The simple fact is that they admitted it. They had to after being caught red handed. The evidence did not sink to the bottom of the Mediterranean and there were witnesses.
The Israeli government admitted to the June 8, 1967 attack by Israeli Defense Forces on the American "spy" ship USS Liberty. The Liberty was a SIGINT or signals intelligence gathering ship. In that attack, on an American ship in the Eastern Mediterranean, 34 military personnel including a civilian crew-member were killed, and 175 were wounded, with enough damage to the ship to end her useful service life. Among the 34 dead, 33 were naval personnel and one was a civilian employee of the National Security Agency, the NSA. The ship had a crew compliment of 290 officers and men including three civilian linguists.
A sterile diplomatic apology was made by the Government of Israel (GOI), without admitting culpability, and eventually, after some haggling compensation was paid to the families of the dead, and to the wounded for their injuries. Years later, during the presidency of Jimmie Carter, after more political pressure and haggling, the United States government received payment for the damage to the ship from the government of Israel. In view of the vast amounts of foreign aid provided to the State of Israel, one can speculate as to whom actually made these damage payments--was it the Unites States taxpayers?
In the aftermath of the attack by planes of the Israeli Air Force and motor torpedo boats of the Israeli Navy, some 40 plus years later, survivors continue to suffer a life time of trauma and the sense of abandonment by their government with no forum or remedies "apparently" available to redress the injustices suffered. For them justice is not measured in dollars. There is a lingering sense of betrayal by their then President and Commander-in-Chief, and the Congress of the United States. Subsequent presidents and congresses have perpetrated this injustice claiming no new evidence exists to warrant opening the matter for further investigation. It is no surprise that many of the crew suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome; however, it is disconcerting to have the claim of PTSS used against them to undermine the survivors' credibility as witnesses. After the passage of years as new information slowly emerges, the witnesses and victims to the event are now passing away due to age. Memories are fading and documents have become lost or destroyed--evidence of possible crimes committed at the governmental level.
Despite efforts by both the United States government and government of Israel to sweep the incident under the rug with the continuing cloak of official secrecy, the matter still lingers today, more actively than ever, after more than forty years. An open festering wound continues to exist in many quarters adversely affecting relationships between both countries, to some extent mitigated with the passage of time and the need to deal with real world crises in the Middle East region. A simple question is do we spy on each other? Former U.S. government officials will claim that because of our special relationship with Israel that our national security has been undermined for political reasons at the presidential level.
The attack on the USS Liberty raises many questions, some answered, but more remain part of a continuing mystery. To understand the Liberty story is to understand our Middle East foreign policy, and our strange relationship with the State of Israel. Nevertheless, the interests of the United States and Israel do not always merge. Events of that Six-Day War still cloud efforts to bring peace to the area, and we came close to a nuclear confrontation every bit as serious as the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early '60s.
