SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
July 17, 2001

BAMFORD "LIBERTY" ACCOUNT REPUDIATED

Key aspects of author James Bamford's recent account of the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty are being disavowed by some of his own sources.

美国间谍船的自由是在1967年战争结束时在1967年6月8日在1967年6月8日遭到以色列航空和海军袭击西奈海岸的地中海海上航行的。有34名美国人被杀，171人受伤。以色列政府声称这次袭击是“错误”。一些美国官员和幸存的自由团体辩称，袭击一定是故意的。但为什么？

在他的新畅销书中Body of Secrets, Bamford proposes a motive for the attack: Israel, he says, was in the process of murdering several hundred Egyptian prisoners of war at nearby El Arish and wanted to prevent the Liberty from preserving recorded evidence of the massacre.

But there appears to be no verifiable evidence that such a massacre ever took place, and Bamford's description of events at El Arish doesn't hold up. Thus, he attributes to Israeli journalist Gabi Bron a claim that 150 prisoners were executed there. But Bron himself denies that and says "there were no mass murders."

Meanwhile, Bamford infers that the Israelis must have known that they were attacking an American ship because, as he discovered, an American surveillance aircraft was flying overhead at the time and it recorded Israeli pilots' references to a U.S. flag.

But Bamford's source, the American airman and linguist who recorded those communications, reached an "opposite" conclusion. Marvin E. Nowicki wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal (16 May 2001) that the Israeli military forces "prosecuted the Liberty until their operators had an opportunity to get close-in and see the flag, hence the references to the flag." The attack, he believes, "was a gross error."

These and other disputed points in Bamford's account are presented in a fierce critique by Michael Oren in the latest issue ofThe New Republic（“不友好的火”，7月23日）。该文章不在网上，但Oren的较早文章题为“美国自由：案件关闭”，以色列新保守期刊出现在Azure（2000年春季），可以在这里找到：

詹姆斯·班福德（James Bamford）比任何其他人都做得更多，以阐明国家安全局，并促进这个强烈秘密组织的公共责任，可以追溯到他的地标1982年的书籍拼图宫. The list of his reportorial coups to the present day is long and impressive.

His new chapter on the Liberty itself contains significant new information and reporting. But his tendentious interpretation of the event is a salutary reminder that even the best reporters can get it wrong, and that readers ultimately have to be their own critics.

为了应对大量的评论指出德fects in his argument that the Israeli attack was deliberate, Mr. Bamford has lately taken a somewhat defensive posture. "It's not my job to provide definitive proof," he said at a recent book-signing. "I didn't have the time or the money to look into all of the details."

相反，他说，他希望促使国会对此事进行调查，并促进诸如美国监视飞机录音的笔录等文件的解密。

Documentation on the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty will be printed in "Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, volume XIX, Six-Day War" which is tentatively scheduled for publication next year.

The National Security Agency and the Defense Department are now conducting a declassification review of documents for publication in that volume. The NSA exceeded the nominal deadline for declassification in May, but told the State Department that its review should be completed by August of this year. No description of the documents under review has been disclosed.

POSTOL SECRECY ABUSE ALLEGATIONS DISPUTED

Prof. Ted Postol, a leading critic of the national missile defense program, warned last year that the Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO) might be "attempting to illegally use the security and classification system to hide waste, fraud, and abuse" after it classified a letter that he wrote to the White House criticizing the program.

但是，一份新的一般会计办公室报告发现，BMDO处于其权利之处，因为Postol博士的信件的某些附件已无意中被释放，并且仍被正式归类。

"DOD's actions were performed in accordance with Executive Order 12958 [on classification of national security information]," the GAO wrote in a letter to Rep. Ed Markey that was released on July 12. The GAO letter, and the underlying Postol correspondence, may be found here:

Dr. Postol toldInsideDefense.com（2001年7月12日）GAO错误地描述了他与国防安全服务官员的相遇，并说GAO审查中有许多事实错误。

The General Accounting Office is conducting a separate review of allegations of scientific fraud in the missile defense program.

中国：威胁有多大？

The National Intelligence Council (NIC) pressured the RAND Corporation to provide a hawkish assessment of the future threat from China, and fired RAND from a classified project last month when its analysts failed to offer a sufficiently gloomy evaluation, according toU.S. News and World Report.

“随着兰德与专家举行会议并进行了分析，似乎[最终报告]将中国描绘成日益增长的军事力量 - 但在不久的将来没有与美国的匹配。来自国会的共和党鹰队 - 似乎正在寻找一个不同，更令人震惊的结论：U.S. Newsstory stated.

"Faced with resistance from RAND, according to some sources, the NIC decided to seek a more compliant contractor. A senior intelligence official denies that the NIC was shopping for a predetermined result."

See "China: How Big a Threat?" by Richard J. Newman and Kevin Whitelaw inU.S. News and World Report，2001年7月23日，这里：

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Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.

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