HINT:
It wasn’t the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis – that was a distant second on the list
The 53rd anniversary of the
United States’ closest-ever nuclear confrontation event will soon come and go
with nary a mention of its significance – certainly not in the “Main Stream
Media” (MSM) where it should appear, but probably very little in the
“alternative” press either.
That is because it is still shrouded in
secrecy, for the sake of protecting the presidential legacy of a man generally
mis-designated as one of the ten “best” presidents of all time by people who
self-identify as credentialed “historians,” who are purposely ignorant of the
incident because knowledge of it is not “politically correct.” The
ironies abound, given that this incident was merely another – and not even the
worst – of his treasons.
The documented facts (at least by the
BBC and Al Jazeera, since no American MSM source ever investigated it) are that
at 8:45 a.m. EDT (2:45 p.m. off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula) on June 8,
1967 two A-4 bomber aircraft loaded with nuclear bombs were dispatched from the
aircraft carrier USS America, bound for Cairo with
orders to drop those bombs on that city.[1]
It
came on the fourth day of the Six-Day War between Israel and three of her
neighbor states: Egypt, Syria and Jordan (the trio was known as the United Arab
Republic – U.A.R., for their defense pact). It was a war that had been
planned for months, provoked and started by Israel but falsely blamed on Egypt.
That war is still celebrated in Israel for how it resulted in expanding its
borders; a sub-operation, to be examined below – the attack on the USS Liberty, which Israel had no real motive or reason
to conduct – had been inserted by President Johnson for his own muddled
political reasons.
But
it backfired on him when the Liberty did not
sink, a “miracle” some say, only possible through Devine Intervention.
Johnson’s outrageous actions might have resulted in his impeachment had he not
initiated the broadest, most effective cover-up of his presidency; indeed, it
was arguably the largest, most enduring cover-up of all time, as evidenced by
the fact that most Americans have still never even heard of it, nor the fact
that a major nuclear conflagration with the U.S.S.R. – the “Soviet Union” (now
known as merely as “Russia”), was likely aborted with only a few minutes to
spare. At the last minute – with the A-4 bombers flying over Egyptian territory,
probably shaken into his senses by his aides and SECDEF McNamara frantically
urging him to do so – President Johnson finally cancelled the attack.
Though it could be argued that
Johnson’s other cover-ups of his own treasons – involving JFK’s assassination
and the murders of a number of other men whom he believed were dangerous to his
continuation in office, or his later “legacy” – were just as highly effective
in hiding his secrets. The difference is that this outrageously brazen
incident, due to the stricter military secrecy protocols put into place, still
remains an “official secret,” thus largely unknown to a public that is now so
disinterested in all of it that the myths may live on forever. Those
others – i.e., the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK (etc.) – have been force-opened
sufficiently to essentially disprove forever the “official stories” (myths), at
least within the minds of those who have studied them closely. The
remaining deconstruction of the primary one (JFK’s assassination), might coincide
with the release of all remaining government secrets, has now been rescheduled
by President Trump for April, 26, 2021. (He had made a number of statements
before the original disclosure date (October 26, 2017) that he fully intended
to open the files and therefore the last-minute delay must be assumed to be a
temporary one).
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Another
False Flag for LBJ
As
detailed in my book Remember the Liberty!,
President Johnson had persuaded Israeli leadership to include a plot called
“Operation Cyanide” in their war planning: It called for Israel to attack his
own reconnaissance ship, the USS Liberty, then
blame Egypt for the brutal attack.
The
plan was to embed LBJ’s operation into the first day of the war – to ensure
that it would be seen as another part of the general chaos that could be
expected that day – which had long been scheduled to begin on June 15, 1967.
But, for curious reasons, Israel “jumped the gun” and started the war ten days
early, on June 5, when they effectively destroyed the entire Egyptian Air
Force, an act which should have also destroyed Operation Cyanide, had the U.S.
President been of sound and rational mind.
On
June 5th the Liberty was still steaming its
way across the Mediterranean Sea, as ordered directly by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff ,by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, on May 23rd,
from its previous position on the Ivory Coast of West Africa; according to the
original schedule, it would take two full days before it reached its
destination off the coast of the Sinai on the evening of June 7th.
Despite
that disconnect, Johnson pressured Israel to proceed with the attack four days
later, on June 8th, despite the fact that (to a rational person), it would no
longer be salable to the public – how were they to believe that it was done by
a country without an air force? That was merely one of a number of signs
that Israeli leadership – conflicted by Johnson’s persistence and forceful
resolve and the potential consequences if the plot were ever revealed – was
never fully unified behind the plan, and finally balked after the vicious
attack that failed to sink the ship.
One
of the most compelling of the signs of Israel’s diffidence was the failure of
their torpedo boats to hit the ship with any of the four torpedoes they fired
at it: If there were any uncertainties about their ability to hit it,
there was nothing to prevent them from getting as close as necessary to the
shot-up, still-burning, crippled and defenseless ship to guarantee multiple
torpedo hits.
As to
the fifth torpedo – that actually did hit it – there has been evidence produced
that the torpedo was fired by a U.S. submarine: LBJ, in a state of
high-frenzied psychosis – has been accused by a Liberty crew
member, who hired an investigator with high-level Pentagon sources, of ordering
one of his own submarines to fire that torpedo; other men, from that submarine,
have acknowledged the veracity of that report, though they have done that
anonymously for obvious reasons. That is understandable because of the
implications to the men whom he ordered to do it, and the horrendous fact that
they were given merely seconds to make such a revolting life-or-death (and risk
of probable court-martial) decision to obey – or not – a presidential order.
What
Were LBJ’s Dubious Motives?
There
was a well-known precedent for LBJ making such a “false flag” operation when he
did: The similarity was the long-planned election-year provocations in 1964
that led to the (phantom) Gulf of Tonkin “attacks” three months before the
November presidential elections that year. That operation guaranteed Johnson’s
landslide re-election in 1964 as he briefly pretended to be a cautious
statesman and seeker of peace. After his election he soon reversed that
pretense as he “Americanized” the Vietnam civil war; two years later, his
escalation of that war had backfired on him. Because of the intense public
backlash he apparently decided — based upon the documented facts of his actions
— that he would need an even larger, more ominous event to guarantee him
re-election in 1968. His diabolical plan went off track when the Liberty refused to sink, as did his chances for
being re-elected.
The
nation, Johnson undoubtedly expected, would have immediately understood the
reason for his quick and decisive retaliation against Egypt, which would have
been quickly blamed for the attack; with the ship and all its men on the bottom
of the sea, no one would be the wiser. Egypt’s president Gamal Abdul
Nassar – hated by Johnson since at least 1956 for his role in seizing the Suez
Canal and thereafter becoming a “puppet” of the Soviet Union – was expected to
be killed in a massive attack on Cairo, to be carried out under the battle cry
of “Remember the Liberty!”
Whether
he had considered the probable repercussions – the reaction of the USSR – of
his attack on their ally will never be known, short of a full release of all
related military files. As it is, the few that have been released, as
examined in Remember the Liberty!, appear to be
the result of either clerical errors at the LBJ Library or, as some believe,
“Devine Intervention.”
But
Johnson’s real intent, it can now finally be deduced, was to turn the tide of
public opinion that had risen against his Vietnam war policies. He had
come to believe that it had been led mostly by young Jewish people, whom he
felt should be among his strongest backers. Men like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry
Rubin and others who had gained fame for leading the war protestors in
Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, with their incessant
chants, “Hey, Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” His reaction to
those chants has been documented well by many of his own aides, like Joseph
Califano; even the sycophants among them, like Bill Moyers and – for awhile,
until he had had enough – Richard Goodwin. Goodwin devoted two chapters of his
memoirs to describing Johnson’s erratic and psychotic behavior, and why he
finally decided to leave his position, which he summed up in these words:[2]
Later I was to question my
failure to disclose what I knew of Johnson’s mental condition, inwardly
speculating that through misplaced loyalty or personal cowardice I was
betraying my obligation to the country . .
. During the next few years, as I campaigned with [Eugene] McCarthy and then
[Robert] Kennedy, I never disclosed – even to my closest friends and colleagues
– the wild surmise that had preoccupied my final days in the White House. But
my own active, fervent opposition was always, in part, informed and motivated
by the knowledge that Lyndon Johnson had become a
very dangerous man. (Bold italics added by author)
The
contrast between those words – and the rest of what Goodwin had to say about
Lyndon Johnson’s demented mental condition and character flaws – and the
Alice-in-Wonderland, inane dreck recorded by his wife Doris Kearns, is
stunning. To some, it seemed that by combining her fantasies about
her intimately thrilling days with the former President, and Goodwin’s horrid
recollections of a psychotic President in real-time, a strange sort of abstruse
equilibrium was reached by both (their brand of “pillow talk” must have been of
the therapeutic kind). In aggregating their diverse experiences, were
they hoping to solidify their defenses against critics who might point out that
neither of them did anything in real-time to expose the legendary deceits of
the 36th president? It took another decade and a half, after
Johnson’s death, for Goodwin to publish his “limited hangout.”
They
might not have been aware of the closeness the world had come to nuclear
annihilation – as neither of them were under his employ on June 8, 1967 – but
the fact that they were both in positions which should have given them access
to some of his darkest secrets, and thus provoked their curiosity, is enough to
conclude that they were complicit in keeping them (and “it”) hidden.
LBJ: The Mastermind of...Phillip
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_____________
Remember the Liberty! – Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas,
was published in 2017, the fiftieth anniversary of the June 8, 1967 attack, by
TrineDay Publishing. Three survivors of that attack – Ernie Gallo, Ron
Kukal and Phil Tourney – co-authored
much of the book with their personal stories of the treachery they experienced,
and how, for fifty years, they have been fighting the government to get the
real story presented. It is a story of treason on the high seas, the
direct result of disgraceful presidential treasons of the highest order:
Endnotes:
[1] Hounam, Peter, and John
Simpson. Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly
Caused World War III. Chatham, Kent, UK: Mackays of Chatham, Ltd.,
2003, pp. 181-82. (Also see the BBC video “Dead in the Water” available
on Youtube).
According
to Mike Ratigan, who served on board that carrier as a center-deck catapult
operator responsible for maintaining the catapult in working order. He
remembered the call to general quarters (battle stations) in the early
afternoon of June 8, 1967, later learning that this was due to the attack on
the Liberty. The A-4 bombers were each fitted with two bombs having a
gold-colored tip, a type that he had never seen before: “I’d never seen that
particular type of ordnance, and as we had gone into Condition November (notice
of imminent nuclear war) subsequent to being in general quarters, it was
definitely not a drill. Marine guards were escorting the A-4, and that was a
very unusual experience. I’d never seen anything like that in the four years
that I was in the Navy as a Cat operator.”
[2] Goodwin, Richard, Remembering America, New York: Little, Brown &
Co., 1988 (p. 416)
Reprinted
with the author’s permission.
Phillip F, Nelson [send him mail] is the author of Who REALLY Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? The Case
Against Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover. His previous books
include LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, LBJ: From Mastermind to The Colossus,
and Remember the Liberty.
Copyright © Phillip F. Nelson
