Arabs find it difficult to forget the June War, which will have taken place exactly 34 years ago next month. Truth be told, there are a lot of Americans around who also find it equally difficult to forget that war — or at least to forget one ruthless atrocity in it, committed calculatedly and deliberately by Israel, that resulted in the slaughter of 34 American servicemen and the wounding of 171.
If you guessed we’re talking here about the attack on the American ship, the Liberty, that at the time, with an election year coming up, everyone in the weak-kneed House and Senate — whose members did not want to offend pro-Israel groups, or lose their campaign contributions — swept under the rug, you would be right.
“The Israelis got away with cold-blooded, premeditated murder of Americans on June 8, 1967,” said Phillip F. Tourney, president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association, in July 2000. “There is widespread cynicism that our elected officials will not go up against the powerful Israeli lobby out of fear ... This coverup must be investigated, now.”
Well, the attack on the Liberty is now fully investigated, not on an official government level — the Israeli lobby is still around, and still wields a lot of influence — but by the nationally known investigative reporter, James Bamford, whose previous book on the National Security Agency, “The Puzzle Palace”, became a best-seller when it was released in 1982. (What people do not know about the NSA is that, with a staff of 38,000, it dwarfs the CIA in budget, manpower and influence, and is considered the largest, most secretive and powerful intelligence agency in the world.)
In Bamford’s new book, “Body of Secrets”, issued last week, and published by Random House, we find the most revealing, no-holds barred account to date of what happened to the Liberty and its crew. During his four years of research, Bamford was able to obtain thousands of NSA documents and to interview dozens of NSA officials who had unique access to secret tapes and other highly classified evidence, all of whom, he says, were “virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was deliberate.”
The Liberty, you may recall, was a slow, highly armed eavesdropping intelligence ship that was anchored a few miles off the Sinai coast town of Al-Arish, monitoring the goings-on of the June War for the NSA when it was attacked from the air and sea by Israeli planes and torpedo boats on June 8. Fearing what the Liberty might have intercepted, the Israeli military command ordered it destroyed and sunk, leaving no survivors. After the attack, they claimed it was all done in error, since they “mistook” the Liberty for an Egyptian ship. Most US investigations at the time, including those conducted by the NSA itself, took the path of least resistance, the one onto which they were pushed by Lyndon Johnson’s White House, and accepted “the mistake” theory.
Hogwash, says Bamford.
The Liberty, which sat within eyeshot of Al-Arish, with the town’s minaret visible to the naked eye, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, “had suddenly trespassed into a private horror,” writes Bamford, “for at that very moment, near the Al-Arish mosque, Israeli forces were engaged in a criminal slaughter.” Earlier, on June 5, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers had pushed toward the Suez Canal along all three roads that crossed the desert, turning the burning sands into a massive killing field, with 7,000 to 10,000 Egyptians killed. Few were spared as the Israelis pushed forward.
“By June 8, three days after Israel launched the war,” we read in Body of Secrets, “Egyptian prisoners had become nuisances. There was no place to house them, not enough Israelis to watch them, and few vehicles to transport them to prison camps. But there was another way to deal with them.”
As the Liberty listened in, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. “In the shadow of Al-Arish mosque, they lined up unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs,” writes Bamford, “and then opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert turned red.” Then they forced other prisoners to bury the victims in mass graves.
In still another incident at Al-Arish, Bamford quotes the Israeli journalist Gabi Bron as saying that he saw about 150 Egyptian POWs and civilians sitting on the ground, crowded together with their hands held at the backs of their necks. “The Egyptian prisoners were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them of death,” said Bron. “I witnessed the executions with my own eyes on the morning of June eighth, in the airport area of Al-Arish.”
The Israelis did not want any witnesses recording their atrocities in Al-Arish, nor what they were doing in their advance on the three fronts in Sinai. Not knowing what intelligence the NSA, through the Liberty, was picking up, they would have had reason to suspect the worst — that the agency had recorded evidence of the numerous atrocities committed that morning only a few miles away. This would be devastating evidence of hundreds of serious war crimes, approved by senior Israeli commanders. The attack on the Liberty was then ordered, though the American ship’s flag was clearly visible from the cockpits of planes and the decks of the torpedo boats that later came for the kill.
What the Israelis did not know — revealed here publicly for the first time by Bamford — was that there were witnesses from high above, in a Navy EC-121 spy plane, intercepting communications between the attackers themselves, and the attackers and their command, indicating that they fully knew that the ship was indeed American. As the Israelis continued their slaughter, neither they nor the Liberty crew knew about those witnesses. Nor for that matter did the public. Until now.
Writes Bamford: “According to information, interviews, and documents obtained for Body of Secrets, for nearly thirty-five years NSA has hidden the fact that one of its planes was overhead at the time of the incident, eavesdropping on what was going on below. The intercepts from that plane, which answer some of the key questions about the attack, are among NSA’s deepest secrets.”
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Israel had attacked the ship and killed the American servicemen deliberately, the Johnson administration and Congress covered up the entire incident.
Even after all this time, and even after senior NSA officials, with unique access to the tapes and other highly classified evidence, became virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was deliberate, NSA refuses to make public what it knows about the Liberty, and no Senate committee has had the guts to launch public hearings on what happened on that fateful morning of June 8, almost exactly 34 years ago.
True, the US and Israel have a “special relationship”, but heavens above, what a neurotic sadomasochistic relationship that one is. And imagine, it is the hulking, not the puny, partner here who is the masochist.
