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Originally Posted by PeriscopeDepth
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Originally Posted by Lurchi
The ship was well known before and the only reason for the attack i can imagine is that they didn't want the U.S. to gain information about their tactics ...
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Then they probably shouldn't be training together all the time and sharing intelligence, either. 
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The fact that countries are allied doesn't mean they share all their intelligence. You are naive when you believe a country gives all information to another - especially not in wartime.
Now you seem to be of a different opinion so i would like to ask you why the U.S. sent SR-71s over the Negev to get information about the Israeli Nuclear program for example? Why U.S. ships shadowed new german submarines of Type 212A during tests in norwegian waters?
This is not unusual at all ... and i believe it is true what
jimbuna said:
The U.S. were not aware of the extent and targets of the israeli operation especially not of those aimed at the Golan - that's why they probably sent the Liberty.
And the Liberty was indeed almost unarmed: 4 50cal machine guns in open mounts are pretty useless against fast jet-fighters or torpedo boats. The return fire must have been pretty weak and according to crew members they were silenced pretty soon.
The Liberty even wore her unique designation which easily identified her as an U.S. ship and which were much different in style from soviet ships. A quick encounter between friendly forces can always happen - but this was a massacre, partly at point-blank range. Seems that the americans knew pretty soon who attacked them ...
Israel is very sensitive in respect to intelligence gathering:
Recently an F-16 fired warning shots above the reconnaissance ship "Alster" which is very similar to the Liberty in it's mission. First it was said that this incident happened in israeli waters - later it became clear that this ship was 100 km away from the lebanese coast.