Ahron Jay Cristol, Israel First ALWAYS

Parts from an old review of A. Jay Cristol’s “Liberty Incident” –The Official ‘approved’  USS Liberty Apologist Manual

ATTACK ON THE LIBERTY: TRAGIC ERROR OR PREMEDITATED ASSAULT?
Review by Amb. (ret.) William N. Dale

A fraud, a 'Israel First' American and USS Liberty apologist and liar.

“Cristol’s conclusions have been subject to much criticism. First of all, his observation that there were thirteen investigations of the incident appears to have been an exaggeration. The U. S. Navy court seems to have done as thorough a job as possible considering the time restraints it encountered in its investigation. Incredibly, it did not even query any Israeli. Many of the later inquiries based their opinions on the naval court’s conclusion that there was no evidence the attack was premeditated. The Congressional investigations cited by the author were actually hearings on other subjects in which the Liberty incident was only briefly mentioned. The Israeli investigations also reached the conclusion that the attack was accidental. The U. S. government has yet to conduct a thorough and official investigation.

One of the claims examined by Captain Cristol is that of Ambassador Dwight Porter who was in charge of the Beirut embassy at the time of the attack. The ambassador claimed that he had seen an intercept of a conversation in which an Israeli pilot who had reported that the Liberty was an American ship was ordered by Israeli Air Force headquarters to proceed with the assault. Cristol maintains that the Beirut embassy was too far away from the scene of the attack to have been able to intercept such messages and that Porter’s story had varied over the years. The author’s doubts, notwithstanding, if Ambassador Porter–a highly experienced Foreign Service Officer–maintains that he saw these intercepts, then the chances are very great that he did so.

In Cristol’s account that an Israeli plane had observed and reported the presence of the Liberty early in the morning of September 8, he noted that the naval authorities had placed a wedge on their plotting board representing it. An Israeli naval officer later removed it so that headquarters would have no record of it when it was rediscovered, its identity questioned, and the ship attacked. If there was any possibility that an American ship was in the area, it seems improbable that any naval officer would have removed the wedge representing it from the plotting board without mentioning to his colleagues that it was a U. S. ship. If the Israelis knew from morning on that the ship was American and for one or more reasons decided to destroy its ability to monitor Israeli military movements, this would have been a point at which a tragic accident story could emerge.”

http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2006/0103/book/book_dale_liberty.html