Thirty years ago, the mighty grizzly bear of the American Rocky Mountains landed on the Endangered Species list. It was one of the first animals honored with this dubious citation.

By 1973, the giant bears, which once ruled the great plains and Rocky Mountains from the Dakotas to California and struck terror into the Lewis and Clark expedition and many who followed, existed only in a few patches of isolated and still wild land in Montana and Wyoming: greater Yellowstone, Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the Cabinet Mountains, the Selkirks and the Swan Range.

Even in these last remote refuges, the bear was hardly thriving. Perhaps 350 bears remained in Yellowstone. Then the Park Service closed the open dump, a stable source of food, and the population dropped. The Cabinet-Yaak, Selkirk and Swan populations totaled less than 200 bears combined. The healthiest population existed in the chunks of wilderness in and around Glacier National Park, which tallied perhaps 500 bears in the early 1970s. But this was something of an illusion, since the Glacier population was being buffeted by Canadian bears crossing the border to escape the merciless hunting campaigns to the north. Grizzly refugees.

Extinction loomed as a real possibility for the greatest living symbol of the American Rockies.

It still does.

From the time the bear was listed, the State of Montana clamored to have the bear removed, particularly in the Glacier area, where it wanted to auction off lucrative grizzly bear hunts. The Forest Service, which manages most of the bear’s habitat in the region, griped that if taken literally the Endangered Species Act protections would put a serious dent in its annual timber sale offerings. The agency refused to interpret the act literally. The Park Service, which manages Yellowstone and Glacier, liked having the bear as an attraction, but chafed at suggestions that the agency should scale back its plans to construct resorts for tourists in bear habitat; when, inevitably, tourists got mauled and dismembered by irritated bears, the Park Service, whose mission is to protect wildlife, sent assassination teams out to track down the killer bears and dispatch them.

Across much of Montana, federal land is checkerboarded with private holdings, a legacy of the railroad land grants. This was, of course, one of the greatest government sanctioned rip-offs of all time, where the railroad barons were given alternating sections of federal land as an inducement for the construction of the trans-continental railroads. In secret deals, the railroads eventually sold off these lushly timbered parcels to big timber companies. The deals were covert because under the terms of the land grants, the land was supposed to revert to the federal government if they weren’t needed for the construction of the railroad corridors.

For decades, the railroad grant lands were owned by two timber giants, Plum Creek and Champion International. Through the 1960s, the timber companies did little logging on these mountainous lands. They were remote and the timber wasn’t that valuable. Then beginning the late 1970s two things happened. The Forest Service began building roads into these lands, thus reducing the logging costs for Plum Creek and Champion. And the price of timber soared.

The timber companies struck while the iron was hot. Over the next 10 years, Plum Creek and Champion went on a logging frenzy, cutting without restraint. By the end of the 1980s, more than two million acres of forest, most of it prime grizzly habitat, had been liquidated. Internal memos from executives at both companies unearthed by reporter Richard Manning revealed that each company had logged off more than 90 percent of its holdings. So much for sustainable forestry.

Predictably, both firms began to shut down their operations in the Rockies, closing the mills and laying off thousands of workers despite their repeated pledges to stay in Montana for the long haul. Champion left Montana altogether, moving to the southeast and Mexico. Plum Creek stuck around, but transformed itself from timber company to real estate developer, turning its clearcut forests into wilderness ranchettes and mountain subdivisions.

Meanwhile, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency charged with ensuring the bear’s survival, took a laissez-faire approach toward ursus horribilus, partly on its on initiative, partly at the insistence of the Wyoming/Montana/Idaho congressional junta. Under the strictures of the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service is tasked with identifying the lands that are considered essential for the survival of a listed species and designating those lands as critical habitat. These lands are then considered sacrosanct and the agency is permitted to prohibit any activities therein, which might harm the species.

With the grizzly, this never happened. The Fish and Wildlife Service neglected to designate critical habitat and their decision was backed by a congressional rider that prevented environmental groups from suing the agency for violating the law. Without a critical habitat designation, it was almost impossible to challenge incursions into the bear’s last redoubts.

Not that they would have sued, mind you. Nationally and locally, environmental groups considered the grizzly politically toxic. It threatened to put them in conflict with some of their favored politicians in the region, most notably Senator Max Baucus.

So the grizzly never had much of a chance. Its habitat was under assault by loggers, miners, oil companies and real estate barons, while the bureaucrats and NGOs charged with looking out for its survival took a pass.

This all changed in 1990 when a group of young and radical greens came together in Missoula and formed the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. Headed by Mike Bader, a former Yellowstone Park ranger who had conducted extensive research on grizzlies, the Alliance unleashed a barrage of lawsuits on behalf of the bear. It frontally attacked Democratic politicians, such as Baucus, Bill Clinton and Representative Pat Williams, who spouted green rhetoric, but worked to undermine the bear at every turn, often through the noxious practice of congressional riders to appropriations bills, which shielded destructive logging schemes from environmental challenges in the federal courts.

What other groups in the region took as a liability, the Alliance seized on as a calling card. More than any other animal in North America, the grizzly craved large expanses of roadless terrain. The northern Rockies were the only place in the lower-48 with grizzlies and a sizable chunk of wilderness, about 16 million acres spread across Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Protect the bear and you could save most of this land from the chainsaw and oil wells. Save the roadless areas and you ensure a future for the grizzly and dozens of other species, such as the bull trout, lynx, Pacific fisher and gray wolf.

But it turns out you have to go beyond merely saving the roadless areas and wildernesses. They are now islands, isolated refuges in a sea of clearcuts, ranchettes and oil patches. To give the grizzly a real shot, these archipelagos of forest need to be linked together through a network of wildland corridors that are off-limits to logging, road building, mining and oil development. That’s the logic behind the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act.

NREPA, or something even bigger, may be the last chance to save the grizzly. The news has not been good for the great bear. In early 2007, the Bush administration moved to strip the Yellowstone population of bear of its protections under the Endangered Species Act . This unwelcome event occurred despite the fact that several sinister internal assessments have concluded that the grizzly faces dire threats in all three of its final strongholds, a crisis brought on by Homo sapiens voracissim. Otherwise known as ranchers, timber companies and the oil and gas industry.

If there’s been one human subspecies more antipathetic to Ursus horribilis than any other, it’s probably been the bear’s supposed protector: Homo bureaucraticus, AKA the federal lands bureaucrat, who sees the irascible bear as an unmitigated nuisance. That’s because grizzlies are the original sylvan Luddites, frightening tourists (occasionally taking one out), shredding pretty North Face tents, rummaging around dumpsters at local resorts and generally raising hell in the neighborhood.

You can hardly blame the bear. One example: after the grizzly was put on the endangered species list, the Park Service approved the huge Grant Village resort complex on the western shore of Yellowstone Lake, right in the middle of prime grizzly fishing habitat. In exchange, the Park Service promised to dismantle the Fishing Bridge campground on the other side of the lake, also favorite habitat for the bear. Enter Senator Alan Simpson, who put a stop to that. So the bears went fishing for cutthroat trout as they have done since time immemorial and got caught up in the tourist traffic. First-time ursine intruders get drugged up with sodium pentothal (which turn many into psychotics) and airlifted to remote, troutless regions of the park. Two strikes and you’re out. Repeat offenders are shot to death. In 2004, 19 grizzlies were killed in the Yellowstone region, half of them by wildlife and Park Service officials.

So after thirty years of this, the Feds have had enough. They’ve pronounced their work done and have moved to de-list the grizzly in Yellowstone. The rationale for such de-listing is an old stratagem of Homo bureaucraticus, namely: a robust declaration of victory. The Bush administration (following a template laid down in Clinton time) declared flatly that the government believes it has “achieved recovery plan goals for the Yellowstone ecosystem.” And then wash their hands of the blood.

Grizzlies, for obvious reasons, are hard to count, except for the ones you’ve dispatched. But most non-government scientists believe that there are fewer female grizzlies in the Yellowstone and Glacier regions now than there were when the bear was first listed. In fact, of the 19 bears killed in Yellowstone in 2004, 10 were adult females, some leaving behind cubs to that soon perished as well. Does this mean the Endangered Species Act is a failure? No. It means that federal bureaucrats have lacked the will to enforce the law.

To truly defend the bear, those bureaucrats would have been forced to confront the designs of some of the most ruthless lobbies in America — for whom Ursus horribilis has been an irksome obstruction to making money. The grizzly stands in the path of oil and gas companies such as Chevron, which wants to sink wells in the Rocky Mountain Front east of Glacier Park; in the path of Boise-Cascade and Plum Creek Timber, which wants to log off the remaining six million acres of wild forest in the Northern Rockies; in the path of Club Yellowstone, and other elite ski resorts; in the path of mining companies, who want to excavate giant holes in the Absaroka and Pioneer Mountain ranges in search of gold.

Facing these opponents, where may the beleaguered grizzly turn for succor, aside from an unwary hiker? An apparent ally would seem to be the wildlife lobby, but here too peril lurks in the path of Ursus horribilis. A few years ago someone sent me an internal memo from the National Wildlife Federation, which set forth a plan for establishing a “grizzly recovery zone” in central Idaho. The plan was written in consort with Defenders of Wildlife and, yes, two timber industry groups. Alas, the Idaho grizzlies won’t, in all likelihood, be given much chance to recover. Plowing through the virtually impenetrable prose of the memorandum, we find that these two conservation groups placed some codicils on the tails of their plan. For example, oversight of the recovery zone was to be partially surrendered to local boards, dominated by such disinterested parties as Potlatch Timber and Hecla Mining.

The bear’s status under the scheme is somewhat of a giveaway, as any alert Ursus horribilis skimming the contents would speedily realize. The intent is to reclassify the great bear as “a non-essential experimental population,” which means the bears could be killed by any rancher or hunter claiming thereafter that their lives or livestock were at risk.

Characteristically, this cautious approach surrenders the fruits of a tremendous legal victory for the Endangered Species Act in the so-called Sweet Home case by the Supreme Court. The court ruled that destruction of a listed species’ habitat is the same as killing the species outright. But in their “fair compromise” with industry, the neoliberal greens conceded that the notion of “harm” should not be understood to include “any actions that modify grizzly habitat.” In other words, the grizzly should not be considered an impediment to timber sales or gold mines. They were expendable.

Under these perilous conditions, give the grizzly another 50 years at most in the lower-48. The only hope for their survival resides in legislation like NREPA that locks up huge chunks of land away from the bulldozer and the chainsaw, locks the land up tight as inviolate wilderness, with no exceptions.

No wilderness, no grizzlies. No grizzlies, no real wilderness.

Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.

A few hours later more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.

A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship’s top officers.

The Liberty’s radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called “a buzzsaw sound”. Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet’s large aircraft carrier, that it was under attack

Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty’s aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. “Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,” he barked. McNamara’s injunction was reiterated in saltier terms by Admiral David L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations: “You get those fucking airplanes back on deck, and you get them back down.” The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.

After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.

As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. No body was going to get out alive that way.

After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: “Do you need any help?”

The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: “Fuck you.”

The Israeli boat turned and left.

A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty’s commanding officer refused.

Finally, 16 hours after the attack two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk to the press about their ordeal.

The following morning Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.

Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. “These errors do occur,” McNamara concluded.

***

In Assault on the Liberty, a first-hand account by James Ennes Jr., McNamara’s version of events is proven to be as big a sham as his concurrent lies about Vietnam. Ennes’s book created a media storm when it was first published by Random House in 1980, including (predictably) charges that Ennes was a liar and an anti-Semite. Still, the book sold more than 40,000 copies, but was eventually allowed to go out of print. Now Ennes has published an updated version, which incorporates much new evidence that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the US government went to extraordinary lengths to disguise the truth.

It’s a story of Israel aggression, Pentagon incompetence, official lies, and a cover-up that persists to this day. The book gains much of its power from the immediacy of Ennes’s first-hand account of the attack and the lies that followed.

Now, 35 years later, Ennes warns that the bloodbath on board the Liberty and its aftermath should serve as a tragic cautionary tale about the continuing ties between the US government and the government of Israel.

The Attack on the Liberty is the kind of book that makes your blood seethe. Ennes skillfully documents the life of the average sailor on one of the more peculiar vessels in the US Navy, with an attention for detail that reminds one of Dana or O’Brien. After all, the year was 1967 and most of the men on the Liberty were certainly glad to be on a non-combat ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, rather than in the Gulf of Tonkin or Mekong Delta.

But this isn’t Two Years Before the Mast. In fact, Ennes’s tour on the Liberty last only a few short weeks. He had scarcely settled into a routine before his new ship was shattered before his eyes.

Ennes joined the Liberty in May of 1967, as an Electronics Material Officer. Serving on a “spook ship”, as the Liberty was known to Navy wives, was supposed to be a sure path to career enhancement. The Liberty’s normal routine was to ply the African coast, tuning in its eavesdropping equipment on the electronic traffic in the region.

The Liberty had barely reached Africa when it received a flash message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sail from the Ivory Coast to the Mediterranean, where it was to re-deploy off the coast of the Sinai to monitor the Israeli attack on Egypt and the allied Arab nations.

As the war intensified, the Liberty sent a request to the fleet headquarters requesting an escort. Requesrt denied, by Admiral William Martin. The Liberty moved alone to a position in international waters about 13 miles from the shore at El Arish, then under furious siege by the IDF.

On June 6, the Joint Chiefs sent Admiral McCain, father of the senator from Arizona, an urgent message instructing him to move the Liberty out of the war zone to a position at least 100 miles off the Gaza Coast. McCain never forwarded the message to the ship.

A little after seven in the morning on June 8, Ennes entered the bridge of the Liberty to take the morning watch. Ennes was told that an hour earlier a “flying boxcar” (later identified as a twin-engine Nord 2501 Noratlas) had flown over the ship at a low level.

Ennes says he noticed that the ship’s American flag had become stained with soot and ordered a new flag run up the mast. The morning was clear and calm, with a light breeze.

At 9 am, Ennes spotted another reconnaissance plane, which circled the Liberty. An hour later two Israeli fighter jets buzzed the ship. Over the next four hours, Israeli planes flew over the Liberty five more times.

When the first fighter jet struck, a little before two in the afternoon, Ennes was scanning the skies from the starboard side of the bridge, binoculars in his hands. A rocket hit the ship just below where Ennes was standing, the fragments shredded the men closest to him.

After the explosion, Ennes noticed that he was the only man left standing. But he also had been hit by more than 20 shards of shrapnel and the force of the blast had shattered his left leg. As he crawled into the pilothouse, a second fighter jet streaked above them and unleashed its payload on the hobbled Liberty.

At that point, Ennes says the crew of the Liberty had no idea who was attacking them or why. For a few moments, they suspected it might be the Soviets, after an officer mistakenly identified the fighters as MIG-15s. They knew that the Egyptian air force already had been decimated by the Israelis. The idea that the Israelis might be attacking them didn’t occur to them until one of the crew spotted a Star of David on the wing of one of the French-built Mystere jets.

Ennes was finally taken below deck to a makeshift dressing station, with other wounded men. It was hardly a safe harbor. As Ennes worried that his fractured leg might slice through his femoral artery leaving him to bleed to death, the Liberty was pummeled by rockets, machine-gun fire and an Italian-made torpedo packed with 1,000-pounds of explosive.

After the attack ended, Ennes was approached by his friend Pat O’Malley, a junior officer, who had just sent a list of killed and wounded to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He got an immediate message back. “They said, ‘Wounded in what action? Killed in what action?’,” O’Malley told Ennes. “They said it wasn’t an ‘action,’ it was an accident. I’d like for them to come out here and see the difference between an action and an accident. Stupid bastards.”

The cover-up had begun.

***

The Pentagon lied to the public about the attack on the Liberty from the very beginning. In a decision personally approved by the loathsome McNamara, the Pentagon denied to the press that the Liberty was an intelligence ship, referring to it instead as a Technical Research ship, as if it were little more than a military version of Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso.

The military press corps on the USS America, where most of the wounded sailors had been taken, were placed under extreme restrictions. All of the stories filed from the carrier were first routed through the Pentagon for security clearance, objectionable material was removed with barely a bleat of protest from the reporters or their publications.

Predictably, Israel’s first response was to blame the victim, a tactic that has served them so well in the Palestinian situation. First, the IDF alleged that it had asked the State Department and the Pentagon to identify any US ships in the area and was told that there were none. Then the Israeli government charged that the Liberty failed to fly its flag and didn’t respond to calls for it to identify itself. The Israelis contended that they assumed the Liberty was an Egyptian supply ship called El Quseir which, even though it was a rusting transport ship then docked in Alexandria, the IDF claimed was suspected of shelling Israeli troops from the sea. Under these circumstances, the Israelis said they were justified in opening fire on the Liberty. The Israelis said that they halted the attack almost immediately, when they realized their mistake.

“The Liberty contributed decisively toward its identification as an enemy ship,” the IDF report concluded. This was entirely false, since the Israelis had identified the Liberty at least six hours prior to the attack on the ship.

Even though the Pentagon knew better, it gave credence to the Israeli account by saying that perhaps the Liberty’s flag had lain limp on the flagpole in a windless sea. The Pentagon also suggested that the attack might have lasted less than 20 minutes.

After the initial battery of misinformation, the Pentagon imposed a news blackout on the Liberty disaster until after the completion of a Court of Inquiry investigation.

The inquiry was headed by Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd. Kidd didn’t have a free hand. He’d been instructed by Vice-Admiral McCain to limit the damage to the Pentagon and to protect the reputation of Israel.

Kidd interviewed the crew on June 14 and 15. The questioning was extremely circumscribed. According to Ennes, the investigators “asked nothing that might be embarrassing to Israel and testimony that tended to embarrass Israel was covered with a ‘Top Secret’ label, if it was accepted at all.”

Ennes notes that even testimony by the Liberty’s communications officers about the jamming of the ship’s radios was classified as “Top Secret”. The reason? It proved that Israel knew it was attacking an American ship. “Here was strong evidence that the attack was planned in advance and that our ship’s identity was known to the attackers (for it its practically impossible to jam the radio of a stranger), but this information was hushed up and no conclusions were drawn from it,” Ennes writes.

Similarly, the Court of Inquiry deep-sixed testimony and affidavits regarding the flag. Ennes, remember, had ordered a crisp new one deployed early on the morning of the attack. The investigators buried intercepts of conversations between IDF pilots identifying the ship as flying an American flag.

It also refused to accept evidence about the IDF’s use of napalm during the attacks and choose not to hear testimony regarding the duration of the attacks and the fact that the US Navy failed to send planes to defend the ship.

“No one came to help us,” said Dr. Richard F. Kiepfer, the Liberty’s physician. “We were promised help, but no help came. The Russians arrived before our own ships did. We asked for an escort before we ever came to the war zone and we were turned down.”

None of this made its way into the 700-page Court of Inquiry report, which was completed within a couple of weeks and sent to Admiral McCain in London for review.

McCain approved the report over the objections of Captain Merlin Staring, the Navy legal officer assigned to the inquiry, who found the report to be flawed, incomplete and contrary to the evidence.

Staring sent a letter to the Judge Advocate General of the Navy disavowing the report. The JAG seemed to take Staring’s objections to heart. He prepared a summary for the Chief of Naval Operations that almost completely ignored the Kidd/McCain report. Instead, it concluded:

“that the Liberty was easily recognizable as an American naval vessel; that its flag was fully deployed and flying in a moderate breeze; that Israeli planes made at least eight reconnaissance flights at close range; the ship came under a prolonged attack from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats.”

This succinct and largely accurate report was stamped Top Secret by Navy brass and stayed locked up for many years. But it was seen by many in the Pentagon and some in the Oval Office. But there was enough grumbling about the way the Liberty incident had been handled that LBJ summoned that old Washington fixer Clark Clifford to do damage control. It didn’t take Clifford long to come up with the official line: the Israelis simply had made a tragic mistake.

It turns out that Admiral Kidd and Captain Ward Boston, the two investigating officers who prepared the original report for Admiral McCain, both believed that the Israeli attack was intentional and sustained. In other words, the IDF knew that they were striking an American spy ship and they wanted to sink it and kill as many sailors as possible. Why then did the Navy investigators produce a sham report that concluded it was an accident?

Twenty-five years later we’ve finally found out. In June of 2002, Captain Boston told the Navy Times: “Officers follow orders.”

It gets worse. There’s plenty of evidence that US intelligence agencies learned on June 7 that Israel intended to attack the Liberty on the following day and that the strike had been personally ordered by Moshe Dayan.

As the attacks were going on, conversations between Israeli pilots were overheard by US Air Force officers in an EC121 surveillance plane overhead. The spy plane was spotted by Israeli jets, which were given orders to shoot it down. The American plane narrowly avoided the IDF missiles.

Initial reports on the incident prepared by the CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency all reached similar conclusions.

A particularly damning report compiled by a CIA informant suggests that Israeli Defense minister Moshe Dayan personally ordered the attack and wanted it to proceed until the Liberty was sunk and all on board killed. A heavily redacted version of the report was released in 1977. It reads in part:

“[The source] said that Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship and that one of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, ‘This is pure murder.’ One of the admirals who was present also disapproved of the action, and it was he who ordered it stopped and not Dayan.”

This amazing document generated little attention from the press and Dayan was never publicly questioned about his role in the attack.

The analyses by the intelligence agencies are collected in a 1967 investigation by the Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations. Two and half decades later that report remains classified. Why? A former committee staffer said: “So as not to embarrass Israel.”

More proof has recently come to light from the Israeli side. A few years after Attack on the Liberty was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an Israeli pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book and wanted to tell him his story. Toni said that he was the pilot in the first Israeli Mirage fighter to reach the Liberty. He immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy vessel. He radioed Israeli air command with this information and asked for instructions. Toni said he was ordered to “attack”. He refused and flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily arrested for disobeying orders.

***

How tightly does the Israeli lobby control the Hill? For the first time in history, an attack on an America ship was not subjected to a public investigation by Congress. In 1980, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater planned to open a senate hearing into the Liberty affair. Then Jimmy Carter intervened by brokering a deal with Menachem Begin, where Israel agreed to pony up $6 million to pay for damages to the ship. A State Department press release announcing the payment said, “The book is now closed on the USS Liberty.”

It certainly was the last chapter for Adlai Stevenson. He ran for governor of Illinois the following year, where his less than perfect record on Israel, and his unsettling questions about the Liberty affair, became an issue in the campaign. Big money flowed into the coffers of his Republican opponent, Big Jim Thompson, and Stevenson went down to a narrow defeat.

But the book wasn’t closed for the sailors either, of course. After a Newsweek story exposed the gist of what really happened on that day in the Mediterranean, an enraged Admiral McCain placed all the sailors under a gag order. When one sailor told an officer that he was having problems living with the cover-up, he was told: “Forget about it, that’s an order.”

The Navy went to bizarre lengths to keep the crew of the Liberty from telling what they knew. When gag orders didn’t work, they threatened sanctions. Ennes tells of the confinement and interrogation of two Liberty sailors that sounds like something straight from the CIA’s MK-Ultra program.

“In an incredible abuse of authority, military officers held two young Liberty sailors against their will in a locked and heavily guarded psychiatric ward of the base hospital,” Ennes writes. “For days these men were drugged and questioned about their recollections of the attack by a ‘therapist’ who admitted to being untrained in either psychiatry or psychology. At one point, they avoided electroshock only by bolting from the room and demanding to see the commanding officer.”

Since coming home, the veterans who have tried to tell of their ordeal have been harassed relentlessly. They’ve been branded as drunks, bigots, liars and frauds. Often, it turns out, these slurs have been leaked by the Pentagon. And, oh yeah, they’ve also been painted as anti-Semites.

In a recent column, Charley Reese describes just how mean-spirited and petty this campaign became. “When a small town in Wisconsin decided to name its library in honor of the USS Liberty crewmen, a campaign claiming it was anti-Semitic was launched,” writes Reese. “And when the town went ahead, the U.S. government ordered no Navy personnel to attend, and sent no messages. This little library was the first, and at the time the only, memorial to the men who died on the Liberty.”

***

So why then did the Israelis attack the Liberty?

A few days before the Six Days War, Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited Washington to inform LBJ about the forthcoming invasion. Johnson cautioned Eban that the US could not support such an attack.

It’s possible, then, that the IDF assumed that the Liberty was spying on the Israeli war plans. Possible, but not likely. Despite the official denials, as Andrew and Leslie Cockburn demonstrate in Dangerous Liaison, at the time of the Six Days War the US and Israel had developed a warm covert relationship. So closely were the two sides working that US intelligence aid certainly helped secure Israel’s swift victory. In fact, it’s possible that the Liberty had been sent to the region to spy for the IDF.

A somewhat more likely scenario holds that Moshe Dayan wanted to keep the lid on Israel’s plan to breach the new cease-fire and invade into Syria to seize the Golan.

It has also been suggested that Dayan ordered the attack on the Liberty with the intent of pinning the blame on the Egyptians and thus swinging public and political opinion in the United States solidly behind the Israelis. Of course, for this plan to work, the Liberty had to be destroyed and its crew killed.

There’s another factor. The Liberty was positioned just off the coast from the town of El Arish. In fact, Ennes and others had used the town’s mosque tower to fix the location of the ship along the otherwise featureless desert shoreline. The IDF had seized El Arish and had used the airport there as a prisoner of war camp. On the very day the Liberty was attacked, the IDF was in the process of executing as many as 1,000 Palestinian and Egyptian POWs, a war crime that they surely wanted to conceal from prying eyes. According to Gabriel Bron, now an Israeli reporter, who witnessed part of the massacre as a soldier: “The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death.”

The bigger question is why the US government would participate so enthusiastically in the cover-up of a war crime against its own sailors. Well, the Pentagon has never been slow to hide its own incompetence. And there’s plenty of that in the Liberty affair: bungled communications, refusal to provide an escort, situating the defenseless Liberty too close to a raging battle, the inability to intervene in the attack and the inexcusably long time it took to reach the battered ship and its wounded.

That’s par for the course. But something else was going on that would only come to light later. Through most of the 1960s, the US congress had imposed a ban on the sale of arms to both Israel and Jordan. But at the time of the Liberty attack, the Pentagon (and its allies in the White House and on the Hill) was seeking to have this proscription overturned. The top brass certainly knew that any evidence of a deliberate attack on a US Navy ship by the IDF would scuttle their plans. So they hushed it up.

In January 1968, the arms embargo on Israel was lifted and the sale of American weapons began to flow. By 1971, Israel was buying $600 million of American-made weapons a year. Two years later the purchases topped $3 billion. Almost overnight, Israel had become the largest buyer of US-made arms and aircraft.

Perversely, then, the IDF’s strike on the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel together, in a kind of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF attacks defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and Apache helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody assaults as a joint operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden partner.

Thus, does the legacy of Liberty live on, one raid after another.

This is essay appears in The Politics of Anti-Semitism edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

More than 700 feet below the surreal steel span of Glen Canyon Bridge, the Colorado River bursts loose from the spillways of Glen Canyon Dam. The current of this once mud-red river is now a strange cartoon-blue, deathly cold, as it courses through the last 17 miles of Glen Canyon. Now, it is a river in name only, its every minute fluctuation controlled by hydroengineers and water bureaucrats. The Colorado is finally loose, but it is not free.

To the north stands the implacable concrete plug of Glen Canyon Dam: smooth, white, indifferent. Behind the blond wall stretches a dead lagoon of stagnant water 200 miles long, burying one of the most glorious canyons on Earth. Knowing that the one-armed explorer John Wesley Powell was something of a heroic figure to the conservation movement aligned against the Colorado dams, Floyd Dominy, chief hydro-imperialist and then-head of the Bureau of Reclamation, impishly decided to name Glen Canyon’s watery grave Lake Powell, Jewel of the Colorado.

Radical environmentalists, such Edward Abbey and David Brower, viewed the naming as kind of final sacrilege. But sticking Powell’s name on the reservoir is probably apt. The big hydro dams clotting the rivers of the world have always been pushed by progressives under the false promise of tamed rivers, cheap water for irrigation, and cheap power. Native ecosystems and native peoples be damned. Even Powell, a humane man by most accounts, thought this way. He would have dammed every river in the American West. Does it matter that he would have done so in the name of democracy?

In 1869 John Wesley Powell began his first venture down the Green and Colorado Rivers. This wasn’t an Army expedition. It didn’t enjoy the backing of the federal government. Powell wasn’t the hired errand boy of an eastern-industrialist-turned-philanthropist. He wasn’t searching for gold or oil. He was merely a largely self-educated teacher at a small college in rural Illinois with a consuming interest in geology. His expedition to the Colorado Plateau consisted of four small boats and a crew of nine other men: hunters, drifters, friends, and shell-shocked Civil War vets. It was financed by the Illinois Natural History Society he headed. Powell had neither the educational pedigree of Clarence Dutton nor the imperial ambitions of John Fremont.

Powell was the oddball on the roster of explorers of the American outback. His trip was as close to pure science as the West had yet seen. His conclusions from that trip, and his subsequent career, highlight the dangerous impurities bundled into that science, and the blind spots Powell shared with his cohorts. He presents us with a parable of intrusiveness*, heedlessness, and self-aggrandizement that often escapes the notice of an environmental movement more willing to iconize him for relative virtue than analyze his ultimately disastrous failures.

The trip took Powell and company through some of the world’s deepest and most beautiful canyons-including Lodore, Desolation, Labyrinth, Cataract, and the Grand-and over vicious rapids and through sizzling uncharted deserts and Indian country to the Colorado’s confluence with the Virgin River, at Grand Wash in southeastern Utah, 1,000 miles downstream. In 1875 after a second, federally-funded expedition crewed by geologists, photographers, and painters-and rooted on by the booster press and Congress-Powell produced his self-glorifying bestseller Exploration of the Colorado River. Three years later his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States called for a reorganization of the development of the West under the auspices of a new government agency-which he, of course, would lead. Powell got to head the US Geological Survey; but the West’s fate ended up in the hands of the Bureaus of Reclamation and Land Management.

However awed he might have been by the landscapes he traversed, Powell never shared Thoreau’s belief in the redemptive power of wilderness and of wild, untamed rivers. Rather, he knew that the arid wasteland itself must be “redeemed”: by the judicious application of irrigation principles. Mid-life, the amateur geologist who collected seashells on the banks of the Mississippi became a technocrat fascinated with harnessing the water of the West. Like Jefferson, Powell held that democratic values flourished from small farms and ranches. An appropriately irrigated West, Powell believed, would keep the interior reaches of the country from falling into the hands of monopolists and robber barons.

Powell dreamed of capturing the river’s power for utilitarian service. At various turns he could be called a progressive, a realist, a technocrat; under any label he was consistently ready to re-engineer nature and western society, an advocate of centralized planning on a vast scale. Powell was one of the first apostles of scarcity. Laudably, he would reject Jefferson’s gridded township system for political boundaries contoured to hydrographic basins. Still he was willing to impound nearly every drop of the Colorado River’s water behind dams–built high in the mountains in order to minimize evaporation. “All the waters of all the arid lands will eventually be taken from their natural channels,” he wrote. Note the double “all”.

Powell advocated this gargantuan water-impoundment even though he estimated that all of that water would yield viable crops or pasture on less than 3 percent of the arid Western lands. He sought to rationalize and control the development of these irrigation lands by reserving them in the public estate, making most of the West a kind of federal commons interspersed with homesteads and small communities.

“I early recognized that ultimately these natural features would present conditions which would control the institutional or legal problems,” Powell wrote in his Report on the Arid Lands. That is, the harsh terrain would form a natural safeguard against over-population and economic exploitation. He was wrong, of course. Soon he saw the power elite capture the government and use it to redesign the plumbing of the West-training the spigots to their own enterprises, irrigating the vast plantations of the Imperial, San Joaquin, and Sacramento valleys, worked by the West’s equivalent of slave labor. Irrigation led to servitude, not liberation; to cartels, not small-scale democracies; and the centralized water bureaucracy was a servant of the hydro-imperialists, not an honest broker of the public interest.

Powell began to see the shape of the future, and objected. He engaged in fierce congressional combat with Senator William Stewart of Nevada, the Ted Stevens of his time. Powell was one of the first whistleblowers and he met the fate assured most of his kind: he was chased out of office, running from trumped-up charges of corruption and financial malfeasance.

Was this disaster of water control the perversion of Powell’s vision, as he thought? It was different from anything the maverick explorer and politician had wanted or worked for. But it was in another way the culmination of his vision-of his deeper vision, which differed not at all from that of those he fought. The vision characterized enterprises of the era, from rail-laying, to buffalo-killing, to dam-building, to homesteading promotion, to forced relocation and outright massacres of Native peoples. It is the vision of Manifest Destiny.

When the Manifestly Destined looked out over the land, they saw deficiency: an incongruity between what was there and what was familiarly usable. The reflex thought after such vision is always, how to clear the slate and close that gap. Pre-existing human relationships to the land-honed over millennia of necessity, of error, of success-was invisible to the various explorers’ eyes. The functioning commons, the dynamic equilibrium of fire-managed forests and prairies, the intricate stewardship and sharing of a river’s salmon runs between dozens of autonomous peoples: rejected as impossible, these had to be denied and if necessary eradicated, with the plow, the canal, the cattle ranch, the grid of 160 acre wheat farms. As the US runs up against its borders, it begins to recognize the magnitude of loss incurred in its expansionist rampages. This book is a primer in that destruction and the possibilities of recovery.

Dam Nation begins with the Colorado, presenting a bleak portrait of the West’s greatest river in decline. The annual floods of the Green, Grand, and Colorado Rivers have been neutered, as upstream dams straight-jacket the flow of the rivers. The river channel is narrowing. The seasonal wetlands are vanishing. Springs and seeps are drying up. Beaches are disappearing. The water table is dropping. The cottonwood groves are dying off, and so are the sand and coyote willows, squeezed out by tamarisk. The river is losing its organic nutrients, as driftwood and other debris are entombed behind the dams. Endemic species of fish, like the humpback chub, which evolved only in the Colorado Basin, are sliding toward oblivion, replaced by catfish and carp. The water behind the dams is evaporating, turning saline, loading up with pesticides, petrochemicals, and fecal matter. The reservoirs are silting up, losing storage capacity and electrical generating capability.

On the Klamath River, the decline has reached bottom, giving us a glimpse of the Colorado’s near-certain future. The salmon of the Klamath River, once one of the mightiest runs on earth, have been for decades in a slow, steady slide toward extinction. Then, in 2002, 30,000 salmon died as they ascended the broiling river, deprived of water by the political antics of farmers in the Upper Basin who demanded full deliveries in a drought year. The gory front-page photos of mass death suggested a sudden catastrophic event, a singular tragic mistake. In fact, the salmon of the Klamath, which flows some 200 miles from southern Oregon to the northern California coast, are the victims of a system that has conspired against them since the 1940s at least. Industrial agriculture, backed by the federal government, has free reign to de-water the Klamath River to irrigate alfalfa, potatoes, and onions.

That the Yurok, Hoopa, Karuk, and Klamath tribes enjoy treaty rights to the river’s salmon and depend on those fish for food, income, and ceremonial rites has meant nothing to the irrigators’ agribusiness backers. The salmon are a looming impediment to their increasingly frail economic hold. Once the fish provided leverage for legal threats-via tribal lawsuits and the Endangered Species Act-the masters of the river plotted their final doom. With the troublesome fish out of the way, they believed that their precious waterworks would be safe.

In the wake of the fish kill, the Klamath River tribes stepped up their campaign against PacifiCorp’s relicensing of the four hydroelectric dams. The implausible latest addition to the alliance of tribes, environmentalists, fishermen, and Pacific Northwest ratepayers is the ultra-conservative Klamath Basin Water Users Association. The farmers, many of whom lost contracts after the 2001 water shutoffs, say that they have finally joined with the tribes because removing the dams would pull the basin back from the brink of crisis. (The alliance is praiseworthy, powerful, and barely precedented, but it must be noted: Farmers irrigating this dry cold land, trying to save their way of life, still ride in the same wooden boat going over the waterfall with John Wesley Powell.)

In the face of such united pressure, PacifiCorp has agreed to discuss dam removal. Those dams coming down would make the Klamath conflict-until now considered a hopeless battle-a turning point in the water wars. We already see farmers in the Deschutes basin heeding the Klamath’s terrible warning.

Deranged models of U.S. water control have been cloned across the developing world, always with the same bottom line: drowned riverine ecosystems, displaced communities, flooded sacred sites, extinctions, and resource privatization. Third World nations buying the hydro-power rap must hock their futures to the merciless cadre of global bankers, submitting to the neoliberal stricture of the IMF and World Bank. Water and power must be privatized, jacking up the price for basic necessities. The dams are vulnerable to catastrophic breaches and terrorist attacks-and I don’t mean terminally ill river-rats with a houseboat and 17 beer coolers packed with C-4 explosives. Object to the dictates of your imperial overlords and your brand-new dam might well become an inviting target for cruise missiles.

Worldwide, threatened river systems are crying out for a new generation of whistleblowers, for government biologists, hydrologists, and geologists willing to risk their own careers to save river ecosystems on the brink of collapse. Like Dai Qing in China, they will, almost certainly, be vilified, ridiculed, investigated, and threatened by the international cliques profiteering on the waters’ demise. In the U.S., the Bush administration, in collusion with its stacked Supreme Court, is axing the last frail protections federal whistleblowers enjoy. These scientists, should they ever step into the public spotlight, will need cover and protection. Can they look to Gang Green-the big DC enviro groups like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society-the ones that gave you Glen Canyon Dam (and so many more)? Fat chance.

But we must leave these brave whistleblowers to their fates for the moment. Their alarms alone will never be enough. We learn from the example of John Wesley Powell that science, vision, and conscience will not suffice against the Leviathan’s momentum and might. Nor can any Bureau of Reclamation fish-saving compromise truly threaten the hegemony of the megadammers, wherein any water that makes it to the sea is water wasted, and no trickle goes unlevied. In just the same way, the hero model favored even by many eco-warriors actually perpetuates the mega-dam mindset. Those who would save the rivers must take the rivers for their heroes, and the salmon and chub, and look not to iconized individuals for leadership but to one another and to the earth itself for partnership. The Klamath River tribes, like the Mun River protesters and Cochabamba’s “Defenders of Water and Life” win more lasting victories than Gang Green. It will take a network of river consensus and the forging of a new water culture to bust the dams and to scour away their poisoned silts.

Dam Nation is a clarion call for a new global movement of resistance to the hydro-imperialists: a movement to stop new dams, decommission existing ones and restore wild rivers. This is a real reclamation movement whose compelling mantra is: Let the rivers flow and the river peoples be. Join it.

Moab, 2006.