The Americans “...convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.”
Like Covid, the public was told that the R&D was for the good of mankind, to save lives, on and on.
America has zero credibility. Zero.
These people are doing everything in their power to goad us to war. We are on a runaway train.
However, as I have a moral objection to capital punishment (I do not believe the State has the moral authority to take human life), I will refrain from cheering on the use of the guillotine.
The crescendissimo of cheering on of novel medical interventions these days is deafening, as is the death sentence they frequently impose. Intentionally take a life, then one surrenders one's moral imperative to it.
I am not sure what team would that be? US funds supported Nazi Germany until the Soviet Union started advancing Westward... and then changed sides, because they were afraid they would lose all Europe. Nazi Germany was the Ukraine of WW2 - US proxy against the Soviet Union.
... except that President Putin was NOT wrong; he had no choice, because Nazilensky was prepared to invade Donbas in March... For people who actually listen to what President Putin has to say, his opinion is that if a fight cannot be avoided, it is better to throw the first punch, and this is what he did.
This will NOT stop, because the only way to replace the US$ with the CBDC coupons is to rule the world -> Russia and China MUST be made vassal states -> lots of good luck with that!
The best end to this would be the total collapse of the American currency, which will lead to an end of the globalist corruption... or regime change in Washington... otherwise it is NUKES for us.
Why bother reading or writing about anything? Accounts of history (news) as it happens are a form of quasi-fiction and prophecy aka editorial. History is likewise. "Based on a a true story".
Most of us lie far more than we care to admit. I see news as primarily a form of entertainment, but note that entertainment such as eugyppius provides is both uncommonly accurate history, a nifty lens of uncommon relative clarity on the now emerging from history to become history, and useful for making critical life decisions as history rolls through us and we through it.
One is unlikely to save humanity from itself. One may well not save oneself from humanity or even oneself (recovering addict speaking); but one can often save the moment, and life is nothing but moments. They are ultimately all we've got.
I hope and trust you will keep us informed of how the mainstream German media play this story, especially since Hersh reports that the German chancellor went to see Biden and it was after that meeting, that Biden made the public announcements about NS being doomed if Russia invaded Ukraine and was much more public and bombastic. Did Biden tell Scholz anything about this in advance? It only seems logical that the US would forwarn the German government that they are about to shut down a main energy artery.
Hersh may have just opened the first can of worms, in a crate.
I’m pretty sure Germany knew in advance, the Greens were happy with the outcome. Otherwise there would have been an “investigation”. The German media seems also to have completely ignored the elephant in the room and doesn’t want to admit that German leaders literally stopped their citizens from having heat for the winter to appease the Americans.
Germany is all in on the NATO side. Ultimately, that's the takeaway of the sabotage itself.
Russia lost any credibility in playing the victim card with their wanton and deliberatel attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, a blatant war crime.
Ultimately, NATO is in conflict with Russia -- cold/proxy war now, with a probability of a shooting war in the near future. There are those who question the strategic wisdom of this conflict (for both sides), but until the shooting war with NATO starts, no one is really animated by the question of who sabotaged the pipelines. They would have been in the headlines far longer if they were.
Even ZeroHedge touches on it only sporadically, and they're hard-core pro-Russia
I kind of don’t see ZeroHedge as being hard-core proRussia, more that they talk about the nuances of war, whereas US press tries to paint everything black and white. ZH focused a lot on the biolabs and that maybe the Russians were reasonable to hate them, the CIA orchestrated Maidan uprising and how Ukraine was always historically not supposed to join NATO. All of it was provocations. I don’t think anyone denies Putin is scary and obviously regularly poisons his political adversaries. When I speak to Americans who only read MSM press, I ask things like- if you decide to hit a cobra with a stick, should you be surprised when it bites?
Moreover, the entire biolabs narrative is intrinsically slanted towards Russia, as it ignores the actual history of biological threat reduction and "surveillance" programs not only within Ukraine, but also within Russia (what Putin does not want to acknowledge is that Russia received considerable funding through Nunn-Lugar and the DTRA up until 2012).
The reality of the "biolabs" is that they were never a deep dark secret, but were openly established and funded (Obama even took a victory lap over them while still a Senator), and Russia under Putin was a major participant in all the same "threat reduction" programs.
While it is all well and good to question the wisdom of Ukraine being a member of NATO, the reality is that Russia was for many years a NATO Partner For Peace alongside Ukraine.
It is also a reality that Putin has a very ethnonationalist view of Ukraine--it only has a right to exist as a satellite to a Muscovite Russian empire or hegemony, a view he laid out in detail in a July 2021 essay which was published on the Kremlin website. That makes his concern about "Nazis" within the Kyiv regime darkly and comically ironic.
The historical reality of Ukraine is that they do not want to be aligned with Russia. Lenin had to conquer the territory during the Russian Civil War in the 1920s (Ukraine had declared its independence from Russia after the tsar was overthrown), Stalin inflicted the Holodomor on them (which was in terms of number of deaths a far more horrific genocide than the Nazi Holocaust) in the 1930s, and they got dragged into WW2 because they had been forcibly integrated into the USSR. Ukraine has good and powerful historical reasons not to want to be aligned with Russia at any level.
"Ethnonationalist" is a newspeak and a tautology. If you are a nationalist, you are automatically speaking for your people's right to the soil their parent generations and ancestors lived on.
Blood heritage and its connection to land as a concept is almost as old as agriculture. And even (semi)nomadic peoples too had and still have the concept.
To not be nationalist is to say "I'm okay with my own blood relatives, my children, all the work done by my parents and grandparents being undone and voided and destroyed by intruders". To advocate multiculturalism and open borders and massmigration is to advocate genocide of the less prolific, less numerous ethnicities of the world.
The alternative to nationalism is the old cosmopolitan futurist and communist ideal of the Homo Sovjeticus: the State Citizen, only loyal to the state, with the state as the sole arbiter of morals, justice and the definitions and meaning of words and feelings. Nothing above the State; nothing beyond the State is the idealof the multiculturalists of today - they are one and all globalist fascists.
Nationalism is a force for good and does not mean hating others. Nationalism was intrinsical in the struggle for sovereignity and democracy in Europe in the 19th century and inspired all the peoples colonised by european powers to also strive for independence.
Family; kin; people; nation. That is the foundation of all cultures. Not the state. Not global corporations. Not communism. Not capitalism.
To be nationalist is to stand for your people's freedom and right to self-determination.
"The historical reality of Ukraine" is that it is complex. Consider the history of one of Ukraine's most beloved poets Taras Shevchenko. Although a fierce patriot and campaigner for an end to Ukrainian serfdom, Shevchenko loved Russia, its language and its history. He lived for years in St Petersburg, where there is still a monument honouring him, to this very day. The relationship is far more similar to that of Ireland the England - rivals, yes, but with a cultural and historical closeness that is greater still.
Because your comments are disingenuous and exist only in the realm of hyper polarized state propaganda, that is willfully ignorant to details from the other side, or apparently history of the entire world prior to a year ago. All of your claims of war crimes are dubious at best, and we know much of them have been perpetrated by Ukraine themselves - e.g. Bucha was Ukrainians themselves "cleansing" those they suspected of being Russian sympathizers, which they then went on to blame on the Russians to rile the west up into sending more billions.
You high jacked a comment thread to yell "Putin is a war criminal" as loudly as you can. And you do it here on a platform like substack where we have independent journalists reporting actual facts on the ground, not the stuff you're regurgitating from the msm. Then you have the gall to make statements like "Fact. Period. End of discussion."
Russia made the decision to invade Ukraine, and only Russia. And every time they power whine about escalation, they play the victim card. They target civilian infrastructure while calling strikes on legitimate military targets such as Kerch Bridge acts of terrorism--what is that but pretending to be the victim in a shooting war they chose to initiate?
Putin could stop this war tomorrow by pulling his troops back to Russia proper. Ukraine does not have that option.
US and NATO (Norway). Sweden and likely as well Denmark have helped conceal the facts. Europe is acting as vassals of the Global American Empire. I’m in the USA. I do not understand Europe’s submissive behavior. Is it a “Woke” thing with this new generation of the leadership class? Money? I do not see how cutting off Russian energy to the EU and escalating a dangerous proxy war on their own continent in the best interests of their people. Biden, Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan and top Republicans such McConnell and Pompeo et al are neocon bullies. Hopefully in the not so distant future, Europe (beyond Hungary and Turkey) will regain leaders who will fearlessly speak truth to power (hegemonic Global American Empire) and stand up for their own people and interests.
But not essential for living, which is the operative criterion for calling an attack a war crime, within the scope of the Geneva Conventions to which Russia is a signatory.
look, this "war crime" discourse is tiresome for many reasons, but it also overlooks all the proportionality and other exceptions in the Geneva articles. these make the strict legal case far more ambiguous than you suggest.
There's also the fact that the United States (and NATO) have pushed these exceptions very, very far, as an allowance to target dual-use infrastructure very broadly. On top of it, there is the controversial US position which designates even "war sustaining" economic infrastructure and supplies as legitimate targets.
It's not that the hypocrisy of your enemies justifies your own crimes, or that two wrongs make something justified. It's that Geneva idealises a kind of restricted warfare that spares the civilian population, then undermines this legal idea with all kinds of ambiguous exceptions because in practice it's impossible, and actual signatories to the treaty push these exceptions to the breaking point and beyond, while disingenuously accusing their opponents of WaR CriMEs according to much stricter definitions of the terms that they themselves reject.
All of this makes hand-wringing about Russian energy infrastructure attacks just fundamentally unserious.
The EU / NATO sought to undermine legitimate government in the Ukraine (2014). That was achieved with the installation of the most useless and corrupt government on the planet. The relentless attacks against the Donetsk Oblast region were obvious, as are the bio-labs. Therein lies the political and civil terrorism to which you allude, the endless bear-baiting and the current consequences which the globalists would dearly love to turn into a nuclear conflict, the product of a deranged US doctrine. In reality it marks the end of NATO (a organisation of defence that the Ukraine is not a proper member of) and probably further disintegration of the EU. Russia will continue its economic and financial ascendency. The US, as most can now see, is destined to irrelevance and chaos. Secession would seem a useful idea to preserve what remains of value in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
War crime war schmime. War is violence to achieve an end, and citizens ALWAYS get hammered in wars.
Geneva Conventions and all that are sorry public relations compromises to give war some aura of ethical legitimacy, an illusion of a "fair fight".
That said, I understand and endorse what Putin is doing, and find apologists for USNATO belligerence absurd but, alas, not in an amusing way. And if USNATO doesn't wake up and back out of Ukraine soon, Putin might enact another war "crime" and nuke the smithering shits out of us.
Fortunately, Putin does not appear to be anywhere near that delusional.
That being said, Putin IS violating the Geneva Conventions. Should he wind up on the losing side of this war, he is vulnerable to war crimes prosecution in The Hague.
It was a war crime for the CIA and State Department of the USA to overthrow the legitimate Ukraine government in 2014. Ukraine is a terrorist state. Victoria Nudelman and Angela Merkel are war criminals for orchestrating the coup.
How about the US and DoD being charged with war crimes for creating and funding the weaponization of the coronavirus into a bioweapon which injured and killed millions around the world?
What a ridiculous comment have you ever looked at actions of the west and its clear in your comment you have only the moral hand to play without historical /cultural context.
Of course, the best way to "discredit" Hersh is to come up with a viable alternative theory as to how and why the pipelines were blown up. Calling him "controversial" (who isn't?) etc, shows Der Spiegel has nothing of substance to say. Ad hominem attacks speak for themselves.
Exactly. They can't debunk Hersh's theory, except by referring to the White House denying the allegations. Which is not exactly convincing evidence.
To be honest, since the media collectively stopped reporting on Nordstream after 48 hours or so, it's very clear that nothing points to the Russians. If they could blame the Russians in any meaningful way, they wouldn't let us forget it. And who else has means, opportunity, and motive.?
I read the Hersch piece earlier today and while all the details might be open to question and further investigation, I believe that the United States had some role (major?) either directly or indirectly in this action. Quite frankly they had the most to gain politically and economically from seeing these pipelines taken off line. I find it fascinating that the MSM in the United States hasn't shown the least bit of interest in this story. Continues to confirm they are completely co-opted by the US security state. I am sure Russia knows exactly who is responsible for this action and has taken it into their continuing calculations on their war strategy/execution in Urkraine.
The only way it would have made sense as a Russian act of sabotage is if Putin had done it just before announcing his partial mobilization, as a false flag attack to generate popular support for mobilization.
There is historical precedent for this: it is believed that Putin orchestrated at least some of the "terror bombings" by Chechens in 1999 as a run-up to the Second Chechen War to garner popular support for retaking the breakaway republic.
Of course, the chronology doesn't line up for that, which leaves US/NATO/EU as the most probable scenario.
Russia never had an interest in attacking the pipelines, false flag scenarios make no sense according to any timeline. Intact Nord Stream means Russian leverage over a core NATO member, why would they ever give that up?
As for the 1999 apartment bombings: You have to be some level of deluded or manipulative to say that's remotely comparable, even if you believe every last inch of the Evil Putler Rise to Power fanfiction.
China, India, and S Africa are enjoying buying Urals Crude at a deep discount to Brent Crude. Even at that, Russian oil production is down significantly from pre-war levels, and Russia's ability to ramp back up is not nearly as certain as many would like to believe.
China and India are great customers for crude, but not for refined products, which means the refined products cap which just came in to effect could result in further reductions in Russian oil production by as much as 1 million bbl.
As of the last closing for Urals crude, the price caps are holding, and they have resulted in Putin having 40% less oil revenue flowing into government coffers.
IF China fully ramps up their "reopening" they may yet put upward pressure on the crude cap, but we are two months past the end of Zero COVID and China's reopening has yet to translate into higher oil prices.
Meanwhile, Europe has already made strides in replacing Russian NatGas with LNG imports--energy is more expensive, but not nonexistent.
Can they replace enough to sustain their industry (particularly in Germany)? That is still a bit of a question. However, at the present time the EU economy is in slightly better shape to endure the economic attritional warfare that the price caps fundamentally are.
Do not underestimate the stupidity and utter lack of morals of Nuland, Sullivan, Blinken and Biden. They don't care how many Ukrainians die in their futile war with Russia. They don't care how many Germans suffer and die, if it serves their hegemonic ambitions
I’m thinking Nuland is CIA and more and more that Blinken is just the hugest moron. He’s sort of the embodiment of the worlds most dangerous health policies created for covid- only he’s the foreign policy version.
Nuland is amoral and arguably evil, but you can't say she's stupid. She completely outmaneuvered Putin in 2013-3014 during the Maidan uprisings. Right or wrong, hers was the winning strategy.
The 'winning strategy' will result in the complete destruction of the Ukraine as a sovereign nation. Her winning strategy will result in the end of the Anglo-Zionist Empire.
This is crux of the issue. A tactically clever fool is still a fool. They might be able to gain the upper hand in the short term, but that may just set the board up for a larger collapse in the long term, which is what we're seeing now in Ukraine.
Real Politique, honor, statesmanship, strategy, informed and guided by a working moral compass. This is what's needed in the Collective West if we are to make it through the coming crises. We are sorely lacking. Things are not good
Lying over matters like sovereignty and peace accords is not out-maneuvering. It's stealing a cheap Pyrrhic short victory while ensuring your ultimate doom.
Also, how dare Putin try and take government diplomats at their word during a discussion in good faith?
Nuland "won" the way one "wins" by stealing hugely from the mob and thinking you can hide in plain sight.
The alleged Nuland ploy to use divers to evade Congressional scrutiny that would come of using USSOCOM divers is very plausible to me. Used to work in the building, certain quarters of the government are very inventive in coming up with ways to evade oversight and accountability, and Victoria Nuland is exactly the sort of official who would be well versed in such games.
From what I’ve read over the years since 2001, there’s a boutique aspect to it. Sometimes they go with CIA, sometimes with military; or as here, they (allegedly) went with regular Navy rather than Special Forces – all to minimize oversight in the specific situation they are presented with.
Certainly could be a wag the dog situation..... where US intelligence puts out a story (which is broadly true and factual) but which they want to allow certain elements to be "debunked" and then can claim the truth is a "conspiracy theory".
Literally everything the current admin does and tries to hide gets labeled a conspiracy theory as the truth starts to ooze out so it sounds about right to me!
Hersh's story includes the easily debunked claim that Stoltenberg was recruited as a US asset during the Vietnam war (which ended in 1975, when Stoltenberg was 15). I've already seen this apparent error used in an attempt to discredit Hersh's whole piece.
I'm glad Hersh landed here on Substack. I'll read the article and share my thoughts, but the most important thing is that this platform is becoming the place to be for free press and free thinkers.
I think the “others” are aware now of substack and that’s why folks like “Your local epidemiologist” are going to be opening up more accounts soon, unfortunately. They will try to ruin substack, like they tried with comments on Zerohedge (anonymous anti-semitic posters in the comment section).
I agree. Opportunists, opponents, and sociopaths/psychopaths end up gaming and ruining pretty much anything, from governments to economies to the scientific method. All we can do is be alert and try to minimize the damage.
Dispensing with Congressional oversight or notification? I'm shocked that such an upright administration, overflowing with integrity, honesty, and transparency would resort to such conduct.
Captain Renault! Please pick up the white courtesy phone, Captain Renault.
My new theory is that maybe the Swedes are near to reaching some conclusions from their investigation, or it's feared that they are, and it's also feared that they have evidence pointing to the involvement of the Norwegian navy. The story, then, is from the Americans, saying effectively "they were just acting on our orders."
In November last year the investigation was handed over to our Security Police (think secret police force dealing with both domestic and foreign issues) and a special prosecutor.
The entire thing is classified to the highest level, and everything points to any findings not being made public, ever. There's no real statute of limitations on classifying documents here, so don't expect anything at all beyond "inconclusive" as the result, at best.
Our regime has much too much riding on NATO-membership and trade with US-satellite states in the Middle East to risk upsetting the gravy cart. Heck, the only journalists covering how swedish arms and surveillance equipment is being soldto Saudi Arabia to help them with their ethnic cleansing in Yemen are old school communists - not even our alt-media is willing to cover that, simply because it would go against corporate interests of the dozen or so families who owns 85% of the swedish economy outside the state.
Still, assuming the Hersh story is roughly accurate: At this point, a lot of people at various levels in Denmark, Sweden and other governments must know or suspect some version of the truth. An authorised unofficial leak would be one way of framing the story in as favourable a way as possible, and forestalling more hostile, less flattering leaks.
For Sweden, that would be very unlikely in our current domestic political climate. All involved are vetted by military intelligence and the Security Police (Sicherheits-Polizei would be the closest translation to german), and you do not reach the positions of the investigating team without a real or metaphorical "Parteibuch" (this still exists as a political reality in Sweden and no one reaches higher than local middle management in any civil service or the military without it).
It is actually far more likely that any eventual leak would be due to accident or incompetence.
Simple, but good point: Lots of other people, agencies, governments, investigators, etc. must also know. I'm no underwater detonation expert, but it seems some "forensics" could have been found at the crime scene.
I keep thinking about the evidence that Assad "bombed his own people." That "Investigation" was no doubt a farce/cover-up as well.
Sweden has had the forensic evidence since the immediate aftermath of the explosions.
If the remnants of the electronics involved are identifiably US manufacture (and the type of signal processing technologies Hersh describes could very well be a US-only capability), then Sweden has known all along that this was a US operation.
If the remnants of the electronics involved are not identifably American, the US probably cannot be exposed by Sweden's evidence alone. Either way, it is unlikely Sweden did not reach their conclusion weeks ago. They are hardly slouches at maritime technologies.
I'm trying to say, that I think Hersh's story is only superficially about US complicity, and actually more about the junior NATO partner to this operation.
I think eugyppius’s characterization of Hersh’s article as “broadly plausible” basically sums up my reaction.
However, far from finding the part where Hersh describes how the planners justified (to themselves) not notifying Congressional leaders to be problematic, as eugyppius seems to, I echo commenter Murray from a few minutes ago in thinking that was maybe the most believable thing in the whole piece.
The sprawling secret state of U.S. so-called “national security” became well-practiced in just that sort of empty legalism during the Global War on Terror, when they wanted some tiny fig leaves to cover the naked lawlessness of their program of worldwide torture and kidnapping.
The flimsy fencing around the U.S. intelligence and covert ops apparatus that was set up in the 1970s was completely blown down during the Bush Jr. administration. They do what they want, and amuse themselves by getting some prostituted legal experts to explain how black is white.
Yes! And We The People are waking up more & more each day. The only good thing about the entire C19 Debacle is that it has caused People to deep dive into questioning EVERYTHING!! In the last 3 years I first questioned the extreme censorship, the ZERO treatments ( go to hospital when lips turn blue, hope there isn't a ventilator shortage), the constant barrage of fear-porn, etc.. Once I saw how we were being lied to I went down many rabbit holes and learned hundreds of years of history of Pharmakeia, the pure EVIL of allopathic medicine. I then asked myself ," What else is a lie?" "How much propaganda have I swallowed?" It was, at times, a devastating experience to learn the truth of things like NATO, of chemtrails, of food and water being poisoned by design and SO MUCH more.. When awake & you start connecting dots you cannot ever go back to sleep. Which brings me to the last sentence of your comment. Our Constitution has been captured. The Congress has been captured and are passing laws abdicating their powers.. PREP Act, Cares Act. Executive Orders all taking away our rights. The WHO treaty they are trying to pass, another nightmare usurping the power of Our Constitution!!! But People are waking up in large numbers and we thankfully have some individuals who are NOT corrupted in Congress. Recently, a member from my state of Michigan, Brad Paquette was vax injured and is beginning to wake up. I pray daily that more & more people WAKE UP and that more whistle-blowers come forward. I am 60 and woke up at 57 so I know it's possible!
Hersh has a hell of a track record, he's never been caught out on anything, to the best of my knowledge. This would not be the first time he single sourced a story, he did so with the illegal Cambodian bombing (see https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/lessons-thinnest-seymour-hershs-thinly-sourced-claims/), and was completely vindicated. The guy just doesn't do shoddy journalism, though of course caution is warranted, as always, on principle.
Hersh learned early enough, before publication of "The Dark Side of Camelot", to excise any reliance on the trove of documents discrediting JFK that turned out to be fraudulent (like Zip codes before the codes were introduced) from the published book. But there is still plenty in the book that is probably or certainly untrue. Most scandalous in my opinion is the undertone that he presumably picked up from his Secret Service and CIA sources that JFK's death was a good thing, in view of his scandalous misbehavior.
Though important, the detail is far less interesting than the complete dissinterest by any country or their media to call this act out as blatant US aggression.
It will come back to haunt USG, at some point. For now, no one can do anything about it because the power cartel running the show in the West will ensure there are no consequences, but eventually their position will worsen and the long term consequences of the loss of NS to Germany’s economy will ramify. Then the seeds that were sown by those divers’ charges will grow and bear their ugly fruit.
I thought the clever avoidance of congressional oversight was one of the more strikingly plausible aspects of the story, in the "Yes, Minister" sense. You can just imagine Sir Humphrey Appleby musing, "Well, the president has *basically* announced we're doing it, so technically it isn't 'covert' anymore, and that means we can leave Congress out of the loop altogether!"
Hersh's story does fit the available facts, apart from the weird issue with the 17 hour delay between explosions. The mysterious surveillance flights over the area, the naval exercises, the involvement of Norwegian toadies, it all adds up.
But the main takeaway from the story (if true) is the familiar one of the Great Retard Hegemon lumbering across the world stage, casually blowing up its allies' infrastructure because it wants to sell gas to another market. Truly a fitting sign of the times.
Except the "sell gas to another market" line doesn't make a huge amount of sense in conjunction with the current administration doing quite a bit to stymie the development of new gas sources. Like, if the US were actually *producing* the gas, I could totally see it. But we aren't, so what's the point?
It's an empire thing: You have multitudes of interests, each with their own power base and bought-off politicians, all jockeying to further their own agenda. I suspected at the time that there were whole huge sections of the USG hydra that had no idea this was being planned. That seems to have been the case. The fossil-fuel guys won this one.
More seriously, there is an actual geostrategic rationale for blowing up Nordstream, which is pretty much standard Mackinder Thesis stuff about preventing the Eurasian landmass from uniting and forming a competing power bloc to the hegemon (Britain then, the Retard Hegemon now). Nordstream threatened to bring Germany closer to Russia, so they made it go away.
I know my tin foil hat is getting a little tight these days but is it possible that our genius class in the US has a strategy to push a large part of our actual natural gas production to Europe in order to justify their goal of moving us to a "green" energy platform? You know, we have to help our friends in Europe by letting them have our nasty, dirty fossil fuels which allows us to get that much closer to energy utopia!
Limiting the German-Russian powerhouse. German industry and ingenuity combined with Russia's natural resources is an economic threat to the USA. Plus there's an interview following around with condoleeza rice from I believe around 2014, where she basically articulates the goal of getting Europe on American natural gas.
I like Fox News as much as the next guy, but if you don’t realize that the U.S. is a major exporter of LNG, and that powerful forces in the *permanent* U.S. government (yes, even under Biden!) want to maximize both the wealth and power that spring therefrom, by fair means and foul – please wake up.
The point is US Dollar hegemony. Allowing other countries to work with the BRICS orbit speeds the process of de-dollarization. It seems to be the one overriding thing that the US empire must avoid at all costs.
It's good to question the story and the sources. But Seymour Hersh is probably going to get very rich, very fast ... by just doing investigative journalism that is off limits to the msm. If he throws in some Covid stories, he'll be a millionaire just from his Substack site in half a year. I see he already has "hundreds" of paid subscribers. I also don't think he'd botch his first big Substack story would he?
Prediction: "They" are going to come after his ass big time and hard. They can't have big-time investigative journalists with all kinds of sources and credentials coming after them. But that's what they are going to get. The market is too big and too lucrative for every investigative journalist with some bonafides not to tap into it. Berenson already showed what's possible. Hersch will too. So they better stop him now before he gets going good.
It was mentioned earlier here that Hersh only mentions the second explosions. We ASSUME he lacks conclusively damning data on the first. Maybe he does. The maintenance of the official narrative facade seems to be increasingly reliant on various 'dead man switches', incriminating data dumps, being ready to explode if TPTB go brazen with assassination, be that physical or of character.
One always has to wonder, but singularity of source is a vague reason for dismissal. Was a time when Einstein was the only reliable source on relativity; and Hersh himself is a "single source".
His job, never easy, is going to be even harder. He can't say he's working on a story for the NY Times or some other well-known publication that is paying him for freelance work. He's just working for himself now. But he will be able to get interviews or phone calls returned that Substack peons like myself never could. Plus, if someone wants to reach a big audience with their "whistleblowing" claims ... he'll still be able to deliver that audience. Even more so now that Twitter is once again allowing good stories to go viral. It will be interesting to follow his work in coming months. I think the bottom line is that Substack is getting closer to killing the faux investigative journalists.
I think there are 2 different types of sources that can be used by Hersh. Officially, the FBI and CIA have sources at WaPo and NYT that they regularly use for their spin (sometimes even against each other about an incident). But whistleblowers (if there are any genuine ones- so far very few) could be a second source. Hard to know which one was used for the Hersh article if they are trying to get out ahead of the Swedish investigation.
Seymour Hersh is 86 years old. I doubt he is doing it for the money. He is likely working with elements in the US government determined to remove the evil influence of the neo-conservatives on American foreign policy.
1. Prime minister Støre meets Biden at the White House on January 27th, 2022. Literally the same day, Victoria Nuland at State makes the statement about "one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward".
2. Norway received their first P8 surveillance planes from the US in early 2022. Documentation from the Norwegian armed forces shows by May, the government had accepted a request for more funding for "additional" sonobuoys, even though the P8 planes hadn't yet gone on any official missions.
3. On September 16th, Norwegian media report that a photo ban has been expanded around Evenes Air Station, where the P8 surveillance planes are stationed.
4. Prime minister Støre and defense minister Gram visited the US Navy 2nd Fleet and NATO Joint Force Command in Norfolk, VA on September 19th, one week before Nord Stream blows up.
All of this could be a coincidence, and the details about Norway could be part of a red herring to undermine the entire story about US involvement. Nonetheless, I find the timing on these things a bit unnerving.
Not to mention that Norway would stand to benefit from Nord Stream becoming inoperable, due to gas sales to Europe.
In no way being combative, but I find the skepticism applied here quite strange. Like, this is how this stuff generally gets disclosed. Is the hypothesis that this is some kind of false flag and had nothing to do with what happened? What alternative hypothesis seems more compelling? That it was more involved? More banal?
Whether these details are accurate or not, this is a plausible scenario of how it could have happened, and I don't quite get the fixation on a single source. The media is untrustworthy, journalists are untrustworthy, them having 2-3 sources does not magically make it better. There were 50 sources for the claim that the laptop was russian disinformation, they just happened to be false.
Anyway, I completely get not believing the security state or the journalists covering them. I get being skeptical of a single source. But in this case, why? Do you think this is a wholesale fabrication? Do you think this is a single source misleading a journalist into writing a plausible story that could have happened, but didn't? Why?
I'm not trying to imply these assertions are baseless, I don't quite grasp what the implication is as to what potentially untoward behavior may be happening here. To me, this is consistent with how these things get disclosed, both that it's limited in scope, it has an element of doubt, and it quietly explains what happened and when.
in broad terms, the story is totally plausible, and I think US/NATO involvement in the attacks is a near-certainty. but, we have to keep in mind that this is potentially an unofficial but authorised leak from the administration, or an unauthorised leak from some self-serving party to the decision, or any number of other things. it's certainly only part of the truth, as important details are missing, and so it's worth remaining critical right now.
Good point: "There were 50 sources for the claim that the laptop was russian disinformation, they just happened to be false."
We also had about 20 people (credible sources all) who signed that letter/article saying that the coronavirus came from nature and couldn't have come from any kind of lab leak.
Generally speaking, whatever the U.S. government spokesman says, I believe the opposite until proven otherwise.
If this story contains demonstrably untrue details (like Stoltenberg being recruited as a US asset at age 14), that could be used to discredit all narrative about Nordstream that diverges from the MSM narrative.
What jumped out at me in Hersh’s article is this:
The Americans “...convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.”
Like Covid, the public was told that the R&D was for the good of mankind, to save lives, on and on.
America has zero credibility. Zero.
These people are doing everything in their power to goad us to war. We are on a runaway train.
"America has zero credibility. Zero."
Jacinda on the other hand :P...
C'mon; the global West has zero credibility; they are Nazi and Nazi supporters.
https://youtu.be/lt0iLMoG7XU?t=1554
Nazis never lost WW2, only Germany did.
Until very recently I would have dismissed your comment but not anymore.
Until recently, I would have dismissed it myself 🤣🤣🤣. Live and learn!
You're just saying that because Klaus Schwab looks like a German villain straight out of central casting. ;)
If governments ever had credibility the American Revolution would never have needed to be fought, and the French Revolution would never have happened.
Nor is there getting around the reality that Russia under Putin and China under the CCP are far more fascistic than the west has even attempted to be.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
1. Thanks for the link
2. Speaking of the French Revolution, it's the time for the guillotine yet again.
You are most welcome.
However, as I have a moral objection to capital punishment (I do not believe the State has the moral authority to take human life), I will refrain from cheering on the use of the guillotine.
I also am against capital punishment but given what we have seen lately in health and geopolitical skulduggery , I am willing to make exceptions.
The crescendissimo of cheering on of novel medical interventions these days is deafening, as is the death sentence they frequently impose. Intentionally take a life, then one surrenders one's moral imperative to it.
Well, it'll actually be the State and those who run it that'll actually be under the blade...
The US picked the wrong team in that war.
I am not sure what team would that be? US funds supported Nazi Germany until the Soviet Union started advancing Westward... and then changed sides, because they were afraid they would lose all Europe. Nazi Germany was the Ukraine of WW2 - US proxy against the Soviet Union.
Vee did not lose zer vor vee came second.
“ old Charlie stole the handle , and the train, it won’t stop going...no...way... to...slow...down”
Unelected, unwanted, unaccountable. Hoch der Kaiser.
... except that President Putin was NOT wrong; he had no choice, because Nazilensky was prepared to invade Donbas in March... For people who actually listen to what President Putin has to say, his opinion is that if a fight cannot be avoided, it is better to throw the first punch, and this is what he did.
This will NOT stop, because the only way to replace the US$ with the CBDC coupons is to rule the world -> Russia and China MUST be made vassal states -> lots of good luck with that!
The best end to this would be the total collapse of the American currency, which will lead to an end of the globalist corruption... or regime change in Washington... otherwise it is NUKES for us.
Thank you for speaking sense. We already seem to have shills on hete
God forbid our currency collapse...”them’s fightin words!” We are ready for regime change ASAP, though. Unnecessary war we are funding.
Zelensky's primary cultural identity is Jewish, not Ukrainian or Freemason.
His cultural identity is coke-head 😏
https://odysee.com/@RussiaInsight:a/clownzelensky:e
Because the people in charge are few, and there is power in numbers, and truth. Never give up.
Because I have an infant grandson, my first grandchild. That's reason for me to never give up.
Why bother reading or writing about anything? Accounts of history (news) as it happens are a form of quasi-fiction and prophecy aka editorial. History is likewise. "Based on a a true story".
Most of us lie far more than we care to admit. I see news as primarily a form of entertainment, but note that entertainment such as eugyppius provides is both uncommonly accurate history, a nifty lens of uncommon relative clarity on the now emerging from history to become history, and useful for making critical life decisions as history rolls through us and we through it.
One is unlikely to save humanity from itself. One may well not save oneself from humanity or even oneself (recovering addict speaking); but one can often save the moment, and life is nothing but moments. They are ultimately all we've got.
I really like this one:
https://youtu.be/b4IuHaV-N2E
Hail Atlantis!
Nice!
I hope and trust you will keep us informed of how the mainstream German media play this story, especially since Hersh reports that the German chancellor went to see Biden and it was after that meeting, that Biden made the public announcements about NS being doomed if Russia invaded Ukraine and was much more public and bombastic. Did Biden tell Scholz anything about this in advance? It only seems logical that the US would forwarn the German government that they are about to shut down a main energy artery.
Hersh may have just opened the first can of worms, in a crate.
I’m pretty sure Germany knew in advance, the Greens were happy with the outcome. Otherwise there would have been an “investigation”. The German media seems also to have completely ignored the elephant in the room and doesn’t want to admit that German leaders literally stopped their citizens from having heat for the winter to appease the Americans.
disgusting really.
Germany is all in on the NATO side. Ultimately, that's the takeaway of the sabotage itself.
Russia lost any credibility in playing the victim card with their wanton and deliberatel attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, a blatant war crime.
Ultimately, NATO is in conflict with Russia -- cold/proxy war now, with a probability of a shooting war in the near future. There are those who question the strategic wisdom of this conflict (for both sides), but until the shooting war with NATO starts, no one is really animated by the question of who sabotaged the pipelines. They would have been in the headlines far longer if they were.
Even ZeroHedge touches on it only sporadically, and they're hard-core pro-Russia
Pretty obnoxious comment, also wrong in ways big and small.
I kind of don’t see ZeroHedge as being hard-core proRussia, more that they talk about the nuances of war, whereas US press tries to paint everything black and white. ZH focused a lot on the biolabs and that maybe the Russians were reasonable to hate them, the CIA orchestrated Maidan uprising and how Ukraine was always historically not supposed to join NATO. All of it was provocations. I don’t think anyone denies Putin is scary and obviously regularly poisons his political adversaries. When I speak to Americans who only read MSM press, I ask things like- if you decide to hit a cobra with a stick, should you be surprised when it bites?
The commentariat at ZH is definitely pro Russia.
Moreover, the entire biolabs narrative is intrinsically slanted towards Russia, as it ignores the actual history of biological threat reduction and "surveillance" programs not only within Ukraine, but also within Russia (what Putin does not want to acknowledge is that Russia received considerable funding through Nunn-Lugar and the DTRA up until 2012).
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/when-is-bioweapons-research-not-bioweapons
The reality of the "biolabs" is that they were never a deep dark secret, but were openly established and funded (Obama even took a victory lap over them while still a Senator), and Russia under Putin was a major participant in all the same "threat reduction" programs.
While it is all well and good to question the wisdom of Ukraine being a member of NATO, the reality is that Russia was for many years a NATO Partner For Peace alongside Ukraine.
It is also a reality that Putin has a very ethnonationalist view of Ukraine--it only has a right to exist as a satellite to a Muscovite Russian empire or hegemony, a view he laid out in detail in a July 2021 essay which was published on the Kremlin website. That makes his concern about "Nazis" within the Kyiv regime darkly and comically ironic.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
(archival link here: https://archive.fo/IzbpA)
The historical reality of Ukraine is that they do not want to be aligned with Russia. Lenin had to conquer the territory during the Russian Civil War in the 1920s (Ukraine had declared its independence from Russia after the tsar was overthrown), Stalin inflicted the Holodomor on them (which was in terms of number of deaths a far more horrific genocide than the Nazi Holocaust) in the 1930s, and they got dragged into WW2 because they had been forcibly integrated into the USSR. Ukraine has good and powerful historical reasons not to want to be aligned with Russia at any level.
lol, so 1) the biolabs are cool because they're not secret, and 2) RuSSiAn ImPEriALisM. go post state department propaganda somewhere else.
"Ethnonationalist" is a newspeak and a tautology. If you are a nationalist, you are automatically speaking for your people's right to the soil their parent generations and ancestors lived on.
Blood heritage and its connection to land as a concept is almost as old as agriculture. And even (semi)nomadic peoples too had and still have the concept.
To not be nationalist is to say "I'm okay with my own blood relatives, my children, all the work done by my parents and grandparents being undone and voided and destroyed by intruders". To advocate multiculturalism and open borders and massmigration is to advocate genocide of the less prolific, less numerous ethnicities of the world.
The alternative to nationalism is the old cosmopolitan futurist and communist ideal of the Homo Sovjeticus: the State Citizen, only loyal to the state, with the state as the sole arbiter of morals, justice and the definitions and meaning of words and feelings. Nothing above the State; nothing beyond the State is the idealof the multiculturalists of today - they are one and all globalist fascists.
Nationalism is a force for good and does not mean hating others. Nationalism was intrinsical in the struggle for sovereignity and democracy in Europe in the 19th century and inspired all the peoples colonised by european powers to also strive for independence.
Family; kin; people; nation. That is the foundation of all cultures. Not the state. Not global corporations. Not communism. Not capitalism.
To be nationalist is to stand for your people's freedom and right to self-determination.
"The historical reality of Ukraine" is that it is complex. Consider the history of one of Ukraine's most beloved poets Taras Shevchenko. Although a fierce patriot and campaigner for an end to Ukrainian serfdom, Shevchenko loved Russia, its language and its history. He lived for years in St Petersburg, where there is still a monument honouring him, to this very day. The relationship is far more similar to that of Ireland the England - rivals, yes, but with a cultural and historical closeness that is greater still.
drool-soaked equivocation
If I could down vote you I would, shill.
And this matters....why?
Because your comments are disingenuous and exist only in the realm of hyper polarized state propaganda, that is willfully ignorant to details from the other side, or apparently history of the entire world prior to a year ago. All of your claims of war crimes are dubious at best, and we know much of them have been perpetrated by Ukraine themselves - e.g. Bucha was Ukrainians themselves "cleansing" those they suspected of being Russian sympathizers, which they then went on to blame on the Russians to rile the west up into sending more billions.
You high jacked a comment thread to yell "Putin is a war criminal" as loudly as you can. And you do it here on a platform like substack where we have independent journalists reporting actual facts on the ground, not the stuff you're regurgitating from the msm. Then you have the gall to make statements like "Fact. Period. End of discussion."
No sir, no you're a non objective zealot.
Russia did not plat victim!
It is the "Collective Waste" that have reduced their crediblity to ZERO.
Who really are the perps of this unnecessary conflict: U$A or Russia.
Russia made the decision to invade Ukraine, and only Russia. And every time they power whine about escalation, they play the victim card. They target civilian infrastructure while calling strikes on legitimate military targets such as Kerch Bridge acts of terrorism--what is that but pretending to be the victim in a shooting war they chose to initiate?
Putin could stop this war tomorrow by pulling his troops back to Russia proper. Ukraine does not have that option.
These realities are not ever going to change.
US and UK blew up Nordstream which is civilian infrastructure.
US and NATO (Norway). Sweden and likely as well Denmark have helped conceal the facts. Europe is acting as vassals of the Global American Empire. I’m in the USA. I do not understand Europe’s submissive behavior. Is it a “Woke” thing with this new generation of the leadership class? Money? I do not see how cutting off Russian energy to the EU and escalating a dangerous proxy war on their own continent in the best interests of their people. Biden, Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan and top Republicans such McConnell and Pompeo et al are neocon bullies. Hopefully in the not so distant future, Europe (beyond Hungary and Turkey) will regain leaders who will fearlessly speak truth to power (hegemonic Global American Empire) and stand up for their own people and interests.
Did they forget the destruction to their cities caused during WWII?
Did they forget the Nazi occupied countries using their citizens for forced labor?
Did they forget the displaced persons in Europe who had no home to return to?
Did they forget the millions that were killed?
Guess they want a repeat.
But not essential for living, which is the operative criterion for calling an attack a war crime, within the scope of the Geneva Conventions to which Russia is a signatory.
look, this "war crime" discourse is tiresome for many reasons, but it also overlooks all the proportionality and other exceptions in the Geneva articles. these make the strict legal case far more ambiguous than you suggest.
There's also the fact that the United States (and NATO) have pushed these exceptions very, very far, as an allowance to target dual-use infrastructure very broadly. On top of it, there is the controversial US position which designates even "war sustaining" economic infrastructure and supplies as legitimate targets.
It's not that the hypocrisy of your enemies justifies your own crimes, or that two wrongs make something justified. It's that Geneva idealises a kind of restricted warfare that spares the civilian population, then undermines this legal idea with all kinds of ambiguous exceptions because in practice it's impossible, and actual signatories to the treaty push these exceptions to the breaking point and beyond, while disingenuously accusing their opponents of WaR CriMEs according to much stricter definitions of the terms that they themselves reject.
All of this makes hand-wringing about Russian energy infrastructure attacks just fundamentally unserious.
Cars, hospitals, bridges, railroads, airports, hydro-electric dams, nuclearpower plants, et cetera are not essential for living either.
Only shelter, food, water and sleep are "essential for living".
Energy is essential for living.
People die when they freeze to death.
Countries collapse when they don't have enough energy for industry.
The CIA-backed coup in Ukraine was in 2014; Russia was 8 years too late in her response.
The EU / NATO sought to undermine legitimate government in the Ukraine (2014). That was achieved with the installation of the most useless and corrupt government on the planet. The relentless attacks against the Donetsk Oblast region were obvious, as are the bio-labs. Therein lies the political and civil terrorism to which you allude, the endless bear-baiting and the current consequences which the globalists would dearly love to turn into a nuclear conflict, the product of a deranged US doctrine. In reality it marks the end of NATO (a organisation of defence that the Ukraine is not a proper member of) and probably further disintegration of the EU. Russia will continue its economic and financial ascendency. The US, as most can now see, is destined to irrelevance and chaos. Secession would seem a useful idea to preserve what remains of value in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
War crime war schmime. War is violence to achieve an end, and citizens ALWAYS get hammered in wars.
Geneva Conventions and all that are sorry public relations compromises to give war some aura of ethical legitimacy, an illusion of a "fair fight".
That said, I understand and endorse what Putin is doing, and find apologists for USNATO belligerence absurd but, alas, not in an amusing way. And if USNATO doesn't wake up and back out of Ukraine soon, Putin might enact another war "crime" and nuke the smithering shits out of us.
https://youtu.be/jShMQw2H2cM
Fortunately, Putin does not appear to be anywhere near that delusional.
That being said, Putin IS violating the Geneva Conventions. Should he wind up on the losing side of this war, he is vulnerable to war crimes prosecution in The Hague.
That's a bit more than just "PR".
It was a war crime for the CIA and State Department of the USA to overthrow the legitimate Ukraine government in 2014. Ukraine is a terrorist state. Victoria Nudelman and Angela Merkel are war criminals for orchestrating the coup.
How about the US and DoD being charged with war crimes for creating and funding the weaponization of the coronavirus into a bioweapon which injured and killed millions around the world?
Zelensky is a corrupt greedy little bitch.
+100 billions USD given to that little blackmailer to keep Pedo Joe Biden's secrets safe.
US funded the bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
Everything I said is backed up by facts.
Period.
End of Sentence.
End of Discussion.
US = perp
What a ridiculous comment have you ever looked at actions of the west and its clear in your comment you have only the moral hand to play without historical /cultural context.
I hope so....
At the moment, Der Spiegel is trying hard to discredit Hersh:
"the controversial US-Journalist Seymour Hersh writes in a blog post (using weak references only) ....it is already used by Russian propaganda."
Of course, the best way to "discredit" Hersh is to come up with a viable alternative theory as to how and why the pipelines were blown up. Calling him "controversial" (who isn't?) etc, shows Der Spiegel has nothing of substance to say. Ad hominem attacks speak for themselves.
Exactly. They can't debunk Hersh's theory, except by referring to the White House denying the allegations. Which is not exactly convincing evidence.
To be honest, since the media collectively stopped reporting on Nordstream after 48 hours or so, it's very clear that nothing points to the Russians. If they could blame the Russians in any meaningful way, they wouldn't let us forget it. And who else has means, opportunity, and motive.?
I read the Hersch piece earlier today and while all the details might be open to question and further investigation, I believe that the United States had some role (major?) either directly or indirectly in this action. Quite frankly they had the most to gain politically and economically from seeing these pipelines taken off line. I find it fascinating that the MSM in the United States hasn't shown the least bit of interest in this story. Continues to confirm they are completely co-opted by the US security state. I am sure Russia knows exactly who is responsible for this action and has taken it into their continuing calculations on their war strategy/execution in Urkraine.
oh, I completely agree that US /NATO involvement is a near-certainty.
It was always the most probable scenario.
The only way it would have made sense as a Russian act of sabotage is if Putin had done it just before announcing his partial mobilization, as a false flag attack to generate popular support for mobilization.
There is historical precedent for this: it is believed that Putin orchestrated at least some of the "terror bombings" by Chechens in 1999 as a run-up to the Second Chechen War to garner popular support for retaking the breakaway republic.
Of course, the chronology doesn't line up for that, which leaves US/NATO/EU as the most probable scenario.
Russia never had an interest in attacking the pipelines, false flag scenarios make no sense according to any timeline. Intact Nord Stream means Russian leverage over a core NATO member, why would they ever give that up?
As for the 1999 apartment bombings: You have to be some level of deluded or manipulative to say that's remotely comparable, even if you believe every last inch of the Evil Putler Rise to Power fanfiction.
US Navy bragged about the "training" exercise in the June 2022 issue of Seapower Magazine.
https://seapowermagazine.org/baltops-22-a-perfect-opportunity-for-research-and-resting-new-technology/
If Putin didn't see it coming before he invaded it's part of his continuing miscalculations on Ukraine.
China, India, and S Africa are enjoying buying Urals Crude at a deep discount to Brent Crude. Even at that, Russian oil production is down significantly from pre-war levels, and Russia's ability to ramp back up is not nearly as certain as many would like to believe.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/could-the-oil-price-cap-end-russian
China and India are great customers for crude, but not for refined products, which means the refined products cap which just came in to effect could result in further reductions in Russian oil production by as much as 1 million bbl.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/tightening-the-fossil-fuel-screws
As of the last closing for Urals crude, the price caps are holding, and they have resulted in Putin having 40% less oil revenue flowing into government coffers.
IF China fully ramps up their "reopening" they may yet put upward pressure on the crude cap, but we are two months past the end of Zero COVID and China's reopening has yet to translate into higher oil prices.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/if-chinas-first-wave-of-covid-is
Meanwhile, Europe has already made strides in replacing Russian NatGas with LNG imports--energy is more expensive, but not nonexistent.
Can they replace enough to sustain their industry (particularly in Germany)? That is still a bit of a question. However, at the present time the EU economy is in slightly better shape to endure the economic attritional warfare that the price caps fundamentally are.
Do not underestimate the stupidity and utter lack of morals of Nuland, Sullivan, Blinken and Biden. They don't care how many Ukrainians die in their futile war with Russia. They don't care how many Germans suffer and die, if it serves their hegemonic ambitions
I’m thinking Nuland is CIA and more and more that Blinken is just the hugest moron. He’s sort of the embodiment of the worlds most dangerous health policies created for covid- only he’s the foreign policy version.
Nuland is amoral and arguably evil, but you can't say she's stupid. She completely outmaneuvered Putin in 2013-3014 during the Maidan uprisings. Right or wrong, hers was the winning strategy.
The 'winning strategy' will result in the complete destruction of the Ukraine as a sovereign nation. Her winning strategy will result in the end of the Anglo-Zionist Empire.
This is crux of the issue. A tactically clever fool is still a fool. They might be able to gain the upper hand in the short term, but that may just set the board up for a larger collapse in the long term, which is what we're seeing now in Ukraine.
Real Politique, honor, statesmanship, strategy, informed and guided by a working moral compass. This is what's needed in the Collective West if we are to make it through the coming crises. We are sorely lacking. Things are not good
The classic case of someone who was tactically clever but caused ultimate disaster is Adolf Hitler.
Lying over matters like sovereignty and peace accords is not out-maneuvering. It's stealing a cheap Pyrrhic short victory while ensuring your ultimate doom.
Also, how dare Putin try and take government diplomats at their word during a discussion in good faith?
Nuland "won" the way one "wins" by stealing hugely from the mob and thinking you can hide in plain sight.
The alleged Nuland ploy to use divers to evade Congressional scrutiny that would come of using USSOCOM divers is very plausible to me. Used to work in the building, certain quarters of the government are very inventive in coming up with ways to evade oversight and accountability, and Victoria Nuland is exactly the sort of official who would be well versed in such games.
thanks, very helpful.
Seapower Magazine did an article in June 2022 about the US Navy "training" exercise with NATO allies.
https://seapowermagazine.org/baltops-22-a-perfect-opportunity-for-research-and-resting-new-technology/
From what I’ve read over the years since 2001, there’s a boutique aspect to it. Sometimes they go with CIA, sometimes with military; or as here, they (allegedly) went with regular Navy rather than Special Forces – all to minimize oversight in the specific situation they are presented with.
100%. Spot on.
I'd add it looks to be a step further in the last 10 years; we've hijacked the Law itself as a vehicle for illegality.
It is striking to me how similar these neoliberal actors are to the neocons during Bush II.
Certainly could be a wag the dog situation..... where US intelligence puts out a story (which is broadly true and factual) but which they want to allow certain elements to be "debunked" and then can claim the truth is a "conspiracy theory".
Literally everything the current admin does and tries to hide gets labeled a conspiracy theory as the truth starts to ooze out so it sounds about right to me!
AKA, a "limited hangout".
Hersh's story includes the easily debunked claim that Stoltenberg was recruited as a US asset during the Vietnam war (which ended in 1975, when Stoltenberg was 15). I've already seen this apparent error used in an attempt to discredit Hersh's whole piece.
I'm glad Hersh landed here on Substack. I'll read the article and share my thoughts, but the most important thing is that this platform is becoming the place to be for free press and free thinkers.
agreed.
I think the “others” are aware now of substack and that’s why folks like “Your local epidemiologist” are going to be opening up more accounts soon, unfortunately. They will try to ruin substack, like they tried with comments on Zerohedge (anonymous anti-semitic posters in the comment section).
I agree. Opportunists, opponents, and sociopaths/psychopaths end up gaming and ruining pretty much anything, from governments to economies to the scientific method. All we can do is be alert and try to minimize the damage.
This. You can decrease SNR and credibility with noise. "Fairness doctrine" with paid front-posters.
Dispensing with Congressional oversight or notification? I'm shocked that such an upright administration, overflowing with integrity, honesty, and transparency would resort to such conduct.
Captain Renault! Please pick up the white courtesy phone, Captain Renault.
If Americans acted unilaterally, it is tantamount to an act of war.
If German officials knew, it is an act of treason.
We totally agree.
My new theory is that maybe the Swedes are near to reaching some conclusions from their investigation, or it's feared that they are, and it's also feared that they have evidence pointing to the involvement of the Norwegian navy. The story, then, is from the Americans, saying effectively "they were just acting on our orders."
interesting
So the Swede inspections might show internal vs external causes? They have been silent.
but why would Sweden release their findings if it undermines NATO?
you think they can't suppress it leaking and US now getting out in front of the story?
real shame if Hersch is getting played on his big Substack debut...
In November last year the investigation was handed over to our Security Police (think secret police force dealing with both domestic and foreign issues) and a special prosecutor.
The entire thing is classified to the highest level, and everything points to any findings not being made public, ever. There's no real statute of limitations on classifying documents here, so don't expect anything at all beyond "inconclusive" as the result, at best.
Our regime has much too much riding on NATO-membership and trade with US-satellite states in the Middle East to risk upsetting the gravy cart. Heck, the only journalists covering how swedish arms and surveillance equipment is being soldto Saudi Arabia to help them with their ethnic cleansing in Yemen are old school communists - not even our alt-media is willing to cover that, simply because it would go against corporate interests of the dozen or so families who owns 85% of the swedish economy outside the state.
Still, assuming the Hersh story is roughly accurate: At this point, a lot of people at various levels in Denmark, Sweden and other governments must know or suspect some version of the truth. An authorised unofficial leak would be one way of framing the story in as favourable a way as possible, and forestalling more hostile, less flattering leaks.
For Sweden, that would be very unlikely in our current domestic political climate. All involved are vetted by military intelligence and the Security Police (Sicherheits-Polizei would be the closest translation to german), and you do not reach the positions of the investigating team without a real or metaphorical "Parteibuch" (this still exists as a political reality in Sweden and no one reaches higher than local middle management in any civil service or the military without it).
It is actually far more likely that any eventual leak would be due to accident or incompetence.
Simple, but good point: Lots of other people, agencies, governments, investigators, etc. must also know. I'm no underwater detonation expert, but it seems some "forensics" could have been found at the crime scene.
I keep thinking about the evidence that Assad "bombed his own people." That "Investigation" was no doubt a farce/cover-up as well.
Sweden has had the forensic evidence since the immediate aftermath of the explosions.
If the remnants of the electronics involved are identifiably US manufacture (and the type of signal processing technologies Hersh describes could very well be a US-only capability), then Sweden has known all along that this was a US operation.
If the remnants of the electronics involved are not identifably American, the US probably cannot be exposed by Sweden's evidence alone. Either way, it is unlikely Sweden did not reach their conclusion weeks ago. They are hardly slouches at maritime technologies.
I'm trying to say, that I think Hersh's story is only superficially about US complicity, and actually more about the junior NATO partner to this operation.
Why does the Hersh story make absolutely no mention of the Brits?
I think eugyppius’s characterization of Hersh’s article as “broadly plausible” basically sums up my reaction.
However, far from finding the part where Hersh describes how the planners justified (to themselves) not notifying Congressional leaders to be problematic, as eugyppius seems to, I echo commenter Murray from a few minutes ago in thinking that was maybe the most believable thing in the whole piece.
The sprawling secret state of U.S. so-called “national security” became well-practiced in just that sort of empty legalism during the Global War on Terror, when they wanted some tiny fig leaves to cover the naked lawlessness of their program of worldwide torture and kidnapping.
The flimsy fencing around the U.S. intelligence and covert ops apparatus that was set up in the 1970s was completely blown down during the Bush Jr. administration. They do what they want, and amuse themselves by getting some prostituted legal experts to explain how black is white.
Hersh's article matches the movement of one Navy P8 extremely well.
look on imgur [dot] com [slash] a [slash] hB5HNzV
A screengrab from that P8's tracking via adbsexchange [dot] com.
Gary
Yes! And We The People are waking up more & more each day. The only good thing about the entire C19 Debacle is that it has caused People to deep dive into questioning EVERYTHING!! In the last 3 years I first questioned the extreme censorship, the ZERO treatments ( go to hospital when lips turn blue, hope there isn't a ventilator shortage), the constant barrage of fear-porn, etc.. Once I saw how we were being lied to I went down many rabbit holes and learned hundreds of years of history of Pharmakeia, the pure EVIL of allopathic medicine. I then asked myself ," What else is a lie?" "How much propaganda have I swallowed?" It was, at times, a devastating experience to learn the truth of things like NATO, of chemtrails, of food and water being poisoned by design and SO MUCH more.. When awake & you start connecting dots you cannot ever go back to sleep. Which brings me to the last sentence of your comment. Our Constitution has been captured. The Congress has been captured and are passing laws abdicating their powers.. PREP Act, Cares Act. Executive Orders all taking away our rights. The WHO treaty they are trying to pass, another nightmare usurping the power of Our Constitution!!! But People are waking up in large numbers and we thankfully have some individuals who are NOT corrupted in Congress. Recently, a member from my state of Michigan, Brad Paquette was vax injured and is beginning to wake up. I pray daily that more & more people WAKE UP and that more whistle-blowers come forward. I am 60 and woke up at 57 so I know it's possible!
Hersh has a hell of a track record, he's never been caught out on anything, to the best of my knowledge. This would not be the first time he single sourced a story, he did so with the illegal Cambodian bombing (see https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/lessons-thinnest-seymour-hershs-thinly-sourced-claims/), and was completely vindicated. The guy just doesn't do shoddy journalism, though of course caution is warranted, as always, on principle.
Hersh learned early enough, before publication of "The Dark Side of Camelot", to excise any reliance on the trove of documents discrediting JFK that turned out to be fraudulent (like Zip codes before the codes were introduced) from the published book. But there is still plenty in the book that is probably or certainly untrue. Most scandalous in my opinion is the undertone that he presumably picked up from his Secret Service and CIA sources that JFK's death was a good thing, in view of his scandalous misbehavior.
Though important, the detail is far less interesting than the complete dissinterest by any country or their media to call this act out as blatant US aggression.
It will come back to haunt USG, at some point. For now, no one can do anything about it because the power cartel running the show in the West will ensure there are no consequences, but eventually their position will worsen and the long term consequences of the loss of NS to Germany’s economy will ramify. Then the seeds that were sown by those divers’ charges will grow and bear their ugly fruit.
Which, to me, indicates that they wanted this outcome and were in on it.
I thought the clever avoidance of congressional oversight was one of the more strikingly plausible aspects of the story, in the "Yes, Minister" sense. You can just imagine Sir Humphrey Appleby musing, "Well, the president has *basically* announced we're doing it, so technically it isn't 'covert' anymore, and that means we can leave Congress out of the loop altogether!"
Hersh's story does fit the available facts, apart from the weird issue with the 17 hour delay between explosions. The mysterious surveillance flights over the area, the naval exercises, the involvement of Norwegian toadies, it all adds up.
But the main takeaway from the story (if true) is the familiar one of the Great Retard Hegemon lumbering across the world stage, casually blowing up its allies' infrastructure because it wants to sell gas to another market. Truly a fitting sign of the times.
Except the "sell gas to another market" line doesn't make a huge amount of sense in conjunction with the current administration doing quite a bit to stymie the development of new gas sources. Like, if the US were actually *producing* the gas, I could totally see it. But we aren't, so what's the point?
It's an empire thing: You have multitudes of interests, each with their own power base and bought-off politicians, all jockeying to further their own agenda. I suspected at the time that there were whole huge sections of the USG hydra that had no idea this was being planned. That seems to have been the case. The fossil-fuel guys won this one.
More seriously, there is an actual geostrategic rationale for blowing up Nordstream, which is pretty much standard Mackinder Thesis stuff about preventing the Eurasian landmass from uniting and forming a competing power bloc to the hegemon (Britain then, the Retard Hegemon now). Nordstream threatened to bring Germany closer to Russia, so they made it go away.
The geniuses in DC have already created the Mackinder nightmare by uniting Russia and China.
I know my tin foil hat is getting a little tight these days but is it possible that our genius class in the US has a strategy to push a large part of our actual natural gas production to Europe in order to justify their goal of moving us to a "green" energy platform? You know, we have to help our friends in Europe by letting them have our nasty, dirty fossil fuels which allows us to get that much closer to energy utopia!
Limiting the German-Russian powerhouse. German industry and ingenuity combined with Russia's natural resources is an economic threat to the USA. Plus there's an interview following around with condoleeza rice from I believe around 2014, where she basically articulates the goal of getting Europe on American natural gas.
I like Fox News as much as the next guy, but if you don’t realize that the U.S. is a major exporter of LNG, and that powerful forces in the *permanent* U.S. government (yes, even under Biden!) want to maximize both the wealth and power that spring therefrom, by fair means and foul – please wake up.
"I like Fox News as much as the next guy"
You find them barely tolerable, then? ;-)
Tuckers it on fox. The rest is bunk imo
What is NOT brought up or discussed on Fox is more interesting than what they DO discuss. Tucker mostly excepted.
Ad dollars
The point is US Dollar hegemony. Allowing other countries to work with the BRICS orbit speeds the process of de-dollarization. It seems to be the one overriding thing that the US empire must avoid at all costs.
It's good to question the story and the sources. But Seymour Hersh is probably going to get very rich, very fast ... by just doing investigative journalism that is off limits to the msm. If he throws in some Covid stories, he'll be a millionaire just from his Substack site in half a year. I see he already has "hundreds" of paid subscribers. I also don't think he'd botch his first big Substack story would he?
I'm totally sure a credible source is telling him these things. But, it's all based on this single source, so you have to really wonder.
Prediction: "They" are going to come after his ass big time and hard. They can't have big-time investigative journalists with all kinds of sources and credentials coming after them. But that's what they are going to get. The market is too big and too lucrative for every investigative journalist with some bonafides not to tap into it. Berenson already showed what's possible. Hersch will too. So they better stop him now before he gets going good.
They can dismiss him as another formerly "good" person who is now a fringe conspiracy member of the alt-right.
It was mentioned earlier here that Hersh only mentions the second explosions. We ASSUME he lacks conclusively damning data on the first. Maybe he does. The maintenance of the official narrative facade seems to be increasingly reliant on various 'dead man switches', incriminating data dumps, being ready to explode if TPTB go brazen with assassination, be that physical or of character.
Hersh only gets put upon if this story survives the weekend. If by Friday people are talking about something else, he has nothing to fear.
Hersh says he's going to follow up on the piece with more reporting.
One always has to wonder, but singularity of source is a vague reason for dismissal. Was a time when Einstein was the only reliable source on relativity; and Hersh himself is a "single source".
Perhaps it's to invite OTHER sources to establish communication with Hersh. Or to be a trap for those trying to reach him.
His job, never easy, is going to be even harder. He can't say he's working on a story for the NY Times or some other well-known publication that is paying him for freelance work. He's just working for himself now. But he will be able to get interviews or phone calls returned that Substack peons like myself never could. Plus, if someone wants to reach a big audience with their "whistleblowing" claims ... he'll still be able to deliver that audience. Even more so now that Twitter is once again allowing good stories to go viral. It will be interesting to follow his work in coming months. I think the bottom line is that Substack is getting closer to killing the faux investigative journalists.
I think there are 2 different types of sources that can be used by Hersh. Officially, the FBI and CIA have sources at WaPo and NYT that they regularly use for their spin (sometimes even against each other about an incident). But whistleblowers (if there are any genuine ones- so far very few) could be a second source. Hard to know which one was used for the Hersh article if they are trying to get out ahead of the Swedish investigation.
Well they also liked Medium for a time to produce leaks but maybe now onto SubStack since Medium became a bit too woke.
Seymour Hersh is 86 years old. I doubt he is doing it for the money. He is likely working with elements in the US government determined to remove the evil influence of the neo-conservatives on American foreign policy.
I would argue they are neo liberals. Their end goals are more a giant socialist corporatocratic state.
Some data points to add as far as Norway goes:
1. Prime minister Støre meets Biden at the White House on January 27th, 2022. Literally the same day, Victoria Nuland at State makes the statement about "one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward".
2. Norway received their first P8 surveillance planes from the US in early 2022. Documentation from the Norwegian armed forces shows by May, the government had accepted a request for more funding for "additional" sonobuoys, even though the P8 planes hadn't yet gone on any official missions.
3. On September 16th, Norwegian media report that a photo ban has been expanded around Evenes Air Station, where the P8 surveillance planes are stationed.
4. Prime minister Støre and defense minister Gram visited the US Navy 2nd Fleet and NATO Joint Force Command in Norfolk, VA on September 19th, one week before Nord Stream blows up.
All of this could be a coincidence, and the details about Norway could be part of a red herring to undermine the entire story about US involvement. Nonetheless, I find the timing on these things a bit unnerving.
Not to mention that Norway would stand to benefit from Nord Stream becoming inoperable, due to gas sales to Europe.
Wow
In no way being combative, but I find the skepticism applied here quite strange. Like, this is how this stuff generally gets disclosed. Is the hypothesis that this is some kind of false flag and had nothing to do with what happened? What alternative hypothesis seems more compelling? That it was more involved? More banal?
Whether these details are accurate or not, this is a plausible scenario of how it could have happened, and I don't quite get the fixation on a single source. The media is untrustworthy, journalists are untrustworthy, them having 2-3 sources does not magically make it better. There were 50 sources for the claim that the laptop was russian disinformation, they just happened to be false.
Anyway, I completely get not believing the security state or the journalists covering them. I get being skeptical of a single source. But in this case, why? Do you think this is a wholesale fabrication? Do you think this is a single source misleading a journalist into writing a plausible story that could have happened, but didn't? Why?
I'm not trying to imply these assertions are baseless, I don't quite grasp what the implication is as to what potentially untoward behavior may be happening here. To me, this is consistent with how these things get disclosed, both that it's limited in scope, it has an element of doubt, and it quietly explains what happened and when.
in broad terms, the story is totally plausible, and I think US/NATO involvement in the attacks is a near-certainty. but, we have to keep in mind that this is potentially an unofficial but authorised leak from the administration, or an unauthorised leak from some self-serving party to the decision, or any number of other things. it's certainly only part of the truth, as important details are missing, and so it's worth remaining critical right now.
Good point: "There were 50 sources for the claim that the laptop was russian disinformation, they just happened to be false."
We also had about 20 people (credible sources all) who signed that letter/article saying that the coronavirus came from nature and couldn't have come from any kind of lab leak.
Generally speaking, whatever the U.S. government spokesman says, I believe the opposite until proven otherwise.
Yeah, I've been thinking to file an FOIA request for documentation of the last time what the government said was TRUE.
Behavior by the Biden administration and DoD in all world matters makes the report plausible. They're evil.
maybe this story is being launched NOW to further plans to impeach Biden-
If this story contains demonstrably untrue details (like Stoltenberg being recruited as a US asset at age 14), that could be used to discredit all narrative about Nordstream that diverges from the MSM narrative.