Ukraine take 6 – Seymour Hersh

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The West having de-industrialised, its ruling classes are dependent on super profits from the exploitation of cheap labour in the global south and from their highly financialised domestic economies. Both are threatened by a renascent China and Russia; respectively, Wall St/Washington’s greatest economic threat, and greatest military obstacle. At the same time the war has weakened America’s greatest trade rival, Europe. (steel city scribe)

It has long been beyond reasonable doubt that the sabotage last September of the Nordstrom 1 and 2 gas pipelines to Germany was either perpetrated by the USA, or outsourced by the same to a vassal state like Britain. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming.

“Circumstantial evidence”, a learned judge once said, “is not inferior evidence. It just needs to be considered with extra care.”

Not only did Washington have means, motive and opportunity – all gone into in previous posts. We have Joe Biden’s announcement of February 7, 2022. “Should Russia invade Ukraine”, he declared – and this of course is precisely the outcome Washington has worked so assiduously to bring about – “then we will stop [Nordstrom]”.

(The crime scene having DC’s dabs all over it did not deter the indefatigably ludicrous Voice of America from running one of its “fact checks” to reassure its famously credulous audiences that:

Though no one knows for certain how the pipelines were ruptured, spilling methane into the North Sea, many pointed to Russia, which has benefited from spiking natural gas prices, as well as the fear factor while escalating its war on Ukraine.

Not only does that assume a Kremlin too stupid to realise it could achieve the same by turning off the taps. As Caitlin Johnstone has noted, so ridiculous an accusation reminds the less than totally brainwashed of the unwritten rule that it’s only a conspiracy if it’s anti-USA.)

Now Seymour Hersh, the octogenarian who at thirty-two had forced corporate media to cover My Lai on pain of being globally scooped, has turned his interrogative skills on the Nordstrom sabotage. Appearing on February 8 on the substack platform, his meta-assessment is by no means fully aligned with mine. But Seymour is an investigative journalist with a record second to none. As with John Pilger, shortcomings of worldview are more than made up for – especially when recognised and factored in – by his fearless holding of power to account. Now read on.

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now.

The U.S. 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, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

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. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

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. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

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.

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.

From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance …

Continue reading on substack …

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