Seymour Hersh: How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline (1 Viewer)

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    SaintForLife

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    The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

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    The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

    The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordnance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

    Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

    Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

    Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

    Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

    There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

    President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

    The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.



    I know this is from a few weeks ago, but it definitely deserves it's own thread
     
    Thank you for your service, I’m not listening to that shirt, lol.
     

    Does this scenario sound familiar? Energy dispute between Georgia and Russia in 2006 lead to an explosion, causing dire shortages in Georgia and Armenia. That was a particularly cold winter. This was when Azerbaijan wanted to avoid building pipelines through Russian territory and Georgia was a candidate for that purpose.

    Explosions in southern Russia this morning severed the country's natural gas pipelines to Georgia, swiftly plunging Russia's neighbor into heat and electricity shortages and causing a diplomatic flare-up between the nations.

    Two more explosions hours later severed one of Russia's main electricity cables to Georgia, deepening the electricity shortage even as the gas supply in Georgia dwindled.
    Mr. Saakashvili said the cease in flow came as Russia was trying to pressure Georgia into selling Russia the Georgian gas pipeline network, and that officials at several levels of Russian government have been issuing veiled threats in recent weeks.
    Russian officials initially said the explosions appeared accidental but later announced that a criminal investigation had been opened and that the blasts were acts of sabotage, perhaps by insurgents in the region using makeshift bombs.

    Or how about this one?
    The Russian daily “Vremya novostei” reported on April 14 that the pipeline rupture is actually good for Gazprom. It stated that Gazprom’s agreement last year with three Central Asian states to pay “European prices” for their gas now appears to have been a “mistake.” Gazprom made the deal with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan when the price of gas was rising to record highs; now the price is falling and, according to “Vremya novostei,” Gazprom “lost more than $1 billion purchasing gas in the first quarter” of 2009.

    an explosion on a pipeline that supplied natural gas from Turkmenistan to Gasprom coincidentally freed them from that obligation. How strange.
     
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    I'm surprised he waited until this story had mostly been discredited to post it.

    It would have been way more interesting to post this a week and a half ago.

    It does prove he doesn't read the board in general. He would know this was already discussed.
     
    It does prove he doesn't read the board in general. He would know this was already discussed.

    He is a troll.

    He reads. He just waits til he gets his "marching orders" to post, in feverish fashion to overwhelm his opposition with misinformation, then slowly moves the goal posts.

    as in Post 1- US BLEW UP

    Several posts rebuke/fully show no

    Post 5- now its " im skeptical"

    LOL.
     
    It’s hilarious that you put forward criticism of the debunking that says it’s bunk because it’s not hard proof. And yet you are willing to believe someone with very shaky credibility who has one anonymous source. Do you not see the irony?
    Are you really claiming the the world's most acclaimed & distinguished living investigative journalist has very shaky credibility? How ironic you said the same thing about a Pulitzer winning journalist who was an investigative journalist for 30 years at the NYT in Jeff Gerth in regards to the Press vs The President. You don't like anything that doesn't go along with the corporate media narrative.

    I do understand that if someone contradicts the official narrative then the corporate press and their lackeys go into overdrive in their attempts to discredit them.

    Debunking? Are you referring to the article from Oliver Alexander? It was pointed out in the comments of his Twitter thread that he didn't know what he was talking about in regards to thw AIS data. Also:


    Hersh was asked in this interview about the criticisms about the GPS data. He said it's very easy to manipulate OSINT data and that's always done in any covert operations.
     

    Does this scenario sound familiar? Energy dispute between Georgia and Russia in 2006 lead to an explosion, causing dire shortages in Georgia and Armenia. That was a particularly cold winter. This was when Azerbaijan wanted to avoid building pipelines through Russian territory and Georgia was a candidate for that purpose.





    Or how about this one?


    an explosion on a pipeline that supplied natural gas from Turkmenistan to Gasprom coincidentally freed them from that obligation. How strange.
    Oh look, the US blew up the USSR's pipeline in 1992.

    "German investigators currently have no evidence that Russia is behind the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, German Attorney General Peter Frank told Die Welt. Frank said Russian involvement couldn’t be proven "at the moment""



    Shouldn't the US try to force Sweden to release the results of the investigation? You know that if the investigation showed it was Russia it would have already been released. Why don't you think Biden or anyone else in the US government has called for an investigation?

     
    SFL keeps his perfect record: he will fall for just about any anti-American conspiracy theory out there.
    While you continue to live in lala land while believing every US endeavor is altruistic in nature, that we only want to help protect democracies, that we should believe anything the national security state or the corporate media says, and that anyone who says anything negative about US actions is Anti American.
     
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    Yall be a glutton for punishment lolol

    4 more various Twitter rabbit hole links to click and lose 2 hrs of your life mindlessly adrift in his conspiratorial world.

    Tell me he doesnt get this spoon fed and regurgitates once all ducks are lined up.
     
    I still reserve judgement on it. I do have a problem with a serious motivation for America to do this. Biden in a speech told Russia something along the lines of "the oil from the nordstream pipelines would stop". That's vague enough to just mean sanctions though.

    Some people point to LNG, but my understanding is LNG is already at max capacity going to countries like China. So what good does that do you, other then potentially raising the overall price? Sanctions again, accomplish the same thing though.

    Norway, and Ukraine are the top for motive to do the deed.

    I do think people are right to doubt the story of Russia doing it. That doesn't make sense either. Russia would have bombed Norway's pipeline.

    My general opinion is I feel most certain Russia didn't do it, and probably not Germany. Everyone else? Who knows.
     
    While you continue to live in lala land while believing every US endeavor is altruistic in nature, that we only want to help protect democracies, that we should belive anything the national security state or the corporate media says, and that anyone who says anything negative about US actions is Anti American.
    No, but I like to see real evidence before I buy into a narrative. You obviously only need to want it to be true. You give far too much weight to what other people tell you and you do not use common sense. You have become enthralled with certain people who, for whatever reason, are carrying Putin’s water, and you refuse to acknowledge that you believe what they say no matter what.

    When will you respond to the very real incentives Russia had for blowing up said pipelines? Several people here have taken a lot of time to debunk your theories, and you only picked at one small point, and ignored the rest.

    All those things you said about me are simply excuses, and they’re not true. Show me real proof and I will believe it. But this crap you are shoveling so far is just ridiculous.

    As long as you present this type of article as fact, which you did, nobody here can take you seriously.
     
    SFL: did you even read the WaPo article about the US supposedly “blowing up” a Russian pipe line?

    this is a serious question. I looked at the article for less than 2 minutes, and it isn’t the way you describe it at all. Like you are seriously misrepresenting facts here.

    What the US actually did was discover that Russia was stealing software that runs pipelines from us, and they got the okay to sabotage the software so that if Russia stole it and used it on one of their pipelines it would cause an explosion
     
    Oh look, the US blew up the USSR's pipeline in 1992.

    "German investigators currently have no evidence that Russia is behind the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, German Attorney General Peter Frank told Die Welt. Frank said Russian involvement couldn’t be proven "at the moment""



    Shouldn't the US try to force Sweden to release the results of the investigation? You know that if the investigation showed it was Russia it would have already been released. Why don't you think Biden or anyone else in the US government has called for an investigation?


    WaPo article doesn’t say what you think. You really should read what you post.

    SFL: what makes you think the US doesn’t already have the results of the Swedish investigation? What makes you think Biden and the US don’t already know who blew up the pipelines?
     
    Yall be a glutton for punishment lolol

    4 more various Twitter rabbit hole links to click and lose 2 hrs of your life mindlessly adrift in his conspiratorial world.

    Tell me he doesnt get this spoon fed and regurgitates once all ducks are lined up.
    I never spend more than a few minutes on his stuff. Mostly not any time at all, because he posts crap sources.

    For example: he posted a story from WaPo which he said proved that the US blew up a Russian pipeline back when Reagan was president. Well, I would consider WaPo a source worth looking at so I skimmed the article. Shocker: the US didn’t blow up a Russian pipeline. Russia blew up their own damn pipeline actually.

    Now, I’m guessing that one of his crap pro-Russian sources said that’s what the article said, and he believed them. They were twisting the truth, like they always do, and he got burned. This has happened to him multiple times, yet he still goes back to the same sources. Who knows why he chooses to read pro-Russian propaganda like it’s his day job? Don’t know, don’t really care, but I just cannot leave his false takes and crap laying there as if it were true. It’s one of my faults. Lol.
     
    Oh look, the US blew up the USSR's pipeline in 1992.

    "German investigators currently have no evidence that Russia is behind the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, German Attorney General Peter Frank told Die Welt. Frank said Russian involvement couldn’t be proven "at the moment""



    Shouldn't the US try to force Sweden to release the results of the investigation? You know that if the investigation showed it was Russia it would have already been released. Why don't you think Biden or anyone else in the US government has called for an investigation?


    Are you suggesting that the US caused those 2 other pipeline explosions from the Georgian and Turkmenistan crisis? Bold move Cotton! Bold move!

    And I'd suggest you enlightened yourself by reading up on the US desperate attempt to get the EU to take initiatives on their hegemonic sphere. This Ukrainian invasion by Russia shows how bleak that prospect is. Go read up on the US's pivot to Asia.



    From MT:
    It’s hilarious that you put forward criticism of the debunking that says it’s bunk because it’s not hard proof. And yet you are willing to believe someone with very shaky credibility who has one anonymous source. Do you not see the irony?
    How you summarily dismiss Bremmer's arguments because he was incorrect in the past. Apparently you have ignored what I posted when you boldly claim that Hersh is beyond reproach as I've already laid out his credibility is severely lacking. Just from the article from the topic of this thread, he claims Jens Stoltenberg was a US agent in the Vietnam war. Let's put on our thinking hat on here. He would be 16 or so then...does that make sense to you? And since that seems Hersh is full of shirt there, we can use our reasoning, your rules: once you're wrong you cannot be trusted. Fair correct? And this doesn't even touch the many nonsensical things like the need to hold a secret but recruit other nations. Just because the US is incapable of looking at maps. And the spoofing of the Ais is ridiculous. So as a cover, the US coop an existing planned OP, spoof the AIS of a decommissioned ship, tells everyone on that existing OP not to tell anyone when a new top secret team from 8 different nations are injected, because...you know...only the principles need to know. Does that sound like a good plan to hold this very top top secret? And to hide the fact that Hersh, before he was exposed, claims the ship was there for all to see! But once told, "oh the AIS was spoofed" and US had already planned to trick these open-sourced intel community.

    Call me a skeptic but my BS meter is on Spiderman sense tingling.

    And btw, when you call out folks for being drones to the corporate media and proceed to link a US lead sabotage of a Soviet pipeline from a corporate media article, that doesn't bode well for your credibility. Either the source is reliable or not. It cannot be only when you link it. First sign of a conspiracy theorist. Ok I made that part up....the first sign part....the rest seems obvious.

    Also, most of Germany's store of natural gas are from Russia before they reduced the pressure. Norway increased their production only by 6%, exhausting their capacity. Could that increase be more about the higher gas price/filling a need when Russia weaponized energy? In that article I posted earlier where you can find the force majeure, you can find Russia played the game and used every excuse from a broken turbine to a force majeure to reduce gas sent to Germany. Would it be prudent to find other sources when Russia is black mailing you? Especially when Russia had already reduce the gas imported into Germany before the NORD 1 explosion? The increase import gas in Germany from the US/Norway/Qatar is due to that rather than an explosion of a pipeline that had already been reduced to 40%?

    From Alexander's article: Doesn't seem to be a big rise from Norway's perspective.


    598a6ba7-ef89-46e5-b3cd-15dc3c899cd2_724x511.png

    Here is how much gas Germany was importing from Russia. Notice how the gas import was already low before the explosion (late Sept 2022). So much for the 2 players benefiting from the explosion argument.

    FphMk13XEB4Ey4Q.png
     
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    I never spend more than a few minutes on his stuff. Mostly not any time at all, because he posts crap sources.

    For example: he posted a story from WaPo which he said proved that the US blew up a Russian pipeline back when Reagan was president. Well, I would consider WaPo a source worth looking at so I skimmed the article. Shocker: the US didn’t blow up a Russian pipeline. Russia blew up their own damn pipeline actually.

    Now, I’m guessing that one of his crap pro-Russian sources said that’s what the article said, and he believed them. They were twisting the truth, like they always do, and he got burned. This has happened to him multiple times, yet he still goes back to the same sources. Who knows why he chooses to read pro-Russian propaganda like it’s his day job? Don’t know, don’t really care, but I just cannot leave his false takes and crap laying there as if it were true. It’s one of my faults. Lol.
    This is why disinformation is so difficult. Leave it alone, it metastasize. Respond to it and it is exhausting while they jump to another conspiracy.

    MSN.com had an article on this just today. At least they included how his Hersh has been debunked. But the fact that this was even discussed (because of Hersh's name) at all is the real danger. Not one editor would take this story. Just like the Bin Laden story that he pushed the NYTimes to publish. They tried their best to publish it, but in the end couldn't verify anything in his article.
     
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    And SFL calling Hersh the greatest living investigative journalist of our time is actually hilarious. You outlined clearly a career arc where, ever since his first couple of achievements, he has been chasing the same sort of relevance with increasingly less and less credible results. Sometimes people catch lightning in a bottle. Sometimes the novelist only has one great book in them. Sometimes there are one-hit wonders. It’s okay to be able to admit that.
     
    The consistent theme with Hersh is anti-Americanism; that the us lies all the time. That includes Obama. The other is his heavy reliance on anonymous sources. It got to a point that no one questions him because of his reputation.

    I found this piece questioning Hersh’s bin laden account.


    And when he has a named source:
    When I emailed Durrani after the Hersh piece appeared, Durrani said he had “no evidence of any kind” that the ISI knew that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad, but he still could “make an assessment that this could be plausible.” This was hardly a strong endorsement of one of the principal claims of Hersh’s piece by his only named source.

    And I do get that America has some really atrocious international operations; particularly those in the name of containment. But then to gush over dictators as Hersh did with Assad is astounding.


    Written seven years into the Syrian war, which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, Reporter contains no criticism of Assad—not once does Hersh reflect on whether his early impressions of the dictator were naive. In person, Hersh goes further. “I liked Assad,” he says. “I thought he improved a lot as I met him. He never did enough on human rights but he was moving.” Hersh cites the arrival of cash machines and the broadcast of a Turkish soap opera about an unmarried mother as evidence. “He was getting better. He was much more confident every year. You could speak out against him a little bit.

    But of course his opinion of Assad didn’t affect his reporting of the Syrian rebellion, right? No. Against un reports and all accepted reporting backed by evidence, he believes it wasn’t Assad but the people trying to fight for their freedom that used satin gas. And now, he happily believes it is again the Americans when it can just be as likely the Russians.

    And true to form the confirmation bias rears it’s ugly head with sfl. And it’s his rules. You are a drone if you believe a story from the corporate media…here I’ll prove you are a drone with this corporate media piece. Hey that reporter was wrong in the past but hey I have one who dwells in anti Americanism conspiracy so believe every word. I’m certain he did not read Alexander’s piece at all. (btw should be taken with skeptism as it is a self published piece; however he has receipts with references etc. as do a few reporters I do follow on sub stack.)

    And every time, when the issue of the right’s criticism of media bias comes up, I have to point out Matthew Sheffield s observation.



    Almost all right-wing support in the United States comes from a view that Christians are under attack by secular liberals. This point is so important and so little understood. Logic doesn’t matter. Fact-checking doesn’t matter. What matters is if I can use this information to show that liberals are evil. Many of them are not interested in reporting the world as it is, but rather to shape the world like they want it to be.

    The problem, as he describes it, is that most conservatives think the purpose of journalism is to wage partisan political warfare, and that has created an ecosystem on the right where facts and truth are increasingly irrelevant.
    “Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’ It doesn’t even have to be a fact,” he wrote. “I eventually realized that most people who run right-dominated media outlets see it as their DUTY to be unfair and to favor Republicans because doing so would somehow counteract perceived liberal bias.”

    He believes that the msm do have bias; such as what they cover. Yet they generally operate in good faith, ie journalistic standards and adherence to the facts.
     
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    And SFL calling Hersh the greatest living investigative journalist of our time is actually hilarious. You outlined clearly a career arc where, ever since his first couple of achievements, he has been chasing the same sort of relevance with increasingly less and less credible results. Sometimes people catch lightning in a bottle. Sometimes the novelist only has one great book in them. Sometimes there are one-hit wonders. It’s okay to be able to admit that.
    Lol. I meant to reply to that line w a “Yes”, but forgot.
     

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