06/03/10 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

All right, Charles, Antiwar Radio Chaos, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Ray McGovern worked for the CIA for 27 years as an analyst.
He was the briefer in the morning for George H.W.
Bush when he was the vice president back in the 1980s.
He's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
That's asking a lot in this day and age, I think.
And he writes for ConsortiumNews.com over there with the great Bob Perry.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
What was the USS Liberty and why should any American care?
And why isn't it still the USS Liberty or is it?
Well, it's a scrap metal now, but it was the most sophisticated intelligence collector ship in its day.
And its day was 1967.
It was sent to the eastern Mediterranean during the Six Day War.
That started on June 5th, of course, and on the third day of the war on June 8th, it was stationed off the coast of the Sinai and all its antennae were whirling around.
Of course, they were collecting every signal they could.
Specifically, the signals the Soviets in Egypt were putting out, but also whatever signals they could come up with.
And what happened was they found themselves in a beautiful day, some of the people sunning on the deck when these Israeli airplanes early in the morning started flying over with Israeli colors and people they could see waving from the cockpits and so forth.
This reconnaissance went on for a couple of hours and then nothing.
And then shortly after noon, Israeli fighter bombers came and started bombing the ship, started strafing it.
And the USS Liberty crew didn't know what was going on.
Then three Israeli torpedo boats arrived and they shot their torpedoes at the Liberty.
One of them hit the midships immediately demolishing the National Security Agency's secure set up there, the one that was intercepting messages and everything else.
And it was very clear that the Israelis wanted to scuttle the ship and leave no survivors.
The crew number 300, getting ahead of myself here, 200 were either killed or wounded.
The exact figures were 34 killed and 170 plus wounded.
And the ship escaped in the final analysis only because one of the seamen, a young fellow from Texas named Terry Haldbardier, scooted across the napalm greased deck and attached a cable which allowed them to send out an SOS to the Sixth Fleet.
And as soon as that SOS went out, of course, the Israelis intercepted it.
They broke off the attack and went back to Israel.
And isn't it the case that the Sixth Fleet scrambled jets and that Lyndon Johnson called them back?
Yeah, what happened was there were two carriers out there.
The Saratoga was the first to scramble the jets and send the jets off to do battle with whoever it was that was attacking a U.S. naval ship.
And what happened was the commander of the Sixth Fleet, Admiral Geis, got an order from Secretary McNamara to cease and desist and call the planes back.
Now, Geis was, you know, he was no lily.
And so he said, you know, this is ridiculous.
I've never been ordered to to break off an attack on people attacking my forces.
I want to speak to your supervisor.
At which point, if you can believe it, and it actually happened this way, we have eyewitness testimony.
LBJ, Lyndon Johnson, got on the phone and he said, I want you to pull those planes back.
I don't want to embarrass an ally.
And so Admiral Geis said, yes, sir, call the planes back.
By that time, thankfully, the Israelis had left the scene and the skipper was able to to maneuver it back to Malta after several hours of slow speed travel.
The big thing to bear in mind, Scott, is that this was very deliberate.
I was I was in the CIA at the time.
I remember my colleagues working in the Middle East.
They heard the intercepted messages, for example.
But this is an American ship.
It's got an American flag.
Doesn't matter.
Shoot it up.
But sir, sir, I did you hear American flag?
Follow your orders.
Several such conversations were intercepted.
So there is no doubt, no doubt that they wanted to sink the ship.
And in terms of what was about to ensue before the SOS went out, there were helicopters, you know, like the helicopters on Monday and Sunday night, Monday morning in the eastern Mediterranean, helicopters with black clad Israeli commandos in them.
And they were just about to land, propel down onto the Liberty and finish the job on those who are left alive of the Liberty crew when when the SOS went out.
And they never did propel down.
The other thing was that the Liberty did have some some lifeboats, of course.
But as soon as they were lowered down, they were strafed by these torpedo boats, which, by the way, is a war crime.
You don't strafe lifeboats.
OK, well, and isn't isn't Johnson's actions here?
Isn't that the textbook, pardon me, the constitutional definition of treason?
Well, yes, he did this and everyone cooperated with him, including, to my horror, the United States Navy.
They all followed orders.
Now, a president's first duty, in my view, is to protect U.S. citizens.
Johnson cast off 34 dead, 170 wounded, and told them never to mention this, not even to their wives.
Now, it's going to be very interesting to see how President Obama handles the one U.S. citizen that was killed by the Israelis on Monday morning.
Oh, well, he'll never have heard of it.
But hang on a second.
Let's I want to stay on 1967 here for a minute.
And we are short on time, Ray.
Why?
Why would the Israeli Air Force bomb and attempt to sink an American ship?
Well, there are let me make clear that it is.
It is for sure, as we say in the Bronx, that they did it deliberately.
We have the intercepted messages.
We have all manner of other evidence why they did it.
That's not clear.
There are several theories.
The one that I favor is that the Israelis were about to go the next morning up on the Golan Heights, take that from Syria.
They had been warned time and time again by the U.S.
Please don't do that.
You did a great job there in the Sinai.
And you really, you know, Ghazi got the whole please don't don't don't get involved in a war with Syria now.
But they're going to do it.
And they didn't want us to know about it.
There was no way that they could communicate with their forces up there in the Golan or near the Golan without this communications intercept capability on the Liberty finding out about it.
So they they preferred to to ask for for forgiveness or pardon, not for permission to do that.
That's one theory.
The other theory is equally interesting.
There were a lot of Egyptian prisoners captured when the Israeli forces made that three pound attack into the Sinai.
They ended up with about 200, 250 Egyptian prisoners.
And they're brought to El Arish right on the Mediterranean.
They had not much water.
They had not much food.
These prisoners were a real burden.
And so the Israelis lined them up, shot them.
Buried them in the shallow graves.
And we had Israeli, one Israeli journalist and another Israeli researcher watching all this happen.
Then they looked up.
And 13 miles offshore was the USS Liberty.
And well within the capability, actually the line of sight capability to pick up all the kinds of radio and other transmissions that were used to carry out this atrocity.
And the other theory then is that the Israelis were hellbent and determined that this ship would not be able to transmit that stuff back home.
And so they set out to sink it.
Well, and, you know, it's sort of beside the point, but it's interesting to bring it to the current day and the conclusion there with, you know, as you said, the news reports this morning that one of the dead from the Gaza flotilla is an American citizen shot once in the chest.
And they're saying four times in the head, Ray.
And what is Obama going to do?
They didn't have the Internet back in 1967.
And I don't know whether TV really has to recognize that these other arguments even exist or not.
But, well, I don't know.
Now I can't even ask you a question because the music's playing and we're all out of time.
I'm afraid he's going to cave again and that will be really, really big trouble.
Yeah.
Everybody, you can find Ray McGovern at ConsortiumNews.com.
Thanks, Ray.
Sorry to have to cut it so short.
I'll see you tomorrow.