Leaks in the pipeline - Nord Stream 1 & 2
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From the FT:
DON’T let them eat cake.
- RFK Jr -
Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream
Seymour Hersh’s recent Substack post claims to provide a highly detailed account of a covert US operation to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines in order to ensure that Russia would be unable to supply Germany with natural gas through them. 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.
When first reading through Hersh’s account of the events, the level of detail he provides could add credence to his story. Unfortunately for Hersh’s story, the high level of detail is also where the entire story begins to unravel and fall apart. It is often stated that people who lie have a tendency to add too much superfluous detail to their accounts. This attempt to “cover all bases” is in many cases what trips these people up. Extra details add extra points of reference that can be crosschecked and examined. In Hersh’s case, this is exactly what appears to have happened. On the surface level, the level of detail checks out to laymen or people without more niche knowledge of the subject matter mentioned. When you look closer though, the entire story begins to show massive glaring holes and specific details can be debunked.
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"My pronouns are FA/FO." - Mik, 2024
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First of all, the problem(s) with Sy Hersh:
Hersh’s biography of John F. Kennedy has been harshly criticized for errors of fact and interpretation.
Hersh also narrowly avoided a scandal when papers in his possession relating to the extramarital affairs of John F. Kennedy were assessed to be forgeries shortly before they were to become the core of an ABC documentary on the late President.
In 2015, Hersh published an account of the death of Osama bin Laden that contradicted nearly every official and unofficial account of the raid, proposing that, in fact, the terrorist leader was simply turned over to the United States by the Pakistani government.
Like the latest exposè, Hersh’s account of the Bin Laden raid relied heavily on a very small number of sources, a particularly serious problem because the story directly contradicted mountains of eyewitness testimony regarding the planning for, execution of, and aftermath of the raid.
Hersh’s reporting on the Syrian Civil War has similarly run into a firestorm of criticism.
And this:
Hersh’s reporting on the Nord Stream 2 attack relies heavily on a single source within the U.S. government who provided details not only of the deliberations behind the decision but also of the attack itself.
The operation involved a complex train of events in which divers installed explosives on the underwater pipeline, which were then detonated at a much later date. It implicates not only the U.S. government but also the Norwegian government and associates the attack with long-running U.S. government criticism of the pipelines.
The story has a veneer of plausibility; the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline remains unsolved. It is not difficult to imagine the motive, means, and opportunity for the United States government to carry out the operation. It also includes many small details, although this barrage eventually starts to pose questions in the mind of the reader about how a single-source could be privy to all of the evidence in question.
Unlike previous exposès, Hersh was unable to find a publisher for the piece, instead posting on his Substack. This is not necessarily cause for dismissing the story (editors can make poor decisions). Still, it is surely relevant that no major journalistic organization was capable of confirming the essence and details of the story, or willing to put its prestige behind the account.
The account also has some critical gaps. One surprising omission from Hersh’s reporting is a discussion of the legal reasoning behind the purported attack. It is not exactly true to say that the United States government never does anything illegal, but it is most certainly true that the executive branch invariably goes to great lengths to interpret the law in such a way that its actions appear legal from an internal perspective; lawyers are always present in major decisions about the use of force on the international stage, and can almost always offer an account of how any particular operation accords with domestic law.
In this case, Hersh offers only very thin gruel regarding how Biden’s public statements about the Nord Stream pipeline “ending” provided legal cover for the attack, a justification that executive branch lawyers are unlikely to find particularly compelling.
No one should trust an account of a massive conspiracy at the highest levels of government that relies on a single source. Moreover, Seymour Hersh’s reporting for the last decade has hardly earned him unequivocal trust from the reading public. That Hersh could not find a publisher for his explosive Nord Stream 2 story suggests that he has lost the confidence of the journalistic and editorial communities, communities that worshipped Hersh for decades.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Sy Hersh Swings and Misses Big
The most astounding claim in the blockbuster new article from Seymour Hersh alleging that the U.S. is responsible for sabotaging two of Russia’s natural gas pipelines is that the Biden administration is led by a no-nonsense crew of highly capable tacticians.
On Hersh's credibility:
Hersh has enjoyed an impressive journalistic career that includes a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the 1968 My Lai massacre, when U.S. soldiers slaughtered Vietnamese civilians. He is also notorious for getting spun up by his sources. Most notably, he fell for forged documents claiming that John Kennedy bought Marilyn Monroe’s silence about their alleged affair. Hersh was planning to use them for his book The Dark Side of Camelot but luckily for him questions about the documents’ authenticity surfaced before publication and he had time to withdraw the sections based on them.
His most charitable colleagues like to distinguish between the hard-working veteran reporter and the man who seems incapable of stopping himself from making sensational claims unsupported by evidence. For instance, shortly after The New Yorker published his deeply reported expose about U.S. military personnel torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib, Hersh mesmerized an ACLU audience saying he’d only told half the story — the Pentagon had videotapes of American soldiers sodomizing young boys at the prison. He never followed up with a written report to corroborate those charges. And so according to this interpretation of his two modes, Hersh unplugged is a freewheeling and sometimes parodic version of the indefatigable investigative journalist who’s at his best when accompanied by a rigorous editorial process.
But that’s not entirely accurate. Some of Hersh’s most bizarre reports were published in The New Yorker, a publication once recognized as America’s most prestigious magazine. In a 2008 article, for instance, Hersh questioned whether the Israelis really bombed a Syrian nuclear facility the year before, a fact corroborated by virtually everyone in the world aside from the Syrian government. The Israelis bombed something, concluded Hersh, but probably not a nuclear facility, at least not according to his sources.
On Biden's "threat."
Hersh’s framework is wrong. To advance the theory that Biden sabotaged the pipelines, he cites as evidence a press conference in which the president boasted that he’d terminate Nord Stream 2. Hersh’s source claims Biden had said “that we knew how to do it” — i.e., destroy the pipeline.
But Biden didn’t say that. Hersh was too lazy to do his own fact-checking, even though he links to a video of the press conference. Biden said that if the Russians invade, “we will bring an end to it.” After a reporter asked how that was possible since NS2 is a German project, Biden said “I promise you we will be able to do it.” Hersh didn’t bother with the details because he needs Biden’s February press conference to show that the administration all but confessed, before the act, to committing an act of war against Russia.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Trump hints that the US may be involved in sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines, and insists that the Russians did not do it:
… Trump said Russia didn't blow up the Nord Stream pipelines last year and hinted that the US might be involved in the incident.
"I don't want to get our country in trouble, so I won't answer it," the one-time president told Fox News host Tucker Carlson when asked about the pipeline blasts.
"But I can tell you who it wasn't – Russia. It wasn't Russia."
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And how would the former POTUS know that Russia wasn’t behind it?
Did Putin tell him so and Trump believed it?
Seem to recall Putin telling Trump
things before and Trump believing it. Trump’s the kind of a friend with a whom a tyrant like Putin can level.“Little by little I am learning the art of being quite content by doing very little slowly” ~ Lionel Hardcastle
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@Renauda said in Leaks in the pipeline - Nord Stream 1 & 2:
And how would the former POTUS know that Russia wasn’t behind it?
Did Putin tell him so and Trump believed it? Seem to recall Putin telling Trump
things before and Trump believing it. Trump’s the kind of a friend with a whom a tyrant like Putin can level.And Little Lord Haw-Haw appears more than happy to help.
Proud supporter of Plan 2525. Everything you think, do and say will be in the pill you took today.
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A Man For All Treasons.
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@Renauda said in Leaks in the pipeline - Nord Stream 1 & 2:
And how would the former POTUS know that Russia wasn’t behind it?
Exactly. While some former presidents have limited access to security information, I do not think that President Trump is one of them. LOL
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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U.S. had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline
Three months before saboteurs bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, the Biden administration learned from a close ally that the Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June 2022. They provide some of the most specific evidence to date linking the government of Ukraine to the eventual attack in the Baltic Sea, which U.S. and Western officials have called a brazen and dangerous act of sabotage on Europe’s energy infrastructure.
The European intelligence report was shared on the chat platform Discord, allegedly by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira. The Washington Post obtained a copy from one of Teixeira’s online friends.
The intelligence report was based on information obtained from an individual in Ukraine. The source’s information could not immediately be corroborated, but the CIA shared the report with Germany and other European countries last June, according to multiple officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence operations and diplomatic discussions.
Dozens of highly classified documents have been leaked online, revealing sensitive information intended for senior military and intelligence leaders. In an exclusive investigation, The Post also reviewed scores of additional secret documents, most of which have not been made public.
Who leaked the documents? Jack Teixeira, a young member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was charged in the investigation into leaks of hundreds of pages of classified military intelligence. The Post reported that the individual who leaked the information shared documents with a small circle of online friends on the Discord chat platform.
What do the leaked documents reveal about Ukraine? The documents reveal profound concerns about the war’s trajectory and Kyiv’s capacity to wage a successful offensive against Russian forces. According to a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment among the leaked documents, “Negotiations to end the conflict are unlikely during 2023.”
What else do they show? The files include summaries of human intelligence on high-level conversations between world leaders, as well as information about advanced satellite technology the United States uses to spy. They also include intelligence on both allies and adversaries, including Iran and North Korea, as well as Britain, Canada, South Korea and Israel.
What happens now? The leak has far-reaching implications for the United States and its allies. In addition to the Justice Department investigation, officials in several countries said they were assessing the damage from the leaks.
The highly specific details, which include numbers of operatives and methods of attack, show that for nearly a year Western allies had a basis to suspect Kyiv in the sabotage. That assessment has only strengthened in recent months as German law enforcement investigators uncovered evidence about the bombing that bears striking similarities to what the European service said Ukraine was planning.
Officials in multiple countries confirmed that the intelligence summary posted on Discord accurately stated what the European service told the CIA. The Post agreed to withhold the name of the European country as well as some aspects of the suspected plan at the request of government officials, who said exposing the information would threaten sources and operations.
Ukrainian officials, who have previously denied the country was involved in the Nord Stream attack, did not respond to requests for comment.The White House declined to comment on a detailed set of questions about the European report and alleged Ukrainian military plot, including whether U.S. officials tried to stop the mission from proceeding.
The CIA also declined to comment.
