Monday, June 06, 2016

The Unites States Navy most decorated ship (in a single action) by Miko Peled



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 USS Liberty 3132a
I asked my daughter Tali if she would like to spend Memorial Day this year doing something significant. She is thirteen and even though there are two more weeks of school, Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of summer. So the weekend is always spent doing fun things, being outdoors with friends, and rarely if ever doing anything that signifies what Memorial Day is about.
“What kind of thing? Are you giving a lecture somewhere?”
“Yes and no,” I replied, “come read this.”
I let her read a message I received from Ronald Kukal, who was the first class petty officer on the USS Liberty, a US navy ship that was attacked and destroyed by the Israeli military on June 8, 1967. Ron is one of the Liberty survivors.
Tali read the message carefully, then looked at me and said:
“Dad, we have to go to this!”
“This” was a Memorial Day in event Maricopa, Arizona in the heart of the Arizona desert, commemorating the USS Liberty.
The USS Liberty is the most decorated ship in the US Navy for a single action, though it was not engaged in battle, in fact being an intelligence gathering ship, it had no battle capabilities and was only armed with 4 fifty caliber machine guns to ward off unwanted boarders. The crew were awarded, collectively, one Medal of Honor, two Navy Crosses, eleven Silver Stars, twenty Bronze Stars (with “V” on it for valor), nine Navy Commendation Medals, and two hundred and four Purple Hearts. The ship was also awarded the Presidential Unit Citation. But all the survivors were ordered never to speak of what they had experienced. It took many years and a great deal of suffering before the survivors reached the point where they felt they could no longer keep in inside and had to speak up.
On the morning of June 8, 1967, in the midst of a war that Israel had initiated just a few days earlier - and was clearly winning - against Egypt, Syria and Jordan - the USS Liberty was about 17 miles off the Gaza coast, in international waters. For several hours throughout that day Israeli air force reconnaissance planes had been flying over the Liberty, in what seemed like attempts to identify it. The crew felt no threat – quite the opposite, Israel was a US ally. During one recorded debriefing a naval observer from the reconnaissance flight arrived at Israeli air force HQ and sat down with the air-naval liaison officer there. The two officers consulted Janes’ Fighting Ships and learned that the ship they saw earlier in the day was the USS Liberty, a United States Navy technical research ship. [1]
Then, at 1400 hours, (2:00 PM local time) without any warning, Israeli fighter jets launched an attack on USS Liberty. The aircraft made repeated firing passes, attacking with rockets and internal cannons. After the first group of fighter jets had exhausted their ammunition, subsequent flights of Israeli fighter jets continued to attack with rockets, cannon fire, and even napalm. The use of napalm is significant because it is made of a toxic, flammable combination of gel and petroleum that sticks to the skin and causes severe burns. Eight men died as a result of the air attack and the shrapnel and shock of exploding rockets had wounded 75 men.
After the Israeli jets completed their attacks, Israeli torpedo boats began firing torpedoes, killing 26 more men. Survivors reported that the Israeli torpedo boat crews swept the decks of USS Liberty with continuous machine gun fire, targeting communications equipment and any crewmembers that ventured above decks. Survivor Glen Oliphant said, “I personally recall very clearly from my position outside the wardroom -- that the torpedo boats then circled the ship for a long time firing at close range at anything that moved. Men trying to aid their wounded shipmates on deck were fired upon. Men fighting fires were fired upon and I recall seeing their fire hoses punctured by machinegun fire. This went on for several minutes. At one point the boatmen concentrated their fire near the waterline amidships, presumably hoping to blow up the boilers to hasten our demise.” 
Although communication systems were severely damaged the crew somehow managed to get a distress signal to the Sixth Fleet command which then sent out aircraft to defend the Liberty. Shortly after the Sixth Fleet command transmitted an authorization for the rescue aircraft to destroy the attackers, the Israeli torpedo boats halted their attack. At the same time, the Israeli military notified the US Naval Attaché in Tel Aviv that Israeli forces had mistakenly attacked a United States Navy ship, and apologized. The commander of the Sixth Fleet received an order from Washington, DC to turn the rescue planes around. According to several sources the commander questioned the order which was then reiterated to him by President Johnson himself.
Israeli sources claim that Israeli helicopters flew over the Liberty after the attack and offered assistance but their offer was turned down. Several of the survivors mentioned that at one point after the attack an Israeli combat helicopter flew over with civilians which included the US Naval Attaché. A bag with a message for the captain was dropped from the hovering helicopter, which read: “Do you have any casualties?” At this point the ship was barely afloat, bullet ridden, with gaping holes as a result of the torpedo attacks and the blood and body parts of the dead and the wounded were everywhere. Two thirds of the crew had become casualties. According to the survivors, the Captain looked up at the chopper and gave them the finger. The ship and survivors were left to float in the Mediterranean, miraculously not capsizing, for 17 long hours before help arrived to rescue the survivors and take care of the wounded.
Ronald Kukal was first class Petty Officer on the Liberty, this is how he described to me the very moments after the torpedo attack, “I could hear shrapnel flying over my head, and little did I know that shrapnel was killing almost all my men down there.” Ron was also put in charge of body recovery and identification. This took place several days after the attack, which meant that the bodies, many of them in pieces, had been in the water for days. His very words to me were, “I went about the dismal job of picking up the pieces of a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. Can't put it any other way. Most of my shipmates couldn't stand the smell. I smelled nothing.” For many years the survivors were forced to remain silent and the US government and the press said little about the attack.
In his message to me, a message that convinced my daughter to join me on this long road trip from San Diego to Maricopa, rather than stay in town and spend the weekend with friends, he writes:
“The men who survived the Liberty are slowly making their way out of this world, so to speak. This meeting in Maricopa is sort of a last effort on our part to keep the memory of the ship alive […] what our government is hoping for and always has, is the death of all of us, and then the matter will be over […] I don’t know how we have held together but we have. There is no hatred in this group, and really there never has been, we have only wanted justice. I doubt if we will get it.”
Endnote 
1. http://www.ussliberty.org/report/report.htm

WRITER

Sunday, June 05, 2016

SPECIAL REPORT. Obama and Clinton push entangling alliances as keystones of U.S. foreign policy By Wayne Madsen Report



SPECIAL REPORT. Obama and Clinton push entangling alliances as keystones of U.S. foreign policy By Wayne Madsen Report
George Washington warned America against them. Thomas Jefferson was not keen on them. However, Barack Obama, in the last commencement speech he gave under his lackluster eight-year term as president, urged the graduating class of the Air Force Academy to support all the foreign treaties and alliance of the United States. And in a campaign speech in San Diego, Hillary Clinton, who hopes to succeed Obama in office, echoed him by stressing that America's foreign alliances have kept the country "safe."

Obama's hailing of America's foreign alliances, which Washington warned were "entangling," came a week after he spoke in Hiroshima, Japan of the value of America's alliance with Japan. Obama's words were clearly directed against China. Although the Cold War-era Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the alliance that helped plunge America into the Indochina War quagmire, no longer exists, Obama is trying to recreate it with his military "pivot to Asia." Obama is beefing up U.S. military ties with Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand, India, and Vietnam. In essence, Obama is clearing the path for Hillary Clinton to pursue a military confrontation with China.

Although the "punditocracy" claims that Obama and Clinton were responding to Donald Trump's isolationist signals, their message was more deep-seated. The Clinton Doctrine will be the Obama Doctrine on steroids. Trump is no panacea either. The real estate mogul has criticized Obama for reneging on America's "alliance" with Israel. That comment came after uber-Zionist casino mogul Sheldon Adelson dangled a $100 million campaign contribution in front of Trump in exchange for the presumptive GOP candidate's everlasting commitment to Israel, the only nation that Adelson cares about.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the only U.S.-led Cold War military alliance that continues to entangle the United States, received a shot in the arm from both Obama and Clinton. They see NATO has the spearhead for a U.S. military confrontation with Russia during a Clinton administration. NATO just welcomed Montenegro, a one-time loyal Slavic ally of Russia, into NATO. In addition, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the pathetic neoconservative ex-Danish prime minister who committed Danish troops to the Bush-Cheney disaster in Iraq, just signed on as a foreign policy adviser to the corrupt American-installed Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko. Rasmussen joins the wanted fugitive ex-President of Georgia, the George Soros acolyte Mikheil Saakashvili, as a member of the joint neo-Nazi/Zionist government of Ukraine.

Obama, in his zeal to support for the new right-wing governments of Argentina and Brazil, installed with the help of Soros and the CIA, has propped up the old Organization of American States (OAS), another Cold War relic that was used to justify the economic blockade of Cuba and U.S. military invasions of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Panama. 

With Venezuela in the  of Obama and his old CIA pals, the U.S. saw to it that another Soros acolyte, Luis Almagro of Uruguay, was installed as the Secretary General of the OAS. Almagro is the U.S.-designated Latino puppet who has been organizing opposition -- especially from the right-wing fascist governments of Argentina and Brazil -- to Venezuela's beleaguered socialist government. Almagro was silent when Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, was ousted in a right-wing "constitutional" coup. Almagro now hopes to see the same action take place in Venezuela with a right-wing National Assembly-sponsored recall vote of President Nicolas Maduro. 


OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro not only takes his orders from the CIA and Soros.

Meanwhile, Soros has been rubbing his hands and licking his fangs over the prospect of extending, for the first time, International Criminal Court indictments into Latin America by targeting the Venezuelan leadership after it is forced from office. For Soros, these phony "war crimes" indictments have been used to imprison or threaten to imprison CIA and Rothschild banking family foes in Serbia, the Srpska Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, and Chad.

As president, Clinton will surely continue NATO's "drang nach osten" -- the "long march east" coined by Adolf Hitler -- until Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Sweden, Kazakhstan (where Hillary's despicably crooked and perverted husband* has brokered lucrative uranium export deals with the county's dictator), Finland, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia become full-fledged members of the "North Atlantic" Treaty Organization. The "North Atlantic" euphamism is now a joke, NATO only exists to protect the interests of U.S. war contractors (the term "defense industry" is also a joke) and the House of Rothschild and its front man Soros. The Rothschilds, through their influential puppet Soros, invested millions in Obama and Mrs. Clinton in order to carry out what a one-time recipient of Rothschild donations -- the short former Austrian corporal in the German Army with the short mustache -- could not do, namely conquer the Eurasian land mass and join it to European and North American overseers.

There is a reason why such neocons as Robert Kagan (married to Mrs. Clinton's war-mongering Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland who crafted the Ukrainian coup), Max Boot, and John Podhoretz are supporting Hillary over The Donald. Mrs. Clinton will plunge America into a major world war much sooner than Trump can be blackmailed into one.


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Bill Clinton does not have a monopoly on sexual perversion. WMR has been informed by a very good source in Manhattan that Trump, while sitting next to his underage daughter Ivanka at the Trump Grill in Manhattan's Trump Tower, was witnessed by waiters on a number of occasions with his hand under her dress and fondling her genitalia. Some of these waiters have stated they would swear out affidavits about what they saw. After Ivanka became of age, Trump told Playboy magazine, ". . .if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her." Eventually Ivanka married Jared Kushner of the very wealthy Orthodox Jewish and ultra-Zionist Kushner real estate family of New York. 


This photo of Trump with his 15-year old daughter was taken while sitting on a statute of two copulating parrots at Trump's Mar Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. Mr. Trump's hand appears to be starting a journey that some waiters witnessed it complete during numerous table interludes at the Trump Grill in New York.

What lurid secrets were rampant under the table cloths at the Trump Grill?
It is now well known that Bill Clinton feared that the Mossad possessed tapes of his salacious phone calls with Monica Lewinsky. Mossad was in a commanding position to blackmail Clinton. One can only wonder what evidence Mossad currently possesses of Donald Trump's incestuous pederasty with his 15-year old daughter. George Washington could have never dreamed of such "entanglements" when he warned about "entangling" foreign alliances.