WASHINGTON, 11 January 2004 — The US Department of State’s Office of the Historian will host an international conference next week to examine newly released historical research on the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
The conference coincides with the release of the publication: “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967.” It will be available on-line at: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb.
The conference will also focus on the 1967 Israeli attack on the US spy ship USS Liberty, which killed 34 American servicemen, and wounded 170.
Jay Cristol, author of “The Liberty Incident,” will be a featured speaker. David Satterfield, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, will deliver the keynote address. Academics, diplomats and military experts will attend the two-day conference.
Demands to reassess the attack on the USS Liberty are due to a former US Navy attorney who helped lead a military investigation into the incident. Ret. Capt. Ward Boston said in a signed affidavit last October that then-President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry into the attack on the USS Liberty declare the incident was an accident.
Capt. Boston said President Johnson and McNamara told those heading the Navy’s inquiry to “conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
Boston was senior legal counsel to the US Navy’s original 1967 review of the attack. He said in the sworn statement that he stayed silent for years because he’s a military man, and “when orders come, I follow them.”
He said he felt compelled to “share the truth” following the publication of Cristol’s “The Liberty Incident,” which concluded the attack was unintentional.
The USS Liberty was an electronic intelligence-gathering ship cruising off the Egyptian coast in international waters. On June 8, 1967, Israeli planes and torpedo boats opened fire on the Liberty during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War.
After the attack, a Navy court of inquiry concluded there was insufficient information to make a judgment about why Israel attacked the ship, stopping short of assigning blame or determining whether it was an accident.
Israel has long maintained that the attack was a case of mistaken identity, an explanation that the Johnson administration did not formally challenge. Critics of Israel, and crewmembers on the USS Liberty, have long questioned Israel’s motives behind the attack, questioning why the Israelis continued to attack the ship despite clear signals it was a US vessel.
David Lewis of Lemington, Vt., was on the Liberty when it was attacked. He previously told journalists that Israel had to know it was targeting an American ship, and said a US flag was flying that day and Israel shot it full of holes.
