The award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, published a Substack post earlier today claiming the U.S. Navy was responsible for blowing a hole in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline last year. Here’s how his piece begins:
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 centre’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 centre 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 harbours and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance — 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 centre, 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 authorised to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicised 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 bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponise 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.”
Rather surprisingly, the White House has already issued an emphatic denial. According to a report on Reuters: “The White House on Wednesday dismissed a blog post by a U.S. investigative journalist alleging the United States was behind explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines as “utterly false and complete fiction.”
Seymour Hersh’s piece is worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Eugyppius has waded in, noting that “the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist has the story from a single high-level anonymous source, and it’s not without problems” though he finds it “broadly plausible”.
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Did Toby believe a single word he said about replacing Braverman or that Cameron had anything useful to offer? Really?!
If Cleverley is the best Toby can put forward for the next leader things must be worse than I tought. To follow his analogy, however, the destruction will surely be half way between Nagosaki and Hiroshima 1946. Southampton 1945 looked better than the Tories will the morning after the GE.
Haven’t listened to this yet, but if Toby says a word in defence of Sunak I’ll thcweam and thcweam and thcweam until I’m thick.
How is the return of Cameron “bizarre”? It’s entirely in keeping with the direction of travel in every possible way.
Agreed. They’re simply getting all their political ducks in a line. If we view the landscape that the elites are playing on as a battleground, which it is, then they are preparing for a huge offensive.
I have decoded the Cameron thing. Rishi will be gone soon and Cameron will be PM. Interesting idea eh? There is much more to all this, and only Nadine Dorres has written anything about it. “The Plot:” her new book, is brilliant.
Finally got round to listing to the whole podcast. Toby is still remaining adamant that anyone raising any kind of eyebrow about the ease at which Hamas found itself in Israel as “distasteful”. I’ll ask the question again: Toby, do you find questions around the complicity of the US in 9/11 “distasteful”? What about the possibility that Bush and Blair knew full well that there were no WMD in Iraq before invading? “Distasteful”? What about the possibility that the US deliberately provoked Russia into conflict? That must also be “distasteful”, right? Are you saying that anyone who questions a States complicity in an act that causes civilian deaths are “distasteful”? You must be. Or are you just cherry picking and arbitrarily choosing what people can ask questions about and what they can’t?
Please respond Toby, as my respect for you is waning by the week. I’m sure I’m not alone.
Oh, and you guys had better change the name of the podcast (and this website actually). Either that or Toby needs to reacquaint himself with the definition of ‘sceptic’.
Not too long ago Natanyahu turned all children in his nation into Pfizer guinea pigs and locked up everyone who refused. I think it’s save to say that he doesn’t care for human life. It’s why I wouldn’t dismiss the idea of him allowing the recent terror attack to happen. Yes, it’s outrageous, but so is Netanyahu’s track record.