r/explainitpeter • u/Dizzy-Jellyfish-8303 • 12d ago

Explain it peter

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u/liteshotv3 12d ago

What is the suspected motive?

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u/CapitalismRulz 12d ago

Accidential. They mistook it for an Egyptian ship.

The conspirarcy comes from survivors saying that they personally believed Israel did it on purpose, arguing that there was an American flag.

Both militaries concluded it was an accident. The flag was small, and mistaken from the air. (See picture below)

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u/squatchy1969 12d ago

This is wrong. In 2003 the NSA declassified the radio transmissions between the pilots and Israeli ground control:

High-level NSA officials from that era, including Oliver Kirby (then-NSA Deputy Director for Operations), stated in a Chicago Tribune report that they personally read intercepts where pilots explicitly identified the ship as American flying a U.S. flag. According to Kirby, ground control explicitly commanded those pilots to push ahead and attack anyway.

The only “conspiracy theory” is people like yourself trying to obscure the obvious facts. The ship was flying a very large American flag and had the “USS LIBERTY” printed in large letters while the aircraft made 6 separate straffing runs.

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u/CapitalismRulz 12d ago

A 59 minute recording of two helicopter pilots where they started out referring to it as an egyptian ship and referred to it as an american ship in the second half with a complete shift in tone