Tell Somebody

On June 8, 1967, fighter jets and torpedo boats attacked a defenseless U.S. spy ship off the coast of Egypt.  After an assault lasting over an hour, 34 U.S. sailors, marines, and civilians were dead, 174 wounded, and the ship was in danger of sinking with a house-sized torpedo hole in its side.  The attackers?  The Israeli Air Force and Navy. Investigative journalist James M. Scott, son of a Liberty survivor, has written a new book, Attack on the Liberty - the Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship (Simon & Schuster 2009). From the back cover of the book: "The specter of the Liberty has haunted the Navy and the intelligence community for decades.  The underlying question the attack raised in 1967 still resonates: how do politics and diplomacy impact battlefield decisions?  In the case of the Liberty, the White House - afraid of offending Israel's domestic backers at a time when it needed support for its Vietnam policy - looked the other way.  Likewise, Congress failed to formally