One of the NSA “whistleblowers” is a James Bamford. He thinks the USS Liberty was “an inside job.”

Hiding war crimes

Another possible motive was offered by James Bamford in his 2000 book Body of Secrets. Bamford claimed that Israel mounted the attack because it worried that the Liberty would learn of the nearby killing of hundreds of Egyptian POWs by the Israeli army. In fact, no evidence has been found to corroborate a war crime charge, and Cristol has shown that Bamford’s account has little credibility. For example, Bamford quotes Marvin Nowicki, a Hebrew linguist on the U.S. surveillance aircraft that recorded the attacking Israeli pilots, to support his theory that the Israelis knew the ship to be American. Cristol reveals, however, that Nowicki stated in an exchange of letters with Bamford that “our intercepts, never before made public, showed the attack to be an accident on the part of the Israelis.”

Muhajiroun (added December 5)

Al-Muhajiroun, a militant London-based Islamic organization, posted on its Web site an October 21 article quoting from Lyndon LaRouche’s publication, Executive Intelligence Review, to make the case that “The September 11 attacks could not have been carried out without complicity from rogue elements in military/security circles inside the United States.” The article goes on to draw a parallel with an account by James Bamford in his book Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Bamford concluded that in 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff “proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.” The article concludes, “To the astute reader, the potential parallels with recent events should be chilling.”