‘The Israelis were intent on leaving no survivors,’ Massie says of the 1967 attack [File: Kylie Cooper/Reuters]

Monday, in a historic event, Thomas Massie spoke out on the Congressional floor about Israel’s lethal attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 Americans and injured at least 174. Fifteen of the surviving crew members, wives, widows, and sons were there.

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(1/4) Massie honors survivors of USS Liberty on House floor, calls for investigation into attack

By Charlotte Hazard, Reposted from KATU, June 08, 2026

“It’s a great honor, maybe one of the biggest honors of my lifetime, to stand here on the floor and do something that’s 59 years overdue: to recognize the survivors and those who gave their lives on the USS Liberty 59 years ago today,” Massie said at the start of his remarks.

The USS Liberty was a U.S. ship that was attacked by Israeli jet fighters and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967. The attack happened off the coast of Egypt, resulting in 34 service members being killed and over 170 injured.

Twelve surviving members of the attack watched Massie’s speech from the House gallery.

Massie said he spoke to the survivors before coming out to speak. He said that the ship was unarmed and sent to observe a six-day war going on in the Middle East and the U.S. flag was very visibly waving on the ship.

“But what happened next surprised them all,” Massie said. “French mirage jets showed and for 25 minutes strafed and attacked the USS Liberty. They shot rockets, they shot 30 millimeter cannons into the hull and into the ship. They even dropped napalm on the bridge of the ship.”

He said this was an effort to kill everybody on board.

“According to eyewitness accounts, the Israelis machine gunned the lifeboats that they put down,” Massie said. “They machine gunned the firefighters who were on the deck.”

U.S. officials and Israeli officials have described the incident as a tragic mistake of mistaken identity.

Massie said that there were ships sent to help the USS Liberty, but they were recalled. He later added that officials such as former Secretary of State Richard Helm and former CIA Director Bobby Ray Inman don’t think the attack was an accident.

“None of these distinguished men think this was an accident,” he said. “They think it was intentional murder by the country of Israel, either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”

He concluded his speech by calling for an investigation into what happened.

“Honor these individuals,” Massie said, referring to the survivors. “Quit ignoring they exist. Go to their website USSLiberty.org. Support them, and while they’re still alive, they need closure. Let’s give them closure. Let’s have an investigation. Let’s pass a resolution honoring them. It’s long overdue.”

(2/4) US congressman demands probe into Israel’s 1967 attack on USS Liberty

‘Thomas Massie suggests the deadly assault was not an accident and calls on the US government to honour its survivors.

Reposted from Al Jazeera , June 08, 2026

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie has urged the United States to reopen its investigation into a 1967 Israeli attack on a US Navy ship, the USS Liberty, that killed 34 service members and injured 171 others.

Monday marked the 59th anniversary of the attack, and Massie honoured the occasion by delivering a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, in the presence of survivors.

The Israeli government has long maintained the incident was a “friendly fire” accident. But some crew members from the USS Liberty have disputed that assessment, calling the attack deliberate.

Massie highlighted their testimonies in his speech, which questioned the official version of the events.

“While they’re still alive, they need closure,” Massie said of the survivors.

“Let’s give them closure. Let’s have an investigation. Let’s pass a resolution honouring them. It’s long overdue. And then they can have their justice.”

The House floor speech represented a rare congressional acknowledgement of the lingering questions surrounding the attack.

It also comes at a time of growing opposition to the US’s policy of giving unconditional aid to Israel.

In the wake of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and the joint US-Israeli war against Iran, public opinion polls have shown that the US ally is becoming increasingly unpopular among the American public.

Critics have argued for decades that the USS Liberty incident and the alleged cover-up that followed illustrate a lopsided alliance with Israel that does not serve Washington’s interests.

The war on Iran and horrific atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon have renewed scrutiny of that partnership, as well as of the 1967 attack itself.

Massie is among those skeptical of the US-Israeli relationship. He has opposed the war on Iran, as well as efforts to further integrate the US and Israeli militaries.

The outgoing congressman ultimately lost his primary last month to a challenger backed by US President Donald Trump and pro-Israel groups.

In Monday’s speech, he cast doubt as to whether Israel could have unintentionally targeted the USS Liberty.

“The visibility was unlimited. The American flag was flying proudly on the USS Liberty,” he told the House, describing the ship as being “viciously attacked”.

Israel’s supporters, however, insist that the assault was a misidentification accident not uncommon in war.

At the time, Israel was locked in the Six-Day War with several Arab countries. The USS Liberty had been sent to international waters nearby for observation and intelligence collection.

But on June 8, 1967, Israeli jets opened fire and dropped napalm on the USS Liberty, before torpedoing the vessel.

“The Israelis were intent on leaving no survivors,” Massie said in his speech, noting that Israeli jets had been seen surveilling the vessel the day prior to the attack.

To back up his argument, Massie cited statements from several top diplomatic, intelligence and military officials, including former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk and ex-top General Thomas Hinman Moorer, both of whom have said they believe the attack was deliberate.

“None of these distinguished men think this was an accident,” Massie said. “They think it was intentional murder by the country of Israel, either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”

Israel illegally seized the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and Syria’s Golan Heights by the end of the conflict in 1967.

Decades later, in 2003, Ward Boston — a US Navy official who served as an adviser to the court of inquiry that looked into the attack — released sworn testimony that lead investigator Isaac Kidd had faced pressure to rule the incident as a case of mistaken identity.

But an assessment from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that was released in 2006 claimed that Israeli pilots “failed to identify” the USS Liberty as a US ship.

Congressman Dan Crenshaw criticized Massie, a fellow Republican, on Sunday for his plans to speak about the attack on the vessel.

“The USS Liberty incident is a tragic one, but it’s an incident with a clear conclusion if one uses any objective analysis of the facts,” Crenshaw wrote on the online platform X.

But the USS Liberty Veterans Association praised Massie in a social media post. The group, composed largely of survivors, has been calling for accountability in the case.

“A dynomite [sic] telling telling of our story in such a short amount of time,” the group said of Massie’s speech. “The story NO other member of Congress will even listen to.”

(3/4) Why was Israel spared scrutiny for the 1967 USS Liberty attack?US Representative Thomas Massie honors the crew of the vessel on the House floor, bringing attention to the 1967 Israeli attack.

Reposted from Al Jazeera, June 08, 2026

On June 8, 1967, at least 34 US sailors were killed and 171 others were wounded in an Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, a United States Navy technical research ship stationed in the Mediterranean Sea off Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Israel claimed it was a case of mistaken identity, saying its naval forces thought the vessel was Egyptian. However, some of the survivors and researchers have disputed the Israeli version of the incident. They lament that successive governments did little to uncover the truth behind one of the deadliest attacks on the US Navy by its closest ally, Israel.

This year, the attack has come under renewed attention after US Representative Thomas Massie called for an investigation into the “unprovoked” attack during a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives on Monday.

So what do we know about one of the most controversial chapters of the US Navy?

What happened on June 8, 1967?

Israeli air and naval forces bombarded the intelligence-gathering vessel in international waters near the Sinai Peninsula during the 1967 war, when Israel captured Egypt’s Sinai, Gaza and the West Bank.

The assault began when Israeli jets attacked the vessel, striking the ship’s deck with antipersonnel weapons and armour-piercing bullets.

This was followed by a devastating strike from Israeli torpedo boats that blew a massive hole in the ship’s starboard side, instantly killing 25 men in the lower research spaces. In total, 34 sailors were killed in the attack.

The crew had been flying the US flag and had even exchanged waves with low-flying Israeli aircraft earlier that morning, making their identity clear. Israel has long maintained the strike was a tragic error, claiming exhausted pilots mistook the US naval vessel for an Egyptian warship.

Was there an attempt to cover up?

Nearly 60 years on, records related to the attack remain classified, survivors and advocates say.

Richard Brooks, chief engineer on the vessel, told Al Jazeera in a 2015 interview that “it wasn’t a tragic accident”.

“It was a deliberate attack. They knew who we were. They tried to sink us. They wanted us out to either bring the Americans into the war by blaming the Arabs, or we picked up some information about their war plans.”

A naval board of inquiry was hastily convened while the severely damaged ship was dry-docked in Malta, but the proceedings concluded swiftly.

Ernie Gallo, president of the USS Liberty Survivors Group, dismissed Israel’s “mistaken identity” excuse as a lie and accused the US government of complicity for accepting the false narrative. He continues to demand a full official inquiry.

The US Congress never formally questioned the attack or formed a committee to investigate the tragedy.

Speaking in the House on Monday, Massie said the unarmed ship was flying a clearly visible US flag when it came under sustained attack.

“According to eyewitness accounts, the Israelis machine-gunned the lifeboats that they put down,” Massie said as 12 survivors watched from the gallery of the US House of Representatives. “They machine-gunned the firefighters who were on the deck.”

Israeli officials have long claimed the attack was a case of mistaken identity, but Massie said senior officials, including former CIA officials, rejected that explanation.

The USS Liberty anniversary has renewed relevance because Massie has criticised Washington’s longstanding reluctance to hold Israel accountable, even when US citizens are killed. He has also opposed the latest war on Iran, which Israel dragged the US into, and which has killed at least 13 US soldiers and wounded more than 380.

Via https://t.me/thecradlemedia/61729

Screen grab of two Iranian missiles launched towards regional US military bases June 10, 2026

Al Mayadeen English

An Iranian military source says the large-scale operation struck 70% of designated targets, noting that ballistic missiles and drones hit US-linked bases in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

Dmitry Orlov

By now lots of political pundits and commentators, not to mention some number of YouTube talking heads and a fair number of armchair geopoliticians, have noticed that something new is afoot in Russia; namely, the Russians are no longer content to sit quietly and watch their citizens, including, recently, a dormitory full of sleeping young women in training to become primary school teachers, get blasted to spam by drone aircraft supplied by the Europeans and launched by the Ukrainians. The proper response, many Russians are now thinking, is to “whack” the Europeans. For the students of Russian, the new vocabulary word is “жахнуть” (zhakhnut’). It can be loosely translated as “to blow to smithereens,” perhaps with a nuke.

Whacking the Ukrainians themselves isn’t effective. They are no longer masters of their own destiny. They have formed some sort of a death cult and helping them join the crowd invisible, as Russia is currently doing at an average of 1500 dead Ukrainian soldiers a day, does not seem effective in dissuading some of the rest from launching terrorist attacks against Russian civilians. The trick, then, is to dissuade the Europeans from supplying the Ukrainians with lethal toys, and then the question is one of target selection and choice of ordnance: where to whack, and what to whack with. This is a surprisingly hot topic of discussion within Russia, from passengers on rural busses to supposed “Kremlin propagandists” in gleaming television studios. All of this should cause at least a few thoughtful people in the West to think deeply about the consequences of all of this and perhaps even to consider ways to avert getting whacked by angry Russians.

Rest assured that the question of “What to whack with?” is being considered at the very top. Below is an extended quote from Vladimir Putin’s comments at the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum about Russia’s new Oreshnik missile system, of which he is clearly a major fan. “Oreshnik”, by the way, is Russian for “European hazel nut tree.” It is quite traditional for Russian weapons systems to have such vegetarian names. The name is apt because the weapon, just as the tree, delivers not one but many handfuls of nuts. In its non-nuclear form, each of these “nuts” most likely consists of tungsten cones or rods, each weighing about a tonne. Tungsten is significantly denser than lead and has a boiling point of 5,660ºC.

“Dozens of warheads, homing warheads, attack the target at a speed of Mach 10, which is about three kilometers per second. The temperature of the warheads reaches 4,000ºC. If my memory serves me correctly, the surface of the sun is 5,500-6,000ºC. Therefore, everything at the epicenter of the explosion is fragmented into elementary particles, essentially turning into dust. The missile can strike even highly protected targets located at great depth. According to military and technical experts, if these missiles were used en masse, in a single strike—that is, several “Nuts”—in a cluster, the force of the strike would be comparable to that of a nuclear weapon. Although the Oreshnik missile is certainly not a weapon of mass destruction. Firstly, because—as confirmed by the November 21 test—it is a high-precision weapon, and secondly, and most importantly, there is no nuclear warhead, meaning no nuclear contamination after its use.”

This weapon has been battle tested in the former Ukraine with satisfactory results. Here is Putin again, speaking of these tests:

“To be honest, I’ll reveal a major military secret: [we] simply struck where it was convenient to observe the results. This applies to Belaya Tserkov’ [near Kiev], and even more so to the [Ukrainian-occupied Donetsk People’s Republic] area within the perimeter of the main fortified area. Our drones then flew in there, [over] the barn they hit, and simply observed how where separate warheads had landed, calculating everything down to the millimeter.”

This is the choice weapon, then, for “whacking” Europe: it is non-nuclear, it is exceedingly precise, and it turns to dust the exact location that is targeted without damaging the surrounding area except for blown-out windows, burst eardrums and, if the population is prone to panic, some amount of panic. Russia’s Ministry of Defense has already published a list of sites all over Europe, plus a few in Turkey and in Israel, where Ukrainian drones or components thereof are produced. Russia would be within its rights under international law to strike these targets since they are being used to supply terrorists.

The question is, Will this work? Will European leaders, seeing a few of their military factories destroyed, suddenly turn peaceful and from then on cease and desist from supplying the Kiev regime with weapons with which to terrorize Russian civilians? Or will they be greatly encouraged by these strikes to accelerate their own rearmament campaigns? Europe’s leaders have a problem: they need to oversee a decrease in the European standard of living of as much as a factor of two while maintaining control.

To this end, declaring a permanent state of emergency would be most helpful. An Oreshnik strike on a handful of locations would serve as an excuse for imposing strict totalitarian control over the population. The opposition, some of which is timidly voicing opinions in favor of restoring relations with Russia, would be permanently silenced. Every government within the EU would be ordered to prepare for war with Russia. Ukrainian terrorist efforts would be stepped up and other marginal Europeans (Finland, the Baltics, Poland, Moldova) would be put under pressure to join the fray.

Obviously, Europe’s war with Russia would never come. Europe is in no position to attack Russia and Russia has no interest in attacking Europe (aside from discouraging terrorism). Instead, European states would eventually do what they always do, throughout their long history: they would fight each other. A German attack on Poland and France is usually at the top of Act I Scene I.

This sequence of events would not be in Russia’s favor. There is, however, a different approach: requiring Europe to sign articles of capitulation, binding its states to policies of nonaggression toward Russia. This is the Japanese model: one or two nukes and then the signing of some paperwork followed by 80 years of peace. It is perfectly normal to regard nuclear weapons as abhorrent; what is not normal is to regard terrorism as acceptable and to regard nuclear weapons as ineffective. Russia could nuke just one European country, chosen for highest Russophobia and maximum distance from Russian territory; that would be Denmark, which is puny but fantastically belligerent against Russia.

The specific target could be Stevring, Østre Alle 6, where Khaki AK-1000 UAV is made. The size of the charge could be chosen to flatten Stevring, to blow out windows in nearby Aalborg (at 260.000, Denmark’s fourth-largest city) and to make radiation detectors go off as far as Gothenburg, Copenhagen and Hamburg. The next step would be a demand for a select group of European representatives to fly to Moscow, there to sign the Articles of Capitulation. If this demand is not acceded to within the allotted time limit, the next target would be chosen at random, struck with something a little bit more powerful, and the demand would be reissued with some additional conditions imposed.

It should take no more than one or two nuclear strikes to produce the required result: European nonaggression toward Russia for the next century.

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/b7198463-fd55-4f8a-9339-67fd7dbeef65