Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream
oalexanderdk.substack.com
oalexanderdk.substack.com
His closing question is "Why leave one of the two Nord Stream 2 pipelines intact"? I haven't seen it discussed much, but apparently there actually were 4 leaks, with one pipeline being damaged twice. One possible explanation would be that this was a mistake in the execution by whoever did this, with one pipeline somehow getting two explosives planted. Here's a Sept 22 article about the discover of the 4th leak: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/fourth-leak-found-no...
This was my thought exactly. It's dark underwater, and it's often not clear which pipe is which
https://vietnamnet.vn/en/ex-foreign-minister-of-norway-honou...
The same Jens Stoltenberg who was against and protested the american war against Iraq from the beginning?
As a Norwegian I have never voted for Jens Stoltenberg or his party, I am slightly more to the center in our politics. However I find the patreon article dishonest and completely speculative. It has no evidence whatsoever just tries to paint normal things in a conspiratorial light.
I've worked with a bunch of old people of late. And I'm saying that from the reference point of 52. It's hard. I don't want to be an ageist. But I regularly see how hard it is to grow older. To do so gracefully scares the heck out of me. Some things are in your control, but it's increasingly a journey where the constitution of yourself slips out of your control. Some 85 year olds (Hersh's current age) are still sharp as a tack, but even then, the fight to still feel relevant is an uphill battle. It is hard for me to not be suspicious much of Hersh's vector here isn't hugely influenced by advancing years.
Yet you felt compelled to cast aspersions on Hersh solely based on age.
People are not agitated at the suggestion that the US did it. People are agitated because the claims are coming from Cy Hersh without remotely compelling evidence, who in the past decade or so has turned to spouting off unsubstantiated claims to carry water for Assad and Putin and shilling ridiculous Bin Laden theories and 9/11 trutherism.
I'm personally agitated because a community that is generally pretty grounded in fact and falsifiability somehow turns into a bunch of edge lord schoolboys around certain foreign affairs subjects. And it comes from the "adults" in our industry (Elon and Sacks) modeling the behavior and a lot of people in our industry mirroring it back. I'm sick of innuendo being passed off as critical thinking. Innuendo is cheap evasive sleight of hand that pollutes the information space and encourages bad faith bullshit. /rant
Circumstantial evidence is still evidence yes, but this is just a bunch of shit that is observably false followed by salacious assertions.
Presenting claims that are trivially falsifiable as true without bothering to apply skepticism because it plays into your favored narrative is not journalism. It’s whatever the hell Hersh is doing now.
I find it interesting that different people have very different reactions to this. I don't think it's just national politics, although that often plays a role. For me, I was bothered by the way the news coverage immediately after the event converged to "Russia did it". It wasn't that I was in any way sure that they were wrong, but I was sure that they were absurdly overconfident.
I'd like to know what caused them to take this stance so universally and so strongly. My would guess would be tribalism and fear of offending the US government. Since then, I've been pleased to see that some recent articles that are moving more to the "we don't really know yet" stance. The New York Times had such an article in late December (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/world/europe/nordstream-p...), and the London Times had a similar one about a week ago (https://archive.is/A35Ce).
Hersh's article doesn't bother me in the way that it seems to bother you. It's not at all that I'm sure it's right. It seems possible, maybe even likely, that Hersh is being fooled by a bullshitter or even a foreign agent. He presumably published it on a brand new Substack because every more reputable outlet refused. But despite this, I think it's good to discuss its strengths and weaknesses. Many people (possibly including you) think it's better that we ignore it, but I think this is more likely to cause problems in the long term. I think it's interesting and useful to look at why our reactions are so different.
And let the narrative given by "trusted US officials" stand unchallenged, yes.
Yeah, buddy. The most absurd interpretation of the opposite is what we mean...
It's about questioning the mainstream media narrative. Mainstream media is politically affiliated. So questioning it becomes a political act.
Once it gets political, people lose all reason, form up into tribes, and things get rough.
It's frustrating because having a theory that the US did it isn't unreasonable, and could be discussed. My initial reaction was that the US probably did it, it was only later after more details came out and really thinking it through I came to realize it wouldn't make sense. Though if they did it certainly would not have occurred in the fanciful way Hersh presented. I do not know who did it, while I could put a good theory together why Russia did it and can see they had some motivation, I could also make a good Hershesque story about how some criminal environmentalist group from Germany did it. Or why Poland did it. Or Sweden.
EDIT: Actually when you think about it, with the alternative Yamal pipeline through Poland, and Poland's distrust of Germany. Poland had plenty of motivation! Much more than the US. They have the explosives, they can whip together a few tech divers for an easy 80-100m dive, and they have easy access to the Baltic. But motivation and opportunity is not enough.
you can trivially know this by comparing the US's response to e.g. every hack china and russia have ever done leading to mean words and maybe economic sanctions, vs the US literally invading two countries - which had nothing to do with the person who did the bombings - after 11/9.
This operation has no upsides and the downsides are so big that this is probably the only time where the meme of the guy being thrown out of the window for suggesting something in a meeting is actually appropriate…
If there was even a whiff of credible evidence that the US was behind it it would’ve set back US-EU relations by decades if not more and if there was actual undeniable proof it could’ve been the end of NATO.
Which in practice only meant gorging on it and storing like crazy, while initiating years-long process of establishing alternative routes (x10 priced LNG obviously doesn't count)
> If there was even a whiff of credible evidence that the US was behind it it would’ve set back US-EU relations by decades if not more and if there was actual undeniable proof it could’ve been the end of NATO
"Could"/"would", yeah, but this is hardly the first time US doing stuff that SHOULD have ended with totally ruined relations, but in fact would be swept under the rug even if credible evidence had resurfaced publicly. They'll just say that it was a private initiative of a few rouge CIA officers, acting independently of the higher command, as it was with operation Gladio.
EU is simply too dependent on US: economically (through trade), in military (EU has no serious military of its own, and almost no military industrial complex of its own - NATO standard is American standard), and in politics (through "international" political organizations).
It's just realpolitik. Burning down a pipeline is bad, but making a fuss about it would be worse.
Regarding what could be achieved, irregardless of who is the culprit:
- There is now no incentive to turn the tap directly to Russia back on
- There is now a ton of incentive to keep Ukrainian gas transportation pipeline safe (which also transports Russian gas to Europe, while Russia is still paying Ukraine for it) - both to Russia and EU.
None of which required NordStream 2, right?
But ironically, I think there's quite a bit of circumstantial evidence to make at least the jist of Hersh's story correct. The big thing for me is the near complete media silence. You'd think blowing up a huge piece of civilian infrastructure would stir up a bigger frenzy, but no. If we really did not know and it was plausibly Russia, it would get talked about a lot more.
The utter stupidity of that idea is along the sames lines as rhetoric, also present in OP, that Russia "weaponized" its gas pipelines. (To use that language, nearly anything can be a "weapon.") I'm going to just go out on a limb here and say that I won't take seriously anything that doesn't immediately address how insane those initial accusations, of Russian sabotage of its own pipelines, were.
This is why the US publicly hated on the pipeline.
Building a pipeline is not cheap, not in money or time or bureaucratic effort. It's easier to just stop supplying the gas if you want to make an obvious threat.
They launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine while denying they were doing so and failed at every one of their military objectives while causing their economy to collapse due to the massive worldwide sanctions. What other evidence could you require?
The situation is not even remotely comparable.
Furthermore, there's substantial evidence that Germany - or rather, some German factions - was very specifically pressuring Austria into a war, precisely so that it could then be "joined":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Crisis#The_German_%22Blan...
What’s the US interest? Now Europe must buy LNG from our fantastic gas companies. US exports of LNG are at an all time high price. Europe is pissed off at our rival. Not to mention our commander in chief threatened to blow it up, why?
Everything here says it’s in the interest of the USA, not Russia. I don’t feel like I’m bending any logic, in fact I feel like this is the only common sense way to think about it.
Russia knew they weren’t going to make any money on it due to the strong reaction to the war on Ukraine.
Russia could have decided to do it to remind Western Europe that it could do the same to other pipelines they depend on.
None of that is determinative that Russia did do it, but it’s sufficient to me to indicate that they could have done it, and insisting that it’s absurd is, well, absurd.
But you think the USA blowing up an inactive pipeline might be the thing that provokes a war and therefore the USA would never do it?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/01/02/hundreds-k...
(To be clear, this is all just conjecture. The factions are real enough, and have motives that could make players in this game, but it's obviously not the only viable explanation.)
The gymnastics come in believing that the guy who was willing to throw caution to the wind in starting a war with Ukraine (causing his economy to take a hammering and killing trade with the EU, running the real risk of pushing NATO entirely into NATO's arms) is somehow going to be precious about a pipeline that had ceased to have any value. I don't see it.
It makes the cost of energy go up in Europe and the US, which exacerbates the existing problem of monetary inflation caused by the recent pandemic. It was meant as punishment for the West's support of Ukraine to increase civil discontent with the existing pro-Ukraine western governments. This allows the electorate to be more receptive to populist candidates funded by Russia with anti-Ukraine positions which will give Russia what they want.
Then, Ukraine goes to Russia, gas goes back to Europe via the still intact pipeline, European money goes back to Russia, and Russia wins.
The Russians can also probably be secure in knowing that NATO won't publicly identify Russia as responsible as that would probably mean war and it has been very clear that NATO's top priority is avoiding the spread of the war in Ukraine.
There are some other possible Russian motivations I've seen, but put less stock in like capability demonstration and limiting incentives for a coup.
Russia was the only country that could do that without risk of widening the war.
I’m not saying they did do it, but I see no reason for everyone to insist it’s obviously false.
The US wasn’t the target, European powers were, and the message was about will (though like other Russian threats over the same policy issue, it was a false message, despite the dramatic form), more than material capacity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_en...
You keep using strong words like "utter stupidity" and "insane" without being aware of recent Russian history...
https://www.rt.com/russia/540121-russia-denies-plans-invade-...
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov:
“We have repeatedly said that the movement of our armed forces on our own territory should be of no concern to anyone. Russia poses no threat to anyone.”
What's your point? That the Russian gov't is capable of lying, therefore they blew up the pipelines? What if I said that the US lied about weapons of mass destruction, therefore the US must have blown up the pipelines? It seems like a non-sequitur. State governments can deceive, especially about their plans for war.
That said, I'm not supporting Russia in this war, nor Ukraine. So I'm not going to participate any further in this other debate about the war that you appear to want to have.
But Hersh's essay indicates there were last-minute changes to the detonation method. That adds risk, which could have manifested as failure of some detonations.
Cutting off energy a nation's energy supply in violation of an established trade agreement, as a response to an escalating conflict between nations, is economic warfare. The term "weaponized" is used correctly in this sense and the author was not engaging in hyperbole.
Modern hybridized warfare is fought across a number of spaces: legal, political, economic, ecological, informational, 'cyber', etc, etc. We no longer have the luxury of believing the warfare only involves weapons with purely kinetic effects. This is not the way Russia conducts war anymore nor has it been for the last few decades if not more. Conventional military action is always the last resort or the culminating event in modern campaigns.
>I'm going to just go out on a limb here and say that I won't take seriously anything that doesn't immediately address how insane those initial accusations, of Russian sabotage of its own pipelines, were.
Can you honestly justify any actions that Russia has taken openly over the last few years as sane? Countries run by viscous autocrats who have consolidated power often make decisions which suit their personal interests more than the those of the nation. Many in Europe and the US have made the mistake of assessing Putin's strategies as being 'Russia's strategy' and therefore unlikely because it would be bad for Russia. When in fact Putin's strategies serve him just fine because he doesn't give a shit about Russians.
The author states that that "they won’t enter into active service until later this year", but the source the author links to doesn't actually make that claim. All it says is that the P-3s will keep flying until sometime in 2023, when the "P-8 is ready to take over". I don't think that implies that Norway doesn't already have some P-8s in active operation.
Translated from this piece published in November 2022: https://www.tv2.no/nyheter/innenriks/settes-i-beredskap-rask...
So the planes were not in operational service at that time of the explosion.
https://www.arctictoday.com/norway-takes-delivery-of-boeing-...
Related Paul Graham essay, "Keep your identity small": http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
This realm is still in the land of almost zero evidence hearsay, and we just do not know yet.
I think Hersh's article is interesting and useful however. There are specific details that journalists can dig into in the future to find validating hard facts. This may ultimately press a government to cop up to involvement over time, once enough evidence has mounted. That's not to say there aren't possible false leads and inaccuracies in his report.
For the linked article - it commits far more journalistic sins than Hersh's article - in an attempt to take it down. Through continued use of insinuation, analogies, and strawmen the author makes the strongest possible case that there's not merit to Hersh's argument - but for me it comes across as Sophomoric.
In terms of who destroyed the pipeline it is clear that the United States, United Kingdom and Ukraine had strong motives - and the US and UK capability. It's difficult to read commentary that dismisses these motivations out of hand as outrageous. Or at least, I'm coming in with priors that significantly diverge from these commentators.
Nobody much wanted to talk on the record about My Lai or Abu Ghraib when it happened either.
Abu Ghraib was uncovered by Amnesty International and the international Red Cross and they had tons of photos.
For the US such an operation would have a huge amount of risk and they have to gain nothing until the war is over and even after that very little or nothing. (Potentially they can sell their gas - but others as well.) So why do it?
On the other hand, Germany had to gain a bit (shutting down the voices calling for it being opened) and Russia had to gain a lot (sowing distrust within NATO; forcing a change from NS1 to the remaining NS2; as a show of power and a threat; making a strategic change impossible to shut down future opposition within the power structure of Russia) or just to complete their shift to trade with China now instead. The NS2 project was already dead.)
They've been doing war and killing innocents ("collateral damage", sorry...) for decades, all in the name of some doubtful "freedom and democracy", and what has happened to them? Nothing whatsoever.
Stating one's opinions on social media is generally fine, but stating them in the form of facts is dangerous in that it can cause other agents in the system to have incorrect state, which can have very serious causal consequences, up to and including death, which most people claim to be "a big deal".
It is counterintuitive to think in this way, but many useful things are counterintuitive.
I'll take that little smirk as evidence any day of the week
Do you have a different transcript or something? There's nothing in the video that provides such a context.
Regardless, "There will be no more Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it" is a weird way to threaten sanctions, don't you think?
> Lol. Here's the video.[0] The 'context' you're arguing for was a question posed to someone else. The question she asked to Biden--the immediate context for his comment--clearly strengthens the argument that this was a threat against the pipeline.
> The entire world had been discussing nothing but Russian sanctions for weeks at that point.
I don't even know where to start with this one.
> And no, it wasn't a weird way to threaten sanctions, and no one at the time thought any differently,
Listen to the lady in the video above. Why's she so flabbergasted after Biden's answer? How does her follow-up question make sense if she thought he was talking about sanctions?
> otherwise there would've been a flurry of articles saying Biden threatened to blow it up.
Articles like this[1]?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKoPA3M7x2o&t=610s [1] https://theweek.com/joe-biden/1009898/biden-warns-there-will...
She just asked how Biden would do it, since the pipeline was within Germany‘s control. And he answered: „We will be able to do it.“
He did not identify who „we“ is and how it‘s done. „We“ could be the US and Germany together, it could be the western World or it could be the US alone. If it were the US alone it could be done by imposing sanctions on that particular pipeline and it could be done by putting diplomatic or economic pressure on Germany (many ways to do that) and it could be done by putting sanctions on companies that interact with the pipeline and so on. It could also be done by using force, but that is merely one of many options and I believe that Biden at that time didn‘t even know how himself. He made a strong assertion in order to take control of the situation and he did.
Many people already speculated it was the US, because Biden himself literally says "we will bring an end to it": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4O8rGRLf8
With a smirk. Even when pressed how he is going to do it.
For me, Hersh' story is the secondary corroboration.
I am not taking a position. I'm saying no one has presented hard evidence. And until they do, if ever, both sides will play hot potato and nothing will happen.
When someone presents hard evidence for either position I'll listen to them happily.
Totally how Biden rolls.
Oh, and they forgot to blow one of the pipes. Whoopsy!
The action that was taken, even though it’s not acknowledged, has brought weight to the statement.
More realistic is the old man who has famously delivered gaffe after gaffe, who has repeatedly stumbled on his speeches and said dumb shit, said something a bit inelegant that everyone's now seizing on like a bunch of qanoners baking the latest q-drop on 8chan
Regardless, it’s apparent that even with a Biden gaffe in the mix, if the US was responsible it was done in a way that preserved enough mystery to minimize the blowback.
If the USA didn't commit this, then through their various covert actions over the last half-century they only have themselves to blame for the suspicion that it was down to them.
As President Obama famously supposedly said: “Never estimate Joe’s ability to fuck something up”
Up to that point, the Russians clearly communicated to Germany that the flow of gas could be resumed either by dropping the sanctions to "repair" Nord Stream 1 or by opening Nord Stream 2.
The reason given by the Russians as to why Nord Stream 1 wasn't running at capacity was technical problems. First it was a turbine which eventually was replaced by Germany. Next it was allegedly damage to a control unit. The Russians claimed the repairs were impossible because of the sanctions.
So up until the bombing, Nord Stream 2 was always there as a possible fallback. Had Germany run into difficulties procuring gas from other sources up until winter, there was this dangling bait in reach of the German government. A freezing population would have been very unkind to a government that refused to open the second pipeline just for political stance.
Since the bombing it has become clear that operating any pipeline through the Baltic might only last for a short time.
My position is: we just don't know yet, nothing is completely certain. I am surprised that people seem 100% convinced because they read an article by Hersh that paints a nice story and uses an as-yet unnamed source as proof and are prepared to take it all at face value. It may well turn out that the USA was responsible after all. But this recent article is, as it stands, no more than a story. It's still completely possible Nordstream 1/2 was blown by the Russians or the Ukrainians or the Brits or the Poles...
We don't know shit, let's not pretend we do.
I agree. I meant "operational" as in "ready to operate". Sorry for causing confusion here.
> I think it is an enormous leap to assume that Germany would in this alternate reality inevitably relent and do what amounts to a pro-Russia stance in backpedalling and using NS2, that would not only fracture the country internally but would cause a foreign policy nightmare at the heart of the EU and NATO.
I live in Germany. Through the entire summer I heard more and more people (and from surpising directions) voice their frustration that Nord Stream 2 wasn't opened in the face of gas shortages. Where I live, every week protests gathered that demanded NS2 to be opened and sanctions to be lifted.
The signs of a weak polar vortex came in around that time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32985927. Had Europe seen the kind of winter that eventually befell North America, matters would have shifted dramatically. From the outside there was no way of knowing whether an already weak looking German government would not flip whith riots at the door.
You've probably got a better feel for public opinion in Germany than I do - I'm over the border in Czech Republic so while we'd have also suffered with a gas shortage, the idea of any concessions to Putin here is nearly unthinkable (people crowdsourced a fucking tank they called "Tomáš" for god's sake :D). I figured Germany might be more forgiving, but would still be very resistant and would be supported in doing so by its NATO allies in any way possible.
However, there's also another thing going on. As I said, there are people protesting. They hold banners calling for peace. But they walk behind a row of martial sounding drums. And if you ask them how peace would be achieved they tell you that military support for Ukraine must be stopped. And if you look at them, you realise you've seen them before. Also the drummers. It's the same people who did pretty much the same walking and drumming against masks and vaccines. That movement was known to be heavily influenced by Russian propaganda and RT in general. The biggest support for this "movement" is seen in the former socialist east, by the way. Which is suprising if you look at the rest of the non-Russian former eastern block and how Russian geopolitics are viewed there. It is not suprising if you know that there is still a lot of distrust towards anything western or American there.
I'm sure that, in between all of that, a winter with failing heating and a crashing industry would have tipped something over.
And one of the pipelines remains operational.
Ukraine's strategic cornerstone is international relations, without which they cannot win the war.
Ukraine would never risk upsetting Germany, the EU's biggest economy, with such a drastic operation.
The first underwater ROV I found via googling is $10K: https://www.deeptrekker.com/shop/products/dtg3#
It seems like something within the technical capabilities and resources of any functioning non-microstate.
Don't have to be in line with the government of a country.
Unfortunately, it's also standard for planted false stories.
It's notable that Hersh won the Nobel prize for producing photographic evidence of war crimes.
None of his anonymously sourced articles has ever been confirmed true
While not "confirmed true", I think this piece shows that later evidence strongly supported Hersh's anonymous claims in this case:
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemi...
It's an interesting style of analysis. You'll need to click on "Show more" below each section to see their actual evidence and reasoning.
> 1 Opposition: Opposition forces in Syria (Liwa al-Islam) carried out the chemical attack. 96.4%
> 2 Syrian army: The Syrian army carried out the chemical attack. 3.6%
though it helps when they also explain the process with nonsense like:
> The few prior instances of chemical attacks against civilian targets contain factors that make them poor comparisons to the attack in Syria, leaving motivation as the primary factor. An analysis of the motivating factors behind such an attack results in the Syrian army being twice as likely to launch such an attack compared to an Opposition group, i.e. 67%-33%.
A short version of their argument is "You might think for any number of reasons that the Syrian government launched the missile, but other peoples calculations of the launch location were wrong and ours were right so it couldn't be the government." Their prior begins at 95-5 for the government doing it, then it becomes 69-31 for the government doing it when they show a video of an anti-government guerrilla wearing a chemical hazard suit, then it becomes 7-93 in favour of the opposition once they decide they know the launch site. The launch site evidence is supposed to mean the Syrian government's probability is divided by 3 and the opposition's probability is multiplied by 15. That's the whole argument, that's where the rabbit is in the hat. After that point, no other evidence can adjust anything.
Most of the other evidence is just conjecture: they assign a 90% confidence to the evidence point "No western countries shared their evidence that the Syrian government did it" and they feel this fact is enough evidence to half their confidence in the Syrian government doing it. As proof for this, they literally say "The US says they have signals intercepts saying the Syrian government did it, but what if they actually have signals intercepts from the Syrian government asking if they did it or maybe they did admit to doing it but they were lying" This is not evidence.
This really seems like crank people trying to apply a rational choice / scientific skeptic veneer to a process of qualitative reasoning. And frankly I flicked through another ten or fifteen pages on the blog and almost everything discussed was discussed in the exact manner LessWrong/Slate Star Codex commenters would, and many of the issues being discussed were the exact issues discussed on those sites.
(I have no prior at all on the Syrian gas attacks, as I don't pretend to know anything about Syria or chemical weapons)
Like what? Give some examples.
Hersh's article is just made up fiction. Hersh has a habit of making up "anonymous sources":
>As soon as he has made an assertion he cites a 'source' to back it. In every case this is either an un-named former official or an unidentified secret document passed to Hersh in unknown circumstances. ... By my count Hersh has anonymous 'sources' inside 30 foreign governments and virtually every department of the U.S. government.
So the question is, what was the strategic effect for the US, Ukraine, and/or Russia to have done this?
My take, its almost as good for Russia to play victim than it is for the US to cut Russia's Gas. It would be interesting to see how dominant this story was in Russia, given the Ukrainian advances in late 2022.
This was after a series of reductions, stops, and restarts where they reduced flows and tried to get Germany to break sanctions to send parts. That they then ultimately rejected and wouldn't receive. E.g. [2].
When Germany offered the parts. They refused them, stopped NS1 entirely and offered to activate NS2 with Germany. [3] Germany refused and resisted the blackmail attempt.
Then the explosion happened a couple of weeks later. After that Russia again offered to activate NS2 with Germany. [4]
In this context, the US going ahead with the plan to demolish NS1, and leave NS2 50% operation makes zero sense.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1331710/nord-stream-phys... [2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/kremlin-says-gazprom... [3]: https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-nord-stream-closed-energy-cris... [4]: https://www.dw.com/en/putin-offers-europe-gas-through-nord-s...
Blowing up the pipeline is the only way to make sure. The only other option would have been to somehow sanction Germany if they turned on Nordstream 2 but that would also be bad for the US that needs to be able to operate their missions from Ramstein.
NordStream 2 was never put into service. Germany halted it due to the invasion. This was considered a very big deal.
At the time of the explosion on 26 Sep there had been no gas flowing on NordStream 1 at all. None! Flows on NS1 were shutdown by Russia on 31 Aug. This came after a series of declining flows from Russia accompanied by various efforts by Russia to get Germany to violate sanctions and persuade other countries to reduce sanctions. It culminated in complete shut off of NS1 and an offer to instead activate NS2 before the explosion (one of those pipes was suspiciously left undamaged).
Russia had been trying the blackmail that everyone feared, and Germany resisted it. I've bashed Germany a lot for it's response to the war but the fact is Germany got off Russian gas at huge costs and resisted the blackmail threat.
Folks who don't believe this can go view the data in graph form here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1331710/nord-stream-phys...
Or Grab the raw data if you want: https://www.nord-stream.info/
Germany gas imports from Russia: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-impor...
You do not offer any reason for Russia to blow up three of four pipelines just to leave around one.
But I didn't claim Russia did it. You know you can suspect the US did it but that doesn't mean you need to promote fake made up stories that defy scrutiny to believe it. You can still search for the actual truth and want to see actual facts presented rather than fiction.
...
> But I didn't claim Russia did it.
Give me a break.
Anyway, it still doesn't make sense why Russia would blow up 3/4th its capacity to bluff the Germans into using 1/4th the capacity. This a mind boggling silly path in the "search for the actual truth".
Forces the certification and use of Nord stream 2.
"I am unsure as to why all the intelligence officials in the initial planning meetings for the mission felt that the only possible way to sabotage the pipeline would be at the short section directly bordering Russia, instead of the large section in more favorable waters."
I can think of one reason; to make it look more likely that Russia did it.
And why oh why would Norway help??? I'll give you 263 billion reasons...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-16/norway-s-...
But no where doe the writer mention why Russia would do this to themselves.
In point of fact probably every major player in the region had a plan like this. Nord Stream 2 was a huge football for everyone with interest. We just don't know who did it. Maybe we never will. But reporting on a plan doesn't tell us much of anything.
My own opinion: I think it probably wasn't the US, simply because the Biden folks are being so cautious in so many other ways. I mean, you know this kind of thing will eventually get out. Why blow up a gas line but not sent ATACMS? Just doesn't make strategic sense. If we wanted to roll the dice and push harder there are so many more effective ways to do it. I still think the "Putin did it to silence internal dissent" theory sounds best. Could also be more hawkish European governments trying to keep the Germans from waffling.
Edit to note: the fact that the two replies are immediately jumping back into the essentially false[1] "Biden said he would blow up Nord Stream 2" canard in response tells us how uninformative Hersh's story turns out to be. It's not proof of anything.
[1] It was a statement in the press conference before the war started about possible consequences and responses. The context was sanctions and international condemnation, literally no one at the time, even the most Russophilic pundits and anti-imperialist tankies, interpreted this as a military threat.
Biden said publicly they were going to "end it." The reporter who asked the question was even baffled and asked how they could make that claim when the pipeline was in foreign territory. Biden further confirmed that we would have a way to do it if needed.
If they didn't do it, then that press conference and that answer was exceptionally incautious.
Then, when you add in that Biden explicitly threatened unilaterally stopping the pipeline, and that threat was subsequently reiterated by the head of the State Department... I have to wonder what evidence would convince people that the US was probably behind the action.
Putin. Blow up the pipeline so no-one can offer cheap gas in exchange for being recognized as the next legitimate leader of Russia behind his back. It's one of the simplest explanations and falls into the overall pattern. False-flag terrorism[1] is how Putin got into power in the first place.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
It's also not the case that Putin needs false flag terrorism. For one, he is already in power and has already started the war. Two, if he needed an example of US or Ukrainian forces blowing something up to galvanize his position - he has plenty of real world examples of Russian things getting destroyed - he doesn't need to manufacture a new one.
Putin can remove the temptation to overthrow him, and restoring normal relations with the EU (gas pipes included), by blowing it up - something that is currently not being used and serves to short to medium term value for putin. However, blowing it up, but hiding who did it, can sow mistrust in the NATO alliance. He might be betting that the germans would think the americans did it (or at least be suspicious). And if he was found out, russia can claim that they're within their rights to blow up a pipeline that belongs to them (aka, no real bad consequences).
(Hat tip to the Grugq for pointing out this weirdness)
Because the strategic goal is is not to militarily defeat Russia, which would probably be impossible, but to drive a hard geopolitical wedge between the EU and the rising Russia-Iran-India-China Eurasian multipolar order, and thereby secure EU dependence on Washington (rather than losing it to the gravitational pull of Eurasia). A limited proxy war, and blowing up economic links between the two, are two ways of achieving that.
The U.S. definitely has an interest in an isolated and weak Russia, but the polarity of this situation is totally unclear. Isolating Russia has already empowered China. It may strengthen the EU and EU-central/eastern European ties, but it may also cause a further loss of influence in Africa and SE Asia for the west. It's definitely possible to make the math shake out for this to be strategically useful for the U.S., but I don't think it's as foregone a conclusion as you expect it is, and for that reason I don't see how this is any more likely an explanation than any contradicting explanation.
How odd that you would consider her second question--which wasn't directed at Biden--to be the relevant context for Biden's answer, and not the actual question that was posed to Biden! Watch the video.[1] The reporter asks Biden if he's received assurances that Germany will pull the plug on the project if Germany invades (then continues to pose a separate question to Sholz). Biden answered "If Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will put an end to it."
Beyond that, his word choice only makes sense as a direct threat on the pipeline. It makes no sense as an oblique threat of sanctions or "international condemnation".
> literally no one at the time, even the most Russophilic pundits and anti-imperialist tankies, interpreted this as a military threat.
You don't remember headlines like "Biden warns "there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2" if Russia invades Urkaine"?[0] They were everywhere.
[0] https://theweek.com/joe-biden/1009898/biden-warns-there-will... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKoPA3M7x2o&t=610s
Given the subject matter it's completely reasonable that he could only have anonymous sources. But when you have anonymous sources then their information has to line up with reality. If it doesn't then you're either getting played or dealing with someone who has kind of lost it and maybe is exaggerating/misinterpreting information that they _do_ have access to. Getting basic claims wrong like the kind of boats involved, or the location of the attack, or the equipment required is disqualifying enough to disregard other more salacious claims.
That all said: the US may very well have been behind it, but Hersh does nothing to prove that in his original article in light of the inconsistencies.
[0] Not so extraordinary that we would blow up a pipeline, but that Biden would pull the silly "I'm-not-covert-actioning" word game. It's stupid and wouldn't shield him from accountability any more than just telling DevGru/DO(or whatever the abbreviation is now) not to tell gang of 8.
Us peons are clueless about what happened but Russia knows and they would know if it was them. If it wasn’t them then it’s obvious who did It and escalating the war would be justified. The fact this didn’t happen to me suggests it was Russia all along.
The Defense industry profits either way.
From the point of view of Russia, this is just yet another move in the much larger scale game of energy geopolitics. Russia's answer might not be to blow up some random pipeline in Alaska but to do many other things that will secure their energy contracts elsewhere, while harming its adversaries in the process.
> Lasting Mine Countermeasures partnerships built during BALTOPS 22 > Experimentation on new types of unmanned underwater vehicles were also tested off the coast of Bornholm Island, Denmark during the exercise.
Them having used mines in prior BALTOPS exercises doesn't necessarily preclude what Seymour noted. BALTOPS 22 _does_ seem to have been more mine-focused than usual, according to the article.
Vietnam had thousands of kids drafted straight out of high school witnessing a massacre that might want to get something off their chest. Here you've got an elite strike team of military specialists hand picked for the mission to serve God and Country. What on earth would anybody involved here have to gain by leaking any of this, beyond a court martial and a bunch of strife for those you supposedly serve?
When it comes to Ukraine, that means you can't trust anything. Any piece you read will have the taint of Ukrainian, American, or Russian propaganda.
I gave up on trying to figure out what is really going on in this scenario a while back.
Something is going on. There's definitely some deeper exchange happening. But I'll probably never know what.
EU made the mistake of following US into middle east and syria which blew up in their face with millions of refugees pouring in.
Getting involved in this RU-UKR war is the mistake to end all mistakes. There is no coming back from this. The world is polarized and EUR/USD is going to take a lot of pain.
EUR was created to offset some of the leash that US had on Europe and that's also tightening now.
I say this as someone who wouldn't be surprised if America was involved
Remember Curveball?
All the information in Hersh’s post reportedly comes from a single unnamed source, who appears to have had direct access to every step of the planning and execution of this highly secretive operation.
It'd be funny if it weren't so tragic how people rush to believe things that confirm their preconceptions
Even if it is from a well regarded journalist. This is a consequence of how far the profession has fallen.
Most of his award winning journalism has relied upon anonymous sources.
This is how it has always worked.
Journalists during Bush Jr's era were solid. Post Obama, the entire profession couldn't handle not being the under dog.
And now we're paying the price with untrustworthy or outright made up "anonymous sources".
https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/07/bush.apology/inde...
Hersh's New Yorker article was published April 30. His reporting was based on the Army's Taguba report, which leaked broadly in the first week of May. Other reporters had access to and reported on the leaked report. There's absolutely grounds to criticize the Pentagon in terms of its lack of transparency with regards to the report, but once the story was broken it was way too well-substantiated to outright deny.
The Abu Ghraib report was published by the New Yorker, which has fact checkers on staff. You cannot tell their stuff "my source is anonymous" and not have them confirm that source: the public may not know Hersh's sources for that work, but the New Yorker does.
Hersh's recent work is self published and not fact checked. Moreover, it is wild, and often logically at odds with itself (This operation was extremely secret, and yet the Treasury department was involved?). So: times have changed.
I love Substack, but Substack doesn't solve your reputation problem for you: if you were reliant on your editor to check your work (as Hersh clearly was), Substack gives you nothing to help out with that. It's a different world now, unfortunately, and it's made a crank out of Hersh.
Btw, the US/NATO sabotaging that pipeline isn't exactly a crazy idea.
It is irrelevant whether Hersh gets all details right, the important thing is whether his source is correct on the big picture or not.
It seems to me that the veracity of Hersh's claims cannot be decided by textual analysis, but rather by another investigative reporter who would travel for months to Florida, Norway, etc. and try to dig into the story. But who will finance that? Who would dare that?
This is just an idiot's idea of a secret military operation.
- Instead of revealing the fishing vessel, he describes a vessel that it couldn't have been.
- Giving the real timing would expose the vessel, so he gives timing that wouldn't have worked as a placeholder.
- Too many people were involved, because only a subset were actually involved - or maybe even just an analogous group.
Hersh eliminates the intelligence value by obfuscating exactly who did what and how, but provides lay readers (to whom the specific details don't matter) a story that conveys a general sense of how the mission was achieved.
Grasping for straws, uh?
“[Jens Steltonberg] was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since.”
when he was actually born in 1959 is not a small thing. It’s simply making things up.
Was he politically involved during the Vietnam War, atound Vietnam issues? Yes. Enough so that the Times wrote an article about that specific nine years ago https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ex-vietnam-protester-to-h... .
So what else in his age makes it not a small thing? That he cooperated with the American intelligence community back then? If he was some random teenager I guess it would be no random thing. However, his father was defense minister of this NATO country. Him spying on the student peace movement and relating details to his father and whoever his father had dealings with is the accusation. He certainly did a complete about face on the US military - or did he? Maybe this was his inclination from the beginning.
Incidentally NATO had a massive intelligence operation against the Norwegian student anti-NATO movement which was in the papers a few years ago.
I'm sure you had no clue the papers talked about his importance as a supposed anti-Vietnam activist years ago. I'm sure you had no idea his father was defense Minister of a NATO country. You're attempting to "discredit" the article by seeing a date, knowing none of these details, and deciding it discredits the article.
For example "nitpicking" is enthusiastically praised during the investigation of physical matters (ie: science), but it is commonly denigrated (if not outright condemned, even by genuinely smart people) when used during the investigation of metaphysical matters, and this mystery is a combination of both (but is mostly metaphysical to my way of thinking).
>whether his source is correct on the big picture or not
(which cannot be verified), based on the details that can be verified.
>another investigative reporter who would travel for months to Florida, Norway, etc. and try to dig into the story.
What would be one concrete specific claim that you'd try to dig into?
>Who would dare that?
The question of "why would someone want to bother" is still open for debate, and until that's settled, there's little use bringing in conspiratorial woo questions.
However the big issue is the complete shutdown of media coverage and that the governments of Denmark, Sweden, and Germany all keep their investigations secret.
Not quite. Any person who makes an assertion either positive or negative has a burden of proof.
This simple misunderstanding is one of the most dangerous beliefs out there if you ask me, and it is a broadly distributed belief.
It is interesting that the White House, CIA, State Department, and establishment media class all found the need to promptly respond to what they characterized as a "blog post" and "conspiracy theory" from a "discredited former journalist". Thousands of such speculations are published every day on the internet, and the government does not find the need to respond.
It is also interesting that none of the above government organizations volunteered an alternative explanation for who bombed their ally's critical infrastructure. You would think that the #1 intelligence service in the world would be able to offer some explanation on the matter, almost half a year later, to quell the speculation.
Hersh's previous activity played a key role in eliminating support for anti-Russian forces in Syria. Hundreds of thousands are dying in Ukraine right now. I think it's pretty obvious exactly why Russia would want want to pin these explosions on the USA, and why the USA would take steps to ensure the truth came out,
> anti-Russian forces in Syria
All-time euphemism for AQ/ISIS affiliates like HTS.
I would strongly suggest you to read a bit about the ideology of the Al-Nusra Front group.
For example, stating that you could write "an entire post on the reasons why sounds entirely made up by someone with no real grasp of what that suggestion would actually technically entail" is a clear-cut appeal to ridicule[1] fallacy with no further elaboration.
This kind of thing was everywhere in the Trump era: whether you were on the right or the left, you could easily navigate yourself into a space where all of your critics were random people who were obviously completely unhinged. They don't actually tell you that your position is all that great in any strict logical sense, but they certainly are emotionally affirming!
It reduces Putin’s energy blackmail ability by just taking some of it off the table. It was kind of like shooting the hostage.
I would not even consider it a scandal. It’s all Europe’s fault for making themselves energy dependents on a dictator.
You should not be chopping off the hands of an addict to prevent him from injecting himself with drugs.
But here you are proclaiming that they used a plane, with its transponder on, to activate the bomb. A very very very secret operation indeed. Cloak and daggers! So much covert.
Because dang overrode moderation, that literal fake news (fake as in actually made up) was allowed to hover on the front page for a long time and given a legitimacy it didn’t deserve. It was able to be seen by a very large audience over a very long time.
Sadly an article that counters to that fake news makes it to the front page for a brief moment and after 3 hours is no on the 5th page.
So many of those people that saw the first will never see the second and get the wrong idea. It’s the old story about a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes. Sadly to me that it was Hacker News that decided to actively help spread the lie.
I'm French and I had never heard of that journalist. Can you share the link to the official list of discredited journalists so I know who not to trust going forward?
The discrediting part would be his recent articles on Syrian government complicity in chemical warfare attacks, his narrative of how the Bin Laden killing actually happened, and if the Russians actually poisoned the Skripals.
But you probably knew all that and I have been concern trolled. Oh well, I try.
I think the less than hour old account with random username might've given it away. :-) Unfortunately a seemingly unusual amount of that on this story.
Seymour Hersh's stories have faced similar backlash every time they're released, including counter-statements by the US government. He has put out more dubious pieces as of late – he could be right or wrong about this – but I'd rather be exposed to his ideas than have them censored.
Anecdotally, I found the Seymour Hersh story intellectually gratifying, and was forewarned of the murkiness of its contents by the HN comments. I think all functioned pretty well on the HN side.