Jun 6, 2023. CIA knew of Ukraine plan to blow up Nord Stream pipeline: Report (Straits Times)
Feb. 10, 2023. Report over pipeline blasts causing uproar (China Daily)
Feb. 9, 2023. Moscow calls Biden a ‘terrorist’ over Nord Stream explosion
Feb. 9, 2023. Kremlin Calls For Conducting Int’l Probe in Light of Journalist Hersh’s Report
Feb. 9, 2023. Journalist’s investigation – Russia accuses Biden of exploiting Nord Stream
Feb. 9, 2023. Russian Nord Stream pipeline destroyed in special CIA operation ordered by Biden
Feb. 9, 2023. Washington owes world an explanation of Nord Stream explosion: Global Times
Feb. 8, 2023. U.S. Utah Senator Mike Lee
Feb. 9, 2022. Biden: “I promise you, we will end Nordstream 2”
Here is some recent news coverage of the investigative report published by Seymore Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, according to which the United States “took out the Nord Stream Pipeline” with the help of the Norwegian navy.
Seymore Hersh, the investigative journalist who broke this story, has recently been called a “discredited journalist” by a “culture writer” for Business Insider. But who is he, really?
Seymour M. Hersh’s journalism and publishing prizes include the Pulitzer Prize, four George Polk Awards, the National Magazine Award, and more than a dozen other prizes (Sigma Delta Chi, Worth Bingham, Sidney Hillman, etc.) for investigative reporting on My Lai, the C.I.A.’s bombing of Cambodia, Henry Kissinger’s wiretapping, and the C.I.A.’s efforts against Chile’s Salvador Allende, and most recently the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Source
CIA knew of Ukraine plan to blow up Nord Stream pipeline: Report (Straits Times) (Jun 6, 2023) Straits Times
A European spy agency told the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) it knew of an Ukraine special operations team plan to blow up the Nord Stream gas pipeline three months before explosions damaged the undersea system last year, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday. The newspaper cited US intelligence allegedly leaked earlier this year by a low-level US Air National Guard computer technician who had access to large amounts of highly classified materials.
The leaked documents indicated that an unnamed European intelligence body told the US spy agency in June 2022, four months after Russia invaded Ukraine, that Ukraine military divers reporting directly to the country’s military commander-in-chief were planning the attack. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, built to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany, were rocked by underwater explosions on September 26, 2022, rendering them useless and cutting off a potential source of billions of dollars in earnings for Russia.
The apparent sabotage sparked a region-wide emergency as it cut off crucial supplies of energy for Europe just as the war had sent the price of oil skyrocketing. Accusations were made against several countries including Russia, the United States and Ukraine, but all denied responsibility.
The Post, citing unnamed officials, said that after the CIA learned of the alleged bombing plot, the United States told allies including Germany about it. It said the original European intelligence on the plot made clear it was not a rogue operation, and that it was overseen by military chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi without the knowledge of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Post report is supported by information gathered by German investigators that a six-person team using false passports took a large sailboat from the German port of Rostock last September to undertake the operation. The sailboat was rented by what appeared to be a front company.
According to German media reports last week, metadata from the emails used to rent a sailboat tie them to Ukraine, and the president of the front company also lives in Kyiv. However, Danish media recently reported that a Russian navy vessel specialised in submarine operations was photographed near the location of the sabotage just before it happened. AFP
Report over pipeline blasts causing uproar (Feb. 10, 2023) China Daily
Kremlin vows ‘consequences’ as White House tries to put out fire over article
A literally explosive story alleging that the United States blew up three of the four Nord Stream natural gas pipelines built by Russia has gotten scant coverage in Western media, other than reports on the White House’s denials.
In a 5,800-word article published on Wednesday on his Substack page, Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist who once worked for The New York Times and won a Pulitzer Prize, said the US plotted and trained Navy divers in Florida to carry out the mission. The pipes were constructed to supply natural gas from Russia to Germany.
The explosions occurred in September after the go-ahead was given by US President Joe Biden, alleged Hersh, 85, who has been criticized in the past for using anonymous sources.
Adrienne Watson, a White House spokeswoman, said in an email that this is “false and complete fiction”.
Tammy Thorp, a spokeswoman for the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
In an interview with Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti on Thursday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov blamed the Biden administration for the Nord Stream explosions and vowed that there would be “consequences”.
“By and large, yesterday’s publication (of the Hersh report) confirmed a conclusion we made for ourselves — the official representative of the Foreign Ministry said yesterday that we never had any doubts that the United States, possibly other NATO countries, were involved in this outrageous sabotage,” Ryabkov said.
He also told reporters in Moscow that Russia’s assumption was that the US and several NATO allies were involved in this “disgusting crime”.
Sweden and Denmark have both concluded that the pipelines were deliberately blown up, but did not assert who did it.
Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a fierce military conflict since February 2022, and Western nations have used sanctions to choke off exports by Russia, an oil-rich nation, to inhibit it from funding its military operations.
NATO, the US and other Western nations have provided Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in military and other aid.
The construction of Nord Stream 2 was designed to double the volume of gas that Russia could send to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
It was completed in September 2021, but never went into operation after Berlin shelved it shortly before the start of the Russian-Ukraine conflict.
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, Hersh wrote. A second pair, Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Friday that the US should give a responsible explanation to the world over the report.
The explosions have caused major negative impacts on the global energy market and the environment, Mao told a news conference.
“If Hersh’s report is true, then such behavior is unacceptable and must be held accountable,” she said.
Speaking of limited coverage of Hersh’s report by US media outlets, Mao said that “certain media outlets care little about facts or truth”.
False narratives
“They pretend not to see the truth that matters. What they have hyped are often false narratives, instead of truth,” the spokeswoman added.
The report elicited criticism from some social media users in the West.
Journalist Michael Tracey wrote to his 300,000 Twitter followers: “Bottom line: When Seymour Hersh reports on security state malfeasance by Republicans, like Nixon or Bush, his sourcing/methods are vigorously defended by respectable mainstream opinion. When it’s a Dem, as with today’s Biden/Nordstream revelation, he suddenly becomes a crackpot.”
Twitter user “banthebbc” told his 82,000 followers: “RADIO SILENCE — Still not a peep from the BBC about Seymour Hersh’s bombshell story that the US blew up the Nordstream AND tried to blame Russia to start WWIII. How is this not the biggest story ever? Is Twitter now the last place where you can go to find out what is going on?”
British journalist Jonathan Cook wrote on Twitter: “Strangely, I still can’t find a word on The Guardian website about Seymour Hersh’s story on the US blowing up the Nordstream pipelines, even though the White House has spent all day frantically trying to put out the fires his story has sparked.”
Hersh begins the article with a description of where he said the US Navy divers trained for the operation.
“The US 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, 110 kilometers south of the Alabama border.” he wrote.
“The center 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 harbors 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,” he continued.
“Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.”
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to Western dominance, Hersh wrote.
In December 2021, Jake Sullivan, US national security adviser, convened a meeting of a new task force from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury departments.
“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to attack the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,” Hersh wrote.
“‘This is not kiddie stuff,’ the source said. If the attack were traceable to the US, ‘It’s an act of war’.”
‘An end to it’
At a news conference on Feb 7, 2022, shortly before the start of the conflict, Biden, after meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House, said: “If Russia invades, … there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Norway, where the US has a submarine base, was the staging site, Hersh wrote.
“Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg (of Norway), … He was a hard-liner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. ‘He is the glove that fits the American hand,’ the source said.”
The Norwegians may have had other interests as well, Hersh surmised. The destruction of Nord Stream would allow Norway to sell more of its own natural gas to Europe.
On Sept 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then to Nord Stream 1.
A few hours later, high-powered C4 explosives that were earlier put in place by US divers were triggered, and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission.
“Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface, and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place,” he said.
dpa International Service in English / anews: Moscow calls Biden a ‘terrorist’ over Nord Stream explosion (Feb. 9, 2023)
Moscow (dpa) – Russian leaders have seized on a report of alleged US involvement in the Nord Stream pipeline explosion, making serious accusations against US President Joe Biden.
“Biden is writing himself into history as a terrorist,” Russian parliamentary leader Vyacheslav Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel on Thursday.
He was reacting to a report by veteran US journalist Seymour Hersh in which he claimed that US Navy divers were responsible for the gas pipeline explosions in the Baltic Sea. The White House has already denied the report.
The Russian leadership is itself suspected of being behind the explosions that severely damaged the pipelines leading from Russia to Germany at the end of September. Moscow, in turn, has argued from the beginning that the pipelines were sabotaged by the United States.
Russia had already shut down Nord Stream 1 at the time of the explosions, because of alleged technical problems. According to the investigations, the detonations were caused by sabotage, though there is no clear proof of who was responsible.
Now Hersh has put forward the theory in his blog that divers from the US special forces attached the explosive devices to the pipelines in the Baltic Sea during a NATO exercise in June, and later – supported by Norway – had them remotely detonated.
The 85-year-old Hersh, who became world famous more than 50 years ago when he exposd the My Lai massacre by US troops in Vietnam, has recently also repeatedly attracted attention with questionable research.
His sources on Nord Stream are unverified, and both the US and Norway have sharply denied the report. “It is completely false and a complete fabrication,” said US National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson.
Condemnation of Moscow was swift and widespread. On Sept 30, four days after the explosions, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told British media BBC that it “seems” Russia was to blame. She said – “It is highly unlikely that these incidents are coincidence.” Ukrainian President Zelensky quickly said it was a terrorist attack planned by Russia. FinanceTwitter, December 2022
Interfax – Russia & CIS Business and Financial Newswire: Kremlin Calls For Conducting Int’l Probe Into Nord Stream Blasts in Light of Journalist Hersh’s Report (Feb. 9, 2023)
A report by United States journalist Seymour Hersh regarding the blasts on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2nd gas pipelines calls for an international investigation into this unprecedented attack on critical infrastructure, Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said.
“Some points [ in the article ] might be disputed, and some points require proof, but it is remarkable in the depth of its analysis and the consistency of its presentation. It would be at least unfair to disregard it, especially for such a country as Germany, which that terrorist attack deprived of a very important energy asset, “Peskov said.
“This can’t be left without identifying and punishing those responsible,” he said.
CE Noticias Financieras English: Russia takes journalist’s investigation, accuses Biden of exploiting Nord Stream pipelines (Feb. 9, 2023)
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s investigation into the blowing up of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in September is being seized upon by Russia to call for an international investigation against U.S. President Joe Biden for allegedly ordering the operation. “Some things are debatable, others need to be proven, but the article is remarkable for its in-depth analysis,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Hersh posted the note on his personal blog and quotes only an anonymous source who claims that US Navy divers planted explosives in June last year and they were set off three months later by Norway. The pipelines ran through the Baltic Sea and Moscow sought to supply gas to Germany without having to go through Ukraine. At first the White House pointed the finger at Russia, which took the blame for the detonation.
Sweden and Denmark, in whose waters the explosion occurred, concluded that it was sabotage, but without attributing responsibility. A few days ago, Germany’s Attorney General, Peter Frank, acknowledged that there is no evidence to prove that the Kremlin was behind the explosion. On the other hand, Vladimir Putin’s government, always without evidence, blamed biden.
Now Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian lower house, says that Hersh’s note “should become the basis for an international investigation to bring Biden and his accomplices to justice.” Russia labeled what happened as a terrorist attack, despite not being allowed to participate in the investigation conducted by Sweden and Denmark. “It’s a complete fiction,” said White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson.
Russia claims that Biden had already planned to blow up the pipelines. Last February, shortly before Putin unleashed the war in Ukraine, the US President had received German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House and warned that if Russian soldiers invaded the neighboring country, there would be no more Nord Stream.
Russia claims that Biden had already planned to blow up the pipelines. Last February, shortly before Putin unleashed the war in Ukraine, the U.S. president had received German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House and warned that if Russian soldiers invaded the neighboring country there would be no more Nord Stream. “We will put an end to it,” he said. Scholz stood to the side, uncomfortably and without nodding to Biden. For Russia, that threat would be realized months later.
The Norwegian Foreign Ministry denied the information and the German Executive did not comment. Hersh is an 85-year-old professional who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam during the US invasion, and a decade later he would reveal the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, at the hands of US soldiers.
But Hersh’s career was tarnished in the last decade for disseminating information bordering on conspiracy, such as that the death of Osama Bin Laden by the US was a lie, or that the Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad had not used chemical weapons against his own population, when the UN and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed the attack.
The Rio Times: Russian Nord Stream pipeline destroyed in special CIA operation ordered by Biden (Feb. 10, 2023)
Pulitzer Prize-winning, prestigious journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ) submariners took advantage of a NATO exercise to place explosives on Russian gas pipelines that were detonated in September last year.
According to an investigation by famed Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, the explosions that damaged the Russian Nord Stream 1 pipeline and knocked Nord Stream 2nd out of service were set off by the US CIA in an unprecedented operation ordered by the Biden White House.
The award-winning journalist explained that, according to his intelligence sources, submariners placed explosives outside the pipelines in June last year under cover of a NATO military exercise in the Baltics, BALTOPS22.
The leaked gas generated a huge whirlpool in the water
These explosives were then remotely detonated when the training ended.
“Last June, US Navy submariners operating on a CIA mission under cover of a NATO exercise, BALTOPS22, placed remote-controlled explosives which, three months later, were activated and destroyed three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines, “Hersh detailed on his website citing a source with” direct knowledge “of the planning of the operation.
The journalist assures that he has tried to contact the White House to address the issue.
Still, spokeswoman Adrienne Watson denied him an interview and only managed to tell him that the information he wanted to publish was “false” and “a complete fiction”.
He then consulted CIA spokeswoman Tammy Thorp, who also denied any statement.
The destruction of these pipelines by US action has a huge geopolitical impact.
When they were built in 2011, the Obama administration actively negotiated for Germany, France, and the Netherlands to get cheap gas from Russia.
Now, the Democrats realized they made a mistake by giving Putin so much power and had to nuke their own construction.
For more than a decade, Russia has been the main supplier of natural gas to Germany and much of Western Europe through Nord Stream 1, and European governments were so happy with the deal that they pushed for the construction of a second pipeline, Nord Stream 2nd, which had completed its laying in September 2021.
Despite heavy sanctions on Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, due to dependence on Russian gas, several European countries were still reluctant to provide aid to Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, especially Germany, which withheld the shipment of Leopard tanks, a “red line” according to Putin.
However, since the destruction of the Nord Stream, Germany was forced to look for alternatives.
It quickly signed an agreement with Iraq and Qatar to receive Arab gas supplies and, a few months later, agreed to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
Location of the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines. Source: Daily Mail
Hersh explains that after the invasion of Ukraine, “President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to use natural gas as a weapon for his political and territorial ambitions.”
The New Yorker journalist details that the operation had been devised more than nine months before the Nord Stream sabotage, which places it in December 2021, two months before Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.
He explains that Biden approved the operation after over half a year of discussions in the private heart of Washington’s national security community.
The US president ordered the head of his Security Council, Jack Sullivan, to assemble a team in December 2021 to plan a pipeline attack, as intelligence reports claimed that Russia would attack Kiev.
The team was composed of members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and other security agencies and was ultimately carried out by Central Intelligence.
In 2021, the discussion aimed to orchestrate a response to the impending Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“What became clear to the participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines and that he was complying with the President’s wishes, “Hersh asserts.
Jake Sullivan, head of President Joe Biden’s Security Council
Several ideas were shared before the dive mission was selected. Other plans included using a submarine to attack the facility or planes to drop fuse bombs, he says.
Ultimately, the operation was carried out by Navy divers who were not US Special Forces Command members but worked directly for the CIA.
Hersh explains that this decision avoided bureaucracy since covert special forces operations “must be reported to Congress and reported in advance to the leaders of the Senate and the House.”
In this sense, the plan was downgraded from a covert operation to one of “highly classified intelligence with military support” to not inform Congress, according to the source consulted by Hersh.
William Burns, head of the CIA, was aware of the capabilities of divers at the US Navy’s Panama City Dive and Salvage Center in the State of Florida.
William Burns is said to have authorized a “task force” to draw up the plan for the deep-sea divers to carry out the mission.
Hersh compared the plot to an underwater espionage operation launched by the United States in the 1970s when agents sabotaged undersea communication cables used by the Russian Navy.
According to Hersh, in early 2022, the CIA group told Sullivan’s task force, “we have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
The planners decided that Norway could serve as an ideal base for the operation because, in the words of Hersh’s source, the Scandinavian nation “hated the Russians and the Norwegian navy was full of excellent sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deepwater oil and gas exploration.”
The planners met with the Norwegian Navy military and secret service officers to define the exact point of the attack.
The Norwayians, members of NATO, proposed that the attack could be near Bornholm Island in Denmark.
William Burns, head of the CIA
“The Norwegian joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden should be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area,” Hersh notes.
This meant that both Danes and Swedes knew about the bombings.
The Norwegian military proposed that US divers set the explosives during NATO’s annual exercises in the Baltic.
As it was, in June 2022, the US divers placed C4 explosives with detonators.
In order not to incriminate themselves and because there were peace negotiations in Ukraine then, they waited almost three months before the White House decided to detonate the explosives.
A few hours later, three leaks were detected in the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2nd pipelines between the early hours of Monday, September 26, and Tuesday, September 27, with shocking images that went viral on social networks.
The leaked gas generated a huge whirlpool in the water.
At the time, the first news reports pointed to a ‘boycott’ or ‘sabotage’ of the two gas pipelines connecting Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea.
Thus, while the European media pointed their fingers, first, against Russia, other channels pointed to Germany as a way to disconnect itself definitely from Putin’s threats.
Norway and Poland also joined in the accusations.
Finally, the shadow of the United States appeared on the scene.
It should be recalled that, in February, Biden said that the United States would “put an end” to Nord Stream if Russia invaded Ukraine during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in a clear fury where he revealed an intelligence operation that was, at the time, in full swing.
When asked how he would do it, the president chose not to give details of the operation, but he did make a promise: “I promise you we will be able to do it.”
The press conference occurred as Russia massaged tens of thousands of troops on its border with Ukraine in preparation for the invasion that began weeks later on February 24.
Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz at a United States meeting weeks before the Ukraine war
Biden’s motivation is not limited to ending Russian influence in Europe, as since the explosion, US liquefied natural gas (LNG) sales to the European Union have increased significantly.
The war in Ukraine is proving extremely profitable for the United States.
Major military contractors are selling billions of weapons, ammunition, and combat vehicles at a level not seen since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
But not only in military sales, but the United States is enjoying its privileged position as an exporter of hydrocarbons, which, thanks to the war, are at prices rarely seen before, with massive profits for the oil, gas, and coal companies.
Thus, the decision to destroy the Russian gas pipelines had a military, political, and economic background.
Quiet, the United States will never admit that it did it since it can be considered an act of war against Russia in the midst of an escalation of tensions not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s.
I’m troubled that I can’t immediately rule out the suggestion that the U.S. blew up Nord Stream. I checked with a bunch of Senate colleagues. Among those I’ve asked, none were ever briefed on this. If it turns out to be true, we’ve got a huge problem. https://t.co/DG0dYTByPI
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) February 8, 2023
Global Times: Washington owes world an explanation of Nord Stream explosion: Global Times editorial
More than four months after the explosion of Nord Stream pipelines, a shocking report by US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released on Wednesday has once again ignited international public opinion. The report provides details of how the US intelligence agencies planned the sabotage under the order of US President Joe Biden and how the US Navy carried out the bombing with the cooperation of the Norwegian forces. After the report was published, Washington quickly denied it. But simply using the phrase “fake news” is obviously not convincing. The international community needs to keep asking Washington until it gives a convincing explanation.
The 85-year-old Hersh is a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. More than 50 years ago, his report that exposed the US military’s massacre of Vietnamese civilians significantly pushed the anti-war movement in the US. He was also behind the investigation of the notorious incident of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse in 2003 and contributed to revealing the Watergate scandal, one of the most disgraceful political scandals in Washington’s history. Hersh’s latest report is not comparable to conspiracy theories in public opinion, nor are they something Washington can just gloss over.
To be honest, the suspicions about the US are not baseless, but the details that got exposed still send chills down one’s spine. For example, the report claims that Washington had been secretly planning the sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines since the end of 2021, long before the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And in more than nine months of debate, Washington focused not on whether to blow up the pipelines, but on how to leave no evidence behind. Therefore, the execution forces, time, place, and the way the explosion was carried out were all carefully planned. Even the most imaginative screenwriter in Hollywood would not dare to write such a plot. If what is reported in Hersh’s article is true, then the world will probably have to reassess the US’ capability to disrupt peace.
The explosion of the Nord Stream pipelines, one of the world’s most important transnational energy supply infrastructures, was an extreme event in international politics. Under the fragile political mutual trust, the Nord Stream pipelines were once a main artery of energy connecting Western Europe and Russia, stabilizing the security situation by expanding common interests. Because of this, it has always been a “thorn in the eye” of Washington.
With the blast of the Nord Stream pipelines, the only remaining bridge to build common security in Europe was destroyed, which means that Western European countries have to choose to be deeply bound with the US at the crossroads of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Hersh also mentioned in his latest report that “Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia – while diminishing European reliance on America.” This is one of the main reasons Washington decided to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines.
Attacking and destroying major civil infrastructure is a highly egregious act of terrorist nature and must not be tolerated. The international community has no dispute over this. After the explosion, many countries publicly condemned it, and the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also declared that sabotage on the Nord Stream gas pipelines would be “in no-one’s interest.”
The Global Times then published an editorial, calling for relevant international agencies to set up a joint investigation team to restore the truth as soon as possible, find out the perpetrators, and let them be punished. But as expected, some countries are blocking such an international investigation, and more than four months have passed, with little progress made. Hersh’s report now at least provides an important clue to the international investigation.
It is worth noting that the US mainstream media, which has always claimed to be “professional” and “independent,” was selectively blind to Hersh’s revelations or simply reported denials by the US government. Compared with their unanimously pointing their fingers at Russia after the explosion, this abnormal silence shows that American media agencies are very clear about when to be high-profile or low-key.
A large number of facts show that the US is the well-deserved leader in the “double standard arena.” It is obsessed with and good at fabricating rumors or making groundless accusations against others. But it will never admit its own mistakes or even crimes, even if the evidence is solid. It will instead try to blame others. Public opinion predicts that the US government will most likely respond to Hersh’s revelations in this way, which will leave another stain on its international credibility.
It is likely to become an event with the Rashomon effect in the 21st century for how the Nord Stream pipeline incident happened. But it does not mean that we should give up the pursuit of the truth, because it is not only about morality, responsibility, and conscience, but also about what kind of footnotes human beings will write for war and peace when looking back at this period of history in the future. This is very important.
Biden: “I promise you, we will end Nordstream 2”
Feb 9, 2022 pic.twitter.com/fVADdRWqcm
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) February 8, 2023
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