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The American Israel Public Affairs Committee brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and it has demonstrated that time and again, and not only on Capitol Hill.
Nowhere is the lobby's power more clearly demonstrated than in its ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967, during the Six Day War:
- Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did its best to sink it and leave no survivors;
- The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the attack upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to the scene; and
- By that time, 34 of the Liberty's crew had been killed and over 170 wounded.
Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known this for years. That virtually all of them have kept a 40-year frightened silence is testament to the widespread fear of touching this live wire.
Even more telling is the fact that the National Security Agency destroyed voice tapes seen by many intelligence analysts, showing beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.
But the truth will come out -- eventually. All it took in this case is for a courageous journalist (of the endangered species kind) to listen to the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not shrinking from naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S. officials, from the president on down off the hook for suppressing -- even destroying -- unimpeachable evidence from intercepted Israeli communications.
The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely on interviews with those most intimately involved.
A lengthy article by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter John Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Oct. 2 titled "New revelations in attack on American spy ship." (For the full story, click here.)
To the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year: "Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of deadly 1967 incident."
Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have known of the incident and coverup for a very long time and have tried to expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for today.
It has proved far easier, though, to get a very pedestrian dog-bites-nan article published than an article with the importance and explosiveness of this damning story.
A Marine stands up
On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield, Mo.
A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy."
The study had originally been commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly. When the draft arrived, however, shouts of "leper!" were heard at the Atlantic. The magazine wasted no time in saying "thanks, but no thanks," and the leper study then wandered in search of a home, finding none among American publishers.
Eventually the London Review of Books published it in March 2006.
I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of courage as well as scholarship. That's what I told the questioner, adding that I did have two problems with the study:
First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing virtually all the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the Israel Lobby and the so-called "neoconservatives" running our policy and armed forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed. But of equal importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what the Pentagon now calls the "enduring" military bases in Iraq, which the White House and Pentagon decided were needed for the United States to dominate that part of the Middle East.
Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt made no mention of what I believe to be, if not the most telling, then perhaps the most sensational proof of the power the lobby knows it can exert over our government and Congress. In sum, in June 1967, after deliberately using fighter bombers and torpedo boats to attack the USS Liberty for over two hours in an attempt to sink it and kill its crew, and then getting the U.S. government, the Navy and the Congress to cover up what happened, the Israeli government learned that it could -- literally -- get away with murder.
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Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
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