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Ussart 2
Ussart 2
Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified
as an American naval vessel."
Admiral Rufus Taylor, Helms' deputy, told his boss, "To me,
the picture thus far presents the distinct possibility that the
Israelis knew that LIBERTY might be their target and attacked
anyway..."
A fine article by David Walsh was released in the NAVAL
INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS on June 3, 2003, (available on the USNI
Web site at <http://www.usni.org>). Walsh's well-documented
article notes that even Clark Clifford, chairman of President
Johnson's, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a great supporter of Israel, called Israeli claims that the attack was
accidental "unbelievable." Clifford told the president, "Something had gone terribly wrong and then it had been covered up.
I never felt the Israelis had made adequate restitution or
explanation for their...unprovoked actions."
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Walsh's article adds,
had said there was "every reason to believe that the USS
LIBERTY was identified, or at least her nationality determined...one hour before the attack." Finally, Walsh notes,
former NSA and CIA director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, based
on his talks with NSA seniors at the time, "flatly rejected"
the Cristol/Israel thesis.
Former Chief of Naval Operations and Joint Chiefs of
Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer has been on the record
for some time as saying the attack on the LIBERTY was deliberate. Among those agreeing with him are then-NSA Director
Marshall Carter, Carter's deputy, Louis Tordella, NSA
"LIBERTY Incident" analyst Walter Deeley, and Hayden Peake,
professor of intelligence history at the Joint Military
Intelligence College and a retired CIA officer.
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control,
Communications and Intelligence John Stenbit told an audience at a conference on "Transforming National Security and
Protecting the Homeland," held April 15 to 17 in Vienna, VA,
that the Israelis had warned the U.S. to move the USS
LIBERTY or they would sink it. His comments appeared in the
Israeli daily JERUSALEM POST and elicited a letter to the
editor in the online section of the magazine. Both the
letter and the article have mysteriously vanished from the
Web site.
In addition to the many Americans noted above, Israelis
and even Russians are adding to the public record on the attack.
Nikolay Cherkashin, who has spent years investigating the
LIBERTY tragedy, quoted a recently published Russian translation of Joseph Daichman's HISTORY OF THE MOSSAD, which states