On June 8th 1967 the United States Navy intelligence ship the U.S.S. Liberty
was attacked in international waters by aircraft and vessels belonging
to Israel. Thirty-four sailors, Marines and civilians were killed in the
attack. The deliberate Israeli air and sea onslaught sought to sink the
clearly identified intelligence gathering ship and kill all its crew.
It was in truth the worst attack ever carried out on a U.S. Naval vessel
in peace time. In addition to the death toll, 171 more of the crew were
wounded in the two-hour assault, which was clearly intended to destroy
the intelligence gathering vessel operating in international waters
collecting information on the ongoing fighting between Israel and its
Arab neighbors. The Israelis, whose planes had their Star of David
markings covered up so Egypt could be blamed, attacked the ship
repeatedly from the air and with torpedo boats from the sea. When one
Israeli pilot hesitated, refusing to attack what was clearly an American
ship, he was instructed to proceed anyway.
Weiß das heute noch wer? Wohl kaum:
The cover-up of the attack began immediately. The Liberty crew was sworn to secrecy over the incident, as were the Naval dockyard workers in Malta, and even the men of the U.S.S. Davis, which had assisted the badly damaged Liberty
to port were ordered to be silent. A hastily convened and conducted
court of inquiry ordered by Admiral John McCain interviewed only a few
crewmen and did not seek to determine what had actually happened,
instead, acting under orders from Washington, it moved quickly to
declare the attack a case of mistaken identity. The inquiry’s senior
legal counsel Captain Ward Boston, who subsequently declared the attack to be
a “deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire
crew,” also revealed that Admiral Isaac Kidd, who presided over the
inquiry, had told him that “President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara ordered him [Kidd] to conclude that the attack
was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the
contrary.” The court’s findings were rewritten and sections relating to
Israeli war crimes, to include the machine gunning of life rafts, were
excised.
Following
in his father’s footsteps, Senator John McCain of Arizona has used his
position on the Senate Armed Services Committee to effectively block any
reconvening of a board of inquiry to reexamine the evidence.
Nett, was man so en passant über einen »Kriegshelden« so zu lesen bekommt ...
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen