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From
>X-Sender: tcrobi@pop.mindspring.com
>Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 21:40:07 -0500
>To: mahan@microwrks.com
>From: Tom Robison
>Subject: A&E
>Precendence: bulk
>Sender: mahan-owner@microworks.net
>
>Just saw a promo tonight for a special entitled “Sea Tails” to be shown
>Sunday night on A&E at 8 p.m. Eastern time.
>
>
>Tom Robison
>Ossian, Indiana
>tcrobi@mindspring.com
From
>X-Authentication-Warning: ecom2.ecn.bgu.edu: mslrc owned process doing -bs
>Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 16:09:42 -0500 (CDT)
>From: “Louis R. Coatney”
>X-Sender: mslrc@ecom2.ecn.bgu.edu
>To: mahan@microwrks.com
>cc: “Louis R. Coatney”
> “William D. Anderson”
>Subject: Re: USS Amberjack & USS Liberty Why? WHY??
>Precendence: bulk
>Sender: mahan-owner@microworks.net
>
>
>But WHY was LIBERTY attacked?
>
>Possibilities: (?)
>
>1. Mistaken identity.
> Unlikely, from what we know from the crew. It seems to have been
> a thoroughly planned, premeditated air-sea massacre.
>
>2. Staged incident, to “frame” Egyptians.
> … rather like the “Polish attack” on the German Army on 1Sep39
> … or the “Finnish attack” on Soviet forces later that year?
>
> Weren’t the Israeli aircraft and boats clearly marked? Didn’t
> the Israelis know there would be other U.S. vessels in the area?
> Regardless of the markings, wouldn’t the Israelis know that trained
> intelligence people would readily identify them anyway? … if any
> survived, of course. I personally don’t think the Israelis are so
> inhumane — or *stupid* — as to attempt such a ghastly stunt.
>
>3. Reprisal for American injury to Israeli war effort?
>
> Did the Israelis think the Americans were “leaking” the intelligence
> we were gathering? Were we trying to restrain Israeli advances, and
> this was their way to msg “butt out”?
>
> Other things to consider: A number of French, Israeli, Soviet, and
> American subs began “not returning” at some time about then. Was there
> some relation?
>
> Moshe Dayan — Israeli Defence Minister — did penance for the attack
> by touring Vietnam and generally endorsing the Johnson Administration’s
> (incompetent) prosecution of the war … apparently.
>
>Fascinating. 🙂
>
>Lou Coatney, mslrc@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu
From
>X-Authentication-Warning: ecom5.ecn.bgu.edu: mslrc owned process doing -bs
>Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 13:52:04 -0500 (CDT)
>From: “Louis R. Coatney”
>X-Sender: mslrc@ecom5.ecn.bgu.edu
>To: mahan@microwrks.com
>Subject: Re: USS Amberjack & USS Liberty … FYI, MilHst-L, >MarHst-L, ConSim-L (fwd)
>Precendence: bulk
>Sender: mahan-owner@microworks.net
>
>
>
>———- Forwarded message ———-
>Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 13:43:11 -0500 (CDT)
>From: “Louis R. Coatney”
>To: milhst-l@ukanvm.cc.ukans.edu, marhst-l@qucdn.queensu.ca,
> consim-l@listserv.uni-c.dk, mahan@microwrks.net
>Cc: “Louis R. Coatney”
> “William D. Anderson”
>Subject: Re: USS Amberjack & USS Liberty … FYI, MilHst-L, MarHst-L, ConSim-L
>
>
>Pat Hughes, the MilHst-L moderator, has told us he doesn’t want us
> talking about the Israeli massacre of the USS LIBERTY in 1967. As
> I remember, Pat is concerned there may still be security restrictions
> on the discussion of the incident. (And risks of legal prosecution?
> … loss of *pension*? … loss of academic access to agencies?)
>
>Someone has just posted an excellent article on the
> mahan@microwrks.net list. There have been some new
> developments in the case. And the coverup described rivals
> anything I found in the wartime gagging about the Katyn
> Massacre.
>
>So I would refer anyone interested in the LIBERTY to Mahan.
>
>Lou Coatney, mslrc@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu
From
>Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 10:02:59 -0700
>From: Mike Potter
>Reply-To: mike.potter@artecon.com
>Organization: Artecon, Inc.
>X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (WinNT; I)
>To: mahan@microwrks.com
>Subject: USS Liberty: draft article
>Precendence: bulk
>Sender: mahan-owner@microworks.net
>
>Last year I contacted a pro-Israeli partisan who supposedly could
>discuss USS =Liberty= (AGTR 5). He provided no information and assailed
>me personally as anti-Semitic for raising the issue. (I have,
>incidentally, a Jewish relative by marriage who perished in the
>Holocaust, probably at Auschwitz-Birkenau; his daughter is my aunt.) Try
>it: e-mail your questions to Prof Alan Stein at the University of
>Connecticut, stein@math.uconn.edu. His apparently publicly-funded web
>site, http://www.math.uconn.edu/~stein, also calls (or did last year)
>Jim Ennes an anti-Semite. I thought scholars were supposed to be
>open-minded. Anyway, this situation could explain why list masters might
>discourage discussion of the =Liberty= incident.
>
>Any Mahan List comments on this draft article? It needs style work but
>is the line of argument reasonable:
>
>In analyzing the =Liberty= incident from the Israeli angle, it is useful
>to distinguish intelligence collection and analysis (G2) from combat
>operations (G3). A major difficulty with Israel’s mistaken-identity
>excuse is that, if it were true, then the problem was simply a common G2
>failure. Israel then would have no reason to cover up why G3 operators,
>or more likely their boss, Moshe Dayan, ordered the sequential,
>multi-service attacks on the =Liberty=. Since Israel did and still does
>cover up their 1967 reasoning, the mistaken-identity excuse is at best
>inadequate.
>
>In =Assault on the Liberty= Jim Ennes hypothesized that Israel attempted
>to “dispatch” her so that she could not discover the plan to take the
>Golan Heights. Since communications interception is passive, Israel
>could be sure that =Liberty= was deaf only after her antennas were
>submerged. But Israeli forces ended their attack before that point.
>Either (a) after initial misjudgment, Dayan changed his mind in
>mid-stream about the need to dispatch =Liberty=; or (b) someone of great
>personal or political authority, perhaps his boss, prime minister Levi
>Eshkol, interceded to stop him.
>
>In either case, why cover it up today? Israel no longer asserts (if it
>ever did) that it seized the Golan Heights as an immediate defensive
>operation in 1967. And why is the U.S. Government still reluctant to
>investigate the attack?
>
>Israel must be protecting something extremely vital to it today. I
>suggest it is Israel’s nuclear strategy. In 1967 Israel was already
>building nuclear weapons, partially for deterrence and partially as
>weapons to punish the world should Israel face imminent destruction.
>This is what Seymour Hersch in his book of the title calls “the Sampson
>option:” punish the world by nuclear terror. Since it remains Israel’s
>current strategy, Israel has a vital interest in concealing its
>strategic decision process – especially since the strategy is deluded
>and operationally severely flawed. The fact that it is a long-standing
>strategy does not make it wise, tenable, or realistic.
>
>I suggest that Dayan in 1967 was not a calm hero but a panicky
>defeatist, and that the =Liberty= was the first pillar that he tried to
>pull down under a then pre-nuclear Sampson option. Probably Israel did
>not then have usable nuclear weapons so he used the weapons at hand
>against the first target within range. Dayan’s initiation of the
>national doomsday strategy obviously would be politically significant.
>Either he came to his senses or Eshkol, or someone, found out about it
>and stopped it. Dayan panicked again in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. =Time=
>magazine reported that during that war Israel assembled ten nuclear
>bombs for retaliatory (not tactical) use. A corollary could be that
>Dayan usurped or already had control of these weapons, a significant
>flaw in political control.
>
>Why the US role in the cover-up of the =Liberty= incident?
>
>Initially: probably because McNamara and Johnson regarded 34 dead as
>trivial and the risk from intervening as high. In a similar incident,
>early in 1968 they forbade rescue of a US Navy A-7 pilot who ditched off
>China’s Hainan island after his aircraft was hit by North Vietnamese
>AAA. His widow obtained the NSC transcript of the decision, confronted
>McNamara with it, and asked him to apologize. He sarcastically refused
>and implied she was lying. (Their meeting was recorded and broadcast on
>NPR’s Christian Science Monitor Radio program in November 1995.) To
>Johnson and McNamara US military casualties were unimportant compared to
>diplomatic inconvenience.
>
>After 1967: probably because the USA has been stupidly stuck to Israeli
>foreign policy and has chosen to protect Israel’s nuclear program. The
>USA long pretended that Israel had no nuclear weapons but blithely gave
>Israel huge amounts of satellite reconnaissance photos that Israel could
>use for targeting purposes. Israel has armed itself with US-built
>weapons, including the new Sa’ar-V corvettes, whose only combat
>capability is long-range attack. Many Israeli fighters, including all
>their F4 Phantom jets right from the first delivery, have no air-to-air
>capability and are fitted purely as long-range bombers.
>
>Today: For many politicians, exploring the =Liberty= incident would
>jeopardize contributions from bipartisan pro-Israel lobbyists. By 1994
>even Newt Gingrich adopted the 1984 Democrats’ plank of moving the US
>embassy to Jerusalem. Hearings would bring the USA face to face with
>Israel’s still-current Sampson-option strategy. Hearings might show that
>Israel’s political leaders have weak authority over its nuclear arsenal;
>that their low-level nuclear weapons custodians might respond to a
>lunatic, as Moshe Dayan could have become under pressure; and that high
>Israeli officials have made deluded errors in judging their strategic
>situation, errors that proved catastrophic for the =Liberty=.
>
>–
From
>Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 10:59:35 -0700
>From: TMO/TX
>Reply-To: swrctmo@iAmerica.net
>Organization: Kestrel/SWRC/OAssoc
>X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (Win16; I)
>To: mahan@microwrks.com
>CC: “Louis R. Coatney”
>Subject: Re: USS Amberjack & USS Liberty Why? WHY??
>Precendence: bulk
>Sender: mahan-owner@microworks.net
>
>Louis R. Coatney wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 29 May 1997, Bill Riddle wrote:
> > > The best hypothesis I have seen is in Jim Ennes’ book. He > has a time
> > > line that puts Liberty’s arrival in context with IDF operations.
> > >
> > > Specifically the Golan Heights campaign which was actually > delayed for
> > > 24 hours, until AFTER Liberty was not available to monitor > events. He
> > > quotes LBJ’s book in which LBJ states that he told the Israeli
> > > ambassador that the US would stand with Israel ONLY if > Israel did not
> > > initiate hostilities. As the IDF was in fact going to occupy the
> > > Golan without waiting for a Syrian event to which they could react,
> > > Ennes’ assertion is that Israel did not want Liberty to provide LBJ
> > > with the evidence.
> >
> > I think I can remember this suggestion, from times past, but it
> > is literally crazy to think that an attack on an American ship
> > would somehow avert American protest/disapproval of an Israeli
> > attack on the heights. Could anyone be so tactically tunnel-
> > visioned (politically)? Is anyone suggesting Dayan was …
> > irrational?
> >
> > There *must* be something else.
> >
>Speaking privately (Ha!) and not for attribution (as if it mattered),
>I’ve always suspected that at some levels of Israeli political
>leadership/military command, there was (and likely still is) some
>perception/blief/suspicion that the US was actively passing INTEL to
>Arab states (the “Counterbalance” theory, the US as inheritors of 19th
>British hegemony playing the “Great Game”).
>
>Given his combative nature and his “position”, Dayan certainly seems a
>likely candidate as an advocate of that position, with an Israeli
>scenario of the Liberty passing real time info to Washington/Maryland?
>where it was piped to “Arabist” State Dept. officials who passed it on.
>
>The concept of “perception” requires assigning to the involved Israelis
>either hard INTEL confirming the scenario or, in my mind more likely, an
>not unreasonable level of “paranoia”. After all, in Israel more than
>anywhere else, there were politicians, military commanders and a
>populace who had recent reason to be somewhat distrustful of the designs
>and motives of the great powers.
>
>Did the scenario represent reality?
>
>I doubt it, not believing that the data which the Libery could rapidly
>pass back to the US could be so quickly pipelined to the “Arabists” (who
>certainly may have existed) and fed to Damascus/Cairo/Amman/etc.
>
>Why?
>
>I’m not sure that our communications capacity (even among the cloak and
>dagger set/BJs/etc.) was that good.
>
>I suspect that most of what Liberty collected was tactical junk,
>examples of our concentration on volume with the hope of panning a few
>grains of gold from a tub full of sand. Sure, there may have been some
>pearls, but it takes better evaluators than most of the Navy types I
>knew to quickly recognize pearls (and even then the pearls may be the
>sort to use for predictions of future methods and activities).
>
>I’m relatively sure that, given the Washington of the time, that the
>Liberty’s sort of INTEL data could be chewed, digested and communicated.
> either accurately or quickly enough to make the scenario operative.
>
>Dealing with a Washington in which paper and ideas move at a snail’s
>pace (as I do), the idea that info could move from NSA to the Executive
>Branch National Security structure to State to the legendary “Arabists”
>quickly enough to alter the course of events in the ME seems unlikely.
>
>What self-respecting Arab leader would have treated INTEL received by
>such a pipeline as credible without a bunch of corroboration? The stuff
>would have literally smelled of disinformation.
>
>But reality is not the cause of events, pereception is (especially the
>perceptions of those able to dispatch combat units). Mutual suspicion
>forms the keel of international relations (and rightly so).
>–
>Kestrel Syndicate – Oliver Associates – Southwest Regional Council
> “Quid consilium cepit…”
From
>X-Sender: tcrobi@pop.mindspring.com
>Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 22:00:43 -0500
>To: mahan@microwrks.com
>From: Tom Robison
>Subject: Internet
>Precendence: bulk
>Sender: mahan-owner@microworks.net
>
>Yes, this is off topic. Forgive me, but you really ought to read this
>article…
>
>Do you think the Internet is a secure place to trust other folks with your
>credit card numbers, phone numbers, even your real name?
>
>Pick up the June 2 issue of U.S. NEWS and World Report, and read the
>article entitled “Cracker”, beginning on page 56.
>
>Prepare to be stunned.
>
>
>Tom Robison
>Ossian, Indiana
>tcrobi@mindspring.com