The USS Liberty Revisited

On 8 June 1967, during the Six Day War, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an American signals intelligence ship operating in international waters off the Sinai coast. The ship was clearly marked, flying an American flag, broadcasting on identifiable frequencies, in daylight, for the more than two hours the attack lasted. Thirty four American sailors were killed and more than one hundred and seventy wounded.

Both the United States Navy Court of Inquiry and a parallel Israeli investigation concluded that the attack was a case of mistaken identity, the result of confusion in the fog of war. Israel apologised and paid compensation exceeding twelve million dollars. The case was declared closed, and it has remained officially closed for nearly six decades.

It has never stayed closed in practice. Captain Ward Boston, the Navy's own senior legal counsel to the Court of Inquiry, stated under oath, in a declaration he asked to be made public after his death, that the inquiry's findings were dictated to him before the evidence was reviewed and that the verdict was written to exonerate Israel regardless of what the evidence showed. Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the attack, said publicly that he did not believe the official account and called it a cover up. CIA Director Richard Helms, NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk have all been cited, by name, as sharing that disbelief. In 2004 an Independent Commission of Inquiry submitted a formal finding to the United States Congress concluding the attack was deliberate. That finding sits in the Congressional Record today.

The survivors have never stopped pressing the case either. For decades, men who were on the ship that day have given talks, written books, appeared in documentaries, and lobbied Congress for a new investigation and for the declassification of National Security Agency recordings they maintain were made in real time during the attack and have never been fully released. Larry Bowen and Bill Casper, two survivors who have spoken publicly in recent years, describe nearly six decades of living with what happened, and with being ignored. Their case has fallen, in their own words, on deaf ears.

On 8 June 2026, the 59th anniversary of the attack, that changed, briefly. Congressman Thomas Massie used a House floor speech to honour the survivors, entered Captain Boston's declaration into the Congressional Record, named Helms, Inman, Rusk, and Moorer by their actual titles and offices, and called for a new investigation and a congressional resolution. The USS Liberty Veterans Association praised the speech as the first time, in their words, that any member of Congress had been willing to listen.

The press response to Massie's speech did not engage a single name or a single claim. He was described as anti-Israel, and his sources were described as a conspiracy theory.

That response inadvertently answers the question it was meant to foreclose. A claim sourced to a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a CIA director, an NSA director, a Secretary of State, and the Navy's own chief counsel to its own inquiry is not, by any honest use of the term, a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory lacks credible named sourcing. This claim has nothing but credible named sourcing. Labelling it anti-Israel rather than examining it reveals, more clearly than any direct statement could, exactly whose interest the label is protecting. If the claim were baseless, it would be refuted. Instead it is renamed. That is not how true things are defended. It is how inconvenient things are buried, and the choice of burial over refutation is itself evidence of which one this is.

Liberty would not be the first time this ally's official account stayed unexamined for decades before the underlying documents finally surfaced. Palestinian historians, beginning in the 1950s, documented the 1948 exodus as systematic expulsion, village by village, drawing on refugee testimony and Arab sources. They were dismissed for decades as biased, partisan, and unreliable, their work treated as advocacy rather than history. Then, in the 1980s and after, Israel's own state archives were opened, and Israeli scholars, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, and Tom Segev among them, read the military's own records and reported the same events the Palestinian historians had already described. They did not discover anything new. They confirmed, from inside the institution that had denied it, what the people the institution had expelled had been saying all along, and had been disbelieved for saying. The New Historians were harassed and professionally punished for publishing it anyway. The files said it regardless, once they were opened, and the founding account did not survive contact with them.

The structure of that episode is the structure of Liberty. An account is contested by the people with direct knowledge of what happened to them. They are dismissed for decades as unreliable or biased. The institution that alone holds the documents capable of settling the question keeps them closed. Eventually, if the documents are opened at all, it is the institution's own people who open them, and what they find is not a discovery but a confirmation of what the original witnesses said from the start.

There is a precedent for exactly this configuration on the American side too, and it resolved.

In August 1964, the United States Congress was told that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had carried out two unprovoked attacks on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. That account became the legal foundation for a war that killed roughly fifty eight thousand Americans and an estimated two to three million Vietnamese. For four decades, doubt about the second attack was treated as fringe and unpatriotic. In 2005 the National Security Agency declassified its own internal history, written by its own historian Robert Hanyok, which concluded that the second attack never occurred, that the intelligence record properly read at the time told the story that no attack had happened, and that officials had deliberately constructed a different story instead. The Navy revised its official position to match. The dissenters of four decades had been correct, and once the file was opened, nobody disputed it any longer.

What changed between the dissent and the vindication was not the evidence. The evidence had existed all along. What changed was that there was nothing left to stop the file from being reopened. The war was over and lost, the policy the lie had served was finished, and the officials it had protected were out of office or dead. This was never a question of any foreign party's interest. It was a purely internal American calculation, and once nothing remained to block disclosure, the file was opened.

Liberty's file has not opened, nearly six decades on, for the same reason it has not opened in any of the preceding decades, and for the same reason the 1948 archive sat closed until Israel's own historians opened it from the inside, decades after Palestinian historians had already said what those files would say. The ally whose conduct Liberty concerns is not a defeated wartime adversary. It is a current, active partner of the United States, attended by every instrument a current partner has at its disposal to ensure that scrutiny is answered with a label rather than a file. Tonkin shows what that label is worth once the file finally opens anyway. It was worth nothing. The men who insisted otherwise, for four decades, against the same charge of fringe and disloyalty now levelled at Massie and at the survivors he stood beside, turned out to have simply been telling the truth before the institution was ready to admit it.