Letter: USS Liberty attack was tragic mistake – Worcester Telegram

Charles Giulianis letter lambasting the City Council for refusing to commemorate the sailors who lost their lives in a tragic 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, resulting from misidentification of the ship, is misleading and biased. A Google search for one of his sources, James Bamford: Golan-Heights attack, leads to an article in a newsletter promoted by lunatic-fringe paleolibertarian Lew Rockwell, a newsletterwhich also described black people as animals and espoused the slogan sodomy=death.

Giulianis other source, Ward Boston, as counsel to the U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry into the Liberty incident signed the Courts 1967 finding that the attack on the Liberty was in fact a mistake. Not until 2003 did Boston recant that finding. His subsequent 2007 news story charging that the U.S. government had covered up the truth about the incident for 40 years supplied no supporting evidence and contained numerous factual errors. It even propagated a myth that the Israelis, rather than trying to rescue the Libertys crew as they did, machine-gunned its life rafts. The elderly Bostons 2007 article relied on the assistance of one Ron Gotcher, who falsely claimed to have worked for the NSA and was reportedly the frontman for a Saudi-financed anti-Israel propaganda coalition.

As journalist James Jackson Kilpatrick wrote in 1967, it would have been utterly irrational for the Israeli Navy knowingly to have launched an attack on the U.S. ship, and the only reasonable explanation was that it was a mistake resulting from the fog of war.

David Lewis Schaefer

Professor of Political Science, Holy Cross College

Worcester

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Letter: USS Liberty attack was tragic mistake - Worcester Telegram

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