37 YEARS AGO TODAY

USS Liberty

Jun 8 1967

34 American servicemen are killed and 171 wounded when the highly-conspicuous U.S.S. Liberty is strafed twice in 75 minutes by Israeli fighters and torpedo boats. The American spy ship happens to be sitting in international waters, 15 miles off the coast of Egypt, monitoring unfolding events of the Six Day War.

 Israel says there was no pre-attack reconnaissance. Any aircraft we saw, they say, were high in the sky carrying troops to the battlefield.

Here is an Israeli reconnaissance airplane that circled the ship about an hour before the attack. The pilot was heard reporting to HQ that he saw an American flag and men sunning themselves on deck. 

"Israeli aircraft had circled us throughout the night (identified by their radar characteristics), and now, with daylight, they came closer and we could see the Star of David markings. Often they came so close that we could see the pilots in their cockpits and exchanged friendly waves."

"I was the officer-of-the-deck on the bridge during this period, and following each visit our leading intercept supervisor, Chief Melvin Smith, would come up to the bridge and ask if I had seen the aircraft's markings to confirm his own electronic observations: 'Not to worry,' he would say, 'Each time they circle we can hear the pilot telling his headquarters that we are an American ship.'" 

"I ordered the quartermaster to haul up a new flag, with bright and clear colors, and instructed signalmen and lookouts to assure that the flag never wrapped around the lines or mast making it difficult to see even for a few seconds. I was pleased to see that we had a steady breeze across the deck, always more than enough to hold the flag out so that it could be seen clearly by the Israeli pilots."

Battle dressing station

The attack has been a matter of controversy ever since. Survivors and many key government officials including Secretary of State Dean Rusk and former JCS Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer say it was no accident. Israel and its supporters insist it was a "tragic case of misidentification" and charge that the survivors are either lying or too emotionally involved to see the truth.

Israel claims they mistook our ship for the out-of-service Egyptian horse carrier El Quseir and that we brought the attack upon ourselves by operating in a war zone without displaying a flag.

Caskets being loaded at Malta

Our commanding officer, Captain William Loren McGonagle, received the Congressional Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty during the attack. To avoid embarrassing our attackers, Captain McGonagle's Medal of Honor was presented in a quiet ceremony in the Washington Navy Yard instead of in the White House by the President as is customary.

www.ussliberty.org

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Dear Mr. Mehlman

Replacing the Bush/Cheney 2004 home page with a tribute to Ronald Reagan was a masterstroke. Surely there are other ways you can exploit his death for the campaign's advantage.

Have you considered taxidermy?

Heterosexually yours,

General JC Christian, patriot

FROM Patriot.com 

Professor Tim Spector, of the Twin Research Unit at St Thomas's Hospital, London, says sutdies of twins suggest a genetic component to infidelity.

If one of a pair of women twins has a history of infidelity, the chances her sister will also stray are about 55 per cent, he claims.

And the tendency for the pair to be either faithful or unfaithful is strongest in identical twins, who have the same genes, he says.

In general he claims the proportion of women as a whole who are unfaithful to their partners is around 23 per cent.

Doubts raised about head of drug program

By Lee Mueller

EASTERN KENTUCKY BUREAU

WHITESBURG - When a local chapter of Eastern Kentucky's newest drug-fighting program chose its chairman this year, it picked a dentist who had been fined by state regulators for failing to document narcotics he had prescribed to patients.

Dr. David Narramore paid the $500 fine in January as part of an agreement to settle a 17-count complaint that claimed he had overprescribed painkillers. Investigators said the dentist prescribed narcotics 20 times for a patient who was already in a drug-abuse treatment program.

Narramore, the Republican Party chairman in Letcher County, said in a recent interview that the Kentucky Board of Dentistry's decision to drop the more serious charges against him amounted to vindication.

UNITE, which stands for Unlawful Narcotics Investigation, Treatment and Education, is a $16 million federally financed program initiated by U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Somerset, that is supposed to bring police, drug rehabilitation groups and grass-roots coalitions of citizens together in a concerted street-level war on illegal narcotics.

Most of the group's original grass-roots members have stopped coming to the meetings.

Republican Jesus

A Chinese man has been seeking medical help after his sweat turned green.

The man from Guangzhou first noticed the problem while moving furniture with a friend.

He claims bright green liquid began pouring down his arms and forehead.

But so far doctors have been left puzzled by the appearance of coloured sweat. Their only theory so far is that the condition may be caused by a mystery parasite inside the patient's body.

The Southern Metropolitan News quotes a doctor at the Guangzhou Friendship Hospital saying he had read of cases of red and blue sweat in ancient medical books but never green sweat.

Saturday, June 5, 2004

Ohio Marine Pleads Guilty to Prisoner Abuse

Two 19-year-old Marines pleaded guilty to giving electric shocks to an Iraqi prisoner they were guarding in early April, months after the Abu Ghraib prison abuse, military officials said.

Sting's father said a sergeant ordered his son to shock the detainee. When the sergeant left, his son had the ordered reconfirmed by another sergeant and a corporal. 

Sting was sentenced to a year in prison, a reduction of rank, forfeiture of pay and a bad-conduct discharge.

Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides

By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Jun 4, 2004, 06:15

President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing.

In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”

A picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.

Aides say the President gets “hung up on minor details,” micromanaging to the extreme while ignoring the bigger picture. He will spend hours personally reviewing and approving every attack ad against his Democratic opponent and then kiss off a meeting on economic issues.

The President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”

950,000 turn out to see Buddha's finger

HONG KONG (AP) - About 950,000 people turned out to see one of Buddha's fingers while it was on loan from Beijing for a 10-day exhibit here. .

Ordinary citizens snapped up about 650,000 free tickets to see it, while another 300,000 people, mainly students and tourists from the mainland, visited in groups.

Some said they hoped the finger would bring a new peace and calm to Hong Kong.

The finger, encased in bulletproof glass, will return to its home at Famen Temple near the ancient capital of Xian in central China.

The sanctification of Reagan

by Mike Sweet

The rehashing of Reagan's life and times is thrust upon the American public with the same sugar coating that encased his beloved jelly beans.

 Many consider it the worst of taste to criticize Reagan for what he did and didn't do. Or to blame him for the many unresolved problems (in addition to the ones he created) that have bedeviled the nation. .

 Republicans have spent the last 13 years canonizing Reagan by whitewashing his record.

And even by reincarnating him. George W. Bush is his ideological equal, and probably his intellectual clone. Neither is anything to be proud of.

Reagan loyalists talk about how he revitalized the military. They don't talk about how he did it by plunging the country into an unprecedented debt we are still paying off.

They don't mention the hundreds of billions of dollars that went for Star Wars and B-1 and B-2 bombers -- pipe dreams that sucked the Treasury dry and never lived up to the promises of their backers, who, nonetheless made money.

Republicans don't like to talk about Iran Contra. Or that Ronald Reagan repeated 79 times that he didn't remember when asked what he knew about selling weapons to Iran so his subordinates could buy weapons off the books to run an illegal and immoral war in Central America.

Nobody mentions the Pentagon Bribery Scandal, in which hundreds of Reagan political appointees and contractors cheated the taxpayers out of billions more.

The media mentions the flavor of his birthday cake but muses not on the Savings and Loan debacle. That's where S&L managers got the green light from Reagan's regulators to spend their customers' money as if it were their own.

In the long-term bailout that followed, customers are still repaying themselves with their own tax money, and yet nobody blames Reagan.

Reagan admirers don't weep for the half a million innocent Central Americans murdered by right-wing dictators supported by Ronald Reagan in defiance of U.S. law.

His fans say the Soviet Union collapsed because Ronald Reagan called for Star Wars and told Moscow to tear down the Berlin Wall.

The Soviet Union collapsed because after 70 years it simply rotted from within, and because Mikhail Gorbachev imposed the political change his predecessors feared.

Reagan had the luck to show up as the Soviet corpse was taking its last gasps and took credit for inflicting the mortal wound.

Ronald Reagan, who dumped his first wife and estranged himself from his children, became the head of the political party that maintains to this day that only its members are fit to set and impose family values.

Ronald Reagan's true believers are still among us. Many are back on top, working in the new Bush Administration.

The nation should move on.

But it should be past the unbecoming, sanctimonious and more than a little nauseating sanctification of Ronald Reagan.