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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If the CIA and the White House are dismissing the Hersh blog post as “fiction” it means it is bang on the money but hardly a surprise to most on here.
Our little Putin basher will be along shortly no doubt.
People who loath “conspiracy theories” love the argument: if xyz were true it would come out because it with all the people involved, it would come out.
And here we have an example of what happens when it does come out.
Either (a) people just dismiss it as untrue or irrelevant e.g. testimonies of firefighters that heard detonations in the WTC buildings before their collapse
Or (b) nothing happens, crickets. Like when Snowden reveals Americans are being spied on by their government, or Blair is shown to have lied about WMDs or this, because we all know nothing will come of this.
People who systematically ridicule “conspiracy theories” are basically terrified of seeing the world as it really is. So terrified they’ll believe denials from the White House and the CIA.
I normally skim lengthy articles, but the whole Hersh tale makes epic reading. Even without the complete conviction of truth there is weighty circumstancial evidence.
Agreed – a gripping read. Eugyppius has raised a couple of issues, however, about the number & siting of explosions, and the problem of relying on just one source:
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
(There was also that Kim Dotcom rumour about Truss and the text message ‘its done’ to Blinken immediately after it happened – what happened to that, or was it just another part of the coup to oust her?)
Wrong link. This is the correct one:
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/seymour-hersh-on-the-american-covert
The article even made The Times.
Most critical thinkers already knew it was the US that did it.
Cui bono, the US can now supply Europe with it’s own LPG whilst trying to harm Russia economically.
Well, if it’s in The Times of London it must be true, mustn’t it? A mainstream publication so well thought of.
At least that’s the logic I’ve used to share it with the family members who only read/watch MSM and think I’m a conspiracy theorist…
Bay Of Pipes – redux ?
Did Mr Hersh also have any insights into what religion the Pope is? Or what bears happen to do in the woods?
As to what they found in the wood, it was clearly Putin say the Americans.
Who the earth else was motivated to do it?
The Psychopathic US State doesn’t want Germany able to backtrack on buying Russian gas whilst the US is weakening Russia
The war is going well for the US
A proxy war – no US casualties
Their weapons industry busy
Europe in tatters
Its a shame they can’t apply the same success to their home land problems
Interesting for the ‘vintage’ explanation – ‘the russians done it’ …( which seems most unlikely to the sceptic); given that Germany, Netherlands and France were almost equal stakeholders – maybe they did it ?? After losing their 49% share in the project they don’t seem to have kicked up much fuss
The only thing that’s certain from this article is Someone whose name nobody knows contacted Hersh to make him write this text.
As this news is picked up by legacy media, the result will be … a more precarious relation with Russia, for which we should all bear concern. How much mocking, taunting and poking will Putin endure before lashing out undepredictably ? And europe is a much more accessible target than the USA
As far as I’m concerned, Putin and the horde of associate propagandists can stick their nukes into some place where the sun doesn’t shine.
That’s in line with a maxim I’m always following, namely Whoever is trying to scare me is not a friend of mine and wants to talk me into doing something which is better for him than for me.
Acknowledged – most of it is just manipulation. But what we’re discussing here is real dynamic intervention – which is being used to lever real drastic measures in economy and society. It does happen !
What could America expect to gain by denying cheap gas to Germany, destroying German industrial competitiveness and providing an alternative supply of gas, fracked, liquified and shipped by the Yanks?
If I told you Every single day that I was going to hit you on the nose, and then a week later I did…would it be a surprise?
How many times do we have to hear the USA talking about the end of Nordstream…?
Only a couple of weeks ago Under Secretary for ‘destabilising the world’ Victoria Nuland, (the same one that was handing out cookies to the mobs in Maidan Square when the USA helped to overthrow the elected Government) …said in the Senate….
”Senator Cruz, like you I am and I think the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
It’s a bloody obsession with them….and they are the only ones who stood to gain…
The latest official report is that German Attorney General Peter Frank has stated that there is no evidence of alleged Russian involvement in the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipeline explosions.
Of course there isn’t…because they know who did it!…
No surprise then. In the meantime I have yet to see any article here on the GB news debacle with Mark Steyn and no doubt coming soon Neil Oliver.It certainly seems that Ofcom / WEF have put an end to further dissent and free speech.
That would certainly warrant more attention than some plausibly sounding theory about an explosion in the Baltic Sea which doesn’t really matter (whoever the culprit was, he’s not going to be brought to some trial and knowing this won’t unexplode the pipeline) and whose correctness can’t be known.
Short news: Mark Steyn quits GBN after threat that he’d personally have to pay any Ofcom fines triggered by his activities there.
Way past time for the spotlight to be shone on Ofcom…
Where have we heard that before…?
Ofcom, Trusted News Initiative, The 77th Brigade, CCDH (counterhate.com)
Indeed…they all need to be under the spotlight…the propaganda machine.
The entire evidential basis for this extended dramatic narrative and series of factual allegations from the self-styled ‘investigative journalist’ Seymour Hersh is a single unnamed informant:
‘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.’
Even if it all turned out to be true, it would be no different to a revelation that in May 1940 US special forces (officially not yet involved in WWII) destroyed a major Nazi rail supply line to the Dunkirk and general French Blitzkrieg fronts.
There are only two ‘hot’ protagonists at war in Europe.
Take your pick.
The two questions you have to ask yourself are “who benefits” and “who has the capability.”
Putin clearly didn’t benefit from blowing up his own country’s pipelines. Germany didn’t benefit from blowing up the Russian pipelines which were supplying it with gas.
The EU in general didn’t benefit, although one or two members (Poland in particular) might have seen a national benefit. The UK didn’t benefit directly, although it might have seen an indirect benefit since Germany would not be able to defy the interventionist policy it has promoted.
The USA clearly benefited by selling more LPG and weakening Russia.
Conclusion: the USA did it.
Who had the capability? The USA; almost certainly the UK and probably the Israeli’s since they seem to be extremely well trained for every circumstance.
Only a fool would think that Putin blew up his own pipelines.
The two questions you have to ask yourself are “who benefits” and “who has the capability.”
Putin clearly didn’t benefit from blowing up his own country’s pipelines. Germany didn’t benefit from blowing up the Russian pipelines which were supplying it with gas.
The EU in general didn’t benefit, although one or two members (Poland in particular) might have seen a national benefit. The UK didn’t benefit directly, although it might have seen an indirect benefit since Germany would not be able to defy the interventionist policy it has promoted.
The USA clearly benefited by selling more LPG and weakening Russia.
Conclusion: The Russians did it to drive a wedge between the USA and its European allies.
NB: I absolutely don’t claim that that’s true. It’s just equally plausible as any other baseless speculation.
Unless you take the ‘common good’ argument (in which case, why would not a local EU member) . Given what we see in the WEF agenda, loss of the pipeline and the war in general will all be used (is being used) to restructure energy and agriculture. New values, new markets.
No shit.
What next?
The vax is a depopulation weapon?!
Never.
At the time it was thought that Liz Truss had something to do with it because of an email she supposedly sent saying “its done” and shortly after we was pushed out of office. Up until now it seemed it had been the UK who did it, though I cannot fathom how we would benefit by becoming terrorists unless we wanted to prove our devotion with America, and now this latest revelation! All in all it was the Americans who had the most to benefit. I cannot understand Germany’s part in this or why they had been so spineless as to allow themselves to be treated in this fashion.
Even my pet dog worked that one out right away.