The Israeli Military intentionally attacked the USS Liberty

Thanks EmilRose for your thoughtful responses. SOURCES I'm not really appreciating how my opponent uses sources. It makes my rebuttals a little harder because they're just kinda cobbled together at the end. I'm also not sure which citations, belong to which facts. My facts also come as close to first hand sources you'll get to with just an internet connection. I'm citing NSA declassified documents and direct statements made by eyewitnesses. My opponent is citing opinion pieces, which may or may not be full of good citations, themselves. ISRAEL KNEW OF LIBERTY'S PRESENCE My opponent asserts that the Israeli military didn't know of the presence of an American ship in the area but go back to my round 2 arguments backed by declassified NSA documents and also statements made by the Israeli government. Statement by Israeli government: "At 0600 hours (local time) on 8 June 1967, an Israeli aircraft, with a naval observer on board, located a ship 70 miles west of Tel Aviv. On the basis of this information, Israeli Navy Headquarters marked the object in red (meaning an unidentified target) on the combat information center plottable. ~ At about 0900 hours, another Israeli plane reported sighting a ship 20 miles north of AI 'Arish, The pilot reported that the ship was "coloured gray, very bulky, and the bridge amidships." The ship was then identified by the Israelis as a supply vessel of the American Navy;"[1] Further more from the same source: "Later that morning at 1055 hours, the Naval Liaison Officer at Israeli Air Force Headquarters reported to the Acting Chief of Naval Operations at Navy Headquarters that the ship sighted earlier was "an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy, named Liberty" This is the Israeli government admitting it knew prior to the attack according to now declassified NSA documents. It knew the ship by name. This is leaving out the fact the acting chief of Naval operations knew of the ships identity, prior or during the attack. More evidence of the knowledge of who they were attacking is that the division commander of the torpedo boats was informed by the deputy commander that the ship was American and shouldn't be attacked. The division commander ignored this.[2] "the deputy commander of the boat testified that he had received the message and passed it on to the division commander"[2] INVESTIGATIONS Not everything listed by my opponent is an investigation into the USS Liberty. I will say this . The reports put out about the USS Liberty by the Israeli government aren't going to conclude that they committed war crimes. No nation does a report on them self and conclude that they committed war crimes. Concerning the IDF history report it's not an investigative inquiry report. It's a report that intends to come to the conclusion that the authors assumed prior to the report and states so in the introduction. "The object of this paper is to present an authoritative version of the circumstances and chain of events which led to the "Liberty" incident" and to respond to some of the claims made regarding Israel's intentions" The preliminary inquiry by Judge Yeshayahu Yerushalmi is another weird investigation to bring up. It was a preliminary hearing that was a mere 48 hour study as mentioned in the beginning of my opponent's citation.[3] That report is also the original source of a few of the pieces of evidence, I've used in my favor so the conclusions are actually bewildering. [4] The senate investigation report, I looked at didn't really say anything of value. I encourage anyone to look at the citation my opponent gave. It just appears to be 2 senators debating whether the attack was intentional but neither one actually offering any evidence to support their position. [5] My opponent knows characters are limited in this debate and has chosen to use a debating technique known as Gish Gallop. Here is a description of Gish Gallop from a Wikipedia article on it. "The Gish Gallop is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of small arguments that their opponent cannot possibly answer or address each one in real time. More often than not, these myriad arguments are full of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments " the only condition is that there be many of them, not that they be particularly compelling on their own. They may be escape hatches or "gotcha" arguments that are specifically designed to be brief, but take a long time to unravel. Thus, galloping is frequently used in timed debates to overwhelm one's opponent."[6] I've discredited a few of those but I clearly don't have the character length to effectively discredit all of them. Also, merely giving the conclusions on some studies isn't a replacement for an argument. If con has a good case to make, they don't need to refer to the conclusions of anther's arguments. It's probably better to just look for evidence within these investigations to support your arguments. It's my belief that the evidence points towards an intentional attack and their conclusions are a non sequiter (doesn't follow). It also should be noted that these reports contain a bias because obviously the people doing these investigations want to err on the side of caution, not making false accusations. We don't have to do that here, nor should we. This is a split Burden of proof debate. In these investigations if there is a 51% chance Israel intentionally did these attacks then they are going to conclude not enough evidence exists to call the attack intentional. If voters decide there is a 51% chance my side is correct, they must vote for me to win this. MOTIVE There are several possible motives for the attack. I don't think the topic of motive is extremely important to this debate. I will say that Israel has a history of attacking it's allies in false flag operations. It's kinda their Modus Operandi. If you take a look at what's now known as the Lavon Affair. It's now part of the historical record that The state of Israel attacked a number of American, British and civilian targets with bombings as part of a false flag attack to blame the Muslim brotherhood as well as a few other targets.[7] Knowing that Israel has a history of black flag ops it may have been to incite America in joining the war. "The losses are far higher and more detrimental than anything Israel would have to benefit. Such losses include being accountable for and potentially convicted of war crimes, lack of U.S backing, expenses, such as those that go on legal cases, etc." Actually it was a very small risk to take. They attacked and have not been convicted of any war crimes or lost any U.S. backing. Israel is prone to make high risk moves like this (see Lavon Affair). The United States has an incredibly strong Israel lobby. Pro Israel people control the mainstream media almost exclusively. Their is also a large group of conservative Christians who dictate the outcome of several election, who have a religious belief that any country who is loyal to Israel is also loyal to Jesus and will be on the correct side in the final battle (referred to as Armageddon), written about in Revelation. The truth is that Israel can do whatever they please and because of this strong religious voting block as well as the amount media controls public opinion, they can get away with quite a bit. Another possible motive is to cover up war crimes. The Israeli's had killed a bunch of POWs during the 6 day war and the attack on the Liberty may have been an attack to cover that war crime up.[9] According to the Washington post (quoted in the same article: ""Israeli soldiers killed hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war during the 1967 Middle East war - deaths that commanders who are now prominent leaders have known about for years, historians said today." THE U.S. FLAG I've provided a link to pictures of the markings on the hull of the USS Liberty. I've provided testimony from 5 different survivors of the Liberty attack about how visible the flag was. Any testimony you find from survivors, talking about the flag report the same thing, while reports of people who could face charges of war crimes if they confessed to seeing the flag before attacking may be different, they have motive to be different. Unless my opponent is calling the Liberty survivors liars, I'd like her to explain why she thinks they may be mistaken about the flags being highly visible and up. On top of that some Israeli sources contradicting that the flag wasn't visible has stated: "When they saw the U.S. flag, the Israelis thought it was probably the Egyptians pretending to be Americans and did not bother to check."[8] It seems like the Israeli government can't really forward a straight story. CONCLUSION Even in the opening arguments my opponent seems to be doing very little to forward a positive case. I'll remind voters that not only must my opponent forward a positive case to win, her positive case must be stronger than mine when all the smoke clears. I give the floor to Con, good luck. sources [1] https://www.nsa.gov... (pg. 37) [2] ibid (39) [3] http://www.thelibertyincident.com... [4] http://www.thelibertyincident.com... [5] http://www.thelibertyincident.com... [6] http://rationalwiki.org... [7] http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org... [8] http://ussliberty.org... [9] http://www.fas.org...