Given enough time, secret government decisions have a way of percolating into the outside world. For example, after decades of silence, Captain Ward Boston, U.S. Navy (Retired), has revealed serious flaws in the Navy's top-secret investigation of the 8 June 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty (AGTR-5) in which 34 Americans died. Captain Boston claims the evidence does not support a key report finding.
The 1967 Navy Court of Inquiry report concludes: "There is no available indications that the attack was intended against a U.S. ship." But Captain Boston, who, as Counsel for the Court, was in charge of collecting the evidence used by the three-member court to make its decision, believes the evidence points in the other direction.
Last year, Captain Boston told the Navy Times, "I feel the Israelis knew what they were doing. They knew they were shooting at a U.S. Navy ship. That's the bottom line. I don't care how they tried to get out of it." Based on his personal discussions at the time with the court's president, Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, Jr., Boston contends Kidd (who died in 1999) also believed the Israelis knew the ship was American. After delivering the report to Washington, Boston says Kidd told him top officials were not interested in hearing the truth.
This new information both reopens a tragic chapter in naval history long ago stamped "closed" in Washington, and begs answers to these questions: What did the U.S. Navy know in 1967, and was the agency's report a deliberate attempt to cover-up the truth?
As to why he waited so long to voice his doubts, Boston says, "In military life, you accept the fact that if you're told to shut up, you shut up. We did what we were told." The U.S. Navy was interested in a quick investigation. On 10 June 1967, Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., appointed the court of inquiry. Eight days later, on 18 June, Kidd delivered his final report to McCain who, on the same day, added his review comments, including that "the attack was a mistake," and sent the report on to Washington.
Did Admiral McCain's conflicting demands—find the truth, but do so in a hurry—set up a Catch-22? Did pressure to meet an unrealistic deadline prompt Kidd to hedge his "Findings of Fact" with this cover-your-stern paragraph: "The following FINDINGS are enumerated as a recitation of those facts established by the evidence of record; however, in those areas of interest wherein the Court could not affirmatively establish a fact per se, an ostensible supportable inference was stated."
In other words, the report's 52 separately listed "Findings of Fact" are a mixture of real facts, based on real evidence, and mere inferences. Could it be that Admiral Kidd knew in his heart his reported "fact" that the Israelis did not intentionally attack a U.S. ship was, at best, an inference?
History should be our guide. In the government's rush to judgment in 1941, Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel became a national scapegoat for the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor. Sixty years later, the U.S. Congress passed a bill concluding the government actually let Admiral Kimmel down by withholding from him information about the coming attack. Following the 1991 Tailhook Association Symposium scandal, Commander Robert Stumpf was accused of ungentlemanly behavior and denied promotion to the rank of captain. In July 2002, Senator John McCain sent a letter to Navy Secretary Gordon England, saying "Stumpf was subjected to a humiliating, highly unprofessional investigation" and that it was "well past the time for the Navy to right this wrong." Stumpf's service record was then revised to recognize that he retired as a captain.
Hundreds of U.S. sailors who survived the attack on the Liberty, many of whom never recovered from their wounds, still feel like victims of a "humiliating, highly unprofessional investigation" in 1967.
They, like Admiral Kimmel and Captain Stumpf, deserve a chance to set the record straight. The place to start is with a thorough, congressional investigation into the serious charges raised by Captain Boston.
Ronald Fraser, Ph.D., is a retired Coast Guard Reserve officer and a graduate of the Naval War College.