Huffpo Provocation
I just posted a thingy on Huffingtonpost about the USS Liberty, the American intelligence vessel that was attacked 40 years ago June 8th in international waters by the Israeli Air Force. I lke Huffpo, and I’m grateful they allow me to blog. They get bajillions of hits each day; and the comments that one can solicit there are a very quick and effective way to measure the intellectual temper of some of these bajillions of readers.
So whatever you make of my polemical stunt there; the object here is not to debate the USS Liberty, but to analyze the best we can what the comments reflect about people we may not normally talk to. I may get backpaged pretty quickly, becaus eanti-Zionism is only barely tolerated there, since there seems to be a preferential option exercised there for the what readers believe is “the soul of the Democratic Party.” So it may net ZERO comments.
This is a test.
Randy Morris:
Nice idea. It’ll be interesting to read the comments by the ever-increasing light of the flames.
Randy
5 June 2007, 9:00 pmDon Bacon:
The test results are coming in.
My pro-Stan, ant-Zionist comment was not deemed publishable by Huffpost, apparently. Or perhaps they need to massage it for more than twelve hours. Basically I wrote that (1) the ‘Arab terrorist” usage (which some didn’t get) was Goff’s irony directed at the fact that it’s the Arabs, not the US or its allies, which are always the terrorists, and (2) the Israelis wantonly and purposely, abetted by President Johnson and Secretary McNamara, tried to sink the Liberty with all hands but were thwarted by the Liberty’s brave crew and its Congressional Medal of Honor recipient captain. Finally I remarked that “such is the reach of wicked Zionism, and such is the bravery of some Americans”.
6 June 2007, 11:27 amTimothy R. Anderson:
And, as stated in a long ago and far away Letter To The Editor in the San Francisco Chronicle , the label terrorists and insurgents is totally accurate to describe folks such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. The British ruling class in the 1770 ’s were NOT troubled , as far as I know, by Arab terrorists ;
they were, however, deeply troubled by white-skinned terrorists causing trouble in and around what would one day become the eastern United States of America.
I think so anyway. Tim
7 June 2007, 1:13 pmChris:
I find it amazing that huffpo commentators would suggest that the victims of crimes that were present during the attack are less reliable sources of information than the accused who belong to organizations with a history of lying. Lying is even in their job description. But of course they are the only people we can trust in these matters. They couldn’t possibly have ulterior motives for bending the truth.
8 June 2007, 2:00 pmJim Craven:
May I recommend, if you all have not read it and I suspect you have, the book by James Bamford “Body of Secrets” on the NSA. May I also recommend the archives of former Mossad Agent Victor Ostrovsky who was also a commander in the Israeli Navy and did a radio program on the USS Liberty on his show “Spy Talk” in Tuscon, Arizona.
Bamford’s first book was “The Puzzle Palace” on NSA which was considered so sensitive by NSA that all NSA personnel were ordered never to even admit to having read it let alone anything on its accuracy. Bamford, a journalist with some intelligence background and well connected, apparently wrote something so accurate, some NSA members later said he had everything but the combination to the NSA director’s safe.
Later, NSA, after trying to shut Bamford and his book down and being unsuccessful, decided they would rather have Bamford inside the NSA tent pissing out than outside the NSA tent pissing in and brought him into NSA to teach classes on the history of NSA. With his second book he was given unprecedented access to some intercepts and he wrote what he claims, and NSA has never refuted it, that USS Liberty was not only a known NSA ship by the Israelis, but was deliberately attacked to try to cover-up mass murders of Egyptian POWs in the Sinai by Israeli Forces under the command of Ariel Sharon, who had even forced the POWs to dig their own graves, like the nazi Einsatzgruppen used to, and according to Bamford, Israel did not know that NSA also had an EC-121 picking up the same radio transmissions that the Israelis thought were only picked up by the USS Liberty.
Bamford’s latest book, “Pretext for War” on the phony and contrived intelligence to justify the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars I also recommend.
This is what I wrote on another blog:
Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent and author of several books on Mossad (By Way of Deception, Another Side of Deception), used to have a radio show called “Spy Talk” in Tuscon. Well on one of his shows he was discussing the U.S.S. Liberty incident during the Seven Day War when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, an NSA survillance ship the Israelis knew well, and after sinking it in three separate attacks, also strafing the waters over 40 minutes to try to make sure all crew were dead. Why? According to James Bamford’s “Body of Secrets” a definitive book on NSA (along with his The Puzzle Palace) and made with assistance of NSA after Bamford and his book “The Puzzle Palace” had first been blacklisted by them, the Israeli troops under the command of Ariel Sharon, had lined up and executed a bunch of Egyptian POWs Nazi “Einsatzgruppen” style, and the Liberty had picked up radio transmissions of the war crimes going on and the Israelis thought only the Liberty had heard them and could be taken out to destrroy the evidence. The Israelis did not know that an NSA EC-121 was also picking up the same broadcasts.
I wanbted to share that with you sometime. I believe that a tape of his radio broadcast is still available but it has been some time since I heard his show and called in.
Addendum, another version is that the story about the USS Liberty picking up radio broadcasts of the Israeli forces mass murdering Egyptian POWs (which they actually did do) is not seen as the real reason, but one of the former Israeli pilots in the initial attack on the Liberty (three unmarked Israeli fighters) plus one of the Admirals in the White House and hear LBJ give the order to sink the Liberty which would have been sunk aftr the repeated attacks had their not been a Soviety spy ship watching the whole thing, said it was really a false-flag operation designed to make it look like an Egyptian attack that would draw the U.S. into the War under pretext, and then facilitate permanent U.S. bases and control in the ME region.
15 October 2007, 1:36 pm