A new "must read" book by LBJ scholar Phil Nelson on Lyndon Johnson and the USS Liberty murders of June 8, 1967

Web Link for new book: https://www.amazon.com/Remember-Liberty-Almost-Sunk-Treason/dp/1634241088/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495592163&sr=8-1&keywords=Remember+the+Liberty%3A+Almost+Sunk+by+Treason+on+the+High+Seas%2C

A new must read book from Lyndon Johnson scholar Phil Nelson on LBJ and the USS Liberty murders. On sale now at Amazon, pre-order now for publication date of June 8, 2017, which happens to be the 50^th anniversary of the LBJ-Israeli attack on the USS Liberty

Book is titled: Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas by Phil Nelson, published by Trine Day

A “heads up” from:

Robert Morrow ….. 512-306-1510

 

In the annals of US military history, there are no doubt many unsolved and perplexing mysteries, but few could compare to the fate of the US Navy spy ship that was mercilessly attacked by one of its closest allies intentionally and without warning. One of the reasons it is still a mystery is because it is also the only peacetime attack on a US naval vessel that, to this day, has never been investigated by the Congress of the United States.

The USS Liberty was a 455-foot, 10,150-ton electronic intercept spy ship, originally a standard-design Victory Ship--a more evolved version of the World War II Liberty Ships--which were built as supply ships, not intended for direct fighting. The Liberty had been converted to an Auxiliary Technical Research Ship (AGTR), known colloquially as a "spy ship," first deployed in 1965; its top speed was only 18 knots.

Yet the Liberty's fate, one of the most enigmatic, unresolved military mysteries of all time, is, paradoxically at its core, quite clear-cut and undisputed. The basic facts generally accepted by all are that, on the fourth day of the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors (Egypt, Syria and Jordan), the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) savagely attacked the U.S. spy ship, the USS Liberty.

On the warm, sunny-bright day of June 8, 1967, starting at about 6:00 a.m., at least twelve, possibly thirteen Israeli aircraft of different types began surveilling the Liberty, some of which were only 1,000 feet or less in altitude, apparently to photograph and "map" her for later targeting purposes. The precision of the later attack could only have been accomplished through such pre-planning, specifically identifying the priority targets, starting with the gun mounts to render the ship defenseless, followed by all of the forty-five different radio antennae and related transmitting equipment. . Beginning just before 2:00 p.m., three unmarked French-built Mirage III-C swept-wing fighter jets, without warning, settled into a triangular formation, aimed straight at the Liberty and proceeded to bore down on the ship in a fast low-level attack that began with rockets targeted at the four gun mounts and heat-seeking missiles aimed at the communications gear, with their warmed transmitters. . When the attack was over, thirty-four men were dead and one hundred seventy-four were injured to varying degrees, some near death.

Unlike all other books ever written about the tragic attack - none of which provide a satisfactory explanation of what really caused it - Remember the Liberty! examines it in complete context of how it was positioned there by Johnson himself, for the very purpose of being attacked, and sunk, with every one of the 294 men on board going to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. His purpose was to use that event - while blaming Egyptian President Gamal Nasser for the attack - as a pretext for joining Israel in the war, even at the risk of igniting World War III with the Soviet Union. This book provides the only realistic explanation for why Lyndon Johnson did what he did, and why, in the heat of battle, he intervened with his Navy officers who were determined to rescue the Liberty and ordered them to recall the squadrons of fighter jets they had already dispatched - twice, 90 minutes apart - for that purpose.

When the heroic crew saved the ship from sinking, it stopped Johnson's plan to join Israel in the war and thereby saved the world from certain nuclear conflagration. It also prevented his strategy of entering what he felt would be a "popular war" (unlike his other one in Vietnam) in order to give him a better chance to be reelected president the following year. When that failed to materialize, so did his reelection campaign; ten months later he was forced to announce his decision to not re-run for the office that he had always considered his destiny.

 

Review

[Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas H.] Moorer is right in saying that, if Americans were told the truth about what happened on June 8, 1967, they might be more discriminating in seeing through Israel's rhetoric and objectives.  Moorer insisted that we owe no less to the brave men of the USS Liberty, but also to every man and woman who is asked to wear the uniform of the United States.  And he is right about that too.

This book makes a huge contribution toward those worthy ends.

~ Ray McGovern, former CIA Analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

Read more

From the Author

The story of the attack on the USS Liberty is one of the most explosive and hidden secrets in U.S. history -- one that has never been previously told -- because the truth was too incriminating for the then-president, Lyndon B. Johnson.  The facts were withheld and replaced with lies which he created to hide his own treasonous conduct. No previous book on the subject has come close to providing a realistic explanation of  how it could occur because none has ever documented the fact that he was the primary instigator of that attack, and even the larger plan for Israel to attack its neighbors in what became the Six Day War. The veil of secrecy he designed has lasted fifty years and this book is the first of its kind to remove it.

 

After the botched plan to sink the Liberty was executed, thanks to its heroic crew, the ship refused to sink even after being hit by a torpedo, leading the attack to be cancelled and a massive cover-up invoked. Including severe threats for the crew members to "keep their lips sealed." That cover-up is barely still in place, and has now been completely exposed.

 

Remember the Liberty! examines the over-arching, larger story behind the attack on the ship and how Johnson had designed it as another false flag" operation intended to secure him another landslide election win the following year, just like he had done in 1964 with another false flag operation -- the faked "attack" by North Vietnam gunboats on two U.S. Navy destroyers at the Gulf of Tonkin. Much of the book was written by three of the survivors of the attack.   Finally, the truth is being told as never before and the real story revealed.

 

Not Remembering the USS Liberty by Ray McGovern

May 21, 2017

 From Consortium News

Desperately seeking some praise, President Trump surely won’t remind Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu about the USS Liberty, which Israel nearly sank a half century ago killing 34 sailors, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern recalls.

By Ray McGovern

It is safe to assume that when President Donald Trump lands in Israel Monday, he will not have been briefed on the irrefutable evidence that, nearly 50 years ago – on June 8, 1967 – Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in international waters, killing 34 U.S. sailors and wounding more than 170 other crew. All of Trump’s predecessors – Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – have refused to address the ugly reality and/or covered up the attack on the Liberty.

 

USS Liberty (AGTR-5) receives assistance from units of the Sixth Fleet, after she was attacked and seriously damaged by Israeli forces off the Sinai Peninsula on June 8, 1967. (US Navy photo)

It is not too late for someone to fill Trump in on this shameful episode, on the chance he may wish to show more courage than former presidents and warn the Israelis that this kind of thing will not be tolerated while he is president.

A new book by Philip Nelson titled: Remember the Liberty: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas, is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand what actually happened to the Liberty and to contemplate the implications.

As I wrote in the book’s Foreword: Even today, scandalously few Americans have heard of the deliberate Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, because the cowardly U.S. political, military, and media establishments have managed to hide what happened.  No one “important” wanted to challenge Israel’s lame “oops-mistake” excuse.  Intercepted Israeli communications show beyond doubt it was no “mistake.”

Chief Petty Officer J.Q. “Tony” Hart, who monitored conversations between then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Sixth Fleet Carrier Division Commander Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, reported McNamara’s instructive reply to Geis, who had protested the order to recall the U.S. warplanes on their way to engage those attacking the Liberty. McNamara: “President Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally (sic) over a few sailors.”

The late Adm. Thomas Moorer after interviewing the commanders of the U.S. aircraft carriers America and Saratoga confirmed that McNamara ordered the aircraft back to their carriers. Moorer called it “the most disgraceful act I witnessed in my entire military career.”

Thanks to this book, those who care about such things can learn what actually happened 50 years ago:

(1) On June 8, 1967, Israel attempted to sink the US Navy intelligence collection ship USS Liberty and leave no survivors. The attack came by aircraft and torpedo boat, in full daylight in international waters during the Six-Day Israeli-Arab War;

(2) The U.S. cover-up taught the Israelis that they could literally get away with murder; they killed 34 U.S. sailors (and wounded more than 170 others); and

(3) As part of an unconscionable government cover-up, the Navy threatened to court martial and imprison any survivor who so much as told his wife what had actually happened. (This, incidentally, put steroids to the PTSD suffered by many of the survivors.)

One Stab at Truth

The only investigation worth the name was led by Adm. Moorer, who had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He led a blue-ribbon, independent commission to examine what happened to the Liberty. Among the findings announced by the commission on October 2003:

 

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

“…Unmarked Israeli aircraft dropped napalm canisters on the USS Liberty bridge, and fired 30mm cannon and rockets into the ship; survivors estimate 30 or more sorties were flown over the ship by a minimum of 12 attacking Israeli planes. …

“…The torpedo boat attack involved not only the firing of torpedoes, but machine-gunning of Liberty’s firefighters and stretcher-bearers. … The Israeli torpedo boats later returned to machine-gun at close range three of the Liberty’s life rafts that had been lowered into the water by survivors to rescue the most seriously wounded.”

Shortly before he died in February 2004, Adm. Moorer strongly appealed for the truth to be brought out and pointed directly at what he saw as the main obstacle: “I’ve never seen a President … stand up to Israel. … If the American people understood what a grip these people have on our government, they would rise up in arms.” [As quoted by Richard Curtiss in A Changing Image: American Perception of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.]

Echoing Moorer, former U.S. Ambassador Edward Peck, who served many years in the Middle East, condemned Washington’s attitude toward Israel as “obsequious, unctuous subservience … at the cost of the lives and morale of our own service members and their families.”

And the Six-Day War? Most Americans believe the Israelis were forced to defend against a military threat from Egypt. Not so, admitted former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin 35 years ago: “In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” [The New York Times quoting an August 1982 Begin speech.]

Adm. Moorer kept asking why our government continues to subordinate American interests to those of Israel. It is THE question.

The War in Syria

Fast forward to the catastrophe that is now Syria. U.S. policy support for illusory “moderate rebels” there – including false-flag chemical attacks blamed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – can only be fully understood against the mirror of U.S. acquiescence to Israeli objectives.

 

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ross fires a tomahawk land attack missile from the Mediterranean Sea into Syria, April 7, 2017. (Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Robert S. Price)

New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief in 2013, Jodi Rudoren, received an unusually candid response when she asked senior Israeli officials about Israel’s preferred outcome in Syria. In a New York Times article on September 6, 2013, titled “Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria,” Rudoren reported the Israeli view that the best outcome for Syria’s civil war was no outcome:

“For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a victory by Mr. Assad’s government and his Iranian backers or a strengthening of rebel groups, increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.

“‘This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie,’ said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. ‘Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.’”

Obama may have read or been briefed on Rudoren’s article. In any event, last year he told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg how proud he is at having resisted strong pressure from virtually all his advisors to fire cruise missiles on Syria in September 2013. Instead, Obama chose to take advantage of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to get the Syrians to surrender their chemical weapons for destruction, verified by the U.N., aboard a U.S. ship configured for such destruction. President Trump, in contrast, chose to go with his “mad-dog” advisors. It is not yet clear whether he was successfully mousetrapped, or whether he saw the April 4 chemical incident in Syria as an opportunity to “retaliate,” and get a bump in popularity.

There are wider ramifications of rank dishonesty and cover-up, at which Establishment Washington excels. Have we not seen this movie before?  Think Iraq. Once again, the “intelligence” is being “fixed.”

Back to the Liberty, Adm. Moorer is right in saying that, if Americans were told the truth about what happened on June 8, 1967, they might be more discriminating in seeing through Israel’s rhetoric and objectives. Moorer insisted that we owe no less to brave men of the USS Liberty, but also to every man and woman who is asked to wear the uniform of the United States. And he is right about that too.

This book makes a huge contribution toward those worthy ends.

[For more on this topic, see “Navy Vet Honored, Foiled Israeli Attack”; “Still Waiting for USS Liberty’s Truth”; “A USS Liberty’s Hero’s Passing”]

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  He served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, and was “on duty” when the USS Liberty was attacked.