Rear Admiral Clarence A. Hill, Jr. and Rear Admiral Merlin H. Staring letter to the Secretary of the Navy Gordon England, July 27, 2005:
". . . Our first reason for addressing you with respect to that letter is in the nature of a fervent thank you. In the Department’s letter to the Congressman is the statement, for the record, that “[the] Court of Inquiry [ordered by Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Europe] was the only United States Government investigation into the attack.” We are most grateful to the Department of the Navy for this official confirmation of a fact that the USS LIBERTY survivors, and others in their support, have maintained over all of these 38 years since the attack. During those years there have been many published assertions and claims that the attack had already been “investigated” a dozen or more times, by various Congressional or other U.S. Government officials or authorities. We deeply appreciate having that matter laid authoritatively to rest. . . .
The official Navy record of the proceedings of that 1967 Court of Inquiry thus reveals that the Court, pursuant to the one-week time limit imposed upon it, actually met during portions of five calendar days – two days of its allotted time having been consumed in its travel between London and the Mediterranean. It is small wonder that the Court fell far short of fulfilling its directed mission of inquiring into “all the pertinent facts and circumstances leading to and connected with” that attack.
The failure of the Court to inquire into, and to record, “all the pertinent facts and circumstances” is both apparent and clear from multiple circumstances of record. We will flag here, preliminarily and briefly, some of the most significant and blatant of those tell-tale indicators:
(1) The arbitrary imposition of a 7-day time limit within which the Court was required to complete its inquiry into a massively complex event;
(2) The fact that, in its three days in Malta, it had access to and took testimony from only 14 of the 260 surviving members of LIBERTY’S complement – many of her 172 wounded crewmen, obviously including many who had been at the heart of the action, having already been medevaced to other U.S. Navy vessels and shoreside facilities for medical attention. (Never thereafter were these critically important eyewitnesses officially questioned concerning their observations of or experiences during the attack.)
(3) Some of the few crewmen whose testimony was in fact recorded included in their sworn testimony factual observations concerning the attack which were eliminated by the Court from its written record or were otherwise subsequently redacted from the Court’s record as it is now officially held and acknowledged by the Government;
(4) Some of the LIBERTY crewmen who did have an opportunity to testify before the Court attempted to respond in full, or to include in or add to their accounts factual observations which would have been clearly relevant to the “pertinent facts and circumstances . . . connected with the armed attack” that the Court had been charged with eliciting – but were stopped and expressly forbidden by the Court to testify further in those areas . . .
We most respectfully ask, Mr. Secretary, that you carefully consider our foregoing presentation – that you examine and appraise, objectively, the official records of your Department to which we have referred, and the validity and accuracy of those records that we have challenged – and that you now, before it is too utterly late, both consent to and support the efforts of the LIBERTY survivors and their supporters to generate a full, fair, and objective United States Government investigation into the facts and records of the 8 June 1967 attack by Israel upon the USS LIBERTY (AGTR-5)."
"I find it very strange that some Americans can argue endlessly that the attack on the USS Liberty was a tragic accident and not the deliberate attack on a known American ship that survivors know it to have been. . . So we are convinced that they (the Israelis) are lying about virtually the entire prelude to, conduct of, and aftermath of the attack. Together, these things have convinced every man on that ship including her commanding officer that the attack was deliberate.
Yet despite these things a few Americans seem to accept the preposterous claim that the attack was a mistake and that firing stopped with the torpedo explosion. One can accept and understand this attitude from an Israeli, as he would have a natural tendency to believe his country’s version of events and to disbelieve contrary versions – especially since he has no personal experience to draw upon. But how can an American disbelieve the virtually identical eyewitness reports of scores of surviving fellow Americans and accept instead the undocumented claims of the foreign power that tried to kill them? That is very difficult to understand or to accept.
The typical Israeli reaction is that we are liars or antiSemites, which of course we are not. We are American sailors honestly reporting an act of treachery at sea. At the very least we deserve your courtesy and understanding.
Lieutenant Jim Ennes, Jr., U.S.S. Liberty
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