the attacking aircraft did not make identification runs over Liberty, but began to strafe immediately. Israel says several identification passes were made. The Naval Court of Enquiry, based on the Israeli timeline of events, found: "One may infer from the fact that within a period of approximately 15 minutes, the request was transmitted (for aircraft to be dispatched), received, a command decision made, aircraft dispatched, and the attack launched, that no significant time was expended in an effort to identify the ship from the air before the attack was launched." Speed of the vessel: According to Israeli accounts, the torpedo boat made erroneous measurements that indicated that Liberty was steaming at . Israeli naval doctrine at the time required that a ship traveling at that speed must be presumed to be a warship. A second boat calculated Libertys speed to be . The maximum sustained speed of Liberty was only , . According to the Court of Enquiry findings the ship was steaming at at the time of the attack. 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. 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". 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 as the aggressor in its impending invasion of Syria, which the White House opposed. According to the Anti Defamation League "the argument that Israel knowingly attacked an American ship has always lacked a convincing motive". Israeli aircraft markings: The USS Liberty Veterans Association says that the attacking Israeli aircraft were not marked, but a crewmember recalls watching a Jewish officer cry on seeing the blue Star of David on their fuselages. The torpedo boats that attacked Liberty flew the Israeli flag. Jamming: During U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry testimony, Wayne L. Smith, Radioman Chief, testified that radio communications were intermittently jammed. Rear Admiral Kidd (a senior member of