[CTRL] James Bamford & USS Liberty

[William Shannon]

BAMFORD "LIBERTY" ACCOUNT REPUDIATED Key aspects of author James Bamford's recent account of the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty are being disavowed by some of his own sources. The Liberty, an American spy ship, was sailing in the Mediterranean Sea off the Sinai coast when it was attacked on June 8, 1967 by Israeli air and naval forces towards the end of the 1967 war.  There were 34 Americans killed and 171 wounded.  The Israeli government claimed the attack was an "error";  some U.S. officials, and surviving Liberty crew members, have contended that the attack must have been deliberate.  But why? In his new bestseller "Body of Secrets," Bamford proposes a motive for the attack:  Israel, he says, was in the process of murdering several hundred Egyptian prisoners of war at nearby El Arish and wanted to prevent the Liberty from preserving recorded evidence of the massacre. But there appears to be no verifiable evidence that such a massacre ever took place, and Bamford's description of events at El Arish doesn't hold up.  Thus, he attributes to Israeli journalist Gabi Bron a claim that 150 prisoners were executed there.  But Bron himself denies that and says "there were no mass murders." Meanwhile, Bamford infers that the Israelis must have known that they were attacking an American ship because, as he discovered, an American surveillance aircraft was flying overhead at the time and it recorded Israeli pilots' references to a U.S. flag. But Bamford's source, the American airman and linguist who recorded those communications, reached an "opposite" conclusion.  Marvin E. Nowicki wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal (16 May 2001) that the Israeli military forces "prosecuted the Liberty until their operators had an opportunity to get close-in and see the flag, hence the references to the flag."  The attack, he believes, "was a gross error." These and other disputed points in Bamford's account are presented in a fierce critique by Michael Oren in the latest issue of The New Republic ("Unfriendly Fire," 23 July).  That article is not available online, but an earlier article by Oren entitled "The U.S.S. Liberty: Case Closed" appeared in the Israeli neoconservative journal Azure (Spring 2000) and may be found here:     http://www.shalem.org.il/azure/9-Oren.htm James Bamford has done more than any other individual to shed light on the National Security Agency and to promote public accountability of this intensely secretive organization, dating back to his landmark 1982 book "The Puzzle Palace."  The list of his reportorial coups to the present day is long and impressive. His new chapter on the Liberty itself contains significant new information and reporting.  But his tendentious interpretation of the event is a salutary reminder that even the best reporters can get it wrong, and that readers ultimately have to be their own critics. In response to a number of reviews pointing out defects in his argument that the Israeli attack was deliberate, Mr. Bamford has lately taken a somewhat defensive posture.  "It's not my job to provide definitive proof," he said at a recent book-signing.  "I didn't have the time or the money to look into all of the details." Rather, he said, he hoped to prompt a congressional investigation into the matter and to promote declassification of documents such as the transcript of the recordings made by the American surveillance aircraft. Documentation on the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty will be printed in "Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, volume XIX, Six-Day War" which is tentatively scheduled for publication next year. The National Security Agency and the Defense Department are now conducting a declassification review of documents for publication in that volume.  The NSA exceeded the nominal deadline for declassification in May, but told the State Department that its review should be completed by August of this year.  No description of the documents under review has been disclosed