I suggest you give each of the 11 Cities/Regions some time to digest where THEY want to go from here, and then develop your National Plan based in part of what you hear from the regions on what they want to do.

The conference call on Wed is just a start of that process. It will take a few weeks for the ideas to unfold

"If American's ever learn about what happened on June 8, 1967 when Israel attacked the USS LIBERTY in international waters while flying the American flag; it will change American history."-Survivor and Veteran of USS LIBERTY who was told to SHUT UP by USA Govt that covered it up so as "Not to embarrass an ally."-LBJ.

In June 2005 during my first -of five- journeys to the Little Town of Bethlehem: Occupied Territory my rage erupted against the empire; the American governments allegiance to Israel's Military Occupation of Palestine and when we talk about Iraq, Iran, we must understand ALL roads lead to Jerusalem and the 40 years of military occupation of Palestine.

It was not until the whistle-blower of Israel's WMD Program, Mordechai Vanunu informed me of things I had never heard of did I wake up to the depth of the deception of America's 'best ally' and blind collusion of the U.S.A. government. It was at a rooftop restaurant in east Jerusalem, where they serve the fish with skeleton and head intact, and fries on the side, that Vanunu blew my mind, "Did you know that President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons? In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Gurion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’ Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Gurion open up the Dimona for inspection. When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.”

It was not until October 13, 2007, when Phil Tourney, Petty Officer and survivor of the attack on the USS LIBERTY affirmed that, "It was God that kept us afloat" at the "No More Wars for Israel Conference" in Irvine, California, did I wake up to that day in infamy forty years ago which remains "the only incident of damage to a major US ship since the sinking of the USS MAINE in Havana Harbour in 1898, prior to the Spanish-American War, that has not been investigated by the US Congress."-Captain Joseph Tully, commanding officer of the USS Saratoga, page 175, Operation Cyanide, by Peter Hounam.

On November 2, 2007, I conversed on the phone with fellow Floridian, survivor of the USS LIBERTY, and the current President of the USS LIBERTY'S Veterans Association, Ernie Gallo, who was a Petty Officer and Communication Technician on the LIBERTY. We shared our frustrations seeking justice for the LIBERTY by beseeching the professed Christian and our Republican Senator Mel Martinez.

Ernie quipped, "I met with Martinez's legal council and let me tell you that Congress will not lift a finger to help us. AIPAC would crucify them! Our government is lock stepped not to say anything about the LIBERTY."

For forty years our government has denied justice to our Veterans and crucified the truth because "We will not embarrass an ally." -President Lyndon Johnson, June 8, 1967.

Forty years ago the American government not only colluded with Israel in the treasonous cover-up of the attack on the USS LIBERTY the survivors "were ordered to remain silent under threat of court martial, imprisonment or worse...The U.S. government has never challenged the obviously phony Israeli excuse of "mistaken identity" nor have they attempted to expose the dishonorable cover up that continues to date. Truth and America's honor were ignominiously sacrificed to provide cover for Israel's transparent lies and despicable act of perfidy." -Phillip F. Tourney, President USS LIBERTY Veterans Association, June 8, 2007, Marriott Courtyard, VA.

The Veterans of the USS LIBERTY have repeatedly requested an open independent panel to investigate the horrific and unprovoked attack upon them and have only received pro-forma letters from a White House staffer in this Administration stating that the attack had already been investigated.

"This is a bald-faced lie!" Tourney wrote in a postscript to our Commander In Chief in his most recent appeal.

"The declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel… showed [that] the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel. The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel's reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation."-
http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/
tuesday/chi-liberty_tuesoct02,0,1050179.story?coll=chi_business_ugc

"Israel got away with cold blooded murder! Forty years ago the CIA and the NSA all threatened the survivors not to talk! They scared me so much; I didn't for twenty years… Israel wanted the world to believe that Egypt [committed the crime]…Thirty-four were killed and 172 were wounded out of a crew of 294…The Israeli planes marked out the Star of David so we wouldn't know who was attacking us… Our keel was broken, we should have sunk but God kept us alive…Eighteen hours after the attack we were rescued…McNamara said, 'We're not going to attack our ally.' How did McNamara know who attacked us?"- Phillip Tourney, On October 13, 2007.

"J.Q. 'Tony' Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco that handled communications between Washington and the 6th Fleet, remembered listening as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis, commander of the America's carrier battle group, to bring the jets home. When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors."

"The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel's claim that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But internal White House documents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library show that the Israelis' explanation of how the mistake had occurred was not believed. Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson's intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was "inconceivable" that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity. The attack "couldn't be anything else but deliberate," the NSA's director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress. [IBID]

Ernie Gallo had been above the water line when the torpedo hit the LIBERTY and he informed this reporter, "It was a beautiful clear sunny day and all morning Israeli reconnaissance planes were flying over us, I counted twelve over flights and one came so close I could see the pilots face; we waved and he dipped his wing as he went by. We were all very comfortable because they were our allies. That morning Captain McGonagle called a general quarter's drill. That's a created special kind of emergency –I can't remember what the mock drill was about-but it was to test our skills and the Captain was well pleased. Because we were in dangerous ground he kept the gunners manning the machine guns-two guys on each 'nest' –this was unusual for them to stay in flack jackets and heavy helmets after the drill, but we knew we were in hostile territories. But we were all comfortable; guys were sunbathing and we were all happy because we saw our friends, the Israelis in the sky. We were all so very relaxed because of their over flights; it was like a scene out of McCales Navy.

"It was about an hour and a half after lunch when the unmarked planes attacked us and they knew exactly where to hit; the communication antennas! They knew the machine guns weren't a threat, those pilots were very careful to take out the antennas. Then they dropped two napalm bombs on us, miraculously the fires all staid on the outside, and even though the fire hoses were bullet ridden, like a garden hose and every CO2 canister on board was used, that fire easily could have gone inside the ship, but the firefighters kept their cool and it didn't. A Signalman constantly watched that our flag was raised, the first one burnt up in the fire but in a few minutes he raised the holiday flag and our ship was well marked with USS LIBERTY on it.

"It wasn't until the torpedo boats came at us did I see the Star of David again. But the Israelis claim mistaken identity that they mistook us for the El-Quseir an Egyptian transport ship that only carried horses [and was a third of the size of the LIBERTY] and had been tied up and out of use for a year. The LIBERTY had at least forty antennas- yet Israel claims they made a mistake in identifying us-if this were ever heard in a Court of Law; it would be beyond belief!

"I was a 'spook' an interceptor, a CT; Communication Technician. Back then, the NSA had security groups in all the branches of Military Service. Normal operations were that for four months at a time, up and down the African Coast, anything within the ambient atmosphere; the air waves I would monitor. The CT's had a multitude of talents; Administrators, Linguists, Morse Code Operators, Communicators and Electronics specialists-that's what I did; kept all the equipment working.

"We all worked behind closed locked doors; none of the rest of the crew ever knew what we were doing. Our whole purpose in life was to intercept messages; UHF, LHF, long and short wave. There were two gigantic Christmas tree antennas on the LIBERTY. Mid-ship there was a pedestal; with a sixteen foot dish pointed sky wards. How they could mistake us for a horse carrying ship is beyond belief.

"You know that when the North Koreans attacked the Pueblo, they wanted to capture it? The North Koreans gave repeated opportunities to surrender. The Israelis never gave us one! Any of the torpedo boats could have approached and asked us to surrender or follow them, but that never occurred.

"The most miraculous part, and I honestly believe the Lord saved the LIBERTY for a reason and for this time in the world…That ship was built in 1944, the LIBERTY was a converted cargo ship and the mechanics of that ship should have broken up and sunk! One foot more or less from where that torpedo hit and we would have sunk! But that torpedo hit a brace; and that brace absorbed the energy and kept us from blowing up."

In 1967, John Hrankowski, was nineteen years old and on his third cruise on the LIBERTY. "I worked in the engineering department, responsible for the air conditioning, electricity, water and steam. I was topside when out of nowhere the blasting of shrapnel knocked me down. I returned to my general quarters space in the boiler room when the call came, 'This is not a drill; we are under attack.'

"Fifteen feet in front of me the torpedo hit and knocked the ship out of the water! If that torpedo had hit the boiler the steam pressure of 750 degrees mixed with cold water would have been like an atomic bomb exploding!

"The lights went out, the generator was knocked out, shrapnel flew around me like fire flies; it was dangerous but somehow beautiful. I worked with a lantern to keep the steam under control. If that boiler blew the ship would have blown up too!"

One of the men who was below the water line when the torpedo hit was Navy Chaplain, Ron Kukall. In an email to me on October 22, 2007, he reported, "On June 8, 1967 during the Vietnam War, I was aboard a Navy vessel called the USS LIBERTY. This unarmed ship was sailing the waters off the coast of Israel during the "Six Day War"…It may be possible that the only reason God saved the LIBERTY was so that we could tell our story...

PLEASE READ IT and MORE:

WAWA Blog November 6, 2007: Honoring LIBERTY and Calling for a Second American Revolution!

WAWA Blog November 5, 2007: Veterans Day is a week away, Remember LIBERTY

WAWA:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/