[Abraham]

Originally Posted by August

What strikes me as hard to believe with the intentional attack theory is all the firepower the Israelis are supposed to have used and they still couldn't sink the ship. Machine gunning the lifeboats and they still left enough of the crew alive to work the ship out of the danger zone.

Now i'm no expert, but it seems to me that if they really intended to sink the ship and murder the survivor/witnesses, then the Israelis did a strikingly lousy job of it.

A couple other things i'm wondering about:

A 6 hour timelag between recon and attack. Now a ship can cover a lot of distance in 6 hours, and i wonder, regardless of what the recon had identified her as, how the attacking planes knew it was the same vessel.

The second attack, (third if you want to count the boats seperate) an hour later was apparently called off at the last second because of a threat that if, if the attacks were intentional, had existed for at least 2 and a half hours.

What i do know is that flying a neutral flag is an old deception in naval warfare, nobody in Washington told the Isrealis that the Liberty was going to be there and even today friendly fire incidents are a fact of war.

I've read the book. I found it interesting, but in many points inaccurate and biased towards Israel. It ends with a highly speculative conspiracy theory.
August touches some good points here.

The authoritive study on the Six Day War, "Six Days of War", by Michael Oren (Oxford University Press 2002) gives the following further info:
1. Egypth had declared a 100 miles off limits zone for neutral shipping.
2. The US government had not reacted on repeated Israeli requests to provide them with a naval liason to contact the 6th Fleet if necessairy, because Johnson considered that too much involvment.
3. Rabin (Israeli Chief of Staff) had summoned the US naval attaché and told him that Israel would defend it's coast by all means possible and requested that the US should acknowledge or remove all ships.
4. Rabin had given a standing order that any inidentified ships in the war area should be sunk.
5. The Israeli navy was - at that time - badly equipped and performed poorly during the Six Day War.
6. The US 6th Fleet stayed at least 240 miles off the coast.
7. The JCS had sent 5 cables ordering the USS Liberty 100 miles off coast, but due to the overloaded navy communication system (there was a war going on in Vietnam!) and human error these orders were first routed to the Navy headquarters in the Phillipines and only reached the ship when it was far too late.
8. Consequently the USS Liberty was still sailing at 5 kts 13 miles off the Sinai coast between Port Said and El Arish, an area rarely used by merchant shipping, on June 8th, when it was spotted at 05:55 by an Israeli reconaissance flight.
9. Israeli Navy Headquarters first marked the position of the USS Liberty with a red marker ("unidentified") but after research in Jane's Fighting Ships with a green marker ("neutral").
10. In accordance with SOP's the navy duty officer removed at 11:00 the green marker (at the end of his shift) because it was too old and not longer considered accurate. The Israeli navy thought the USS Liberty had moved away.
11. Around 11:25 there was a huge series of explosions at El Arish - which was actually an ammunition dump igniting - that was reported as shelling from sea (Egypth had shelled the coast near El Arish on June 7th).
A naval observer with the army spotted "two ships" off the coast.
12. Rabin reiterated his standing order to sink any unidentified ships but cautionned because Russian ships were reportedly operating nearby.
13. Since no Israeli aircraft were available the navy was requested to intercede.
14. Around the same time the USS Liberty reached the eastern limit of its patrol and turned back in the direction of Port Said.
15. Naval headquarters in Haifa did not respond to the order of the General Staf for half an hour after which a rebuke containing the mistake was sent: "The coast isbeing shelled and you - the navy - have done nothing".
16. Around noon the navy dispatched three torpedo boats to find and destroy the "enemy".
17. Since the MTB's did not expect to overtake the "enemy", naval headquarters contacted the air force, which diverted 2 Mirages from a routine patrol over the Sinai. The planes were cleared to attack if the ship was not Israeli.
18. At 13:57 this attack started.
After that things went completely out of control. The air force competited with the navy about the kill. The air force planes were not equipped to attack a ship. There were at certain levels of command still doubts about the identity of the ship etc.
During a strafing run an air force pilot made a positive identification and broke off the attack.
Since Dayan was with the army at Hebron and the chief of the air force, Motta Hod, was en route from a briefing Rabin took personal command of the air force and navy operations. He sent two helicopters to help the crew of the USS Liberty and at 14:20 ordered the torpedo boats to remain at a distance (without furter explanation).
The torpedo boats nevertheless arrived on the scene at 14:44, made a completely wrong identification ("Egypthian supply vessel"), tried to signal the USS Liberty and after that failed, attacked. The attack was as lousy as the identification. The air force helicopters were told that the ship was Egypthian after all. Only when the torpedo boats were convinced of their mistake and positively identified the ship, they broke off the attack.
About two hours later Johnson got a cable that the USS Liberty was attacked "60-100 miles north of Egypth". He first assumed that the Soviets had attacked... Again two hoiurs later the Israeli embassy in Washington confirmed the Israeli "mistaken action".

In my opinion it was a screw up from the US and the Israeli's and both had lots of reasons to downplay their own mistakes. What was the ship doing without adequate protection so close to the coast? Why were the cables to withdraw recieved too late? Why was there no naval liason between the US and Israel established? are some of the nasty questions for the Americans. The incompetence and trigger-happiness of the Israeli navy is clear to everyone.

One thing is certain to me: although Israeli units did their best to sink the USS Liberty, there was no intention from the Israeli command to attack the american vessel for any sinister reason. It seems that the mission of the USS Liberty was a mistake by itself - unless the ship was there to relay secret communications from US submarines operating off the Egypthian coast (operation "Frontlet 615"), which was an operation that could not be revealed at that time for political reasons.