
Dead In The Water - The Sinking of the USS Liberty
On June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, a US Navy intelligence ship stationed off the Sinai coast, killing 34 American sailors and wounding over 170 in a two-hour assault. Israel called it a case of mistaken identity, and Washington accepted that explanation without a public fight. This film combines dramatic reenactments of the attack with interviews from people who were there or ran the aftermath, including Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense at the time, former Israeli navy chief Admiral Shlomo Errell, and surviving crew members describing torpedo boats firing at life rafts. It lays out the discrepancies between the official account and what survivors and intelligence officers say they witnessed, from the markings on the attacking aircraft to the timeline of naval communications. The film does not resolve the dispute so much as document why, more than three decades on, the men who lived through it still refuse to accept the mistaken-identity verdict.