJE documentary here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JRgXie2teo

[Cee]

All,

I needed to go off the rails of the topic of this USS Liberty to add this.

I'm starting to believe more that I had never taken seriously.

http://mycatbirdseat.com/2014/10/jfk-the-zionist-manifold-cover-up/

Only the thesis incriminating Israel can solve these contradictions. Israel had a vital interest in eliminating Kennedy. The President was determined to prevent Israel from achieving its goal of a nuclear arsenal, and wrote Prime Minister David ben Gurion that “this Government’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized”[11] if he didn’t comply with his demand of immediate international inspection of the Dimona complex. Ben Gurion retired on the day he received Kennedy’s letter, dated June 15, 1963, which may be interpreted as a dive into the deep underworld of secret operations. Kennedy was also committed to the right of return for the nearly 800,000 Palestinian refugees expelled from their neighborhoods and villages in 1947-48, that is, for the implementation of 1948 UN Resolution 194. For these two reasons at least (and there were more, such as the Kennedy’s effort to restrict the American Zionist Council, the forerunner of AIPAC, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938), the Zionists wished Kennedy dead. So did Johnson.

[G. I. Hazeltine]

A more moving portrayal of the events than others, and a much much more effective explanation of the cover up. But the 'Why?' of the attack still seems unexplained, convincingly, it seems to me.

[Tidewater]

Tidewater to All,

There is something that I don't understand. I am aware of some of the reasons given for the attack on the Liberty. But at the date of the attack British GCHQ was running the listening station at Mount Troodos on Cyprus. This station is at an old, 19th century, British army post in a resort area. Nearby Mount Olympus--the Cyprus Olympus where there is a radar station -- is at 6,400 feet. The Mount Troodos listening post covered then and covers now all of the middle-east, including eastern Libya, and reaches out all the way to the Kafkas--the Caucasus. Also, at that time the United States Army was running Kagnew station at Asmara, which is, of course, in the Horn of Africa and some fifteen degrees above the equator. This listening post was at 7,300 feet; its big ears reached all the way to soviet missile testing grounds in central Asia. There were more than four thousand Americans stationed at Kagnew. These stations were fabulous assets and as the Telegraph now informs us the GCHQ station at Ayios Nicolaos is busy as a bee scooping up information from undersea cables and microwave transmissions of landlines in the eastern Mediterranean. (Yay!) My question is: what capability did the Liberty have that these other stations did not have? Surely Mount Troodos and Kagnew would have monitored the entire attack. They would have everything that was going on in the fighting that was put out there in the ether, would they not? So what was the point? I believe it to have been deliberate. But what was the gain? What did Liberty have?

[Oofda]

Colonel,
Thanks for this piece and keeping the IDF's attack on LIBERTY in people's minds, especially with the Likudniks and Bibi in charge in Israel.

[William R. Cumming]

Actually I would argue Israel attacks America daily with its apocalyptic FP policies.

[turcopolier]

Tidewater

It has been my understanding that the NSG positions on the ship were collecting Egyptian ground tactical voice communications. IMO Kagnew as a strategic collector aimed at the USSR would have no capability against these comms. I have no idea about the Cyprus station. pl

[AEL]

The motivation for the attack is obvious. The Israeli's intended to invade Syria and were busy swinging their armor from Egypt up north. The USS Liberty was in a position that could listen to Israeli operations.

If the Americans knew of the Israeli intentions there was a good chance that they would force a conclusion to the war before Israel could take a whack at the Golan.

[sceptic]

All-

I have always wondered if (and secretly hoped)that the Israeli submarine Dakar was sunk covertly by the USN in response to the attack on the Liberty. Any thoughts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INS_Dakar

[turcopolier]

All
The Israel apologists are now claiming that NSA mis-translated the Hebrew plain text voices in the tapes.

[rjj]

BM (before MEMRI) - see what happens when you don't have "reliable" translators?

[rjj]

edit: {{{BM before MEMRI}}} need irony brackets {{{ }}}

[Origin]

All,

Several high-up U.S. persons were charged with spying for Israel in the documentary. Do any of you members of the Committee have any web links or other corroborating information for the allegations?

[Fred]

Sceptic.
No. I believe we've beaten that dead horse a few times on this blog.

[Imagine]

I would remind the committee that Israel has developed Jericho III ICBMs with a nominal range of 11,500 km
http://english.pravda.ru/news/world/03-11-2011/119521-israel_jericho-0/#.VFhHG9_I12E
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(missile)#Jericho_III
http://aviationweek.com/awin/israel-tests-enhanced-ballistic-missile
(although one Israeli engineer correctly observed "once you can boost something into orbit, you can hit anywhere").
The US homeland ABM capability is still a bad joke http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182175-the-united-states-missile-defense-system-will-never-work-which-is-why-were-spending-more-money-on-it , although we have recently added blimps to give warning to Washington against missiles http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/01/us-usa-blimps-raytheon-idUSBRE91018320130201 . Assuming 2.5 miles/sec reentry speed and a 350-mile sensing radius, the blimps will give a useful...140 seconds of warning.

Much more interesting is the question, Why would Israel want to build a nuke-MIRV missile capable of hitting Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, and Washington? Cui bono?

[Ken Halliwell]

Near the beginning of the film, the film's narrator states, in effect, that the recording was made by the IDF. The source for the physical tape (or a copy thereof) was not cited. (At some point, the film may cite the NSA recording of the SAR helicopters that arrived at the end of the torpedo boat attack -- I don't recall at this writing.)

The brief "sound bite" translations, presented in the film, mirror several previous translations of the IDF recording; except that other translated versions contain the word "probably" before the word "American."

According to other translations, the "sound bite" presented near the beginning of the film occurs at 1413, near the end of the air attack, not before or at the beginning of the air attack, as the film leads one to believe. Again, the word "probably" appears before the word "American."

I have no Hebrew language skills; so, I cannot say whether or not the "sound bites" in the film were accurately or fully translated.

Here's a related essay that may be of interest:
https://sites.google.com/site/usslibertyinquiry/essay28

[turcopolier]

Ken

Should I take the post down? pl

[Ken Halliwell]

I'd say let it stand. As TJ once wrote: “We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”