Published Commentary: The Liberty Incident
Summary of Position
See also: The Liberty Incident's Analysis and Criticism and Critique of the Author.
The Israelis always have claimed that their attack on USS Liberty was an accident, a tragic case of mistaken identity, and not a planned, deliberate assault on a known U.S. Navy ship.
This book, by A. Jay Cristol, is an account of the attack from the position of the Israeli government. Cristol, a bankruptcy judge, is a retired Naval reservist, having flown transports for a number of years before switching to the JAG office. This book is a revision and reprint of his heavily flawed dissertation.
Cristol states that he researched and prepared for this book by making fifteen trips to Israel and interviewing more than 500 Israelis. He also spoke briefly with a few of the Liberty survivors, but discounts their information on the basis that direct witnesses to history are poor sources.
The book is slow reading, in part because of the author's turgid style of writing. He insists upon giving his readers not just the full names, but also the nicknames of every Israeli he met during the course of his research.
Cristol's thesis is that Liberty had no business sailing in international waters near a war zone. Because she was near a war zone, responsibility for the attack lies at least in part with the captain and crew of the ship; presumably according to the logic that would hold that a woman is partially responsible for getting raped if she travels outside her home.
He describes an implausible chain of events which led the Israelis to misidentify a ship of known nationality that they had been tracking for more than eight hours before the attack. At each stage, either he finds what he asserts to be a plausible "other explanation" for each Israeli "mistake" or he simply ignores it. (Many lawyers refer to this type of expert witness as a Witness Having Other Reasonable Explanation.)
Cristol ignores the fact that the Israeli attackers do not claim to have ever made a positive identification of the identity of the ship, or its nationality. He also ignores the fact that an attack on a neutral ship on the high seas is a war crime under the laws of war.
To the extent that he finds blame on the side of the Israeli defense forces, he excuses it on the basis of a reasonable amount of zeal due to interservice rivalry between the Navy and the Air Force. The Navy, having been left out of much of the fighting, wanted desperately to get in on the action. For this reason, Cristol explains, their rush to attack is both understandable and excusable.
Cristol mentions, but does not analyze the mathematical error made by the torpedo boat division, resulting in their determination that Liberty was moving, first at 30 knots, then at 28 knots, when the ship's speed during this time never exceeded five knots. This is a crucial determination because the Israeli Defense Forces justify their attack prior to making any positive identification as being authorized by their internal rules of engagement which presumed that any ship moving faster than twenty knots was a warship. He also does not explain why the aircraft which initiated the attack did not immediately recognize the "warship" as a converted freighter with no offensive armament.
A good portion of the book deals with what Cristol describes as "conspiracy theories." Presumably, anything that does not reflect the official position of the government of Israel is a "conspiracy theory." He attempts to explain and refute some of the findings and opinions which contradict the Israeli explanation ("conspiracy theories") by building straw men which ignore the real issues.
For diehard Israeli partisans, this book will be like raw meat. For everyone else, it's more like raw meat that has been left in the sun for a week.
As evidence of the author's intellectual honesty, compare the invitation on his web site (www.thelibertyincident.com) with his actual practice, read an e-mail to his webmaster, advising him of serious factual errors on the site and asking him to correct them. There has been no reply.
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