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The 2016 Invictus Games in Orlando showcased over 500 athletes from 15 countries, competing in 10 events.

By Eileen Fleming

Prince Harry created the Invictus Games in 2014 to spotlight the capabilities and achievements of injured service members.

Harry said he hoped the Orlando games would spotlight the mental health issues, injuries such as post-traumatic stress, anxiety and combat-related depression.

The name Invictus comes from a 19^th-century poem by English poet William Ernest Henley and the word invictus means unconquered.

Former President George Bush has lobbied the medical community to drop the term “disorder” from PTSD because “We don’t view [post-traumatic stress] as a disorder. We view it as an injury. If [a troop] has an injury, he thinks, ‘I can get this fixed.’ If he thinks he has a disorder, he’ll think, ‘People will shun me. I’m not going to tell my commanders because they will treat me differently.’ ”

Among the most shunned of injured veterans are the 34 men killed and the 174 survivors of the June 8, 1967 attack on the USS LIBERTY which remains “the only incident of damage to a major US ship since the sinking of the USS MAINE in Havana Harbour in 1898, prior to the Spanish-American War, that has not been investigated by the US Congress.”

Admiral Moorer, General Raymond Davis, Rear Admiral Staring, Ambassador James Akins and other high ranking US officials have come forth stating Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty was deliberate.

Admiral Moorer and his distinguished colleagues also called for every June 8th to be known as “USS Liberty Remembrance Day, in order to commemorate the Liberty’s heroic crew.

Gary Brummett, a USS LIBERTY survivor informed me, “The attack was the easy part; the aftermath in not being able to get our government to address this cover up has been the bastard.”

I spoke with Brummett and other USS LIBERTY survivors after meeting my first survivor in 2007. In the moment Petty Officer Phil Tourney said, “It was God that kept us afloat”, I knew I would do more than just listen to him.

My grandfather was a German Jew who died before I could learn how many of our relatives might have been gassed or fried by the Third Reich; and so all things concerning Jewish people and Governments concern me.

In 2012, I ran for US HOUSE in Florida’s District 5 on a platform that included: the need to establish every June 8 to be known as USS LIBERTY Remembrance Day, to end USA collusion in Israel’s nuclear deceptions and occupation of Palestine, and to end federal regulations on cannabis. I placed a distant third to the incumbent U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown.

In 2016, I became the Florida representative for LIBERTY CENTRAL II, inspired by Richard Schmucker who was known as “LIBERTY CENTRAL” because he amassed every printed mention of the USS LIBERTY before the days of personal computers, when he told me:

“It’s not the Jewish people or the Jewish religion I have a problem with. It’s the governments of America and Israel that colluded in the cover-up that I have a problem with.”

If you have a problem with cover-ups that have contributed to 49 years of PTS for LIBERTY survivors we need you to board LIBERTY CENTRAL II’s campaign to establish June 8 to be known as USS LIBERTY REMEMBRANCE DAY.