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Something that I see being referenced a lot on the dissident Right is the attack on the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War in June 1967 as an ironic statement on the “greatest ally” myth. It’s usually merely a mention: the Liberty. Everybody is simply expected to know what it is all about.

I find that there are a number of misconceptions floating around, stemming from outdated information and speculation on the part of the survivors themselves. “Israel attacked our ship, and then Lyndon Johnson hushed it up.” Well, that’s the very basic of basics.

An up-to-date and brilliantly-edited documentary is Sacrificing Liberty (2020) — and yes, the filmmakers chose the ambiguous title consciously. This miniseries is aimed at a mainstream conservative, Christian, patriotic audience, which I think was a good decision. Later on, I will show the clever techniques that director and editor Matthew Miller Skow employed to make the audience more receptive to the, well, sensitive parts of the background story.

Sacrificing Liberty is a documentary that you can — and should — show to your not yet red-pilled family members and friends, and it was deliberately produced that way. All those involved are clearly aware of Israel’s influence on American politics — they’ve had decades to learn its extent — but they don’t go overboard with it. (Pardon the pun.) They simply point out the logical conclusions drawn from the combined evidence as it pertains to the Liberty. They ask the right rhetorical questions. They carefully avoid uttering any specific statement that might get them cancelled, while saying what they want to say, anyway. Intelligence officer David Lewis carefully frames it that it was “a limited group that betrayed me, very influential but limited,” but he also states that ever since LBJ, Israel has gotten from the United States whatever it wanted, any time it wanted. “It has nothing to do with the religion, it’s the politics of Zionism.” There are clips showing the descendants of those involved in the attack on the Liberty still networking with one another on behalf of Israel.

For decades, the survivors of the attack on USS Liberty have tried to piece together the puzzle of what really happened on that fateful day of June 8, 1967. Most of them only started to get serious after they had retired. They reunited and formed the USS Liberty Veterans Association. Many veterans are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt to this day, and it’s easy to understand why as the story unfolds.

Sacrificing Liberty includes extensive footage from the 2002 BBC documentary Dead in the Water by Peter Hounam, whom we will meet later. Hounam interviewed several higher-ups, both American and Israeli, who had been involved in the Liberty incident, many of whom were no longer available for the 2020 production, either because they had died in the meantime or for other reasons.

Sacrificing Liberty consists of, each about an hour long, and is available on Odysee, but I strongly encourage you to support the filmmakers.

The first part, “Unfriendly Fire,” covers the biographies of 14 former crewmen and how they ended up on the USS Liberty. The vessel was an intelligence-gathering ship, — aka a spy ship — monitoring the political situation on the west coast of Africa. Contrary to what the survivors had assumed in earlier interviews and books, espionage was not the reason why she was targeted by the Israeli military in 1967, as it turned out. Although this function of hers meant that there was a clear divide between the members of the crew: the “communication technicians” and the so-called ship’s company, the regular crew. The survivors express regret about it today, because they were literally in the same boat.

Assisted by archival footage and computer-generated imagery, the initially light-hearted story proceeds to the Liberty being suddenly ordered at the end of May 1967 to the eastern Mediterranean — “full speed, top speed, as fast as we could go,” in the words of survivor Phil Tourney. In Rota, Spain they picked up additional personnel: linguists proficient in Arabic and Russian. This hasty transfer will become meaningful later on.

Knowing they were going into a warzone, the Liberty’s officers requested escorts. This was denied by Vice Admiral William I. Martin (Commander of the Sixth Fleet) and Admiral John S. McCain (Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Europe) on the grounds that the Liberty was clearly not armed, except for one 50mm machine gun that was mounted on its deck, and which could not be considered a serious danger by anyone.

The Liberty then went about her business in international waters off the Sinai coast. Conscious of a war going on ashore, the crew wasn’t worried when, over the course of several hours, Israeli surveillance planes repeatedly circled the ship. The crew felt safe, one survivor attested, because they knew the Israelis were on their side. Everybody at the time was cheering for Israel, and all seemed fine.

During lunch, Bob Eisenberg, a Jewish communications technician, told one of his colleagues that something was about to happen. Somebody was “going to get it.” He had picked up Israeli chatter that referenced “the target.” Eisenberg himself would be killed in the attack.

At about 2 PM, two unmarked fighter aircraft approached the Liberty and began strafing it with 50mm machine-gun fire, three-inch rockets, and finally, napalm. Taken out in the initial attack run were all the ship’s antennas, except for one that was offline due to a malfunction. Now, there has been some debate in the comments on the Odysee videos about this fact. It is claimed in the documentary that the fighter jets had tuned their missiles to the frequency of the live antennas. Some commentators have claimed that this is not how it works; others have claimed that it is. I don’t know anything about radio frequencies, targeting systems, or fighter planes, so I’ll leave the discussion to the experts.

At any rate, one crewmember managed to reactivate the remaining antenna while under fire, and so the Liberty was able to send out a distress signal. The documentary does not explicitly make this clear, but while this feat of genuine heroism did nothing for the Liberty at the time, it produced a large number of new eyewitnesses who would later help in getting to the bottom of the story.

Busy as they were with trying not to get killed, carrying the wounded below deck, and putting out fires, the crew didn’t give much thought to who was attacking them, but they assumed it to be Egyptian forces. But there was no mistaking the two or three (accounts differ) torpedo boats that showed up after the first wave of attacks, given that they were flying the Israeli flag. Any relief the survivors felt about help arriving was quickly dispelled when an announcement came from the ship’s Captain, William McGonagle: “Prepare for torpedo attack.”

Another hour-long wave of attacks followed — as the documentary makes clear, commencing 20 minutes after the aircraft had identified the Liberty as American. It is claimed that the Israeli boats fired five torpedoes, but I don’t know who did the counting. At least two missed the ship, as stated by Phil Tourney. One struck the Liberty amidships and managed to hit an I-beam, which actually prevented the worst damage by directing the force of the explosion outward. Water flooded through the huge hole in the Liberty’s hull, and she began listing to starboard.

The torpedo boats also shot up the Liberty’s life rafts, and even carried one of them off as a trophy, where it is displayed in the Haifa National Maritime Museum even today.

After the torpedo boats retreated, attack helicopters approached and attempted to board the Liberty. Survivor Phil Tourney, the angry rebel, described how he locked eyes with one of the Israeli Marines and flipped him off. “He thought it was funny,” Tourney said. The Israeli smiled, answered the gesture — and then the helicopters took off.

The first part of the documentary ends with David Lewis’ enigmatic words: “If my troops had known the President of the United States was attempting to kill all of them, it might have been the first mutiny the Navy ever saw.”

The second part, “Perfectly Executed Military Operation,” deals with the attack’s immediate aftermath. David Lewis analyzed what had been going on: “The aircraft were sent to make us incommunicado so that we couldn’t send an SOS out, the torpedo boats were sent to sink us, and the helicopters were sent to pick out survivors, so there’d be no trace.”

Clips from Peter Hounam’s documentary are shown in which the Israeli commanders offer the usual excuses that have been given: the Israelis had had doubts about the identification of the ship, and there had been some sort of miscommunication between the Israeli forces involved in the attack. Read the Wikipedia entry for the very lengthy, convoluted explanations and timelines that are clearly designed to either bore or confuse you into giving up looking into it further, including the ridiculous story of how

an Israeli jet fighter pilot reported that a ship 20 miles (32 km) north of Arish had fired at his aircraft after he tried to identify the vessel. Israeli naval command dispatched two destroyers to investigate, but they were returned to their previous positions at 9:40 a.m. after doubts emerged during the pilot’s debriefing.

I mean — what?

The period of waiting for rescue after the intense footage of the attack allows Sacrificing Liberty to show what else was going on. We are introduced to Bill Knutson, who in 1967 was a Navy fighter pilot aboard the USS America, which was part of the Sixth Fleet. He was part of an abortive rescue mission for the Liberty. We learn that the Israelis had been jamming both the international distress frequency (which is a war crime) as well as the Liberty’s tactical frequencies; the jamming only stopped when the aircraft attacked, and this was when the Liberty was able to send out an SOS.

We learn from Captain Tully of the USS Saratoga that he launched 12 conventionally-armed aircraft in response to the SOS, and that Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, the carrier division commander of the Sixth Fleet, then sent a message ordering the aircraft to return to the Saratoga. What was that all about?

By this point, the USS Liberty was riddled with bullet and rocket holes. She was also listing to starboard, where the torpedo had punched a huge hole in her hull. The survivors were trying to evacuate from the flooded lower decks. The mess hall had been turned into a field hospital. The ship’s surgeon, Richard Kiepfer, operated on crewmen while being wounded himself; he had shrapnel in his abdomen, and was only holding his guts in by way of a life jacket tied around his torso.

Lieutenant George Golden, Phil Tourney’s “boss,” basically took over command of the ship at this point. This is not explicitly stated in Sacrificing Liberty, only that Golden was one of the heroes that day. Captain McGonagle was in a state of shock. It has been stated elsewhere that McGonagle actually knew about the upcoming attack, but had been assured that it would only be for show — just so they could claim to have been attacked by the Egyptians. A few shots would be fired, but nothing major. By this time the Captain knew he had been tricked, and that he had been one of the victims selected to be sacrificed.

Over 17 hours after the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty began, help finally arrived at 5 AM the following day. The wounded and some of the dead were flown out. The first reporter on the scene was Robert Goralski of NBC. In the Navy, however, there was an immediate lockdown on information.

The Liberty was ordered to go to Malta instead of Crete, which was much closer; during the six-day voyage, the remaining crewmen suspected the ship was meant to break apart and finally sink. In the sealed-off lower decks, the bodies of 25 crewmen were still floating in 110-degree saltwater.

That was when Admiral Isaac Kidd and his legal aid, Ward Boston, came on board to conduct an enquiry. According to Wikipedia:

[Admiral McCain] ordered a Naval Court of Inquiry to be convened following the June 1967 USS Liberty incident, and chose his colleague, Admiral Isaac C. Kidd Jr., to head it. McCain limited the scope of the Inquiry and gave Kidd only a week to investigate and come up with a report on the matter, factors that led to doubts persisting for decades about what actually took place in the Liberty attack.

And:

Captain Ward Boston . . . claimed that the entire Inquiry was a sham meant to exonerate Israel: “I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of “mistaken identity” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

“Conclude” is perhaps a bit of a weak statement, if one listens to the survivors’ accounts. According to them, Kidd actively threatened them with prison — “or worse” — if they ever spoke a word to anyone about what had happened.

The third part, “Jigsaw Puzzle”, returns us to the USS America, where Admiral Geis told David Lewis in confidence that, upon picking up the Liberty’s SOS, he had launched aircraft, but that Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense, had immediately ordered him to recall them. Geis had then exercised his military prerogative to challenge the order, which meant it was now up to President Johnson to decide. His answer was clear: “I don’t care if the ship sinks, I will not embarrass my ally” – and this was several hours before he was officially informed about who had attacked the Liberty. “Further proof,” concludes Lewis, “that he was behind it all. . . . I hated Lyndon Johnson. I didn’t think much of McNamara. But I couldn’t believe either of them were capable of that.”

In the dry dock at Malta, the huge clean-up and hush-up began. The crewmen had to do the cleaning themselves, including body removal, as no civilians were allowed on board. If you want to have nightmares, this section of the documentary is for you. The most horrible story is that of Ronald Kukal, who had the job of putting the body parts back together. No journalists were allowed on board, and the crewmen were not allowed to talk to the media. The cover story was that the Liberty had been assisting in evacuating US personnel from the Sinai region. Meanwhile, the message to anyone involved, including the relief forces, was: This didn’t happen.

After the holes had been patched up and the ship was newly painted, a skeleton crew, consisting mainly of the engineering crew, brought the Liberty back to the US. Only family members greeted them at Little Creek, and of course they were forbidden to talk to anybody about what had happened.

The affair ruined dreams, ambitions, marriages. The traumatized young men were scattered to various service stations, with no mention of the Liberty in their service records. Phil Tourney relates that he was informed that Israel wanted to settle with him for $200 in damages — take it or leave it.

Captain McGonagle got his Medal of Honor, the only recipient who has received it from someone other than the President — “for action in Vietnam.”

Again, the segment ends with a bombshell: Admiral Martin told one of the survivors that, as a reaction to the Liberty’s distress signal, he had launched four conventionally-armed aircraft to the rescue, and four nuclear-armed aircraft to attack Cairo.

Up to now, the viewer has been cleverly teased with interviewees making reference to President Lyndon B. Johnson as the real culprit behind the attack. Naturally, the question arises: Why would he do such a thing? What would he have to gain from it? It’s only in the fourth and final installment that all the threads come together.

The fourth part, “It’s Not A Whodunnit . . . It’s A Whydunnit,” introduces a whole new cast of characters. It opens with Peter Hounam, author of Operation Cyanide and of the BBC documentary Dead in the Water, talking about the extensive political background of the attack on USS Liberty.

Hounam discusses the many inconsistencies between the official line and both the eyewitness testimony as well as the records. He then reveals that, instead of being an obscure incident as the attack on the Liberty is seen today, this was the moment when the US and the world were probably minutes away from a nuclear war.  Admiral Martin had not launched merely four, but 50 aircraft, as well as amphibious landing craft full of Marines, all of which were headed toward Egypt when suddenly a call came from the Israelis: “Oh, sorry, it was our planes, big mistake.” So the attack on Egypt was cancelled.

This odd backtracking is explained by interviews with the Soviet commanders who were involved in the story, of whom we have so far heard little. But naturally, any movement in the region was closely monitored by Soviet submarines and destroyers. And while Strategic Air Command was readying its forces for attacks on the Soviet Union and China four hours before the Liberty incident, these Russian veterans now confirmed that they were ready to launch an attack on Israel if Egypt had been invaded. There was in fact a nuclear-armed submarine in the same waters as the Liberty that had been issued express orders, in the case of an attack on Egypt, to target Israel. But its targeting system required a high reflectivity surface. Where do you find that in the region? Exactly: the Dome of the Rock, smack in the middle of Jerusalem.

Since counter-intelligence never sleeps, this information apparently made its way to the Mossad and the CIA, creating a panicked flurry of activity. There are several reports describing LBJ and McNamara shouting into their phones to stop the attack. All fighter jets were immediately recalled — including those en route to the Liberty. There would be no invasion of Egypt by US forces. There would be no joining the war. And 34 Liberty crewmen had died pointlessly, murdered on behalf of their own government.

After this shocking revelation, the documentary gets into Johnson’s extreme philo-Semitism. (He was partly of Jewish descent himself.) We meet the femme fatale of the story: charming, beautiful blonde Mathilde Krim. Born Mathilde Galland in Italy in 1926, she had fallen in love and married a Jew from Palestine who had been exiled by the British for his involvement with the terrorist organization Irgun. Mathilde had converted to Judaism and started to work for Irgun herself. The couple moved to Israel, but separated after the birth of a daughter. Mathilde then married the much older Arthur Krim, a rich motion picture executive and finance chairman for the US Democratic Party, which is obviously how LBJ and the Krims met.

The Krims were very close to the President. They bought the neighboring farm to his own at his suggestion, had access to state documents, and during the Six-Day War, Mathilde was in the White House almost every day.

David Lewis gets to the heart of the matter with a few barbed words: “He [LBJ] thought if he invaded Egypt with Israel . . . his girlfriend from the Mossad told him he could raise all kinds of money to continue the Vietnam War.” But, in what increasingly proves to be the US military playbook, he needed a pretext to get America involved in the conflict. What better way than the sinking of a US ship by Egyptian forces?

How many other historic instances such as this come to mind? I can think of a number of them. If the US joins the current fighting either in Ukraine or the Middle East, it will have something to do with a ship. You heard it here first.

We then meet the late Pete McCloskey, who helped form the USS Liberty Veterans Association. He relates a wild tale. According to McCloskey, survivor Jim Ennes, who had written the first book about the Liberty incident, had been contacted by a man with “a hoarse voice” who claimed to be an Israeli pilot who had taken part in the attack, and who now wanted to tell the true story. This character was then serving time in an American prison for embezzlement, so I have some doubts about his credentials. At any rate, he claimed that he and his squadron had radioed back to base that it was an American ship, but were ordered to attack anyway. When he returned to base, he was prosecuted for disobeying orders. Now that he was imprisoned in a US jail, he was afraid of being deported back to Israel when he got out, where he would be court-martialed and probably executed. He wanted either a Congressional hearing or federal witness protection. He also wanted to talk to Pete McCloskey.

Accordingly, McCloskey paid him a visit in Leavenworth and, on his behalf, contacted an Israeli Colonel who went to the same synagogue as the alleged pilot prior to his arrest. I don’t know why you would want to alert a member of the Israeli military to your presence if you were afraid of being deported and executed, but perhaps that’s just me. Within a month or so, Pete McCloskey got a call from the prisoner, informing him that he been transferred to a maximum security penitentiary. People were painting swastikas on the walls, he said, and asked McCloskey to call a rabbi (who was with the Anti-Defamation League) to help stop this anti-Semitic treatment. This was done, and everything appeared to be fine.

Shortly before his release, this man called McCloskey again and changed his statement. “You misinterpreted what I’ve said,” he claimed. He then disappeared after his release, so McCloskey assumed he had indeed been deported.

We are next shown a clip from a 1991 C-SPAN interview with Andrew Cockburn, author of Dangerous Liaisons: The Inside Story of the US-Israeli Covert Relationship, in which he talks about a memoir by the military aide to the then-Prime Minister of Israel, Levi Eshkol. He gives an account of June 3, 1967, when he was at Eshkol’s home, waiting for Meir Amit, head of Mossad, to return from Washington. Amit had gone there to ask permission to start what would become the Six-Day War. Amit then reports that the Americans — probably the CIA — had given him to understand that they would bless the endeavor if the Israelis took out President Nasser of Egypt.

Cockburn mentions another major player in the story, James Jesus Angleton, who was head of counter-intelligence as well as head of the Israeli Desk at the CIA at the time. Angleton was a Zionist and had a close relationship with the Mossad.

Planning for what would become the Six-Day War, we learn, started as early as 1964 under the direction of the so-called 303 Committee led by Walt Rostow, who was the US National Security Advisor. The purpose of the 303 Committee was to serve as a front, so that the US President could pretend ignorance in case something went wrong with “sensitive operations” carried out by the US military — covert or “black” operations, in short.

The 303 Committee came up with the idea of a false-flag attack which would allow the US to join Israel in a war against Egypt in order to remove Nasser, whom they considered dangerous and a Soviet puppet. This became known as Operation Cyanide.

The aforementioned Jim Ennes found reference to this as well as to something called Frontlet 615 during his research. Frontlet 615 was a not-so-cleverly disguised name for the operation that had originally been chosen to start on June 15 (hence 6-15). Time was needed to get the chosen sacrifice, the USS Liberty, into position so that she could be attacked on the very first day of the war, and thus enable the US to join in right at the start. But for some unexplained reason, the events developed faster than planned, and so the Liberty had to make her “full speed, top speed” journey from the African west coast to the Sinai.

Hounam summed it up: After all this, Israel had the US by the scruff of the neck. It was now in a position to blackmail America into becoming its main supplier of arms and aid given that, of course, Johnson and his cronies had much more to lose than Levi Eshkol. Had the American public at the time learned that their own president had given orders to murder 294 of their countrymen just to get them embroiled in yet another conflict at a time when the Vietnam War was already unpopular — well, that would probably have shortened his time in office considerably.

The first three parts of Sacrificing Liberty deliberately kept away from the Jewish Question, focusing instead on the obvious military conspiracy that was going on. By the beginning of the fourth part, the audience can rightly be expected to be angry. That is when the documentary gets into the murky waters of US-Israeli politics under the Johnson administration. It eases the viewer into the bigger picture. But after establishing that, yes, the attack on the Liberty was a joint US-Israeli covert operation to take out Nasser by way of murdering US citizens, things get real.

What follows is a brutal montage of Zionist influence on US politics. David Lewis makes it clear: “The Zionists are an enemy of the United States, and they subverted the policy of the United States.” We are bombarded with clips and images, ranging from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to Cynthia McKinney’s 2007 revelation, and even to Donald Trump’s pro-Israel policy. We learn that the Liberty veterans have been banned forever from the American Legion national convention — because of anti-Semitism.

After this section, tempers are allowed to cool down a little with tales of the veterans’ struggle for justice and recognition. It becomes a call to the American people to reclaim their country’s sovereignty. The documentary ends with another montage: 9/11, the “dancing Jews,” headlines about the attack being “good for Israel,” Iraq, Afghanistan, Trump Heights.

Sacrificing Liberty is an excellent production, and I highly recommend it. It is extensive, well-researched, and well-presented. Many little nuggets are thrown in for good measure; for example, it is only briefly but strongly hinted at that John F. Kennedy’s assassination may have had something to do with his hardline stance on Israel.

Mike Rathke’s music also deserves mention; it perfectly creates the different parts’ atmosphere, from raucous during the crossing-of-the-line ceremony, to aggressive during the attack, to harrowing in the aftermath — and even spooky when the bodies are retrieved from below deck, and the homebound journey in a literal ghost ship.