USS Liberty: draft article
January 2nd, 2009 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=.
>
>–