Black Box Recorder

9.7.03

More on the USS Liberty attack

Ha'aretz runs an article on newly released memos that supposedly show that Israel's 1967 assault against the USS Liberty was a "tragic accident".

These new memos, however, raise more questions than they answer. Why were they released now? They supposedly record the conversations between Israeli helicopter pilots and a base in Israel, but they contain nothing sensitive. Why were they kept secret for 36 years?

Then there's this:

After the Liberty was bombed by both the Israel Air Force and the Israel Navy, the two helicopter pilots were summoned from their base to assess the damage and evaluate the possibility of rescuing the surviving crew
members... The spy plane also recorded the orders radioed to the pilots by their supervisor at Hatzor Base, which instructed them to search for Egyptian survivors from the "Egyptian warship" that had just been bombed - thus supporting Israel's claim that it had believed the ship was Egyptian when it ordered it attacked. "Pay attention. The ship is now identified as Egyptian," the pilots were told.[emphasis added]

What was the Liberty identified as before, if not Egyptian? Alternately, why would Hazor base have to tell the pilots that it was an Egyptian ship - if they were sent out after the bombing? Wouldn't they have been briefed before leaving?

More:

Only at 3:07 were the pilots first informed that the ship might not have been Egyptian at all: Hatzor told them that if they found Arabic-speaking survivors, they should be taken to El-Arish, but if they found English-speaking survivors, they should be taken to Lod.

How would Hazor have known before the pilots - who were on the scene, unlike the analysts at Hazor - that the Liberty "might not have been Egyptian"? Where did this information come from?

But, of course, we know what the real motivations are of people who ask these kinds of questions: