Massie to honor 34 Uss Liberty sailors on House floor
Thomas Massie will honor the uss liberty crew on the House floor Monday at approximately noon, bringing the 1967 attack back into view nearly 60 years later. He said some survivors will attend as his guests in the congressional gallery.
On June 8, 1967, Israeli air and naval forces attacked the United States Navy technical research ship in international waters near Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, killing at least 34 US sailors and wounding 171 others. The ship had been flying the US flag, and the crew had exchanged waves with low-flying Israeli aircraft earlier that morning.
Massie’s House floor speech
Massie posted on June 5, 2026 that he would deliver the speech Monday at approximately noon and honor and memorialize the crew. He described the incident as an unprovoked attack by Israel, while survivors and advocates say the renewed attention comes as records tied to the case remain classified nearly 60 years later.
Richard Brooks, the vessel’s chief engineer, said in a 2015 interview that “it wasn’t a tragic accident” and added, “It was a deliberate attack. They knew who we were. They tried to sink us. They wanted us out to either bring the Americans into the war by blaming the Arabs or we picked up some information about their war plans.”
Israeli account disputed
Israel has long maintained that the strike was a case of mistaken identity and said its naval forces thought the vessel was Egyptian. Ernie Gallo, president of the USS Liberty Survivors Group, called that explanation “mistaken identity” and said the US government accepted a false narrative.
The attack began with Israeli jets striking the ship’s deck with anti-personnel weapons and armour-piercing bullets, followed by torpedo boats that blew a massive hole in the starboard side and instantly killed 25 men in the lower research spaces. A naval board of inquiry was convened while the ship was dry-docked in Malta, and the proceedings concluded swiftly.
Congress and the archive
The USS Liberty case still sits outside the formal congressional record in a way that few wartime incidents do: the US Congress never formally questioned the attack or formed a committee to investigate the tragedy. For survivors who have waited decades for a fuller accounting, Massie’s speech puts their story on the House floor while the records remain sealed in the background.
Monday’s speech gives survivors a public platform inside Congress, but it does not change the core dispute over what the Israeli crews believed in the Mediterranean Sea off Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. What it does change is visibility, and for the men who survived the attack, visibility has been the missing piece.
