From "Deliberate Deceptions" by Paul Findley

Fallacy:
"It is concluded clearly and unimpeachably from the evidence
and from comparison of war diaries that the attack on USS Liberty was
not in malice; there was no criminal negligence and the attack was made
by innocent mistake."
               --Government of Israel statement, 1967


Fact:
In bright daylight on June 8, with no other combat taking place nearby,
Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats repeatedly attacked the U.S.
intelligence ship Liberty off the Sinai coast, killing 34 of its crew
and wounding 171.  The attack involved the use of napalm, rockets,
machine guns, and torpedoes.  It had been preceded by reconnaissance by
Israeli planes for at least five and a half hours, during a time when
the ship was flying a new flag that flew freely in a light breeze.

Though Israel through the years has insisted it was a case of mistaken
identify and an accident, abundant evidence emerged to strongly support
the charge that Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence ship,
apparently because it feared the Liberty wound monitor Israeli
preparations for invading the Golan Heights the next day.  The Johnson
administration accepted Israel's claim that the assault resulted from
misidentifaction.  Even years later, Johnson ws evasive about the
incident, claiming in his memoirs that only ten men died in the attack.
It was a clear indicatin of how Johnson colluded with Israel.

At late as 1991, survivors of the attack charged the U.S. government
with continuing to cover up Israel's role.  Wrote James Ennes, a
lieutenant on the bridge on the day of the attack: "The official lid on
this story remains almost as tight as the day it was first applied."
This was despite the fact that such former officials as Secretary of
State Dean Rusk and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State Admiral
Thomas Moorer had gone on record blaming Israel for deliberately
assaulting the Liberty.

Rusk's words in his memoirs: "I was never satisfied with the Israeli
explanation....  I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to
this day.  The attack was outrageous."  Concluded Ennes: "Yet despite
such strong opinions of key leaders, not a single person while still in
government has ever made any apparent effort to set the record
straight."

It was not until June 8, 1991, that the survivors were finally awarded a
presidential unit citation signed by Johnson in 1967 but not presented
at that time.  Then on November 6, 1991, columnists Rowland Evans and
Robert Novak finally discovered that the U.S. embassy in Beirut had
intercepted Israeli radio traffic in which an Israeli pilot reported:
"It's an American ship."  The Israeli command ignored the report and
ordered the pilot to press his attack.  Evans and Novak concluded that
Israel attacked "because [the Liberty] would have picked up every word
of communication between IDF headquarters and Israeli units preparing to
invade Syria."  The Israeli invasion of the Golan Heights came the day
after Israel had silence the Liberty.  The report was confirmed by
Dwight Porter, who was the American ambassador to Lebanon at the time.
Thus, after twenty-four years, the truth has finally emerged.

Source: Deliberate Deceptions by Paul Findley (Lawrence Hill Books,
1995)