Reason for the attack on the USS Liberty

I've always harbored resentment against Israel for its attack on the USS Liberty. Read Assault on the Liberty by James M. Ennes Jr. and you'll never doubt that it was a deliberate attack, that Israel lied about its true reason for attacking, and that the U.S. government practically wet its pants to avoid investigating it.

I do not know their reason for attacking the Liberty. One friend thought it had to do with their fear that intercepts would show that Israel started the Six-day War, not the Arabs. (Not terribly plausible given that the attack was four days after the start of the war.) Other theories: Israel slaughtering POWs, U.S. and Israel conspired to make it look like Egyptian attack so U.S. could enter the war on the side of Israel, Liberty might detect Israeli buildup vic. Golan Heights. Take your pick.

An unidentified reviewer of Dave Hunt's book Judgment Day Approaching in the June 2005 edition of "The Berean Call" provides a very interesting explanation:

"Six years earlier, on June 8, 1967, the fourth morning of the ‘Six-day War,’ the USS Liberty, an electronics eavesdropping vessel, arrived off the Sinai coast and began to suck in every Israeli military communication, relaying it all to the British Secret Service's giant computer installation on Cyprus. From there, complete maps of every Israeli military move were transmitted in advance to the Arab armed forces. With that help, the Arabs might have been able to use their overwhelming numerical superiority to turn the tide of the war. Israel had no choice except to sink the Liberty. Of course the media screamed about this ‘cold-blooded attack.’ No one believed Israel's public excuse that the Liberty had been mistaken for a hostile Egyptian ship-and neither the U.S. nor Israel has publicly told the truth."

I can't imagine the U.S. knowingly countenancing the retransmission of said maps by the British, or the British doing so in the first place. I also don't know what would or would not have been sent outside of U.S. channels by such a ship, whether in the form of raw or processed data. If analytical capabilities were then what they are now, it would indeed have been possible for the location of all radio transmitters on the battlefield to be determined. Israel may have acted thinking that the U.S. alone was collecting impossibly sensitive data as to which there was a risk of some kind of leak. It was a close thing for them after all.

Still, there is the question, Was the strategic situation so desperate on the fourth day of the fighting to warrant the enormous risk of an attack on the U.S.?