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The crew aren't in a position to make that judgement, I've read far too many accounts of seemingly very dumb friendly fire incidents, particularly involving airstrikes, to believe that it is impossible to screw up this badly. During WW2, a little over 20 years before this incident, Allied planes mixed up what country they were attacking and bombed Switzerland something like 70 times. War is a confusing mess and shit does indeed happen.
Yes, if I was planning to blow up an allied nations spy ship as part of a cover-up, I would make sure to have my planes fly low and slow so that everyone on board can see whose air force the plane belongs to, for good measure I'd also transmit to them and ask in plain, unambiguous language to tell me that they have positively identified the American ship that we are going to bomb in order to cover up our nefarious wrongdoings. After all, even if my foolproof plan of sinking the ship and doing a few strafing runs on the survivors in the water fails, the famously hostile-to-life mediterranean sea will take care of the rest.
There is absolutely nothing that the USS Liberty could have recorded that is more dangerous to the state of Israel, or those in power in Israel, than deliberately bombing a US warship. This is the cold war, the US does not care about the rights and wrongs of the war Israel is currently fighting, who started it or who is massacring who. The Soviets are backing the Arabs, so the US is going to back the Israelis to try and counter-balance the strategically significant middle east.
If you can do this, you aren't afraid of a grainy 1960s recording of intercepted radio messages from a war zone. You just aren't.
You are disagreeing with the NSA director (“It couldn't be anything else but deliberate”), the CIA board of inquiry ("no doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing"), the 18th chief of Naval Operations from 1967 to 1970 and 7th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1970 to 1974, and the President before he was threatened. I imagine all of these people have heard accounts of dumb air strikes, but they didn’t file this under “shit happens”. In WWII the allies flew more than one million sorties over Germany, so 70 dropping in Switzerland is a pretty low amount.
If you have decided to give orders to blow up an American spy ship (and America was not quite allied with Israel at the time), you would not be the grunts tasked with identifying ships over international waters. Those are totally different men.
I don’t think there’s any way to know that. And it depends if they knew how much power they had in the American Jewish community. Evidently they had enough power to threaten the President’s career and reputation and alter news stories on the incident while stifling the influence of the main intelligence branches. Their question is “can I get away with this?” or “can I plausibly deny this?”
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