Why is Nobody Talking About the USS Stark?

Thomas Massie has been in Congress since 2012, which makes me curious why, after fourteen years in office, he suddenly decided that June 2026 was the right moment to reopen the USS Liberty case and demand a new investigation into an event that occurred nearly sixty years ago.

I’m also curious why he’s apparently never shown the same interest in the USS Stark.

In 1987, an Iraqi Mirage F1 fired two Exocet missiles at the USS Stark, killing 37 American sailors and wounding 21 more. That’s more Americans than were killed aboard the USS Liberty. Iraq initially claimed the ship had entered a restricted war zone, which turned out to be false. American officials later claimed the pilot had acted without authorization and had been executed, while later accounts from Iraqi officers disputed that story and claimed he was never punished. To this day, historians disagree over who authorized the attack and whether Iraqi leaders were telling the truth.

Perhaps the official American conclusions were correct. Perhaps they weren’t. Sometimes the truth is deliberately censored to prevent a wider escalation. I have no doubt governments do this all the time. Governments can also make mistakes and investigations deserve scrutiny, especially when dealing with the lives of our servicemen.

But if the goal here is really to uncover the truth, shouldn’t the same curiosity apply elsewhere?

Has Thomas Massie ever gone to the House floor to demand a new investigation into the USS Stark?

Has he ever honored the survivors in Congress?

Has he ever suggested that the American public was misled about what happened?

Has he spent time trying to determine whether Saddam Hussein was hiding something?

Because I don’t remember hearing anything about the USS Stark at all, despite the fact that more American sailors died and despite the fact that there are still many unanswered questions surrounding the attack.

There is nothing antisemitic about criticizing Israel. There is nothing antisemitic about believing, despite the considerable evidence to the contrary, that the official investigations into the USS Liberty may have reached the wrong conclusion. There is nothing antisemitic about asking uncomfortable questions.

The world is full of unresolved episodes. History is full of governments that lied, militaries that covered up embarrassing mistakes, and official inquiries that got things wrong. There are disputed assassinations, contradictory witness accounts, missing records, conflicting testimony, and decades-old events about which historians still disagree. Anyone with enough time and enough determination can spend the rest of his life pulling on those threads.

But when the questions only ever seem to point in one direction, when ambiguities involving every other country are treated as unfortunate tragedies while ambiguities involving Israel become evidence of uniquely sinister intentions, one begins to wonder whether the attraction lies in the unanswered questions themselves or in the identity of the people being accused.

Somehow one particular incident has developed into a kind of permanent obsession, while countless others have simply become part of the ordinary messiness of history. Only one has inspired a nearly sixty-year obsession and only one seems to attract people who are never satisfied with ordinary explanations unless they involve a Jewish state acting with exceptional malice.

Even if one goes against all of the evidence and accepts the most extreme interpretation of the USS Liberty, what exactly follows from that? Are we supposed to conclude that a single incident from 1967 outweighs six decades of intelligence cooperation, military partnership, technological collaboration, and shared strategic interests? America lost hundreds of thousands of men fighting Germany and Japan in the deadliest war in human history and later built strong alliances with both. The idea that a terrible tragedy involving thirty-four Americans nearly sixty years ago should automatically invalidate the entire U.S.-Israel relationship is ridiculous.

People like Massie, Tucker, and Candace, rarely tell their audiences what conclusions they should draw. They enjoy spending hours raising suspicions and cataloguing grievances, only to retreat to phrases like “I’m just asking questions” or “I’m just stating the facts.”

Pay attention and you’ll notice them doing this constantly.

If the argument is that America should sever ties with Israel over an incident that occurred during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, then they should say so openly and explain why the same standard should not apply to Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, or countless other countries with whom we cooperate because we have shared interests.

Instead, as with most cowards, they prefer to deal in implications rather than arguments.

I just find it interesting that people who want Americans to rethink our alliance with Israel almost always end up returning to a single event that took place when Lyndon Johnson was president. One would think that after six decades, there would be something else to point to.

Which is why it strikes me as odd that Thomas Massie spent fourteen years in Congress without making the USS Liberty a cause, and then suddenly decided that June of 2026 was the moment to do so.

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