we saw that...

The Israeli government, the AntiDefamation League, and certain notorious apologists for Israel insist that the attack was a tragic accident and that the US government accepts that assertion. Not so. Virtually every knowledgeable American official with the lone exception of Robert McNamara is on public record calling the attack deliberate and the Israeli story untrue.

Here are a few of those American leaders.

"I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. . . . Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous " -- US Secretary of State Dean Rusk

"...the board of inquiry (concluded) that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing in attacking the Liberty." -- CIA Director Richard Helms

"I can tell you for an absolute certainty (from intercepted communications) that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship." -- NSA Deputy Director Oliver Kirby

"That the Liberty could have been mistaken for the Egyptian supply ship El Quseir is unbelievable"
-- Special Assistant to the President Clark Clifford, in his report to President Lyndon Johnson

"The highest officials of the [Johnson] administration, including the President, believed it 'inconceivable' that Israel's 'skilled' defense forces could have committed such a gross error." -- Lyndon Johnson's biographer Robert Dallek in Flawed Giant, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 430-31)

"A nice whitewash for a group of ignorant, stupid and inept [expletive deleted]." -- Handwritten note of August 26, 1967, by NSA Deputy Director Louis W. Tordella reacting to the Israeli court decision exonerating Israelis of blame for the Liberty attack.

"Never before in the history of the United States Navy has a Navy Board of Inquiry ignored the testimony of American military eyewitnesses and taken, on faith, the word of their attackers. -- Captain Richard F. Kiepfer, Medical Corps, US Navy (retired), USS Liberty Survivor

"The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.... It was our shared belief. . .that the attack. . .could not possibly have been an accident.... I am certain that the Israeli pilots [and] their superiors. . .were well aware that the ship was American." -- Captain Ward Boston, JAGC, US Navy (retired), senior legal counsel to the US Navy Court of Inquiry

That the attack was deliberate "just wasn't a disputed issue" within the National Security Agency -- Former NSA Director retired Army Lieutenant General William Odom on 3 March 2003 in an interview for Naval Institute Proceedings

Former NSA/CIA Director Admiral Bobby Inman "flatly rejected" the Cristol/Israeli claims that the attack was an accident -- 5 March 2003 interview for Naval Institute Proceedings

Of four former NSA/CIA seniors with inside knowledge, none was aware of any agency official who dissented from the position that the attack was deliberate -- David Walsh, writing in Naval Institute Proceedings

"It appears to me that it was not a pure case of mistaken identity." -- Captain William L. McGonagle, Commanding Officer, USS Liberty, speaking at Arlington National Cemetery, June 8, 1997

"To suggest that they [the IDF] couldn't identify the ship is ... ridiculous. ... Anybody who could not identify the Liberty could not tell the difference between the White House and the Washington Monument." -- Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations and later Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, quoted in The Washington Post, June 15, 1991, p. 14