Leaks in the pipeline - Nord Stream 1 & 2
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Well the Kremlin is applauding Hersh’s attempt at “investigative journalism” with this report:
Who knows, but perhaps the Kremlin commissioned the report?
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Germany: No evidence the Russians did it.
German investigators currently have no evidence that Russia is behind the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, German Attorney General Peter Frank told Die Welt.
Frank said Russian involvement couldn’t be proven "at the moment" as the investigations are ongoing.
On Sept. 26-28, four leaks were discovered in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic sea that were built to supply natural gas from Russia to Europe. Following the leaks, several Western officials, including U.S. President Joe Biden, called them a “deliberate act of sabotage.”
Russian submarines were seen on Sept. 24-25 near the areas where the leaks were discovered, CNN reported, citing an unnamed Western intelligence official. Russia denied its responsibility for the explosions.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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."
…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.Elbows up!
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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.@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.
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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.
