Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas
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Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781634241090 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Trine Day |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 820,551 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Remember the Liberty!
Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas
By Phillip F. Nelson
Trine Day LLC
Copyright © 2017 Phillip F. NelsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63424-109-0
CHAPTER 1
The Winds of War
Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.
– President John F. Kennedy at the United Nations, September 25, 1961
Democrats Urge President: Fight Israel Sanctions, Johnson Leads Action
– Headline: New York Times, February 20, 1957
In that front-page article in the New York Times, President Dwight Eisenhower is pictured, scowling, as he returned from his interrupted golfing vacation at the Georgia National Golf Club, home of the Masters Golf Tournament. The article told how David Ben-Gurion had refused to withdraw Israel's troops from the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba, defying a UN resolution that had Eisenhower's support. Ike had hoped to use the threat of economic sanctions against Israel to force it to relinquish control over the lands it had recently occupied. If it weren't for the fact that the majority leader of the Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson, had effectively subverted the president's foreign policy, Eisenhower may have returned to Washington, with a smile instead of a scowl. His anger was focused not only on what Ben-Gurion had already done, but also at the actions taken by the bullying Texan, then known as the "Master of the Senate." A re-examination of that incident is important to put the events that played out a decade later into proper historic context.
The infamous 1954 Israeli false-flag operation in Egypt known as the "Lavon Affair" helped to set the stage for the "Suez Crisis." The rumblings of the crisis began in early 1955, when the Eisenhower administration began pressuring Israel to show some commitment to peace in the Middle East. Israel had been conducting deadly raids in the Gaza Strip, which they claimed were in retaliation for attacks made against their military from Gaza – a pattern that continues today.
On February 28, 1955, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser gave a speech on what he termed "Israeli atrocities," within which he warned of further reprisals if Israel continued the raids. Later that year, Egypt stepped closer to the Soviet Union's orbit and away from the Western powers when President Nasser negotiated a treaty with Czechoslovakia for $200 million worth of (Soviet) arms, including tanks, fighter planes, artillery, and submarines. The border clashes grew more violent and Nasser also felt that Israeli lobbyists and financial backers in America had been behind the loss of US aid for the Aswan Dam.
Nasser had previously been assured by the Eisenhower administration that financial assistance of $1.3 billion (1956 dollars) would be forthcoming, however Israeli lobbyists had pressured the Senate Appropriations Committee into blocking funding for the dam. Nasser's response was to nationalize the Suez Canal as a means to raise funds to build the Aswan Dam. A result of Nasser seizing the Suez Canal was that Israel began planning to attack Egypt, colluding with France and Britain.
It appears that Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson was then enlisted to exercise his political muscle to prevent the UN from imposing sanctions on Israel, despite the fact that Eisenhower had already endorsed the sanctions after deciding that Israel had violated international law in plotting the attack. Eisenhower was determined to force Israel to back down from its aggression by temporarily cutting off American aid. Johnson wrote a letter to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles objecting to the proposed sanctions against Israel and then had the temerity to send a copy of it to the New York Times, with a request that the letter be published. Johnson was hoping to embarrass and humiliate President Eisenhower into bowing to Johnson's will; instead, the public letter only angered Eisenhower more and strengthened his resolve.
After a hurried return to Washington, Eisenhower went on radio and television to speak directly to the nation, saying, indirectly, but emphatically to Senator Johnson: "America has either one voice or none, and that voice is the voice of the President – whether everybody agrees with him or not," and that the U.N. had "no choice but to exert pressure upon Israel." Ultimately, it was Johnson who lost face in the episode, as Israel, France and Great Britain all had to back down. It was not only a humiliation to all of them, but a victory for President Nasser, which was something that, undoubtedly for LBJ, "stuck in his craw." even more than his own embarrassment.
Some historians cite the Suez Crisis as being "... the end of Great Britain's role as one of the world's major powers."
Israel continued using its military superiority over the neighboring Arab states in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Rumors of a nuclear reactor in the Negev Desert at a site called Dimona grew, and the city of Beersheba seemingly became a French outpost, housing nuclear scientists and engineers and their families. Israel's military assets were also used in more pedestrian ways as well, such as the completion of a major new aqueduct that was built during this period and put into service in 1964 to carry the waters of Lake Tiberias to the Negev; by the summer of that year sustained pumping of water began. The Arab states had threatened to use force to prevent that, but they backed down since they did not have the military strength to enforce the ultimatum. Yet when Syria began its own water-diversion project in March, 1965, Israel immediately attacked it with artillery and tanks.
These incidents from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s should be considered as early markers for a pattern that would be repeated by Israel throughout not just the lead-up to, and during, the Six-Day War and the attack on the USS Liberty, but for the next five decades as well. Likewise, Johnson's actions in February, 1957 established patterns that would be repeated time and again during the ensuing decade, which must be considered in the context of the remaining chapters: His unqualified support for Israel as well as his dislike of Egyptian President Nasser.
Johnson's actions were a direct defiance of the executive power of the president.
Lyndon Johnson's Political Perils: Circa 1964 – 1967
To understand how Lyndon Johnson's earliest presidential actions would cause him to react so severely to events that occurred in 1967 – 1968, we must begin where his presidency started to unravel. His downfall was related to his first major presidential decision, made on November 24, 1963: Exactly two days after becoming president, to reverse JFK's Vietnam policies, and make Vietnam a part of what he thought would be an important cornerstone of his presidency.
Johnson wanted desperately to be a "wartime president" just like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and of course George Washington. He had long sided against President Kennedy – never publicly, of course – with like minded men in the Pentagon, the CIA and among JFK's own aides in the White House. There were Cold War mainstays like Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy and, in the State Department, Secretary Dean Rusk, all of whom had pressured Kennedy, against his own instincts, to increase military support for South Vietnamese President Ngô Dình Diêm. Though Kennedy had listened to them for the first two years of his administration, obliging them by steadily increasing the number and scope of duty of the non-combat military "advisors," by his third year, he had begun reassessing those policies with the intention of removing all military support by the end of 1965.
Before President Kennedy was buried, Lyndon Johnson made key decisions to reverse JFK's policies on Vietnam, even while boasting that he "shall continue" to guide the ship of state as JFK would have.
The esteemed Berkeley professor, Dr. Peter Dale Scott, established the dynamics of this charade conclusively, in 1972, upon studying the Pentagon Papers: "With respect to events in November 1963, the bias and deception of the original Pentagon documents are considerably reinforced in the Pentagon studies commissioned by Robert McNamara. Nowhere is this deception more apparent than in the careful editing and censorship of the Report on the Honolulu Conference on November 20, 1963 and National Security Action Memorandum [NSAM] 273, which was approved four days later. Study after study is carefully edited so as to create a false illusion of continuity between the last two days of President Kennedy's presidency and the first two days of President Johnson's." That "illusion of continuity" became apparent in many of the statements from the new president, as he continued to evoke Kennedy's name, in the immediate aftermath of his predecessor's assassination.
Professor Scott then noted that the editing allowed for "selective censorship" or "downright misrepresentation" of the document, to allow, depending upon one's purpose, to focus on "optimism" which led to plans for withdrawal of American forces, or to "deterioration" and "gravity" which could be cited to support escalation of the war. It even provided a method to posit that "President Johnson needed to reaffirm or modify the policy lines pursued by his predecessor" and, curiously, that he chose to "reaffirm the Kennedy policies." Scott then used strong words to convey the duplicitousness of the author of the study, or "some superior" when he stated that the most important part of NSAM 273 (which had been omitted from the documents initially presented) "authorized planning for specific covert operations, graduated in intensity, against the DRV, i.e. North Vietnam." Moreover, said Professor Scott, the consequence of NSAM 273's sixth paragraph (the one which had not been leaked to the press) was "to annul" Kennedy's "NSAM 263 withdrawal decision announced four days earlier at Honolulu, and also the Accelerated Withdrawal Program ..." (italics in original).
Finally, Professor Scott concluded: "The source of this change is not hard to pinpoint. Of the eight people known to have participated in the November 24 reversal of the November 20 withdrawal decisions, five took part in both meetings. Of the three new officials present, the chief was Lyndon Johnson, in his second full day and first business meeting as President of the United States. The importance of this second meeting, like that of the document it approved, is indicated by its deviousness." Scott continued, "This deception, I suspect, involved far more than the symbolic but highly sensitive issue of the 1,000-man withdrawal. One study, after calling NSAM 273 a "generally sanguine" "don't-rock-the-boat document," concedes that it contained "an unusual Presidential exhortation: 'The President expects that all senior officers of the government will move energetically to insure full unity of support for establishing U.S. policy in South Vietnam.'"
The conclusions of Dr. Peter Dale Scott can be summarized as portraying Lyndon B. Johnson, in his second day at the helm, as already making a dramatic, 180-degree change from President Kennedy's decision to begin the withdrawal of troops within weeks (starting with 1,000 in the last six weeks of the year, 1963) and to complete that process for the remaining 15,000 over the next two years, by the end of 1965, so that no troops would remain beyond 12/31/1965.
Johnson's new program would actually reverse JFK's plans, leading to the dramatic escalation, and finally "Americanization" of the war. Of course, none of this was known at the time, else his chances of winning the 1964 presidential election could be jeopardized.
Johnson would, within weeks, order McGeorge Bundy to begin preparing a plan ("34-A") for gradually escalating a series of provocations to North Vietnam. It was an attempt to intimidate the North Vietnamese into retaliating against U.S. Navy vessels, and to do so in the late summer of that year, just months before the November elections.
It was through "deviousness and deception" as cited by Professor Scott that a fundamental shift in policy would be kept hidden from the public. Two days after becoming president and concurrently with his approval of NSAM 273, on Sunday, November 24th, he began making the statement "We shall continue" JFK's policies in his memory, whether the point referenced was related to foreign or domestic policy. People who lived through that tumultuous period remember the constant refrain from Johnson in 1964-65, because he repeated it with almost every piece of legislation, exhorting Congress to pass bills: "in John Kennedy's honor."
Johnson's purpose – in addition to his being a wartime president, which he thought would embellish his eventual "legacy" – was to benefit his friends and himself financially, through investments in various corporations involved in the defense industry. He even admitted that, according a statement from his CIA briefer, as cited by author Dr. William F. Pepper: As Colonel John Downie admitted, in his last session with Johnson in 1966, after he had repeatedly, "... urged him to get out of Vietnam, a frustrated LBJ pounded the table and exclaimed, 'I cannot get out of Vietnam, John, my friends are making too much money.'" It was during this same time frame that Johnson repeatedly explained to the American people how well things were going, though he admitted that they would have to carry "perhaps for a long time the burden of a confusing and costly war in Vietnam."
One of the most incisive authors of Vietnam history (Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam), Army Major H.R. McMaster, summarized how the mistakes that led to the "Americanization" of the war occurred:
Contrary to Robert McNamara's claims of ignorance and overconfidence during the period 1963-1965, the record proves that he and others were men who not only should have known better, but who did know better. ... It was during the period from November 1963 to July 1965 that Lyndon Johnson made the critical decisions that took the United States into war almost without realizing it. The decisions, and the way in which he made them, had a profound effect on the conduct of the war and its outcome. ... Lyndon Johnson was a profoundly insecure man who feared dissent and craved reassurance. In 1964 and 1965, Johnson's principal goals were to win the presidency in his own right and to pass his Great Society legislation through Congress. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was particularly adept at sensing the president's needs and giving him the advice he wanted.
By late 1966, President Johnson was in deep political trouble with his own constituents. He had spent most of the political capital that had come with winning his historic landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election. During 1964-65, he had figuratively "moved mountains" to push progressive legislation through congress. These were bills that he had previously impeded for his entire congressional career, and further vehemently opposed in the three years he spent as vice president, always telling President Kennedy that "the time wasn't right, you must wait until the time is right, we don't have the votes."
After he became president, of course, the time was right, and he was now relentless in pushing Congress to move all of it. The pressure to accomplish his "Great Society" program, and the public's reactions to the three summers of race riots, had been so great that in the 1966 elections, Democrats lost so many congressional seats that they nearly lost their majority status in both houses. The congressional changes resulted in a virtual end to the domestic programs he had envisioned to cement his "legacy."
While the majority of Americans agreed that the civil rights and voting rights legislation were long overdue, some had begun doubting parts of the progressive agenda. Worried that these actions would lead to fundamental societal changes, many pundits warned, for example, of their concerns related to bills that would extend welfare programs so greatly that they could become disincentives for gainful employment, and structured such that they might lead to family breakdowns. The "backlash" that ensued, along with the simultaneous increases in violent inner-city riots during the summers of Johnson's presidency, also caused many to question the speed at which these bills were being pushed through Congress.
But more than any of that, most Americans had begun questioning the need to invest huge numbers of young men for a war on the other side of the world – that they did not understand. A place seemingly devoid of any significant American interests. Within two years President Johnson had become distrusted, and even despised and hated by millions of people. It was the Vietnam "quagmire" that cost him tremendous loss of public support, and he knew by 1966 that, unless something was done to counter that loss, his chances in 1968 would be slim.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Remember the Liberty! by Phillip F. Nelson. Copyright © 2017 Phillip F. Nelson. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day LLC.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Cover,Title page,
Copyright page,
Foreword: Treachery at Sea,
Preface: A Message from The Inferno,
About the Authors,
Dedications,
Acknowledgements,
Prologue,
Part I: Background,
1) The Winds of War,
2) Operation Cyanide/ Positioning the USS Liberty,
Part II: The Survivors Speak - Chronicle of Events,
3) The Attack on the Liberty,
4) The Immediate Aftermath and Recovery - On to Malta,
Part III: The Ensuing "Investigations",
5) The Official Investigation Begins ... and Quickly Ends,
6) The Israeli Response: Recriminations Abound,
7) A Review of "The Liberty Incident" and Other Failed Attempts to Reframe History,
Part IV: The Long-Term Aftermath,
8) First Betrayed – then Deserted,
9) Beyond the Seas: The Flushing of Secrets From The USS Liberty,
Epilogue: On a Wing and a Prayer: Sailing to Zion,
Afterword: The Power of Myth,
Appendix A: A Fair Probe Would Attack Liberty Misinformation,
Appendix B: USS Liberty Alliance Letter,
Appendix C: USS Liberty Alliance Letter,
Appendix D: The CIA's Attempt to Denigrate "Critical Thinkers",
Bibliography,
Index,
