Outing Israeli Crimes: June 1967
Clare Brandabur
June 2007
Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World
James Bamford
London: Arrow Books,2002
ISBN 970099427742 (from Jan 2007) ISBN 0 09 942774 5
As we observe the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War of June 1967, there are few things to celebrate. One notable exception is the full exposure of the actual events of the Israeli aggression which have been carefully guarded secrets. In particular the frenzied attempts by the Israelis to sink the USS Liberty and kill its entire crew, attempts covered up at the time by order of the Johnson White House and covered up ever since by censorship and elaborate lies by Israeli and US authority figures.
Now, thanks to the remarkable book Body of Secrets by James Bamford, it is possible to learn not only what happened to the Liberty, but what it was Israel was so desperate to conceal from the eyes of the world, especially from the Russians and the Americans. What they were covering up, and what President Lyndon Johnson would help them continue to cover up, was war crimes and crimes against humanity, a continuation and intensification of the deliberate and calculated policy of the colonial settler state with respect to the indigenous people: genocide.
A good deal was already known about the genocidal practice of the Israelis in 1967 thanks to Arthur C. Forrest's The Unholy Land (1971). Forrest was sent by a consortium of North American church magazines to research rumors that the Israelis were not in fact allowing the refugees back into Palestine, in spite of their carefully staged claims to the contrary. Forrest quickly learned that refugees were still fleeing across the Allenby Bridge; that many had been attacked by Israeli planes using napalm; that the camp at Jericho which had held some 65,000 refugees from 1948, had been attacked and thousands driven across the River into Jordan by planes using machine gins and napalm; that survivors from the Jordanian Army said whole field hospitals had been napalmed. Of course Forrest was bitterly attacked for daring to criticize Israel, especially for revealing the truth about Israeli use of napalm against civilians and hospitals.
One of the horror stories being told in Amman was of the experiences of fleeing refugees being sprayed with napalm. At first I didn't believe it and shuddered at the thought of using some of the pictures of victims available in Jordan. 'If it were pictures of Vietnam you'd publish them wouldn't you?' a Palestinian said. (Forrest 16)
Forrest was shocked and dubious concerning these reports, so he went to visit survivors of these attacks in Jordanian hospitals. He spoke to Mr. Sami Oweida, the father of a family who had recently crossed the Bridge and whose surviving members were still being treated in hospital in Amman
We crossed the King Hussein [Allenby] Bridge, walking. Planes were going overhead [...] We tried to avoid big crowds, thinking the planes would bomb the crowds.
Then at that moment [about 4 PM] I saw a plane come down like a hawk directly at us. We threw ourselves on the ground and found ourselves in the midst of fire. (Forrest 17)
Forrest also quotes the report of General Sir John Glubb whose interpretation of the Middle East Crisis was published in July 1967 as follows:
The greater part of the Jordan army were destroyed by napalm [.] Glubb quotes from a signed statement by a team of doctors from the American University of Beirut.[...] 'A doctor reported that the Mobile Field Hospital, containing 350 patients, was incinerated with all its patients and staff by napalm,' Glubb says. (Forrest 16)
Forrest took photographs of some of the burned victims, one of which he later published in the United Church Observer, his Church paper in Canada, of a little girl recovering from napalm burns. "That, I was told, proved I was anti-Semitic. To condemn napalm in Vietnam is alright. To report its use by the Israelis is considered anti-Semitic" (Forrest 17). When Forrest asked for permission to visit the three destroyed villages Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Emmaus, he was refused on grounds that "There isn't any Beit Nuba!" (15). Nevertheless Forrest managed to travel to the devastated area. From survivors whom he asked about the destruction of these villages in retribution for their resistance in 1948 he learned that Israeli bulldozers demolished houses over the heads of the elderly who perished in the rubble (15).
Now, thanks to James Bamford's outing of the secrets of the "Black Chamber" which housed the American NSA, (National Security Agency) and that of the British GCHQ, (Government Communications Headquarters) , it is possible to reconstruct a more complete picture of the Israeli cover-up including its attack on the USS Liberty. The well planned war of 1967 was designed to take as much land as possible and to make it appear that the Arab armies had attacked Israel. This is the startling conclusion of a chapter in Bamford's, Body of Secrets (2002) which offers a more detailed explanation for the Israeli attack on the Liberty. Bamford provides a mass of detail about the "criminal slaughter" in which the Israelis were engaged at nearby Al-Arish (201).
From the first minutes of its surprise attack, the Israeli airforce had owned the skies over the Middle East. Within the first few hours, Israeli jets pounded twenty-five Arab air bases ranging from Damascus in Syria to an Egyptian field, loaded with bombers far up the Nile at Luxor. Then, using machine guns, mortar fire, tanks, and air power, the Israeli war machine overtook the Jordanian section of Jerusalem as well as the west bank of the Jordan River, and torpedo boats captured the key Red Sea cape at Sharm al-Sheikh.
In the Sinai, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers pushed toward the Suez Canal along all three of the roads that crossed the desert, turning the burning sands into a massive killing field. One Israeli general estimated that Egyptian casualties there ranged from 7,000 to 10,000 killed, compared with 275 of its own troops. (201)
Clare Brandabur
June 2007
Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World
James Bamford
London: Arrow Books,2002
ISBN 970099427742 (from Jan 2007) ISBN 0 09 942774 5
As we observe the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War of June 1967, there are few things to celebrate. One notable exception is the full exposure of the actual events of the Israeli aggression which have been carefully guarded secrets. In particular the frenzied attempts by the Israelis to sink the USS Liberty and kill its entire crew, attempts covered up at the time by order of the Johnson White House and covered up ever since by censorship and elaborate lies by Israeli and US authority figures.
Now, thanks to the remarkable book Body of Secrets by James Bamford, it is possible to learn not only what happened to the Liberty, but what it was Israel was so desperate to conceal from the eyes of the world, especially from the Russians and the Americans. What they were covering up, and what President Lyndon Johnson would help them continue to cover up, was war crimes and crimes against humanity, a continuation and intensification of the deliberate and calculated policy of the colonial settler state with respect to the indigenous people: genocide.
A good deal was already known about the genocidal practice of the Israelis in 1967 thanks to Arthur C. Forrest's The Unholy Land (1971). Forrest was sent by a consortium of North American church magazines to research rumors that the Israelis were not in fact allowing the refugees back into Palestine, in spite of their carefully staged claims to the contrary. Forrest quickly learned that refugees were still fleeing across the Allenby Bridge; that many had been attacked by Israeli planes using napalm; that the camp at Jericho which had held some 65,000 refugees from 1948, had been attacked and thousands driven across the River into Jordan by planes using machine gins and napalm; that survivors from the Jordanian Army said whole field hospitals had been napalmed. Of course Forrest was bitterly attacked for daring to criticize Israel, especially for revealing the truth about Israeli use of napalm against civilians and hospitals.
One of the horror stories being told in Amman was of the experiences of fleeing refugees being sprayed with napalm. At first I didn't believe it and shuddered at the thought of using some of the pictures of victims available in Jordan. 'If it were pictures of Vietnam you'd publish them wouldn't you?' a Palestinian said. (Forrest 16)
Forrest was shocked and dubious concerning these reports, so he went to visit survivors of these attacks in Jordanian hospitals. He spoke to Mr. Sami Oweida, the father of a family who had recently crossed the Bridge and whose surviving members were still being treated in hospital in Amman
We crossed the King Hussein [Allenby] Bridge, walking. Planes were going overhead [...] We tried to avoid big crowds, thinking the planes would bomb the crowds.
Then at that moment [about 4 PM] I saw a plane come down like a hawk directly at us. We threw ourselves on the ground and found ourselves in the midst of fire. (Forrest 17)
Forrest also quotes the report of General Sir John Glubb whose interpretation of the Middle East Crisis was published in July 1967 as follows:
The greater part of the Jordan army were destroyed by napalm [.] Glubb quotes from a signed statement by a team of doctors from the American University of Beirut.[...] 'A doctor reported that the Mobile Field Hospital, containing 350 patients, was incinerated with all its patients and staff by napalm,' Glubb says. (Forrest 16)
Forrest took photographs of some of the burned victims, one of which he later published in the United Church Observer, his Church paper in Canada, of a little girl recovering from napalm burns. "That, I was told, proved I was anti-Semitic. To condemn napalm in Vietnam is alright. To report its use by the Israelis is considered anti-Semitic" (Forrest 17). When Forrest asked for permission to visit the three destroyed villages Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Emmaus, he was refused on grounds that "There isn't any Beit Nuba!" (15). Nevertheless Forrest managed to travel to the devastated area. From survivors whom he asked about the destruction of these villages in retribution for their resistance in 1948 he learned that Israeli bulldozers demolished houses over the heads of the elderly who perished in the rubble (15).
Now, thanks to James Bamford's outing of the secrets of the "Black Chamber" which housed the American NSA, (National Security Agency) and that of the British GCHQ, (Government Communications Headquarters) , it is possible to reconstruct a more complete picture of the Israeli cover-up including its attack on the USS Liberty. The well planned war of 1967 was designed to take as much land as possible and to make it appear that the Arab armies had attacked Israel. This is the startling conclusion of a chapter in Bamford's, Body of Secrets (2002) which offers a more detailed explanation for the Israeli attack on the Liberty. Bamford provides a mass of detail about the "criminal slaughter" in which the Israelis were engaged at nearby Al-Arish (201).
From the first minutes of its surprise attack, the Israeli airforce had owned the skies over the Middle East. Within the first few hours, Israeli jets pounded twenty-five Arab air bases ranging from Damascus in Syria to an Egyptian field, loaded with bombers far up the Nile at Luxor. Then, using machine guns, mortar fire, tanks, and air power, the Israeli war machine overtook the Jordanian section of Jerusalem as well as the west bank of the Jordan River, and torpedo boats captured the key Red Sea cape at Sharm al-Sheikh.
In the Sinai, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers pushed toward the Suez Canal along all three of the roads that crossed the desert, turning the burning sands into a massive killing field. One Israeli general estimated that Egyptian casualties there ranged from 7,000 to 10,000 killed, compared with 275 of its own troops. (201)
