Men who testified before the USS Liberty Court of Inquiry know that they were not permitted to speak freely. They were told to answer only the questions they were asked, with no spontaneous comments. If they strayed from the narrow path of questioning, they were taken from the room and reprimanded. Some men found their testimony changed later when it appeared in the official transcript.

We learned later that the official deck logs for the day of the attack were also changed. I (Jim Ennes) was Officer of the Deck for the morning watch, from 0800 to 1200. During that period the ship was directly overflown on six or eight occasions, once less than 200 feet directly overhead. Before I left the bridge I completed and signed a log entry for my watch. Yet years later when I reviewed copies of that log I discovered that it had been rewritten and signed by the commanding officer with no reference to the very close surveillance we had experienced during my watch.

Navy Regulations require that the Officer of the Deck personally sign the logs for his watch. Why were these logs changed without my permission?

We know now from Captain Ward Boston, the legal counsel for the Court of Inquiry, that he and the President of the Court (and presumably the other members) actually believed that the attack was deliberate, even though they signed an official report claiming to have found that it was accidental.

My deck logs were changed, apparently to support the fraudulent findings of the Court. A statement I made for the Court describing my morning watch also vanished from the record, no doubt to support the Court's fraudulent findings.

Below are the deck logs for that period. Notice, for instance, that the logs for June 8 give a complete list of deaths and injuries, all information that could not possibly have been known on June 8. The commanding officer, who signed the logs, was incapacitated and could not possibly have signed or prepared these logs on that date or for several days afterward. So they are in fact a reconstruction, prepared long after the fact. The logs for June 8 do not represent accurately the events of June 8.