All about News Directors

Source: The Register-Guard (Original Article)

The June 8 guest viewpoint by Col. Ken Molly suggests that he has been misled by propaganda rather than informed by history. His account of the June 8, 1967, Israeli attack on the USS Liberty is saturated with errors.

Sadly, the Liberty was not supposed to be in the Six Day War combat zone. The House Armed Services Committee’s investigation in 1971 established that five messages ordering the Liberty to stand off were not received in a timely fashion because of flaws in the U.S. military communications system.

The United States had announced to the world at the United Nations that it had no ships within hundreds of miles of the war zone.

Investigations and reports by the U.S. Navy, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and several congressional committees all concluded the attack was a tragic case of mistaken identity. There is no evidence that the attack was made with knowledge that the ship was American. Documentation may be viewed at www.thelibertyincident.com.

On Feb. 27, 1978, Sen. James Abourezk, D-S.D., asked the director of the CIA, “Finally, could I have your judgment and that of the agency you head, based on information acquired by the agency from all sources, that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was deliberate or an honest mistake?” Adm. Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA, replied: “It remains our best judgment that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was not made in malice toward the United States and was a mistake.”

On Jan. 12, 2004, the State Department released Volume XIX of its summary of Foreign Relations of the United States, which stated in part: “After extensive investigation, the CIA and the NSA concluded that there was ‘little doubt’ that the attacking Israeli units ‘failed to identify the Liberty as a U.S. ship before or during the attack’ and that they had mobile pix mistakenly identified the ship as Egyptian.”

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