This one is also being attacked and denied by authorities and their allies in the press, who are calling him a "discredited" journalist and pointing out that his piece is helpful to Putin. Well, his piece about Abu Ghraib was helpful to al Qaeda, but that didn't make it false. I didn't want to believe it, but in the end he turned out to be right about that -- as he had been right about My Lai, which I would also prefer had not been the case.
So here's the thing: somebody blew up the pipeline. That's a hard fact. The list of institutions that could have done it without raising alarm in waters heavily patrolled by Russia, Sweden, and NATO is very short. The US military is one of the small number of names on that list.
The naval exercise he claims was used partly to cover the planting of the bombs really happened; the Navy dive school he identifies really exists. He's right, too, about the prestige aspects of the Navy that make those divers far less glamorous within the Navy than their SEAL comrades; more importantly, he's right about the requirements for reporting to Congress that would make a SEAL operation less likely to have remained secret for six months.
There are other facts that could be checked. One of them is his claim that the waters chosen lack major tidal currents. I don't know how to check that, but it should be possible. A lot of the other claims can't be verified without investigative resources and authorities.
I don't know if the claim is true or not, but I can't see anything in it that looks false on its face. If the claim is true, the Biden administration committed an act of war against Germany as well as Russia -- and, again if true, in a manner expressly designed to avoid consulting with or informing Congress of its intent to do so.
Jeffrey Sachs, who I wrote about on Feb 3 WRT lab leak coverups on Covid, briefly reviewed this and some rather obvious evidence pointing to the fact that we did it.
ReplyDeleteI don't particularly mind that we did it, and I don't particularly mind that we are covering it up. But coverups usually involve discrediting or implying blame of innocent others, and I do object to that.
Almost humorously in that interview he talks about the debate of who was shelling the nuclear power plant in the Ukraine "Now the Russians control the plant. And the Ukrainians are trying to take it back. And the shelling is of the plant. And our newspapers say, well, we don't know who's shelling it, but it's very dangerous. And I say, Well, if the Russians are inside, and the Ukrainians are trying to take it over, maybe it's the Ukrainians shelling it, but our media does not allow any word against Ukrainian actions, not a word. So I've asked very senior people. They say, Yeah, Jeff, of course, it's Ukraine shelling the power plant. But you can't find that in the public discourse, because we are told stories, and we're told whether they make any sense, even when they're absolutely captured on film doesn't matter. We're told stories, and that's how the US government operates."
I think we call this one an open secret. And yet open to whom?
It matters EXTREMELY MUCH to me whether the US was behind the incident, precisely because it is a formal act of war, and at least partially against a US treaty ally at that! This would be, flat out, not a tiny bit of doubt, illegal; and if it were proven true, I would absolutely insist on impeachment for every officer involved (from the President right down to the captain of the Navy ship). It would also be heart-stoppingly reckless, even if it had been authorized.
ReplyDeleteSadly, I can't dismiss it out of hand, given the history of flat-out illegal and heart-stoppingly reckless actions the government has definitely done over the last few years. That said, while Hersch has been right about a lot of very important scandals in the past, and nothing in his account strikes me as obviously wrong/impossible, he's a lone voice at this point, citing unnamed sources and privately-held documents. We've ALSO seen lots of shamelessly false reports from unnamed sources and forged documents passed to reporters in an attempt to sway public opinion lately. I guess what I'm saying is, I'm listening with both ears, as they say, but not convinced at this point.
Janet
I was wondering whether you found that story credible. It was awfully detailed and circumstantial, so much so that I assumed, if it was true, that the sources would become obvious to anyone who was upset about the leak.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I agree with Janet. If this is true, nothing short of impeachments and prosecutions up and down the chain is going to salvage the situation. Cold Germans will remember--and potential allies notice.
ReplyDeleteYou both know as well as I do that there’s no possibility of accountability coming from within this system. The one hand shall wash the other, as always. Accountability is only for those of us who aren’t part of the big game.
ReplyDeleteBIDEN HIMSELF told the world that the USA would demolish the pipeline. It's on video.
ReplyDeleteQED.
I mean, Joltin’ Joe says a lot of things that don’t map to reality. Always did.
ReplyDeleteAdd Nuland to Sponge-Brain, then add the strong likelihood that the CIA itself leaked the story to Hersh........
ReplyDeleteLet's not kid ourselves here.
I feel like I should come back here to add this counter-argument to the Seymore Hersch article:
ReplyDeletehttps://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blowing-holes-in-seymour-hershs-pipe
Caveats: I don't know who the author of this is, thus have no idea how credible he is or what biases he might have. This is just "a guy on the internet", as far as I know. But I thought you should hear him out, and FWIW: his main point is to try to show that the "Tom Clancy" style details that Seymore Hersch adds to his analysis aren't exactly right, and specifically, are mistaken in ways that someone who was actually involved in such an operation wouldn't mess up (e.g. the nationality of the aircraft which supposedly triggered the explosion).
I could also point out possible holes in this guy's debunking-- for example, he makes a big deal of the fact that divers going to that depth would require complex mixtures of helium and oxygen and long decompression stops on returning to the surface, but the mine-clearing ship Hersch seems to indicate as the support ship didn't stay in one place over the explosion sites for anywhere near that long, based on the AIS beacons. Divers definitely would need long decompression times, and the AIS data seems to be true; however, if the mission was done instead with tethered unmanned submersibles (which the Navy divers definitely do have available), then no decompression stops are required, hence no need for lengthy halts. Likewise, the mission could easily have been done from a ship which wasn't transmitting an AIS beacon. (Civilian ships were restricted from the exercise area per normal procedures, so a silent ship wouldn't be easily detected by outsiders.)
In thinking about it, if Hersch's source is not completely fabricating things, then it sounds more like the source was hearing second- or third-hand from a possible brainstorming/planning effort. Something like this: Biden makes some impetuous comments about destroying Nordstream, both in public and in private with his national security team. They, with dutiful idiocy common in senior staffs, take this as an order to go flesh out the operational plans to do what the boss says, as a contingency plan. Various ideas are tossed around, in various stages of feasibility. The more spectacularly stupid ones get gossiped/griped about by different disaffected people, which disseminates them in distorted form to a wider audience, including Hersch's source. Things then settle down, as reality takes hold-- potentially, some tangible actions were taken in the process, up to and including placing explosive charges on the pipeline, or maybe not. But then, when Nordstream goes boom, Hersch's source says to himself, "Huh, they actually did carry it out!" and tells his garbled, partly mis-remembered story to Hersch (for whatever reasons he had to do that).
Hersch's source fabricating it entirely is also 100% believable, BTW. He's had to retract bombshells before due to his source getting jailed for forgery and fraud, and he's been sued in court for libel (he got off because they showed falsehood but not malice). And I have to say, Joe Biden's public comments about destroying Nordstream leaves the US wide open to a false-flag operation from any of the very many potential actors out there-- a famous muck-raker who is alas well past his prime being a part of that. That's why those public comments are utterly inexcusable. And I also have to say, it's not implausible to me that some idiots in the nat-sec bureaucracy got swept up in the Tom Clancy of it all, really did plant a charge on Nordstream, and then bungled it somehow... think Iran-Contra, for example, or Fast and Furious, among many others.
I'm still neither convinced that we did, or convinced that we didn't. I'm still p***ed off that I am not convinced we didn't, due to the idiocy of our leadership and incompetence of the bureaucracy.
Janet
Oh, and PS: Grim, you're only partly correct in your cynicism. Powerful people won't be held accountable for things out of a pure love of justice and fair-play. But they absolutely WILL be tossed under the bus if it's in the personal best interests of other powerful people. For example, Nixon always claimed, correctly, that he didn't do anything that other politicians hadn't been doing. But it was in the personal best interests of the House Republicans to 1) remove Spiro Agnew first, and then 2) remove Nixon, so that 3) a much less-toxic Speaker of the House Ford could step up to the Presidency, which 4) allowed other Republicans to shuffle up in the House hierarchy... and so it happened.*
ReplyDeleteLikewise, Mark Felt didn't leak about Watergate out of pure love of justice, but rather out of anger that he didn't get a promotion he wanted. (Odds-on bet he would have gone along with the shenanigans, had he gotten the top job.) And Woodward and Bernstein weren't working out of pure love of justice either, but rather for a chance to become rich, famous, and jump over more senior reporters at the WaPo.
So it has always been. This was the genius of the Founding Fathers-- you can't depend on an endless stream of ethical men, so instead, pit their interests against each other sufficiently so that they will police the worst behaviors of the opposing side.
Janet
* The Dems may well have been trying to engineer something like this palace coup against Biden and Harris-- witness the amount of dirt being aired lately about their respective families-- but the Republican takeover of the House would then put the brakes on that, since it wouldn't be President Pelosi, the first woman President, anymore; it would be President McCarthy if Harris then Biden were voted off the island. They may be changing strategy, to ensure that neither Biden nor Harris are able to compete in 2024, opening the way to other Dems in the House and Senate. Who knows for sure? But that's provisionlly what it looks like to me.
We note that Lee Smith claims Hersh got it wrong; that it was Trump who set up the demolition scenario.
ReplyDeleteSmith is a good journalist.
Hmmmmm.