Another event from the past that the right wing has tried to whitewash and bury.

Those attempts fail here, thanks to Wikipedia -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident#Ongoing_controversy_and_unresolved_questions

"Motive: James Bamford, among others, says one possible motive was to prevent the United States from eavesdropping on Israeli military activities and monitoring the events taking place in nearby Gaza.^[105] In a study of the incident concluding that there was insufficient evidence to support either accidental or deliberate attack, Colonel Peyton E. Smith wrote of the possibility that "The attack was most likely deliberate for reasons far too sensitive to be disclosed by the US (or) Israeli government and that the truth may never be known".^[108] Author and former crew member James M. Ennes theorized, in the epilogue of his book Assault on the Liberty, that the motive was to prevent the ship's crew from monitoring radio traffic that might reveal Israel being the aggressor in its impending invasion of Syria, which the White House opposed. "