>Has the US ever been easier to manipulate or spy on?
Yes, at least nowadays Israel does not try to sink American warships, killing dozens of sailors in the process and then having the US government to cover it up.
It's pretty absurd to think that Israel would intentionally attack a neutral superpower in the middle of a war for its survival, knowing that at best it would have to apologize and pay reparations, and at worst it would be destroyed by a vastly stronger military.
Friendly fire happens all the time; not everything needs to be a conspiracy.
Can you give an example of a friendly fire on a warship consisting of continuous air and naval attack over the course of two hours? Just one? Friendly fire will suffice, I am not even asking about some other country doing the same to the US.
As for Israel motivation it's pretty obvious why they did it - they wanted to blame the attack on Egypt and involve the US in the war. Though it does not really matter, even you are unable to deny that Israel attacked the US ship, it's an empirical fact.
Screwups happen, and it wasn't only on Israel's side. USS Liberty was way closer to the coast/warzone than it should have been due to missing an order, and once attacked, wasn't able to even communicate with its fleet for quite a while, let alone with Israel.
> they wanted to blame the attack on Egypt
There was no attempt to blame Egypt, and the idea is completely implausible - a US investigation could very easily distinguish an Israeli vs an Egyptian attack when a variety of boats (coming from Israeli ports) and many other assets are involved.
So I figure you could not find an example of friendly fire like that despite your assertion they happen all the time? Color me unsurprised.
>There was no attempt to blame Egypt
Are you an LLM? Of course there was not - the ship survived and there were too many witnesses of Israel doing this, it would be the uber chutzpa to still try to say it was Egypt.
Your demand for a highly specific friendly-fire incident seems a bit silly. Can you cite an example of the opposite - a tiny country intentionally attacking a ship of a superpower, then pretending it was accidental, giving a apology and millions of dollars of reparations?
And of course I'll demand the same arbitrary specificity - it needs to be a two-hour-long multi-domain assault. Also it needs to be a VC2-S-AP3 type ship whose name ends with "Liberty". If you don't have such examples, I suppose we can stop entertaining your conspiracy theory?
> there were too many witnesses of Israel doing this
Even if there were no eventual survivors, there would still be people throughout the fleet talking on the radio. They would have noticed and communicated about the movements of large ships from Israeli ports, among other very obvious signs of an Israeli operation. There would have been absolutely zero chance of the US not knowing who was behind it.
I demand an example of friendly fire incidents where attacker closely observes (they were able to aim at antennas for example) the friendly target for hours yet keeps attacking. All friendly fire incidents are opposite of this - people shooting at something they don't see or see for a brief time before the attack, there are no known cases of such an attack declared "friendly fire" other than the USS Liberty, so this is why I was very skeptical of your claim this happens all the time.
Friendly fire happens all the time; not everything needs to be a conspiracy.