Chapter 3: America the Target: 9-11 and Israel's History of False Flag Terrorism
U.S. President George W. Bush, flanked by Israeli leaders Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres, January 2008
Why should they, the Americans, have trusted us? We were a bunch of Russians; socialist Russians.
- Isser Harel, founder of Israeli intelligence, on U.S. relations with Israel
The previous chapter explains that the Israeli military has a history of owning and operating private aircraft leasing and maintenance companies in the United States. These privately-held aviation companies, created by the Israeli military and linked to its state-owned aviation industry, clearly had the capability and advanced avionics required to convert Boeing aircraft into remote-controlled drones like those that apparently struck the World Trade Center (WTC) on 9-11.
Given the Israeli military's capability to carry out the attacks, the evidence of Israeli prior knowledge raises a fundamental question that must be asked: Would the Israeli military conduct such an outrageous act of terror?
Millions of Americans have blindly accepted, without any proof, the government and controlled media's tale that nineteen Arabs, who lacked basic piloting skills, were responsible for the coordinated precision aerial attacks and subsequent carnage and destruction of 9-11. On the other hand, the same government and media have shown absolutely no interest in probing the evidence or looking into the many unanswered questions surrounding the attacks. There can only be one logical explanation for the persistent avoidance of the evidence by the institutions that should be leading the investigation. They have avoided the evidence because it does not fit or contradicts the fictitious tale they have presented to the public.
The number of people who realize that the government and media have lied about 9-11 is significant and continues to grow all the time. The pack of lies surrounding the attacks has been thoroughly exposed and can no longer be supported. Unable to defend their fictional tale in the face of facts and evidence presented by honest scientists and writers, the defenders of the 9/11 lies use disinformation, defamation, and slander to try and prevent the truth from spreading like wildfire.
ISRAELI PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
While the evidence indicates that the Israelis had prior knowledge of 9-11, commonly-held misconceptions about Israel and a general lack of understanding of Zionism's brutal history of terrorism prevent most people from comprehending the Israeli connection. An ignorance of Zionist history, cultivated by the controlled media, prevents people from understanding reality in the Middle East. It is essential to have a grasp of the history of previous Israeli attacks on the United States to understand 9/11. This chapter examines a few little-known, but key events in the history of Israeli false-flag terror attacks and the Zionist planners behind them. The names and events discussed in this chapter are at the center of Zionist terrorism, false-flag and otherwise.
"False-flag" terrorism means an act of terror planned and perpetrated by one party for the purpose of having the blame assigned to its enemy for political or strategic purposes. 9-11, like many of the terror attacks that have occurred in occupied-Iraq, was a textbook false-flag operation. False-flag attacks are designed to foment hostility or instigate war between groups or nations.
Only very rarely has the United States, oceans away from the conflicts of Europe and Asia, actually been attacked by foreign militaries. The British invasion during the War of 1812 and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 are the only two foreign attacks, prior to 9-11, that come to mind. Although 9-11 is disguised and interpreted by the government and media as an act of terrorism carried out by Islamic fanatics, the evidence indicates that it was a carefully planned false-flag attack carried out by the Israeli military after years of planning and preparation.
EVIDENCE OF ISRAELI INVOLVEMENT
This is not a hypothesis that can be easily dismissed as based on speculation or prejudice. There is solid evidence that Israeli intelligence agencies had prior knowledge of 9-11, which is indicative of involvement in the attacks. Public statements made by key terror suspects, the five jubilant "movers" arrested in New Jersey, for example, who were actually Israeli intelligence agents, indicate that they possessed prior knowledge of the attacks.
In November 2001, after two months in U.S. custody, three of the five agents appeared on Israeli television and admitted, in plain Hebrew, that their purpose had been to document the event. The Israeli interviewer did not ask the men who had sent them, but it is quite clear they were working for Israeli intelligence.
The five fake movers from Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, New Jersey, were actually operatives of the Israeli secret services. The five Israeli agents, described in early news reports as "Middle Eastern," had been sought by the FBI and New Jersey authorities after they had been seen celebrating and photographing the destruction of the World Trade Center. The Israelis made a video of themselves with the burning towers behind them as they flicked their cigarette lighters, laughed, and celebrated as hundreds of innocent people were being roasted alive. Reportedly, they had worn Palestinian or Arab garb, which was later found in their van.
Two of the five Israelis, who were caught with multiple passports, box cutters, thousands of dollars stuffed into their socks, and driving a van that tested positive for explosives, were actually on a list of foreign intelligence agents known to U.S. law enforcement authorities at the time.
ABC News did a follow up on the Israeli agents in June 2002:
The arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion about the men. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. A box cutter was found in the van. But perhaps the biggest surprise for the officers came when the five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens.
‘We Are Not Your Problem’
According to the police report, one of the passengers told the officers they had been on the West Side Highway in Manhattan "during the incident" — referring to the World Trade Center attack. The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers, "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem." The other passengers were his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omer Marmari.
The five "movers" were evidently part of a much larger Israeli terror operation in New York City. The Urban Moving Systems company was later exposed as a Mossad "front" company, a fake agency set up to facilitate their terror operation. An American who worked with the company said he was shocked to see that the Israeli employees had openly rejoiced over the attacks.
The respected New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, reported in March 2002, however, that it had received a briefing on the case of the five Israelis from a US official who was regularly updated by law enforcement agencies. This is what he told The Forward: "The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it."
-- Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, by HeraldScotland.com
A former Urban Moving Systems employee later contacted the Newark Division with information indicating that he had quit his employment with Urban Moving Systems due to high amount of anti-American sentiment present among Urban’s employees. The former employee stated that an Israeli employee of Urban had even once remarked, “Give us twenty years and we’ll take over your media and destroy your country.””
-- 9/11 Revisited: Declassified FBI Files Reveal New Details About ‘The Five Israelis’, by Greg Fernandez Jr.
In November 2001, the five Israeli agents and terror suspects were returned to Israel on "visa violations" although they first repeatedly refused to take, and then failed lie detector tests concerning their involvement in 9-11.
“After the polygraph,” one of the two Israelis arrested in Pennsylvania “admitted to being untruthful regarding his employment status (he stated he wasn’t getting paid by Urban Moving, but only helping [ – ]. Later he admitted that he was, in fact, getting paid directly by Urban Moving), the employment status of his [ -] (he stated that she didn’t work at all and was visiting from Israel … he later admitted that she did work in the U.S. [ – ] but didn’t want to get her in trouble). When questioned about whether he was untruthful about matters pertaining to the terrorist incident, [ – ] said absolutely not.”
-- 9/11 Revisited: Declassified FBI Files Reveal New Details About ‘The Five Israelis’, by Greg Fernandez Jr.
Instant messages warning of the attack at the WTC, predicting the event to the precise minute, sent via the Mossad-owned Odigo messaging system hours before the first plane hit the North Tower, are further evidence that members of Israeli intelligence agencies had very specific and accurate knowledge of the terror attacks – long before they occurred.
In a complex and elaborately planned crime of mass murder and terrorism like 9-11, possession of specific prior knowledge like that held by the fake Israeli movers and the senders of the Odigo messages is clearly evidence of involvement in the crime.
Had the recipients of the Odigo warnings contacted the responsible authorities in New York City, thousands of lives would have been saved. If these people were not complicit in the crime, why didn't they contact the authorities? Taking the evidence of Israeli prior knowledge into consideration with the Israeli military's capability to launch such a sophisticated false-flag terror attack, the obvious question has to be asked: Would Israeli military agencies commit such an atrocious act of terrorism in the United States in order to achieve a strategic goal?
The question whether Israeli strategic planners would conduct a false-flag terror attack against the United States, their most powerful ally, in order to fix the blame on the Arabs, their enemies, raises several specific questions:
1. Has the Israeli military conducted false-flag terror attacks against the United States in the past?
2. If so, are there links between the people or agencies involved in the previous terror attacks and 9-11?
3. Is there a strategic goal for which Zionist planners would commit such a terrorist atrocity?
4. If so, has that strategic goal been realized as a result of 9-11?
The answer to all four questions is yes. The Israeli military has a documented history of conducting military and false-flag terror attacks against the United States. It also has a history of withholding information from the United States about threats that it has knowledge of.
Specific Zionist extremists are, furthermore, the prime suspects with the strongest motives for carrying out 9-11. The Zionist motive was to kick-start their long-planned U.S.-led "War on Terror" with a spectacular terror attack against the United States. Like any other crime, solving 9-11 requires that we diligently investigate those suspects with strong motives and prior histories of committing similar crimes. There are Israeli suspects who fit this description. On the other hand, there is no reasonable Arab motive to attack the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Why would Arabs or Moslems commit such a counter-productive act? Why would any Arab organization commit a senseless crime knowing that it would invite a U.S. military invasion of their nation or another Islamic nation? The Arab/Islamic terror scenario makes very little sense.
ISRAEL'S HISTORY OF TERROR
We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.
- David Ben Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, to the General Staff, May 1948
Zionists and Israelis have long employed terrorism as a tool and a tactic. Senior officials of the Israeli government, the Mossad, and AMAN (Israeli military intelligence) have long histories of using terror as a tool. Zionist immigrants from Poland and Russia used terrorism to drive the native Palestinians from their land, homes, and villages during the war of 1947-48. Some 400 Palestinian villages and towns were obliterated and their populations killed or sent into exile as refugees. Many of the Palestinian houses and villages were taken over by Jewish immigrants; others were razed to the ground.
The Zionists also began using terrorism as a tactic against the West in the 1940s, carrying out false-flag terror attacks against the United States and Britain as far back as the bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel on July 22, 1946. The bombing of the luxury hotel was ordered by Menachem Begin, the head of the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist organization during the 1930s and 1940s. Begin, a terrorist and avowed racist, later became prime minister of Israel, a position he held during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which was led by Ariel Sharon, then minister of defense. Begin had a Jewish supremacist view of the world, which he used to justify his crimes of terrorism and genocide. "[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs," Begin, then Prime Minister Begin, said in a speech to the Knesset, as quoted by the Israeli writer Amnon Kapeliouk in his article "Begin and the Beasts" published in the New Statesman of June 25, 1982.
The children of Israel will happily go to school and joyfully return home, just like the children in Washington, in Moscow, and in Peking, in Paris and in Rome, in Oslo, in Stockholm and in Copenhagen. The fate of … Jewish children has been different from all the children of the world throughout the generations. No more. We will defend our children. If the hand of any two-footed animal is raised against them, that hand will be cut off, and our children will grow up in joy in the homes of their parents.
-- Menachem Begin, Speech to the Knesset, June 24, 1982
Begin is a distinctively Hitleristic type. He is a racist who is willing to kill all the Arabs in order to gain control of the entire land of Israel. In his view, the sacred goal -- absolute rule -- justifies every means. I see him as a grave danger to Israel's internal and external security .... I cannot forget the little I know about his previous operations, which have a clear meaning.... I have no doubt Begin hates Hitler, but this does not prove that they are any different.... The first time I heard Begin give a speech over the radio, I heard the voice and the screaming of Hitler.
-- David Ben Gurion letter to poet Chaim Guri, quoted in Menachem Begin: A Life, by Avi Shilon
Menachem Begin, the Polish-born head of the terrorist gang Irgun, and the King David Hotel he ordered bombed in 1946. "Everything was coordinated with the Haganah," Prime Minister Begin later told the Israel Broadcasting Authority.
Irgun and Haganah terrorists, disguised as Arabs, set off seven large demolition bombs in the basement of the King David Hotel, which was the base for the British Secretariat and the military command in British-occupied Palestine. Ninety-one people were killed, most of them staff of the secretariat. The attack on the hotel was the deadliest attack against the British in the history of the Mandate. To this day, the Zionist bombing of the King David Hotel is the terrorist act which has caused the greatest number of casualties in the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Zionist extremists, however, are proud of the terrorist bombing as one of their actions that compelled the British to give up the Mandate over Palestine.
David Ben Gurion, the head of the Haganah militia who advocated the use of terror as a tool, supported the bombing. Although the Haganah publicly condemned the bombing afterwards, many researchers insist that the Haganah directly authorized the bombing. "Everything was coordinated with the Haganah," former prime minister and Irgun leader Menachem Begin declared in a film clip from the Israel Broadcasting Authority's "Scroll of Fire" series.
"We must use terror," Israel's first prime minister David Ben Gurion (left) told the General Staff in 1948. Ben Gurion (a.k.a. David Grün), the Polish-born leader of the Haganah, authorized the terror bombing of the King David Hotel. Ben Gurion, who developed Zionist terrorism as a tool to coerce the Palestinians and the West, with his junior partners in terror, Shimon Peres (right) and Moshe Dayan.
NETANYAHU'S SUPPORT FOR TERRORISTS
Members of the Irgun, which carried out scores of terror bombings in the 1930s and 40s (and its political successors in the Likud party) hold the world view that "political violence and terrorism" are "legitimate tools in the Jewish national struggle for the Land of Israel," according to Arie Perliger and Leonard Weinberg, authors of "Jewish Self Defense and Terrorist Groups Prior to the Establishment of the State of Israel: Roots and Traditions."
In July 2006, the former prime minister and leader of the Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, attended a two-day 60th anniversary celebration of the King David Hotel bombing with former terrorists of the Irgun and Haganah. The event was organized by the Menachem Begin Heritage House, the University of Haifa, and the Association of IZL [Irgun] Fighters. The seminar was held "to mark the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, by members of the United Resistance Movement (Haganah and Irgun)," the Jerusalem Post noted in its pre-event notices. The Israeli newspaper specifically noted that members of the Haganah and Irgun had been involved in the terrorist bombing.
One of the terrorists even led a tour of the hotel he had bombed. The fact that the American-educated right-wing politician and terror specialist, "Bibi" Netanyahu, had participated in a two-day event celebrating the bombing of the King David Hotel was reported in the Jerusalem Post, and in leading newspapers in Britain, France, and India – but not a single word about the event was printed in the controlled press of the United States, the nation supposedly fighting a "War on Terror."
"It's very good," said Benjamin Netanyahu on 9-11 about the attacks which were thought to have killed more than 10,000 Americans.
Netanyahu's conspicuous role as the main speaker at an event celebrating an act of terrorism was not reported in any U.S. newspaper until Patrick Buchanan mentioned it in his article entitled "Moral Culpability for Qana," on August 2, 2006. Buchanan's comments, however, appeared only in independent regional newspapers in Pittsburgh, Wyoming, and Ohio:
Rubbing our noses in our own cravenness, "Bibi" Netanyahu took time out a week ago to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the terror attack on the King David Hotel by Menachem Begin's Irgun, an attack that killed 92 people, among them British nurses. This was not a terrorist act, Bibi explained, because Irgun telephoned a 15-minute warning to the hotel before the bombs went off.
Right. And those children in Qana should not have ignored Israeli leaflets warning them to clear out of southern Lebanon.
Our Israeli friends appear to be playing us for fools.
"TERRORISTS IN DISGUISE"
In 1946, The Times (U.K.) described the Irgun as "terrorists in disguise." Sarah Agassi, 80, was one of the "terrorists in disguise" involved in the bombing of the King David Hotel, it reported. She and a fellow agent had cased out the hotel. Her brother and other terrorists had disguised themselves as Arabs delivering milk and brought seven milk cans, each containing 50 kg. (110 lbs.) of explosives, into the basement of the hotel.
There were important strategic reasons for the bombing, according to the Jerusalem Post of July 27, 2006:
The bombing was a direct response to the events of the British Operation Agatha and the Black Sabbath of June 29, 1946, during which 17,000 British soldiers confiscated weapons and intelligence documents and arrested thousands of leaders of the Yishuv and Hagana activists.
The documents, brought to the King David headquarters, revealed most of the Yishuv's operational plans and incriminated the Jewish Agency in the leadership of the United Resistance, as well as the IZL and the Lehi, against the British.
The evidence would be used to try the Jewish activists and, quite possibly, to hang them.
Twenty-five fighters took part in the carefully-planned and precisely executed bombing. Six of them, dressed as Arab laborers, placed the seven milk cans filled with 350 kg. of explosives, fitted with timers set to go off in 40 minutes, around the central support beam of the hotel's southern wing. Others spread explosives along the roads leading to the hotel to prevent reinforcements and emergency medical crews from arriving at the scene.
NETANYAHU'S TERRORIST ROOTS
Netanyahu is the son of Ben Zion Netanyahu (born Mileikowsky in Warsaw, Poland). Ben Zion was the former senior aide of Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky, the militant extremist founder of Revisionist Zionism and the Irgun. His son, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu is also a leading advocate of the teachings of Jabotinsky. On July 8, 2007, Netanyahu was the keynote speaker at an event at the Jabotinsky Institute to mark the 67th anniversary of the death of the founder of the Irgun.
The Irgun, a Zionist terrorist organization dedicated to creating Greater Israel, is the political parent of Israel's extreme right-wing Likud party, which Benjamin Netanyahu currently heads. The Irgun was the "armed expression" of Revisionist Zionism, which was expressed by Jabotinsky as follows, according to Howard M. Sachar, author of A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time:
1. Every Jew has the right to enter Palestine;
2. Only active retaliation [i.e. terrorism] would deter the Arabs and the British;
3. Only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state.
TERRORISM SPECIALIST
Netanyahu is also a terrorism specialist who has made a career out of promoting the Zionist agenda of a global "War on Terror" since the early 1980s.
On September 11, 2001, the New York Times asked Netanyahu what he thought of the attacks: "It's very good," Netanyahu said. Who else, but a hardened terrorist involved in the crime, would use the word "good" to describe 9-11?
As James Bennet of the New York Times reported on September 12, 2001:
Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, "It's very good." Then he edited himself: "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy."
In 2006, the Jerusalem Post and other newspapers reported on Netanyahu's outspoken support for the terrorists who had bombed the King David Hotel in 1946. The Irgun's chief of operations at the time of the bombing was Eitan Livni, the father of the Israeli Foreign Minister "Tzipi" Livni (2006-09). The high-level political connections in Israel with the Irgun terrorists of the 1940s are an indication of the degree of terrorist influence on the Israeli political establishment, The Hindu [India] wisely noted in an article entitled "Celebrating Terror, Israeli-style" on July 24, 2006:
"We do not think that it is right for an act of terrorism, which led to the loss of many lives, to be commemorated," Britain's Ambassador to Israel, Simon McDonald, and its consul-general in Jerusalem, John Jenkins, protested weakly in a letter to the local Israeli administration in Jerusalem.
PREVIOUS ISRAELI ATTACKS ON U.S. TARGETS
Eight years after the bombing of the King David Hotel, the State of Israel carried out a series of false-flag terror bombings against U.S. and British libraries, theatres, and other government institutions in Egypt in a terror campaign designed to be blamed on Egyptian groups. This Israeli terror campaign of July 1954 is often referred to as the "Lavon Affair" after Pinhas Lavon, the Israeli defense minister at the time.
In June 1967, thirteen years after the Lavon Affair, the Israeli air force and navy deliberately strafed, bombed, napalmed, and torpedoed an unarmed U.S. vessel, the USS Liberty, and tried to kill all of the nearly three hundred crew members, simply to achieve a strategic war-time goal. Recently released documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) confirm that the United States government at the time had evidence that the Israelis had deliberately attacked the USS Liberty knowing it was a U.S. vessel. Oliver Kirby, the NSA's deputy director for operations at the time of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, confirmed the existence of the transcripts to John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune, saying he had personally read them:
Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts, Kirby replied, "I sure did. I certainly did."
"They said, 'We've got him in the zero,'" Kirby recalled, "whatever that meant -- I guess the sights or something. And then one of them said, 'Can you see the flag?'
They said 'Yes, it's U.S, it's U.S.' They said it several times, so there wasn't any doubt in anybody's mind that they knew it."
Kirby, now 86 and retired in Texas, said the transcripts were "something that's bothered me all my life. I'm willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew."
MORDECHAI FEIN (a.k.a. MOTI HOD)
The Israeli planes involved in the attack reported directly to the commander of the air force, Major General Mordechai Hod. Hod (a.k.a. Mordechai Fein or "Moti" Hod) was the Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the 1967 Six-Day War. Hod was from Kibbutz Degania, like Moshe Dayan, the defense minister he served under.
Major General Mordechai "Moti" Hod, IAF Commander (1966-1973)
Hod left the military in 1975 and created CAL, an Israel air cargo company. Oddly, after only two years he left the company he started and became chief executive of El Al airlines from 1977 to 1979. In 1985, he founded an un-named security company, according to his obituary in the Guardian (UK) from June 2003. From 1987 until retirement in 1993, he was the chairman of Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI).
ICTS, the Israeli airport passenger screening and security firm, is a key defendant in the 9-11 litigation. The ICTS website says this about the company: "ICTS International N.V. was founded in 1982 by a select group of security experts, former military commanding officers and veterans of government intelligence and security agencies."
An employee of ICTS told me in 2001 that Huntleigh USA, their wholly owned airport security subsidiary, had handled passenger screening at Boston and Newark airports on 9-11. As a matter of fact, the Mossad-owned company probably had people at every airport involved in any way on 9-11. The ICTS company website says as much: "In 1998, ICTS International N.V. made a strategic decision to focus on the US market. The following year, it acquired Huntleigh USA Corp., which provides airline passenger screening services at 47 US airports, including all the international aviation gateways in the USA."
The ICTS company developed out of El Al (the Israeli-state airlines) security. The Israeli airline security firm went through a number of name changes as it began providing "security" to European and American airports.
Moshe Dayan, defense minister during the Six-Day War, was a close associate and political ally of Shimon Peres. In 1965, former prime minister Ben Gurion and his closest followers, including Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan, broke away from the ruling labor party, Mapai, and formed a separate minority faction, the Rafi or Workers' List.
COVER-UP
The U.S. government, military, and media all went along with the cover-up of the deliberate attack on the USS Liberty to avoid blaming Israel for the murder of 34 American servicemen, 26 of whom died from the torpedo blast, and the wounding of some 173 others. Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, certainly knows who made the decision to attack the U.S. vessel in 1967.
The Main Battle Dressing Station on the USS Liberty was described as a “bloody scene reminiscent of the American Civil War.” The Israeli torpedo and machine guns took a terrible toll on the Liberty’s crew, killing 34 and wounding 172.
The Crewdson article reveals that the Israelis knew very well that the USS Liberty was an American vessel in international waters – before they fired the torpedo that killed twenty-six U.S. servicemen in one fell swoop:
Twenty minutes later, after the Liberty had been hit repeatedly by machine guns, 30 mm cannon and napalm from the Israelis' French-built Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers, the controller directing the attack asked his chief in Tel Aviv to which country the target vessel belonged.
"Apparently American," the chief controller replied.
Fourteen minutes later the Liberty was struck amidships by a torpedo from an Israeli boat, killing 26 of the 100 or so NSA technicians and specialists in Russian and Arabic who were working in restricted compartments below the ship's waterline.
The Israeli torpedo killed 26 U.S. servicemen and left a hole 39 feet across.
"SINK THE TARGET – NO SURVIVORS"
Lt. James M. Ennes, Jr., an officer on the bridge of the USS Liberty, wrote his first-hand account of the Israeli attack in a 1979 book entitled Assault on the Liberty. Lieutenant Ennes' book is documentary evidence that the Israeli attack was deliberate and not an accident of war. Ennes describes how Israeli torpedo boats repeatedly machine-gunned Liberty sailors fighting the napalm fires on deck and shot her life rafts in the water while an oversize U.S. flag flew from its mast.
The shooting of the life rafts indicates that the Israelis did not want anyone to survive the assault and intended sinking of the U.S. vessel. Steve Forslund, an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing in 1967, saw the transcripts from the Israeli pilots and their ground control as they came off the teletype machine at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha.
"The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it," Forslund recalled. "The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag. The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors." Forslund said he clearly recalled "the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely."
"He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was frustrated with the pilots' responses that it didn't sink."
Chief Petty Officer Stanley W. White, president of the Liberty Veterans Association, said, "The Israeli planes and gunboats spent more than one hour hitting us with rockets, napalm bombs, torpedoes, cannon and machine-gun fire. They machine-gunned our firefighters on deck and they shot our life rafts out of the water … I don't know of a single member of our association who believes that attack was an accident."
There are three reasons that have been given as to why the Israelis wanted to sink the U.S. electronic reconnaissance vessel:
1. To prevent the U.S. from knowing that Israel was planning to seize the Golan Heights from Syria;
2. To prevent the U.S. from obtaining evidence that Israeli troops were slaughtering some 1,000 Egyptian prisoners of war near Gaza;
3. To destroy the U.S. vessel that was capable of discerning that Israel was sending false communications to Jordan and Egypt to keep them in the war until the Israeli military achieved its territorial goals on the ground.
"U.S. intelligence documents indicate the Israelis attacked the Liberty deliberately. They feared she would monitor their plans to attack the Golan Heights in Syria - a move the United States opposed for fear of provoking Soviet military intervention," James Ennes said.
Wilber Crane Eveland, an author formerly with the CIA in the Middle East, wrote that the Liberty had intercepted messages that "made it clear that Israel had never intended to limit its attack to Egypt."
ISRAELI MASSACRE OF EGYPTIAN POWS
The Tribune article reported that the NSA's deputy director at the time, Louis Tordella, speculated in a recently declassified memo that the attack "might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai peninsula who wrongly suspected that the Liberty was monitoring his activities." The activities that needed to be hidden included the slaughter of some 1,000 Egyptian POWs.
Aryeh Yitzhaki of Bar Ilan University, who had worked in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) history department, said in an August 1995 interview with Israel Radio that a reconnaissance unit, known as Shaked (Almond), headed by Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, had killed hundreds of Egyptians who had abandoned their weapons and fled into the desert during the 1967 war.
Yitzhaki said he had investigated six or seven separate incidents, in which approximately 1,000 unarmed Egyptian prisoners of war had been killed by IDF units.
THE BOMBING OF THE U.S. MARINE BARRACKS - BEIRUT 1983
Sixteen years later, 241 U.S. Marines died when a Mercedes truck packed with explosives demolished their barracks at Beirut International Airport on October 23, 1983. A similar explosion occurred nearly simultaneously at the French military barracks a few kilometers away, killing 56 French troops.
In the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, President Ronald Reagan sent 1,800 marines to Beirut to act as "peace keepers." Ariel Sharon and the Israeli leadership, however, resented the interference and used the U.S. presence to commit a false-flag operation that killed 241 marines, according to Victor Ostrovsky in his book on the Mossad, By Way of Deception.
Ostrovsky, a former Mossad officer, reported that Nahum Admoni, the Mossad director at the time, had very specific information about the truck being prepared for the attack on the U.S. Marines, but had intentionally withheld this crucial information from the U.S. military. "No, we're not there to protect Americans. They're a big country. Send only the regular information," Admoni reportedly said.
Admoni, the son of Polish immigrants, was director of the Mossad from 1982 to 1989. In 1947-48, Admoni had served in the Shai, the Haganah intelligence branch headed by Isser Harel, and later in the newly created IDF Intelligence, Aman. After the 1948 war, Admoni studied at the University of California, Berkeley, until 1954.
The purpose of the false flag terror bombings in Lebanon was to create U.S. animosity toward the Arab world and align the U.S. with Israel, according to Ostrovsky. There had been an earlier car bomb at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983, which had killed seventeen Marines. The bombing compelled the Marines to move offshore and President Reagan ordered them to be withdrawn from Lebanon on February 7, 1984.
The Beirut bombing was the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima. Israeli intelligence is suspected of having been involved in the bombings in Lebanon.
