What Phil Saw That Day
by Gilad Atzmon
Wednesday, June 6th, 2012
45th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty
By Gilad Atzmon
Back in 2009, in Houston Texas, Mimi Adams, a distinguished Palestinian solidarity & human rights activist, gave me a present- a USS Liberty baseball cap. She put it on my head and said,
“Gilad, in the next two weeks, make sure you have it on your head everywhere you go in America. You will see what happens.”
It was around midnight, I was tired and jet-lagged, I couldn’t really understand the significance of the baseball cap, I just wanted make my way to my hotel room and catch some sleep. At 7 AM in the airport on my way to the gate with a USS Liberty baseball cap on my head, just before boarding on a flight to San Francisco, I noticed an older guy chasing me. He was breathless and agitated.
“Sorry to bother you, were you on the USS Liberty” he asked.
“No” I said, “I was actually four years old in 1967.” Amused I admitted that the Baseball cap was given to me by a friend in a Palestinian solidarity gathering just a few hours ago. I asked him what did he know about the USS Liberty.
“I was a 6th Navy’s pilot” he said. “We were deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. On that day in June 1967, we heard it all, the sailors on board of the Liberty, they were begging for help, it was a real agony, we were fuming, we wanted to get on the planes, we were about 10-12 minutes away, we wanted to save our brothers, but they didn’t let us onto the deck.”
On June 8, 1967 USS Liberty, an American auxiliary technical research ship, a military vessel specialised in gathering intelligence, was attacked by the Israeli forces. It was subject to an 18 hours combined air and sea raids that left 34 American crew-members dead (naval officers, seamen, two Marines, and one civilian) and 170 injured. The attack also severely damaged the ship. Like the Mavi Marmara, at the time of the attack, the ship was in international waters, north of the Sinai Peninsula, about 50 km northwest from the Egyptian City of El Arish.
Phil Tourney is a USS Liberty Survivor, & like many of his friends who were lucky enough to survive that hot day in June 1967; the event changed his life. I met Phil in Aspen last March. I spent some good hours together with the great man and his lovely wife. We shared our personal stories and thoughts about Israel, America and the Jewish Lobby with a few friends and listeners. When it was time to depart Phillip left me with “What I Saw That Day”; a devastating biographical account written by Phil and the courageous truth teller journalist Mark Glenn.
The book is the life story of a man who survived a murderous Israeli aggression, but it is also the story of a man who has witnessed four decades of deceit. The event, which Phil ‘saw that day’ is something most of us have failed to see for decades.
“What I Saw That Day” is a story of America turning its back on its service-men. It is a story about Israelis slaughtering in cold blood American sailors on the high sea. But it is also a story about a man who battles with wounds and scars that have refused to heal for forty five years. It is a book about the American serviceman being deceived and neglected by American political and military elite. “What I Saw That Day” is also a personal painful account of the tragic consequences of Israeli and Jewish lobby domination in America.
The survival of the USS Liberty was nothing but a miracle. The ship was an old WWII ‘one goer’ that was converted into a military intelligence vessel. It wasn’t built to stand a combat, it wasn’t structured to take any penalty. And yet, it somehow survived hours of heavy Israeli raids. It was hit by napalm bombs and torpedoes, by the end of that horrid day it was soaking with young American blood, but it refused to go down. It didn’t sink. The USS Liberty is there to remind us, our leaders, the Israelis and their lobbies that the memory of this massacre is not going to sink either. Like the Nakba and the Holodomour, USS Liberty bounced back. Seemingly, injustice cannot be suppressed, it always wait patiently for humanity to transform history into a moral lesson.
This horrendous story has been silenced for decades, but not anymore. What Phillip Tourney saw that day was just a glimpse into the magnitude of Western immorality and barbarism. Since then many Americans soldiers lost their life in Zionist global wars. Millions of Muslims and Arabs have been slaughtered in wicked interventionist conflicts.
To save our homes, families, friends, dignity and the world as we know it; is to stand up for the truth and to call a spade a spade.
To buy on Phillip Tourney on amazon.com Click here
Posted by Gilad Atzmon
on June 6, 2012. Filed under America.
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17 Responses to What Phil Saw That Day
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who_me
June 7, 2012 at 12:36 am
it’s funny the sort of reaction one gets when bringing up the subject of the liberty with chomsky type progressives. if in person, one gets these suspicious looks. on the web, they usually avoid the discussion. in both cases, though, the one bringing up the subject is treated there after as if they were some sort of rightwing, antisemitic “mole”.
Gilad Atzmon
June 7, 2012 at 12:38 am
Yep, all it takes to become an antisemite is to touch the truth, not even telling it…
Ariadna Theokopoulos
June 7, 2012 at 2:11 am
As an aside, calling Obama “the first Jewish president of the US” is an injustice to LBJ.
What more callous and criminal act could a Commander-in-Chief commit in the service of a foreign power than this?
Ariadna Theokopoulos
June 7, 2012 at 3:34 am
I don’t want my previous post to be misunderstood as disparaging Obama. He clearly has shown tremendous promise:
June 05, 2012 “The Guardian” – - Barack Obama, according to Foreign Policy magazine, “has become George W Bush on steroids”. Armed with a “kill list”, the Nobel peace laureate now hosts “Tuesday terror” meetings at the White House to discuss targets of drone attacks in Pakistan and at least five other countries. The latest of these killed 17 people near the border with Afghanistan today .
searching
June 7, 2012 at 4:18 pm
The attack on USS LIberty and the silence and lies surrounding it right away is another proof that already ,in 1967, the JEWish Power in the USA government and media was prevailing.
It did not “just” happen 15/20 years ago.
It was existing then, and many, many years prior to then.
Ex. hiding the info about Holodomor done in Ukraine by Stalin and bolshevics, hiding the info about massacre of about 20,000 of Polish oficers done by Stalin and NKVD in Katyn in 1941.
This info was not allowed to see a daylight for tens of years after the war.
Not in the western media.
This shows ,who already was in charge of so-called Free Media.
Here is some info about Katyn massacre.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4Nl_Q-EjbA
Blake
June 7, 2012 at 8:27 pm
Great article and if it were not for the internet we probably would never have known of this terror attack. NEVER FORGET
Gilad Atzmon
June 8, 2012 at 1:33 am
I guess so, the internet has defeated Hasbara…let’s use it before it is taken away…
who_me
June 9, 2012 at 3:02 pm
“let’s use it before it is taken away…”
i wonder how much longer we got?
IMNOKUFFAR
June 9, 2012 at 6:23 pm
who cares what phil ‘saw that day’ if its not headline news in the US its simply not news-
only mimi adams wants to remind us that US intelligence is everywhere—-nothing exposes these twisted jew haters like a story about a jewish attack on US intelligence. if it was a palestinian attack no doubt those yanks would have gotten wot they deserved -
Roy Bard
June 9, 2012 at 6:42 pm
“if it was a palestinian attack no doubt those yanks would have gotten wot they deserved -”
Maybe if the Palestinians had bombed the USS Liberty they would be getting billions in arms and aid every year?
Hows the weather in troll land?
Ariadna Theokopoulos
June 9, 2012 at 7:10 pm
This:
“who cares what phil ‘saw that day’ if its not headline news in the US its simply not news-”
is sarcasm. Intentional or not.
The rest appears to say that “twisted Jew haters” react negatively to being attacked by Jews but would accept it as “earned” if it came from Palestinians?
If the second is the correct translation then the first means that the USS Liberty is not in the news because the media is not in the hands of “twisted jew haters.”
Roy Bard
June 9, 2012 at 7:18 pm
The user name suggests the poster has a problem with his own ‘twisted hatred’
Ariadna Theokopoulos
June 9, 2012 at 8:15 pm
I’m no kuffar…
IMNOKUFFAR
June 9, 2012 at 10:52 pm
hey ‘roy bard’-where did you get that crazy black outfit–it suits you though-
any ukrainian will tell you the Holodomor never went out of the news—
funny though the CPGB,SWP,RCPBML,CPBML will all tell you that Stalin wasn’t stallin in the name of ‘progress’
who cares about bombing of US intelligence- it wasn’t D-DAY or Pearlhabour
Roy Bard
June 10, 2012 at 11:35 am
“who cares about bombing of US intelligence- it wasn’t D-DAY or Pearlhabour”
clearly you don’t. Fortunately no-one is forcing you to read the thread.
Do you want to have a discussion, or are you just here to piss on the carpet and drop tea on the sofa?
who_me
June 9, 2012 at 11:22 pm
the posts from IMNOKUFFAR read like a translation from bablefish or google.
IMNOKUFFAR
June 10, 2012 at 9:19 am
ariadna ‘i’m no kuffar’ but if i was i would be a proud one—to hell with sharia banking
‘palestine’ was invented by imperialists for tax reasons–look at roman and ottoman accounts
tax collectors aren’t popular,but neither are tax dodgers in suicide vests