The truth of the matter

The well respected author Noam Chomsky has written about Israel's intentional attack on the USS Liberty:

“The truth of the matter is that Israel has been granted a unique immunity from criticism in mainstream journalism and scholarship … the attack on the unmistakably identified U.S. Liberty with rockets, aircraft cannon, napalm, torpedoes and machine guns, clearly premeditated, leaving 34 crewmen dead and 75 wounded in “the Navy’s bloodiest ‘peacetime’ international incident of the 20th century" … the general reaction of the press and scholarship has been silence or misrepresentation. … The nature of the attack on the Liberty was also evaded not only by the press fairly generally but by the government and by a U.S. Naval Board of Inquiry, though high-ranking figures had no doubt that the official report was a whitewash; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, for example, states that the attack “could not possibly have been a case of mistaken identity,” as officially claimed.” pp31-32 The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians