Cohen claimed that "like John Kennedy's government before it, the Johnson administration believed that it would be a mistake to allow Israel to develop nuclear weapons, and thus tried to keep Israel at the 'threshold' status" but LBJ's failure to protect and honor the lives that were on board the USS LIBERTY, reflect a moral, ethical and political failure, for he refused to allow the assassinations of "a few sailors to embarrass an ally."
Journalist and author, James Scott wrote in The Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship:
"More than twenty minutes before the fatal torpedo strike killed twenty-five sailors; Israel's chief air controller conclusively identified the Liberty as an American ship" and many years after the attack, Lieutenant Colonel Shmuel Kislev, the chief air controller at general headquarters in Tel Aviv, confessed that he knew the U.S.S. LIBERTY was an American ship as soon as an Israeli pilot radioed in its hull numbers.
"Two months before the sailor's mass burial at Arlington Cemetery, Navy analysis also uncovered that the Israeli torpedo boat gunners had targeted the spy ship with 40-mm tracer rounds made in the United States. In 1967, the Republican representative from Iowa, H.R. Gross asked questions that still demand an answer today:
"Is this Government now, directly or indirectly, subsidizing Israel in the payment of full compensation for the lives that were destroyed, the suffering of the wounded, and the damage from this wanton attack? It can well be asked whether these Americans were the victims of bombs, machine gun bullets and torpedoes manufactured in the United States and dished out as military assistance under foreign aid."
"By November 1967, lawmakers were willing to spend six million USA tax dollars to build schools in Israel but during the debate, Representative Gross spoke with the voice of conscience and introduced an amendment that 'not one dollar of U.S. credit or aid of any kind [should] go to Israel until there is a firm settlement with regard to the attack and full reparations have been made [and Israel] provides full and complete reparations for the killing and wounding of more than 100 United States citizens in the wanton, unprovoked attack. I wonder how you would feel if you were the father of one of the boys who was killed in that connection-or perhaps you do not have any feelings with respect to these young men who were killed, wounded and maimed, or their families.'" [3]
Cohen also told Haaretz , that in a late-1969 meeting between Golda Meir and Nixon, "the United States and most of the Western world agreed to accept Israel's special nuclear status. In other words, Israel did not join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it received special status, and pressure was not exerted on it with regard to this topic. Ambiguity is the Israeli-American policy. Without the West's agreement, there would be no ambiguity.
"I'm often asked why I don't drop this topic of ambiguity. I refer to historic and geopolitical circumstances, but I mainly believe that on the most basic and deepest level, ambiguity is simply not enlightened behavior, not in terms of the state's citizens, and not in foreign relations.
"The bitter irony is that right now, ambiguity serves the interests of Israel's rival in the Middle East. Iran is creating its own version of ambiguity: not the concealment of its project, but rather ambiguity with regard to the distinction separating possession and non-possession of nuclear weapons. It reiterates that it has no intention of building a bomb, but that it has the right to enrich uranium, and even come close to developing [nuclear] weapons - while still remaining true to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is straddling the line, and in my opinion, Iran wants to, and can, remain for some time with the status of a state that might or might not have the bomb. Iran is a state of ambiguity."
In 2006, Virginia Tilley,
Professor of political science wrote:
"In his October 2005 speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad never used the word 'map' or
the term 'wiped off.' According to Farsi-language experts like Juan Cole and
even right-wing services like MEMRI, what he actually said was 'this regime
that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.'
"In this speech to an annual anti-Zionist conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad was
being prophetic, not threatening. He was citing Imam Khomeini, who said this
line in the 1980s-a period when Israel was actually selling arms to Iran, so
apparently it was not viewed as so ghastly then.
"Mr. Ahmadinejad had just reminded his audience that the Shah's regime,
the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein had all seemed enormously powerful and
immovable, yet the first two had vanished almost beyond recall and the third
now languished in prison.
"So, too, the "occupying regime" in Jerusalem would someday be
gone. His message was, in essence: 'This too shall pass.'" [4]
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