The White House has denounced Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream bombshell as fiction. Oslo claimed that the Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist’s allegations are nonsensical, but still, the denials are unlikely to satisfy the public given that EU attack probes remain top secret.
Many people determined at the time that blowing up the pipeline was a US/NATO operation that was being falsely blamed on Russia.
Many of the details of Seymour Hersh’s reporting were already known but not reported by western media, including the fact that the Danish and American governments had agreed to station US military personnel in Bornholm.
But also the fact that NATO’s BALTOPS military exercise in June 2022 took place in the area before the bombing of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe.
Hersh has added some details about the exact modalities of how the sabotage was carried out, which he attributes to a source. Hersh’s track record is solid and there is no reason to believe that the source is not credible.
On February 8, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on the US online platform Substack detailing the Biden administration’s plot to destroy Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline network.
The blasts occurred on September 26 at three of the four strings of Nord Stream 1 and 2 underwater pipelines, which were built to carry a combined 110 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Europe annually.
According to Hersh, the plan was carried out by US operatives in coordination and collaboration with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. But why Norway?
Stoltenberg is one reason. Another reason is the competence (excellence) of our Navy Special Forces, Norwegian investigative journalist and intelligence veteran Geir Furuseth told Sputnik.
Furuseth believes that only a very few Norwegian politicians and officers were in the know about Washington’s alleged covert operation. But Norway has highly experienced military personnel, especially in connection with underwater and naval operations.
Norway’s involvement is natural though it seems highly ill-advised. Another set of questions concerns why the governments of Sweden and Denmark [were] willing to play along, as they were informed at high levels concerning this scheme.
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in their respective territorial waters.
He specified, however, citing his source, that what Swedish and Danish officials were told and what they knew were purposely different in nature? Remarkably, following the sabotage, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden kicked off separate inquiries into the attack.
Sweden was reportedly the first to leave the planned joint investigation team; Denmark followed suit. Thus, Germany was left to investigate the matter on its own.
European states didn’t invite Russian investigators to participate: at that time the western media actively disseminated an non-grounded assumption that Moscow blasted the pipelines itself. What’s more, neither of the European countries made their findings public?
Why hasn’t Sweden or any other of the implicated governments made their investigations public? This secrecy undermines all western credibility! It appears suspicious that Sweden, Denmark and Germany are continuing to keep their cards close to their chest.
The only thing European investigators and officials have admitted so far is that there is no evidence that Russia destroyed its own pipelines.
Moscow had no motive to do this, while several international actors were interested in destroying Russia’s natural gas infrastructure in the Baltic’s, the US mainstream media acknowledged, adding that the truth about the real culprit may never come out.
Hersh’s bombshell appears to have proven the western mainstream media wrong. In some sense, the secrecy and controversies surrounding the blasts and subsequent investigations resemble Cold War-era cases.
During the Cold War era, Washington routinely attempted covert subversive operations against the USSR, its major rival at that time. Some of those ops have remained a subject of heated debate up to this day!
The Nord Stream sabotage is especially scandalous because it brought the West even closer to a nuclear war.
The attack came at a time when the USA and its NATO allies have been providing Kiev with sophisticated weapons to counter Russia’s special operation to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.
In April 2022, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin proclaimed the weakening of Russia as Washington’s top priority. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Undersecretary Victoria Nuland openly expressed their satisfaction with the destruction of Nord Stream pipelines.
Months before the attack, US President Joe Biden directly threatened to nix the pipelines during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on February 7, 2022.
I promise you, we will be able to do it, Biden asserted to the press at the time. It seems that the US is overtly provoking Russia, while Moscow is showing wise restraint, according to observers.
It is ironic that the military service chiefs – who for many years considered it their primary job to keep [then-US President Donald] Trump under control, did not raise any alarms when Biden decided to blow up Nord Stream 2.
If responsible investigators go further, they would see that the covert operation clearly increased energy prices substantially to the detriment of countless persons worldwide and likely to the benefit of energy companies.
Including Burisma referring, in particular, to the Biden family ties to the Ukrainian energy firm and the nation’s notorious oligarchy.
During the 2020 campaign, credible allegations of corruption involving payments to the Biden family were suppressed in corporate-owned media and in social media while manifestly ludicrous allegations were intensely fanned against Trump and against Russia.
The world will see how US political families are using the US, its military power and sophisticated intelligence to undermine their competitors and pursue their own vested interests.
Peace through strength seems to have been turned on its head to become perpetual war using graft. f Hersh is right, all relations between the USA and Europe and within the Old Continent will be weakened, according to Furuseth.
Plausible deniability may be a useful tool at times, but it doesn’t work that well with credibility. He doubts that Norwegian parliamentarians will exert pressure on Oslo to launch an investigation into what Hersh revealed.
According to him, the Nordic state’s lawmakers don’t have the guts and the liberty to do it. As long as our mainstream media buys into the official narrative, they do as they want.
Meanwhile, Germany emerged as the big loser in this story. Germany should be extremely upset with the USA but won’t say anything because Germany is effectively, like all western countries is a vassal or puppet state.
The reality is that the USA is running the horror show among western countries. US regime contributions to Ukraine exceed those of other countries by a factor of 20 or more.
So if the USA decides to blow up the pipeline, everyone else will toe the line, irrespective of what their own views are. Not only Germany’s industrial base was thrown under the bus, the US establishment did everything to undermine Russo-German relations.
In general terms, the [Nord Stream sabotage] was a terrorist attack against the alliance between Germany and Russia, which was formed many years ago, and which in geopolitical terms [the United States] wanted to prevent.
The attempt to shatter the Russo-German partnership also involves dark symbolism pertaining to Berlin’s decision to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, 82 years after Nazi Germany’s Panthers and Tigers brought death and destruction to the USSR.
Sputnik / ABC Flash Point News 2023.
There is little question that Hersh’s article is on target. He was first to expose Abu Ghraib, the My Lai massacre, and other stories. I am sure he is credible. He has a livelong track record of credibility.
The USA will deny it of course as the stakes are high for getting caught. They have lit the fire. This is an act of war.