It's a great story, but it's all unsourced and could be a decent Tom Clancy story at best. You could probably write a similar one with Russia or German agents as the key players and be just as convincing.
The only anchor in reality appears to be Biden suggesting that they knew how to take it out which seems like a pretty weak place to build a large story.
What I find particularly odd is that this entire thing appears to be based on a single, unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning".
I did find it interesting in that Wikipedia article to read that The New Yorker's editor insists on knowing the identify of all of the anonymous sources that Hersh has used when his reporting is published in that magazine. That suggests to me that while Hersh can probably be generally trusted, his work is of a higher quality when it's published in an outlet like The New Yorker, as the editor-in-chief and other staff submit it to a more rigorous internal discussion. That's in comparison to probably no internal review or discussion by Substack.
Seymour Hersh has had a long and storied career, and he has made some very bold claims that later turned out to be correct.
He's also, especially recently, made some very bold claims that so far have not turned out to be correct, whether because the truth just hasn't been revealed yet, or because Hersh was wrong or misled by his sources.
It's also worth noting that Hersh - as with any journalist - is only as good as his sources. If people choose to leak juicy secrets to him (not implausible!) he may end up publishing accurate stories that reveal nefarious conspiracies (which has happened). If people choose to give him lies and misinformation, he may end up publishing conspiracy theories instead. And as he keeps publishing, the odds that this will happen (if it hasn't already) keep increasing.
So I absolutely wouldn't write off any claim Hersh makes, but I wouldn't blindly believe it either. And here he is relying, by his own admission, almost entirely on a single anonymous source, giving details that can't really be independently confirmed.
Was Hersh told by someone that the US took out the pipeline? Probably! Does that mean the US did so? I'm not sure I'd seriously update my priors based on this.
>If people choose to give him lies and misinformation, he may end up publishing conspiracy theories instead.
I am an investigative reporter who covers crime, and my sources often insist on anonymity. There are ways to mitigate the possibility of being lied to.
All of my sources know that we have a deal: I promise to do everything that I reasonably can to keep their identity secret, and they promise me the truth. If a source lies to me or intentionally misleads me, my agreement to keep their identity secret no longer stands.
There’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist, and it has worked well for years. I have never burned a source, and as far as I know, I have never published an investigative story that is wrong about anything material.
>Yes but would you publish this big a story without corroboration? It’s the single source that’s more of a problem than the anonymity.
No, but corroboration doesn't require multiple sources.
For example, sources often provide copies of official records that corroborate their story. That can be enough, particularly when the authenticity of the records can be independently verified.
The thing that a good journalist would do is be skeptical of his crank sources and try to confirm them with reputable sources and evidence. He does neither.
But a broken clock is right twice a day and a bad journalist can break two big stories in a career of publishing lies.
I think this case is special in that the source would get the Snowden treatment if the name leaks.
If you publish all at once, others can go and verify the details. The source is protected.
If you verify pre-publication, e.g., go to the diving school in Florida and ask too many questions, you (and the source) will be under surveillance in no time.
I don’t think he’s calling him a crank, anymore than he’s talking about a specific broken clock being right twice a day. It’s just hypothetical to demonstrate a point. If he were a crank journalist, being accidentally right twice could still make him a journalistic legend. Therefore, we can’t trust simply because he’s famous, because a broken clock is right twice a day.
Seriously. The article's author couldn't think of any reason why they might want to stage the bin Laden assassination? I can think of a bunch of reasons just off the top of my head. Doesn't make the story true, but the author is conspicuously unimaginative.
Because if the best you can do as a whistleblower is to give anonymous info to an independent reporter who won't verify it, you're probably on the crank side of things.
That even that inconsistent Bin Laden story purportedly relied on two distinct sources, and yet his Nord Stream story purportedly relies on only a single anonymous source, should be a significant red flag here. I have no reason to doubt that Hersh heard the quotes in his Nord Stream story from at least someone in government, but that source's motivations and truthfulness were not independently verified even, by his own admission, by Hersh. And that's just... not credible reporting.
Thanks for that angle. The desire to repeat ones brightest hour can certainly be a strong force and might lead even the most careful astray when a big scoop like Abu Graib makes all further successes seem trivial. I'm not suggesting that he personally made it up, but his desire to believe could be spectacularly strong, turning him into an instrument that is easy to play by people with an agenda.
But I'm biased as well, my desire to believe is strong, only that I'm in team "'t was an inside job" so my bias is in clear opposition of these claims (but in limited to speculation, I find "Russia jumped from excuse to excuse to keep the pipelines closed anyways, so the only immediate winners of the explosions were people in Moscow who felt threatened by some real or imagined "make money not war" faction" logically compelling, but that's all there is, I guess, strongly, but can't claim to know)
> the only immediate winners of the explosions were people in Moscow
Come on now. I get the desire for people to believe their own government could just never possibly engage in this kind of skullduggery (at least, not until they're comfortably removed from the incident in question by many decades and can safely file it under "well we don't do that kind of thing anymore"), but the idea that the Russians were the only ones with motive?!
Given the circumstances, which were Russia refusing to send meaningful amounts down those pipes anyways, yes. Next best candidate would be some rogue group refusing to accept that all their preparations were made pointless for the time being.
I have to disagree. The very first line in https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp is "verify information before releasing it." Disclosing that there is only one source is a first step, but an insufficient one. And the tone of the article, from the headline onward, reports not only that "a source said X" but presents "X" as factual. That's simply not a credible practice.
you're suggesting that the ethics code requires you to state how many sources you verified with, and the number Hersh reported is too small a number. (you're going to deny you suggested that, but just keep reading, there's a point here)
I suggest that the ethics code says don't report facts as facts that you haven't verified as facts, but if you say "I could not verified this and I heard it from one source" you are within the code. "Sources in the Administration" often report things to reporters, and most of what they say can't be verified, it can only be echoed by more than one person. And if a reporter has a relationship with one leaker who has been reliable, you're claiming they can't use that, and I'm claiming they can and do. Sure, verify what you can, but being an honest reporter is what is required, not certain fact patterns.
Yes, in a deep dive publication like the New Yorker, they will often kill certain facts or an entire story if it cannot be corroborated, but that doesn't define journalism.
It's not fair to compare anyone else to "the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events ... maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires"
No, credible reporting includes verifying what sources say. Hersh is transparent about not verifying, but he continues to present their statements as fact. That's not dishonest, but it's not a standard of reporting anyone should accept.
That's hairsplitting. If you report something that some anonymous guy said as fact, without being able to verify anything, it's not credible. To be credible, one needs to provide some, you know, credits. Some evidence of why it's true. With all love of everybody around to say "without evidence" on anything they disagree with, somehow when there's a case when somebody literally says something without any evidence, we're supposed to just take it as fact? No way.
It is a dramatization of the hunt for OBL. It elides names, sources and methods for obvious reasons. The larger shape of the story aligns without how the administration and CIA claim the search and assassination of OBL played out. It is alleged that the CIA cooperated heavily with the filmmakers. This would make sense given the amount of torture apologia that is in the movie.
Worth noting that both the White House and the New York Times walked back inconsistent claims they made in the days after bin Laden's death. So the White House and Times were self-admittedly inconsistent about it. If Hersh is inconsistent it is in that light.
Hersh pokes holes in different points of the official narrative. Particularly the idea no one high up in the Pakistani government knew bin Laden was in the compound. Contradicting the White House, but very convincing to me and others.
However, to be fair to you, Hersh goes into a great deal of detail about the initial intelligence, the raid etc. Was any part of that wrong or inconsistent? It's hard to know. He didn't just make a few statements but went into a lot of detail. So there could theoretically be inconsistencies in Hersh's reporting about it too, since he covered so much ground. It is hard to know though. You just take what the White House said, what Hersh says, what the Pakistani press says and try to figure out what actually happened.
Biden stated last year: "If Russia invades [Ukraine] there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." [1] This was a clear threat, clear as day, that the US could destroy Nordstream. It should surprise nobody that the US was involved.
Since Nordstream was destroyed amidst public pressure from US energy companies who wanted to takeover the European energy market, the US has become the world's leading exporter of liquid natural gas, Europeans are paying record natural gas prices, and US energy companies are reporting record profits. Again, the relationship between these things should surprise nobody.
It’s not out of the realm of possibility but that statement is hardly an admission of future sabotage. I would imagine the US has more tools than deep sea bombing to convince their allies. Very high risk operation
I'm not sure what would make it so high risk. The truth could easily be castigated and maligned as "conspiracy theory," a dismissal that most people in the Western countries will readily accept. The only people with the resources to investigate and find hard evidence would either be in on it (Western/NATO allies) or easily written off as pushing lies and propaganda (the Russians).
Sure, a threat is not an admission of guilt. But I think most people were unaware of this statement, and how aggressive the US' posture towards the pipeline was, which is important context for this article.
They must have not been paying attention. Trump was very vocal against it and was laughed at by the genius German technocrats.
The Obama admin was also against it
More likely they were listening, but continued to pursue the path that was in Germany’s national interest. German voters do not care about helping maintain US hegemony; they care about economic stability and energy security. It will be interesting to see what happens in German domestic politics as more evidence emerges that its supposed ally carried out industrial sabotage against it. The rest of Europe’s voters will also take note.
> This was a clear threat, clear as day, that the US could destroy Nordstream [2]. It should surprise nobody that the US was involved.
Or you could take a breath and realize that Nordstream 2 was not yet complete. It was an ongoing, non-operational project. In that context, “bringing it to an end” could easily mean not completing it. In fact, that’s the far more reasonable interpretation—-the literal physical destruction interpretation is only made by someone who wants to believe that.
Not sure what you’re referring to here. If you’re analogizing what Biden said with domestic abuse, that’s just ridiculous. It’s more akin to telling the wife they’re going to need to divorce if she doesn’t stop threatening the children. If you’re saying the US in general has a history of doing things that could be compared to domestic abuse, sure, but so could all parties involved, particularly Russia. So we’re back at square one.
> I knew you would take offense at the comparison.
I was stating my opinion that the comparison was of low intellectual quality, not taking offense.
> When the pipeline was in fact blown up, of course we're going to look at vaguely worded threats in another light.
Except it’s only vaguely worded if you’re approaching it from the bias of wanting to think it was a threat of blowing it up. Approaching it a different way, they’re just the words a person would use if they were talking about ending the project, not literally blowing it up.
If Biden were going to be so aggressive as to threaten to blow up an infrastructure project of a close ally, why specifically limit it to Nordstream 2? “We’re going to lose our ever-loving minds here, but only for phase 2 of the project”.
It was not completed in the most important sense for this discussion—it was not operational. The project could still be ended short of completion without blowing it up.
Most people would find it very hard to believe that Germany would allow such a valuable investment to sit unused for any significant amount of time. Other European countries also had significant investment in Nordstream AG. The Germans were merely placating the Americans while a a diplomatic solution was being sought for Ukraine. The Americans undermined the proposed solutions at every turn while they baited Russia to invade per the RAND report game plan and then decided to remove the pipeline from the bargaining table entirely.
You’re missing the point. This is about what Biden meant when he said Nordstream 2 could be ended. Whether the Germans would have been onboard or not isn’t particularly relevant.
I had been assuming that the working theory amongst the “America definitely blowed up the pipeline” crowd was that this would have been a scheme cooked up amongst the NATO allies. Because, the alternative, that America did that against the will of Germany is just utter insanity. The idea that they would risk turning the entirety of Europe against them with such an act of brazen hostility is just…I can’t even.
I think you’re underestimating the arrogance of American power. I did miss your point, because I couldn’t conceive that anyone would still be making the argument that Russia would blow up its own pipeline. Quibbling over how direct Biden’s threat was in terms of foreshadowing a kinetic attack— not even worth discussing at this point. Good day.
> I did miss your point, because I couldn’t conceive that anyone would still be making the argument that Russia would blow up its own pipeline.
It would certainly be an extreme, and strange escalation of their previous attempts to use gas supplies as a retaliatory device. But, IMO, it’s less far-fetched than what you’re suggesting.
Why destroy NS1 then and not NS2 (NS1 and NS2 both have two pipes and only one of the two NS2 pipes were destroyed)?
And why destroy it at this exact time when Russia was already coming up with less and less plausible excuses to halt deliveries via NS1 (both NS1 pipes were destroyed)?
Why not wait with the nuclear option until there were even signs that NS2 would come online (Germany had already halted the certification process for NS2 shortly before the invasion).. NS2 was already dead.
The article implicitly suggests that the goal was indeed to sabotage both pipelines fully.
It doesn't say it outright, but if the hastily re-programmed explosives were triggered by a sonar buoy after three months in sea water as the article says, then it would not be surprising at all if some of them failed to go off.
Precisely that the article implicitly gives very plausible answers to good questions like yours, is why I think it's credible.
Neither the mechanism nor the reasoning in the article sound plausible to me (nor the involvement of Norway..).
NS1 was already shutdown by Russia within weeks of the supposed time of installation of the explosives, after which there was no more point to explode them and it would make more sense to silently remove them again.
NS2 was already dead in the water since couple days before the invasion.
In addition the bad-trigger scenario would imply that the explosives and triggering mechanism remained in place on the remaining pipe, which would require the US to rush there to remove them or trigger the missing one to avoid terrible diplomatic consequences if the unexploded device were to be discovered.
First, the whole point of these pipes from Russia's side, and the concern about them from the US, was that they could be used as leverage to keep EU from supporting Ukraine. So there was absolutely a "point" in blowing them up even though they were turned off. The point being, when they're blown up, they can't be turned on, thus Russia has no leverage anymore.
Second, those terrible diplomatic consequences probably happened, behind the scenes (and weren't that terrible, because no one really wants to denounce the US in the middle of the Ukraine war). I'll remind you that both Sweden and Denmark claimed nothing other than sabotage could be concluded, and closed down their investigations and classified the heck out of the details. Feel free to make freedom of information requests to them, so that you can get those "national security interest" refusals.
Odds are that the US didn't directly admit anything to them, but strongly suggested they shouldn't look too closely or be too specific in their statements, and that those states were quick to comply. And probably cleaned up well enough that there was nothing left for the Russians to find, in the case that they should run their own investigation (although, Russia can't run a real investigation to save their ass, they're too used to have their conclusions dictated to them, so I wouldn't worry if I was the USG).
Russia already had no leverage anymore. Shutting them down was their "all in" move, but that clearly didn't cut it, so no, there was no point anymore.
For Russia there were more upsides to this however: Getting out of contracts (since they can only halt deliveries for so long before fines kick in), solidifying internal positions, sending a message (since it happened 1-2 days after the opening of a Norway-Poland pipeline; also it was less than 500m from a sweden-poland undersea electrical cable), sewing chaos in the west.
Not that there is any more evidence that they have done it than for the US..
And the rest is all putting the cart in front of the horse.
Would it look any different if Russia (or anyone else) were the culprit?
No, it wouldn't (since otherwise the fact it's classified itself leaks information).
Maybe the investigation just yielded nothing conclusive?
Which given the location and event (big explosion and lots of gas output making sure everything gets nicely distributed elsewhere) wouldn't be that surprising?
I'm trying to keep an open mind and engage with people who don't agree, but you're not making it easy for me here.
You're suggesting that when Russia cut off the gas, and Germany didn't immediately capitulate, that's evidence the leverage was worthless? It wasn't even winter yet.
Also, blowing up your pipeline just as a competitor comes on line? Whatever you think of Hersh's article, it's undeniable that Norway made a lot of money on the sabotage. Even if Russia had stayed firm and sent no gas through the pipeline, the fact that they could have alone would have kept prices lower.
Third, you're suggesting that Sweden/Denmark would have kept it secret if they found evidence of Russian meddling? They absolutely would not. In fact, if there was even evidence exculpating the US, without implicating anyone else, they would have blasted it to the heavens.
NATO-aligned think tanks have gotten better at this - something I view as a good thing, despite that I am not a fan of them, and I don't think they did it willingly. But with the rise of Bellingcat, they're now routinely publishing embarrassing material on Russia that they would have LOVED to keep secret as a bargaining chip, in earlier decades.
In fact, if there was a Russian team that blew up the pipeline, they would have left a trail a mile wide in public data and the countless leaked databases (another huge one just a few days ago, from Roskomnadzor). Bellingcat, or anyone interested, could have given you their damn cell phone numbers, if it was a Russian op. Yet they have instead remained utterly uninterested in the question of how the pipelines were sabotaged.
> Also, blowing up your pipeline just as a competitor comes on line? Whatever you think of Hersh's article, it's undeniable that Norway made a lot of money on the sabotage.
Did they though? Looking at the gas futures chart it's not obvious to me at all.
The prices suddenly spiked much higher when NS1 was suddenly shutdown.
After the explosion they actually went down slightly.
They did profit, but just from the actions from the Russian side (which were earlier in time).
As for whatever you mean with competitor coming online.
Towards Germany the flows from Norway didn't change that much after the invasion, Europipe II from Norway to Germany was already maxed out since January 2021 pretty much.
Russia doesn’t lose all leverage the moment they shut off the pipeline. They still have the leverage from being able to turn the pipeline back on, which impacts competitors and customers by giving the option.
Blowing up the pipeline takes that option off the table for the foreseeable future, and with the advantage that it doesn’t cause immediate dangerous supply shocks to Allies since it was already off.
Win/win for the Allies (though if public, Western Europe gov’ts would have no choice but to be pissed in public), not great for Russia who has their last leverage knocked off the table.
I personally don’t have an opinion on if the US did or did not do it, and I doubt we’d know for at least several decades.
But the US has done lots weirder stuff with far less concrete potential benefits before. hell, nearly anything the CIA had been caught doing in the 60’s or 70’s has far less plausible justification!
In that case they still have exactly same leverage as before, since one NS2 pipe is still available and several land-based pipelines are also still online.
My personal belief is that we will never know who actually performed the acts of sabotage.
But taking some Biden soundbites, mixing it with some public information and some hand-waving doesn't produce any actual evidence about who actually did it.
First point - most of it is now taken off the table because there is an implicit (explicit?) unknown party with the proven ability and willingness to cut off any remaining supply at the drop of a hat, and the ability to supply is severely curtailed. It stops 'cheating' or 'backsliding' on the part of either party.
Second point - agreed. If for no other reason than there is little to no incentive for any of the players to share any evidence or info they may have found that would support or disprove any of the scenarios.
For Russia, if they could prove the US did it, it would strengthens the image of the US as a powerful world player with their foot on Russia's neck. If someone else did it, it would make them look even weaker.
For Western European allies, it would make it really obvious how much influence the US has on them, especially since their own fate continues to depend on the US - and it's large natural gas supplies. Even if they wanted to cut off the US, Russia is even worse for them, and they can't stand on their own two feet against either Russia or the US right now (militarily or economically). If someone other than the US did it, it would make their key infrastructure look even more fragile and vulnerable.
For the US, if they did it, it would expose the extent they are playing dirty (hurting the 'clean hands' narrative) and lose them good will with most of the public. If they found someone else doing it, it would reduce their apparent 'dirty tricks' power folks need to worry about, which is a major deterrent to enemies and allies doing dirty tricks.
actually gas prices in Europe are lower than just before the invasion and in any case the provider of Nord Stream is blackmailing with nukes. Finally, threatening does not lead to proof. Maybe yes, maybe not.
I know nothing of him, but given that there's an entire paragraph about Jens Stoltenberg where almost every sentence is just completely factually wrong in a way that could be verified to be wrong with a look at the first paragraph on his Wikipedia page, I'm not inclined to take what he says seriously.
I mean, par for the course for modern journalism, I suppose.
> "Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg ... He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War."
During the Vietnam War (1955-1975) Stoltenberg (born 1959) was -4 to 16 years old..
Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980.
Links/sources follow:
«Thorvald Stoltenberg and Reiulf Steen visited Hanoi in 1970.»
«In a new biography of Thorvald Stoltenberg, it is described how Norway brokered peace between the parties in the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s.»
Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980.
Likely. Jens's father was Thorvald Stoltenberg, a powerful Labour politician working in foreign policy most of his life. He was allegedly trying to negotiate between the US and Vietnam.
Yes. Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980.
HN favorite Mark Ames has another theory about Stoltenberg fils that wouldn't contradict TFA: perhaps even his teenage war protest was of the "observe then snitch" variety?
I imagine there are very good reasons why he can’t trust the editors of certain publications for certain stories. Many of them are among the “power elite” who collaborate with the security state, whether directly or indirectly. There’s a long, storied history of that.
You're getting downvoted, despite the fact that when he headed the CIA, Allen Dulles used to just call up the editor of the Washington Post to have troublesome reporters fired.
That is exactly right, and nothing has changed— the CIA still has plenty of influence over WaPo, NYT, etc. I would say it’s perhaps slightly less direct now, but even worse because they have such a large network of think tanks and cutouts to shape the narrative.
Remember when CBS news had that 60 Minutes piece last year about how most US arms and supplies were not actually getting to the front in Ukraine? How long did it take for them to “partially” retract it for some embarrassingly bogus reason?
PS: if you haven’t read “The Devil’s Chessboard” by David Talbot, highly recommend.
He has decades of renown from his My Lai reporting, and he renewed it with Abu Ghraib. However, substantially everything he's ever written uses anonymous sourcing to tell a story of intrigue and conspiracy... and only those two stores amounted to anything. There's a reason he's publishing this on Substack: nobody reputable will publish him anymore.
It's unfortunate, but Sy Hersh has kinda flown the coop in the last 10 years. He egged on the Seth Rich conspiracy and tried to deny the US killed bin Laden. The New Yorker has basically disowned him and he hasn't had a byline in many years.
Too bad the New Yorker abandoned him. If your writing makes it past the editors, fact checkers and attorneys at that mag, you're probably golden. The effort they spent on Lawrence Wright's Scientology article was pretty hardcore: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/133561256
Nobody was excluded in my country but America going insane was COMPLETELY missed by almost every expert and America watcher.
It was funny how suddenly all the journalists started to report from Kentucky or Alabama instead of Fifth avenue.
As the media it is your job to explain how the world works.
If he denied the US killed bin Laden he would be unreliable. He never denied the US killed bin Laden. You saying he said that is what is unreliable.
He said that some of the White House and Pentagon assertions about bin Laden, which the New York Times did not question in the days after (but did question, to some extent, later on) were not accurate. Particularly that no one high up in the Pakistani Army, government or intelligence knew Bin Laden was in Abbottabad. Hersh asserted that was incorrect, as were some other things.
The alleged "compound" of bin Laden was located less than a mile from PMA Kakul [0]. So there was at least one odd thing about this event: would we expect that the world's most wanted terrorist could live across the street from USMA West Point for five years, without the government knowing?
In the first few hours after publication, that would be a reasonable question. But since it's been a full day, and Seymour Hersh hasn't stepped in to say "Hey, that's not me", at this point it's quite reasonable to believe that he wrote it. It seems unlikely that the piece generated a full Whitehouse response but somehow Seymour, his agent, his publisher, or any of his close friends haven't yet issued a denial of authorship. Not impossible, but not the way I'd bet.
> It's a great story, but it's all unsourced and could be a decent Tom Clancy story at best. You could probably write a similar one with Russia or German agents as the key players and be just as convincing.
That's why there were several explosions: Everyone was blowing it up at the same time, unbeknownst of each other's plans.
> The only anchor in reality appears to be Biden suggesting that they knew how to take it out which seems like a pretty weak place to build a large story.
I'd bet my last dollar that at least four nations had "blow up Nord Stream to force continued conflict" contingency plans.
Who did it? Germany, Russia, USA, Ukraine, or a curve ball from the one of the Nordic or Baltic states? We'll probably never know, and none of those answers would surprise me.
Why just those countries? Surely some countries in the middle east would be interested in opening and supplying petro products to a new market. What about China? Maybe they're interested in division and weakening their nearest neighbor so they could buy up all the gas?
There are too many players with varying interests at different levels to just go off of someone's reputation and an unnamed source. Perhaps Biden or some other head of state needs to come along and blow up this thread so that moderators and commenters alike have to find other outlets for the water they're carrying.
It's not very deep. You can buy a tethered underwater ROV rated for 300ft OTS for a few thousands of dollars. Not to mention a camera and an actuator on an anchor. Practically anybody could have done it. Even non-state actors. Hardest part would be getting the explosives in sufficient quantity.
Ever hear about Qatar screwing anything up? Me either.
They have successfully annoyed just about ever regional player, as well as the US and every other major power at times, and yet mange to thread the needle of staying friendly with the US and Iran at the same time. The way they played out the Saudi sanctions on them was a masterpiece, and they are the biggest gas exporter in the world.
No evidence they are involved of course, but there are plenty of extremely competent militaries in the Middle East.
Prince Choppy Choppy can't even get rid of 1 guy without the whole world noticing. But to clutch my tinfoil hat, if Saudi Arabia really did want to do this, Prince Choppy Choppy could've told Biden "We're doing this, I know you can see us, but be quiet and you'll get your cheap oil, OK?".
Although if Biden took part in such a conspiracy, someone in one of the American intelligence agencies would've probably leaked it out.
Considering that a lot people came out after the pipeline was blown up, people with the necessary training and experience, saying that it was not a particularly difficult job, it might even have been some rogues having a fun fishing trip.
Besides motive, this article doesn't provide anything new. And that the US had at least motive is established fact since basically the day of the explosion.
There's probably thousands of scuba divers are trained in cold water diving to 300ft/100m depths. That is deep technical diving, but not crazy or stupid deep.
(Although it would probably be easier these days to use a pipe bomb and a COTS underwater tethered drone -- depending on what bits of physical evidence you were comfortable leaving behind you could just blow the drone up with it too -- the "hardest" part would probably be dodging the coast guard on the surface)
I lived next door to Tuvalu once, in New York City. Quiet little apartment building in Manhattan, west-facing views of the East River. We hung out with Vanatu once or twice. Doesn’t quite seem the type.
No man. This was not in the Russians’ geopolitical interests. And even if Germany wanted to divest itself of Russian gas, they would not have done so, in this way.
This was leaked at the time that it is now to send a message to the Germans.
I would be very very careful with your analysis of what is and is not "in the Russians' geopolitical interests." Almost every analysis based on "what was in the Russians' geopolitical interests" ended up concluding that Putin was not going to invade the Ukraine, because doing so was transparently a terrible idea[1]. And he did it anyway, because his calculations of what was in the Russians geopolitical interests were done differently. So before you opine on what the Russians might or might not have done based purely on your calculations of what is in the Russians interests, you need to show that your calculations are similar to Putin's in other ways. Without that, one should be really really skeptical that anyone is doing their calculations of what is in Russia's geopolitical interests the same as Putin.
[1]: Whereas analysis based on what Russia was actually doing was largely correct before the war. This is why there was such a large chasm between what the US was saying then- based on their ability to hack Kadryov's phones and hear what was being said at those levels, along with their satellites to observe what the actual Russian army was doing- and what the French and Germans were saying based largely on 'that would be a dumb thing for Putin to do'.
Many, many realist analysts were of the opinion that Russia invading Ukraine was a possible outcome of the geopolitical moment.
It is now known that Putin's decision to invade was due to bad intel from his intelligence services that reported that Ukraine would not be able to mount significant resistance. In that light it was reasonably self-interest-pursuant.
Acting on incorrect information is not the same as being irrational.
You don't need a submarine to blow up a pipeline at 300ft below the surface lol. A master driver or cheap underwater drone, and access to some explosives, will do.
And one should be skeptical of a single source who somehow knows the entire story, from White House deliberations to technical details; all the more so when it's a supposed secret squirrel story that allegedly was hidden from Congressional oversight on a technicality.
The fact is, Hersh has gotten deeper and deeper into the conspiracy-theory weeds over the past few decades, with his most recent work tending towards outright disinformation -- from suggesting al-Qa'ida wasn't behind the 9/11 attacks, to whitewashing Syrian chemical attacks (and Ted Postol makes a cameo appearance in this piece as well), to denying Russian involvement in the Skripal poisoning, to being one of the motive forces behind the Seth Rich conspiracy theories. Increasingly it seems that he doesn't even care about the credibility of his "sources."
It's not unsourced, the source is being kept private. That may not seem like a meaningful difference but there is a difference. And that difference is the reason Seymour Hersh's reputation is relevant.
That’s why he’s useful. Enough people associate his name with his wins and either don’t know he’s lost his mind or think it’s just the usual hit pieces.
But either he’s being fed this by someone with an agenda or he shares that agenda.
Conspiracy thinking ironically always includes blind credulity, just of other things.
I read the first half of the article, and skimmed the second. It doesn't claim to be sourced from anywhere, and the only paragraph that discusses sources and fact checking is when they point out the White House says the entire article is a work of fiction. It doesn't present any evidence that it happened (other than that the US has a big swimming pool that the navy trains in), and summarizes itself by saying that it was a perfect plan (presumably meaning it left behind no evidence), except that they actually did it.
And it includes direct quotes from that person in the last paragraphs. It was clearly someone Hersh spoke to directly.
While I am extraordinarily distrustful of news reports using anonymous sources you do have to consider the author here. Ultimately we are deciding if we trust him and, for me personally, he lends a lot of credibility.
The other side of this is, duh, of course America blew up the pipeline. I said at the time that we were the most likely culprit.
There's a very small subset of groups who have the capability to do this and even fewer who have the motivation. It forces Germany/EU to stop buying NG from Russia and start buying LNG from the US (among others) with exceptionally minimal political risk to the US.
The US will just continue to deny that we did it, this article will get no traction in mainstream media. If incontrovertible proof ever did surface the media will just bury the story and if anyone involved is forced to comment they will just spin it as a good and necessary and just thing that they did to help Ukraine with a dose of natural gas bad because of climate change and all will be forgiven.
When it happened it was clear that the US, Russia, and Poland were likely the only suspects, except they're all really weird! The US absolutely has not made return on investment, which was obviously going to happen because shipping it over is much more expensive than the pipeline, and in the meantime Biden has to deal with increased gas prices. His incentives go the other way on this. But why the fuck would Russia do it? Poland is like...there, which is why they're worth a mention, but they don't have the same operational capacity and also do not benefit from it at all. But I mean come on, we know it was sabotaged deliberately. Such a weird thing
Why do so many people act as if it's so unlikely that Russia did it? They had the least to lose, their relations with the west were already ruined at that point and such an incident couldn't make them any worse.
What would be their motive? Before the explosion, Russia had illegally shut down the pipeline. Now that the pipeline has exploded, they have plausible deniability and they can say it's not their fault the gas isn't flowing. Because of that, they won't have to pay additional fines when the economic relations with the west are restored.
And don't forget that one pipe of NS2 was left intact and, unlike NS1, there was no contractual obligation to pump gas through it.
As I wrote in my comment, the contractual obligations will matter in the future, when (if) the economic relations are normalized. Settlement of the outstanding financial disputes will be a prerequisite for that.
Ukraine? I am not sure if they have the means, but they have the motive, the nord stream pipelines bypass the Ukraine pipeline.
My knowledge on this is very, very sketchy, but my understanding is the there is still a large amount of Russian gas transiting the Ukraine pipelines, Europe needs the gas so they buy it, Ukraine needs the transit money to defend against Russia so they keep the operation running. and Russia needs the gas money to attack Ukraine so they keep the operation running.
Honestly if true it is one of the weirdest situations I have ever heard about in the middle of a war.
I deliberately used an RT link because it is probably full of Russian propaganda and yet says basically the same thing as other articles. I originally learned about it via the Perun youtube channel(the best place to start if you want actual information not propaganda) but am unable to find the episode where it is mentioned.
> The US absolutely has not made return on investment, ...
Umm, the US has made a terrific return on investment. EU supplies have shifted dramatically away from Russia to Norway and the United States following the end of Nordstream.
> 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.
FWIW, that doesn't really even make sense. If you had direct knowledge only of the planning, then what's the source for the execution? I don't think anyone would be surprised that there was a plan for doing this. The US plans lots of stuff. Why did "planning" even appear in that sentence? Why not "a source with direct knowledge of the operation"?
Again, there's a huge weasel word right there in the only sourcing for the whole article. That just... yikes. Maybe it's a typo. Maybe it's something an editor could have cleaned up. But maybe it's also the sort of thing Hersh's editors simply threw out as unpublishable, which is why it's an uneditted substack blog.
Someone plans to blow something up. And then it blows up.
Makes a lot of sense to connect the dots given that it's a covert activity.
Often planning is done by senior members, who get out of the military more frequently (especially recently) and the younger people who are operational stay quiet.
The people who were on the operation, aren't going to talk right now, because they are still operating and aren't ready to spill the beans and write a book/movie script.
> Makes a lot of sense to connect the dots given that it's a covert activity.
"Makes a lot of sense" is hardly the standard for legitimate journalism though. Did it happen or not? How do you know? Does your source know that it happened or just that it was planned? Do you make that clear? Hersh really does not.
Most News outlets prefer to have more than one source of info. For the life of me I cannot see how this would be a net plus benefit to the US. The potential to destabilize our allies seems likely. If they find out it is true - some of them would be at minimum very pissed.
Well yeah, I think Seymour Hersh's reputation is relevant. He's pretty much a conspiracy theorist in this era.[1] Including his claim that the US never killed Osama bin Laden.
> his claim that the US never killed Osama bin Laden
You give a link but it is nowhere in that link. I watched an interview where Hersh talked about how the US killed bin Laden. Hersh has always said this.
Hersh did do reporting that countered parts of the US government story about bin Laden. Namely the idea no high Pakistani army/intelligence/government official knew where bin Laden was in Pakistan. As well as some other things.
The conspiracy theory is believing bin Laden sat in a big compound in Abbottabad with no one important in the Pakistani government knowing this. I guess the US government feels it needs to state this for some diplomatic reason, but it is ludicrous.
Seymour Hersh regarding the Osama bin Laden raid, in which the terrorist leader was killed in 2011: "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true".
Later on in 2013, he changed his claim, such that he admitted some of the story is true, that is, that the terrorist leader was killed, after he encountered pushback.
That quote doesn't say that the US didn't kill Bin Laden. You're implying that by adding an unnecessary parenthetical "in which the terrorist leader was killed in 2011."
There's nothing simpler and better for your case than typing the quote where he said the thing you say he said. Otherwise, you're actively spreading misinformation on social media, and intentionally using rhetorical games to obscure the lack of evidence you're offering to support it. That's conscious spreading of misinformation.
Let me make sure I understand what you're saying here. You're saying that I'm spreading misinformation when I stated that: Seymour Hersh, with respect to an article about the Osama bin Laden raid, said that not a single word in it was true. He then later went on to admit that indeed, some of those words were true, that Osama bin Laden was indeed killed.
Would you be willing to explain how a strictly historical truth, that is, a direct quote from the individual in question, is misinformation?
You took a completely literal reading of a one sentence quote from an interview as his full opinion on the matter, and ignored that he immediately said that one sentence was not an accurate representation of his entire view. The Guardian even corrected the initial interview adding his further clarification. That seems like misinformation to me.
The Guardian did not issue a correction about Hersh's words. There was nothing to correct about them: the quote from Hersh is accurate. The Guardian issued a footnote/amendment (in their words), and here it is from the Guardian that you're referring to, as context:
> This article was amended on 1 October 2013. The original text stated that Hersh sold a story about the My Lai massacre to the New York Times for $5,000 when in fact it was the Times of London. Hersh has pointed out that he was in no way suggesting that Osama bin Laden was not killed in Pakistan, as reported, upon the president's authority: he was saying that it was in the aftermath that the lying began. Finally, the interview took place in the month of July, 2013.
Note that from this footnote that Seymour Hersh does not admit that he misspoke. He claims that he never suggested that Osama bin Laden was not killed. This is plainly a straight lie, given his claim that the White House's statement did not contain one word that was true.
If he wants to state that he misspoke in this interview: fine, then he should do it. But to state that he didn't make this claim is itself misinformation.
Edit: You're accusing me of bad faith. Can you please explain how my argument is deceptive or a lie? If anything, Seymour Hersh has acted in bad faith in this ordeal, lying about his own statements. And people should be suspect of him for that.
>. Can you please explain how my argument is deceptive or a lie?
You condensed an entire book/section of a book that Hersh wrote into one sentence and then attacked it as if it were the argument he presented. It's not. It's something he said offhand in an interview about the book, and which he immediately clarified was not meant in the way people were taking it.
You're taking the worst possible interpretation of what he said and arguing he clearly meant that. Hence, not arguing in good faith.
That's not the definition of a bad faith argument. Here's a definition of bad faith according to Wikipedia: "Bad faith (Latin: mala fides) is a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another. ... Some examples of bad faith include: ... a prosecutor who argues a legal position that he knows to be false" Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith
I have not engaged in deception in the statements I've made in this thread a single time. However, it is important to point out that Seymour Hersh has indeed engaged in bad faith in his statements about Osama bin Laden, by refusing to acknowledge that he either originally misspoke, or he changed his claim about the White House's statement. In either case, he is being deceptive in his statements as I've demonstrated above, exactly what it means to argue in bad faith.
And now you're making your rebuttal hinge on the exact definition of a term I never used.
You aren't arguing in good faith. You aren't trying to be fair, open, and honest. Like your repeated claim that Hersh saying he in no way was suggesting that bin Laden was not killed in Pakistan is him refusing to acknowledge he misspoke. Or your constant ignoring of anything Hersh has said on the matter besides the one sentence you object to. Neither of those things are fair, or honest about his argument.
Okay, so if I'm understanding you right, and correct me if I'm wrong, you are claiming that your definition of "bad faith" differs from Wikipedia's definition. Is that correct? Would you be willing to offer a definition of what you mean by "not in good faith"?
Maybe you aren't being intentionally deceptive, I can't say. But as I pointed out you are not being fair and honest about Hersh's argument, which is more nuanced than the one sentence.
This is a misrepresentation of my argument. I'm not addressing Hersh's other argument about the other specifics of the Osama bin Laden raid, and therefore fairness or dishonesty to that part of his argument is not relevant. I'm addressing his quote, the quote in which he claimed that all words in the White House report/statement were lies. He denied that he made this claim; he didn't say he misspoke or that he's amending his original statement. To say that I'm being unfair or dishonest about Hersh's argument by misrepresenting my argument is itself unfair and/or dishonest.
As for the reason why Hersh did this, I cannot say, a person's intention is a black box. But this kind of behavior amounts to some amount of dishonesty. It's not much more complicated than that.
> Hersh has pointed out that he was in no way suggesting that Osama bin Laden was not killed in Pakistan, as reported, upon the president's authority: he was saying that it was in the aftermath that the lying began
Is saying he misspoke. His words were interpreted in a way he did not intend them to be.
Addressing only the quote itself is unfair, as again that does not represent his actual argument.
Saying an amendment isn't a correction seems silly.
When your entire argument is "this one sentence when taken literally with no context can be considered crazy," I don't think you're arguing in good faith.
In an interview with the Guardian he said, as you quote
"Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true".
You take this statement he made and translate it to "his claim that the US never killed Osama bin Laden". The original quote you print is much clearer. I certainly don't translate his quote to what you translated it to.
Speaking of changed claims, both the White House and New York Times walked back claims they made in 2011 about bin Laden. So Hersh's claim of "a lie" and "not true", if you want to call it that, is true by their own admissions.
Incidentally the disputed issues are did anyone high up in the Pakistani government know bin Laden was there, how did the US learn he was there (connected to the first point), was the firefight killing bin Laden a kind of John Wayne/Audie Murphy production or was it more pedestrian etc.
If it's not pedantic that Hersh telling the interviewer "not one word of it is true" was hyperbole, when at least one word of the White House story was true, then you have a point on that statement. But it still does not automatically translate as you said. The original statement is more clearly what he said.
I don't have a problem with people who change their claims, and willingly admit that their claims have changed. This is what I'd expect from decent humans and respectable journalists.
I do have a problem with people who change their claims and then deny that they changed their claims, like Seymour Hersh did, with respect to Osama bin Laden and stating that not a single word from the White House was true. That's disingenuous and it makes his credibility questionable, especially if he's going to rely on anonymous sources for his claims.
To address your claim that perhaps he was being hyperbolic in his statement: fine, but at least admit to that. He hasn't. He denied that he said it in the first place, which is a lie.
Someone was killed, but he may not have been ObL. This seems far-fetched, until one realizes that the entire war against Afghanistan was justified on the idea of capturing ObL, who is documented to have left Afghanistan less than a month into the war, which lasted another twenty years. Nothing makes sense, about any of this.
This is a frustratingly common technique that I've seen from those who have strong political affiliations.
It's much easier to make a strong claim, and to repeat it, than it is to read through articles and debunk those claims. Frequently, as soon as you've done it, there are several more of these strong claims made, and the discussion becomes impossible.
I think it's rooted in the desire to "win".
I know I get a little excited when I see a comment I've made get upvoted.
I think about it when I'm writing and I've found it affects what I write and my phrasing.
I think this is an unintended consequence of self-moderated discussions - it seems to devolve into a zero-sum game.
Initially I had the same reaction. After reading the piece slowly again my impression is:
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is very carefully and lucidly written, with so many details, each of which can be refuted. How does he know about all the meetings between the CIA, Sullivan, etc. Why does no one refute individual facts?
I think he did have a source who provided all this. If the source lied, tough.
Investigative journalism is always a gamble. If mainstream media worked, they'd try to press the government on the myriads of claims presented in Hersh's article. Perhaps this would lead somewhere. But the days when mainstream opposed the U.S. government like in the case of Abu Ghraib are over.
> If the source lied, tough. Investigative journalism is always a gamble.
That's not how it works. The onus is on the journalist and the editors to ensure that any source they're relying on is credible, in a position to know what they're claiming, and not playing you. That's why most will insist on dual-sourcing any particularly sensational claims unless they really trust the source.
In the past journalists have been fired for relying on non-credible sources, most recently James LaPorta, so this is no small thing.
If Sy Hersh is not verifying anything about the source he's relying on, he's just being a transcriber not a journalist.
> What I find particularly odd is that this entire thing appears to be based on a single, unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning".
Why is that weird? Assuming this is true, there would be rather many people with such knowledge. One of them may feel the need to talk. Would you expect such a source to be named?
Also, I find it a lot easier to imagine why the US would want to do this, than why Russia or Germany would want to do this.
> Why is that weird? Assuming this is true, there would be rather many people with such knowledge. One of them may feel the need to talk.
The level of detail about the operation is basically, some divers from the US Navy attached bombs to the pipeline during a military drill that were detonated with magical sonobouy signals according to some professor who said that might work.
Another red flag: The vast majority of the article was about a political narrative, which really is focused around hurting Russia, and not who is benefited by the destruction of the pipeline. The US government does not own our energy industry and is often at odds with the gas and oil industry here, and this article assumes a level of integration that does not exist in the US political system.
> Another red flag: The vast majority of the article was about a political narrative, which really is focused around hurting Russia, and not who is benefited by the destruction of the pipeline. The US government does not own our energy industry and is often at odds with the gas and oil industry here, and this article assumes a level of integration that does not exist in the US political system.
I am not really qualified to judge on the verity of the article, but the statement that's there is no strong "integration" between the US government and the gas and oil industry (and other ones for that matter) is absurd. The US fought wars over access to cheap oil (Gulf war 1) has put extremely lucrative deals for their own oil companies into place after forcing regime change (gulf war 2), has highest officials transition to highest jobs in industry (Cheney), has shown multiple times that it will use intelligence apperatus for industry advantages (the spying scandal in Germany, airbus vs boring contracts...). Many (most) US military operations over the last 30 years can be directly attributed to economic motivations.
A US amphibious warship USS Arlington[0] was sailing near the nordstream location. It left a Swedish island in the middle of the Baltic Sea 6 September 2022.
Meanwhile, the US controversially transferred SEALS to Germany earlier in October 2022[1].
USNS William McLean left a German port 5 September 2022[3] (there are also port call records) and headed to meet the USS Arlington on 10 Sept 2022[2] to transfer cargo.
USS Arlington loitered around docking in Lithuania and only reaching the straight near Denmark on 22 Sept.[2]
USS Arlington then meets the exact same USNS William McLean for another cargo transfer 20 days later and just 6 days after leaving port.
Where USNS William McLean went after I don't know. I know it docked somewhere close as there's an entry for 26 Sept 2022, but I don't feel like paying to know the exact location.
If you were conducting a SEAL operation on the high seas, a San Antonio-class ship would be a perfect launch vessel. A cargo exchange would be the perfect cover to swap ships. Delayed bomb detonation isn't dangerous and could explain why only 3 of 4 pipelines were impacted (aka, something went wrong with one).
I'm not saying it 100% happened (and is somewhat at odds with the anonymous source in this story), but to me, it seems like the US had the motive, means, and opportunity.
It has a range of roughly 20 miles necessitating carrying it near the location. That "giant assault ship" is exactly what you use to carry one of these. It also explains how you haul a few hundred pounds of explosives down a hundred meters for planting.
" The US government does not own our energy industry and is often at odds with the gas and oil industry here, "
For someone who is not American, this statement is amusing. The US govt and US military are fully in bed with the US energy industry, when it comes to actions outside America.
US still occupies the Syrian oil fields btw. No one talks about US territory grabbing there - it never even makes the news.
> and not who is benefited by the destruction of the pipeline.
Something that wasn't made clear in the article is that US energy companies have been massive beneficiaries of the Nordstream destruction. The US is now the world's leading exporter of liquid natural gas. That wouldn't have happened if the pipeline(s) were still operational.
NS1 and NS2 are not the only pipelines Russia could be using to export gas to Europe, but there are several land-based ones too.
After shutting down NS1 (they claimed equipment issues) they only moved marginal flows (if any) onto those pipelines.
Blowing up NS1/NS2 doesn't really change anything here..
You can easily imagine any of the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine (with some local help) or even Finland, Swede or Norway doing the deed.
Or, since the pipelines are well known and not difficult to reach, basically everyone with access to explosives, a boat a divers with explosives skills. None of which is particularly hard to come by.
At that moment in the war, even Putin had a lot of strong motivations -- lock out the option of bringing Nord Stream back online and close to door on de-escalation. As a side-benefit, the possibility of driving a wedge into NATO. I also found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713402 interesting. Who knows.
Putin was already effectively doing that, by demanding payment in rubles and making weird terms. If Putin wanted to shut down Nordstream, he'd just stop sending gas. What was Europe going to do, sanction him more?
I can see the US doing it as they've been vocal opponents to nordstream since its inception, I can see Ukraine wanting to do it although I doubt they'd have the resources, might also have been some other rogue European faction wanting out from under Putin's thumb.
The "Putin did it" hypothesis was that he did it to prevent internal replacement. Suppose that some Russian rival wanted to replace him. They could kill or imprison Putin, end the war in Ukraine, restart the gas pipelines, and have a lot of gas money from Europe to distribute to supporters.
Destroying the pipelines removed the potential reward for an internal rival to replace him.
Nah, that's too simple an explanation. Someone in China obviously wanted cheap gas, so they had to force the Russians to stop selling to Europe and turn eastward. But it can't be Xi because he was enforcing the lockdown, so must've been someone else. My money's on Jack Ma - rich, powerful, directly interested in getting the economy running at full speed again.
If Russia levels Kiev and starts moving in to the rest of the country, a) Ukraine will almost certainly not surrender, leading to prolonged insurgency, and b) I expect ground troops from neighbors, EU, and possibly NATO will come into play.
Meanwhile, all the rhetoric of Russia “saving” a brotherly nation goes flying out the window.
I'm afraid something as drastic as the annihilation of Kiev will lead to actions that are beyond the usual risk assessment levels. Countries will be compelled to act, (repeated...) threats of nukes be damned. Europe will not tolerate another Nazi Germany on its borders, period.
Put another way, a massive, discontinuous step in escalation will inevitably lead to a similar step from the other side. There is no world in which Germany and Poland go "OK then" and withdraw all aid.
Of course there is. Mass mobilization and a war economy would do the trick. Many of Putin's rivals are calling for exactly that.
Ukraine's military barely held on against 90k professional soldiers and 140k mobilised. It would not stand a single chance against 3 million soldiers and a fully militarized Russian economy. Russia hasn't even called up a tenth of its trained reserves.
The Russians had been claiming in the months before the explosion that sanctions were keeping them from delivering gas, and that Europe needed to back off sanctions if they wanted gas to flow. Europe called them out and said this was obviously a falsehood.
Then the explosions happened, which prevented gas from being transported through the pipelines - except for one Nordstream 2 pipeline, which actually would require Germany to budge for it to be operational. Russia even stated that they'd be happy to send gas through the remaining pipeline as soon as Germany backtracked.
Whether or not you think Russia did it, the explosion had the effect of turning something the Russians had been trying and failing to convince other countries of into a reality.
> If Putin wanted to shut down Nordstream, he'd just stop sending gas.
Indeed, Nordstream hadn't been running gas for about a month at the time of the explosions. (Indeed, Nordstream 2 also never ran gas). That is critically useful information for assessing who had motive to blow up the pipeline, yet everyone speculating on the matter seems to assume that it was being used at the time of explosion.
Well, someone did it. If somebody knows who, they are not telling.
Without sources, everything is specilation at best, consiracy theory BS or propaganda at worst. Personally, I don't even believe half of what is reported with connection to the war in Ukraine.
Agreed. One of those situations where everyone wants to blame everyone else for a "terrible" thing that happened, but at the same time don't really GAF because all sides were okay with finalizing a clean break between Europe and Russia for a variety of domestic and IR reasons anyways.
Now I picture a virtual waiting line of covert divers and motivated activists in front of the pipelines waiting for their turn to try it. And being pissed someone else was first! Maybe they have a class reunion of sorts ten years from now!
A dozen divers of the joint US-Russia-Ukraine-Germany “diplomacy simplification strike force” show up only to find the wreckage of the pipeline. Floating nearby, the telltale calling-card, a globe emblazoned on a white flag… Greenpeace!
Why do you think Putin is against de-escalation? The post you links to proposes a not very sensible argument: We are talking about _nation states_. The law isn't as black and white, Gazprom would not pay any fines put on it by a court of the enemy. Even if they were to pay fines put on them, why would this in any way reduce fines? Even if it were to reduce the fines, why would that be worth more than two pipelines there were full of methane? It sounds very implausible.
International contract arbitration wouldn't be handled by 'a court of the enemy', but by a neutral venue mutually agreed to in the contract signing, perhaps hosted by the World Bank, International Chamber of Commerce, or similar.
Gazprom would have to abide by it once relations are normalised, or find other countries unwilling to trust it when signing future contracts.
The Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden and so on, all understand that they have duties to Germany due to their EU membership and further understand that they are dependent on the German economy and that any action of this kind, which jeopardises the German economy, jeopardises also them.
Thus you cannot easily imagine any of the Baltic states, Finland or Sweden doing the deed.
Norway is conceivable-- but they're not really all that active in the Baltic sea, Ukraine is conceivable-- but it isn't actually super easy to do what was done. Blowing up the pipeline would have been easy, but there were several bombs, and they were, as I understand it, quite big, and this would be removal of resources from things closer to the fighting.
Norway is difficult for political reasons though-- would they really screw over their neighbouring countries in the EU?
Thus all these countries are all unlikely choices.
Because without a collaboration of some sort this reads like a planted story.
Source with this degree of knowledge would have no issue providing lots of things that could be confirmed through other means. Documents, names, precise dates and times. Who was in charge of this on Norwegian side? On CIA side.. when and where did they meat etc etc etc
"You could probably write a similar one with Russia ..."
I disagree - there is no credible motive here for Russia and, in fact, the outcome was directly opposed to every outcome they are, or were trying, to achieve.
Not only do I, as a US citizen, believe that the US perpetrated this act but further: I believe it is an overtly hostile action against EU citizens and, particularly, Germans, who will suffer the most economically.
EU states are now buying US natural gas like we always wanted them to. How much pain and suffering were we willing to inflict to make that happen ?
As a German citizen let me tell you, hardly anyone here is angry that the pipelines are gone. No one is even talking about Nord Stream anymore. When Gazprom stopped the gas flows in July 2022, it was abundandly clear, that the deliveries would not resume in the foreseable future. In a way, blowing up the pipelines made things easier, because the government and the industry could fully focus on reorganizing energy procurement, without being needlessly entangled in hypothetical discussions about what could have been. Even if Russia wanted to resume selling gas to Western Europe sometime in the future, there is still plenty of capacity in the remaining pipelines through Belarus and Poland, as well as Ukraine. They are fully operational and currently either not used at all (Yamal pipeline), or operating at a very low capacity (Transgas).
I'm French and I'm missing the Nord Stream pipelines. We need all the supply lanes we can get even if our neighbours are untrustworthy.
Now we have to rely on the US and there is nothing worse than relying on the US. Europe just showed once again it failed to learn anything from the Suez crisis. The US should never be trusted. They are not a reliable and only care about themselves.
Europe has been mismanaging its relationship with the BRIC since the end of the Cold War. We are too dependent on NATO. Not that there is much to expect from the EU. Every addition since 1995 has only weakened it.
Europe couldn't even stop Little Russia (Serbia) from genociding Bonsian Muslims and Kosovo-Albanians until the US-led NATO intervention had to put a stop to it twice.
Also Norway can replace a lot of the Russian gas supplies.
If your justification of NATO is their entirely illigetimate and overall worthless intervention in Kosovo, I don't think we will ever see eye to eye. The bombings were highly destructive and didn't solve anything. The war stopped when Russia urged Milošević to surrender after a lot of diplomatic negotiations.
As an EU citizen living next to Russia I can assure you, I'm DELIGHTED that people can no longer buy gas from a mass murderer like Putin. Anyone who buys gas from Russia is essentially supporting genocide of Ukrainian civilians, if suffering is what we're talking about.
Besides, things are going on pretty okay. Electricity prices are stabilizing and Europe will eventually become greener as well. No matter who did it, blowing up the pipeline was a good thing.
The second string of NS2 is undamaged (but denied operation from the German side). In addition Russia there are several land-based pipelines from Russia to central Europe (only used for small volumes at this point - much below capacity).
> Anyone who buys gas from Russia is essentially supporting genocide of Ukrainian civilians, if suffering is what we're talking about.
Recent reports suggest the US and certain European nations sabotaged peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. Are those nations supporting the genocide of Ukrainian civilians?
The amount of LNG gas remains insignificant so far. Germany also hasn't signed any significant contract with the US but rather with Qatar.
To give you one credible motive for Russian involvement: Russia cut off Europe of Gas supplies to get leverage on the Ukraine conflict, but this largely failed as European countries pooled their gas reserves and vowed to move away from Russian gas. As Russia could see that this market was lost the explosions were a last punch to send gas prices higher before the European winter and protect Gazprom from lawsuits. The mild weather killed that first motive, let's see about the other.
It was a hostage situation. "You want to quit our gas? See how you're going to fare when winter comes and you can't fill your storage in time."
In September it was already clear that a weak polar vortex would make for a frosty winter in the northern hemisphere. It was just luck (for Europe) that it hit North America and not Europe. During summer in Germany every week more people were drumming up (literally) demands to open Nord Stream 2.
There was no way of being sure a German government wouldn't flip under pressure once people were freezing and showing up with torches at the Reichstag.
But one September night someone went in and shot the hostages...
While this winter is milder than usual, Europe does typically have a hotter climate than could be expected, thanks to the Gulf Stream. (For instance
the North Mediterranean is on the same longitude as New York !)
There is a lot of credible motive for the fascist russia. First, make allies distrust each other, sabotaging their unity. Second, create panic among the EU population, hoping for increased pressure to lift the sanctions and stop support of Ukraine defending their homeland. Third, force the issue with pending legal approvals for the remaining new pipeline.
Fortunately, EU managed to store up plenty of gas and the winter was mild, so russian blackmail has failed.
Are you saying that the world should just bend over to russian imperialism and merrily let them commit cultural genocide because global warming is bad? Cause I am at a loss what your comment is supposed to mean. If not for imperialism and lack of foresight and integrity among both the elites and the general population, we wouldn’t have either global warming nor these kind of wars. Global warming is already here, and it’s shitty enough, but if it will help bring down those imperialist monsters I certainly won’t cry over it.
I remember reading at the time that the motive would have been to remove the oligarch's desire to end the war. If you can't sell the gas anyway, then you can't complain about it.
Seeing as Russia was already using gas supplies as a political tool, it doesn't seem too far fetched.
Notice how the Nord Stream explosions were timed with the opening of the Baltic Pipe connection, which makes it possible to send Norwegian (and Danish) gas from the North Sea to Poland (and possibly further to Lithuania).
Putin was still trying to energy blackmail Europe back then. It is hard to see the explosions as anything else but a threat that the Baltic Pipe could also be blown up -- and the Nord Stream pipes weren't very useful to Russia at that point so it wouldn't cost much to lose them.
Sorry, but why wouldn't he just blow up the Baltic Pipe then? What use is the threat itself when you admit losing the Nord Stream did cost them something? Seems like a stretch.
That would have been treated as an attack on NATO. Why perform a hostile act if a much cheaper threat works? Even if it only gets you 10% of what a successful hostile act gets you, it is worth doing because it is a lot less risky.
Gotta say this threat doesn't sound compelling. Who didn't know Russia could bomb a pipeline? Seems more like Russia punching itself in the face for literally no reason.
Also, given the climate now, if there was even a shred of evidence or any hint that Putin did this, US media and intelligence officials would be blaring that from every rooftop and every talking head would be "Russia this", and "Russia that". I think the relative silence speaks very clearly.
There are plenty of credible motives for Russia to do this (some even listed in this thread), but they are all just as weakly supported as this theory.
> I believe it is an overtly hostile action against EU citizens and, particularly, Germans, who will suffer the most economically.
In the scenario where America did it, I think there is a strong argument to be made that it was in the long-term interests of EU citizens, despite causing them some short-term discomfort. They never should have started this pipeline project in the first place, buying energy from Russia made the EU weak. Breaking that relationship permanently will make the EU stronger.
America "doing things in the long-term interests of EU citizens, despite causing them some short-term discomfort" is exactly why the US is seen as the baddy in a lot of countries.
We are not your children to be nannied and taken decisions on behalf of!
Europeans are lucky that most Americans don't care what Europeans think of America, and continue to support and defend the EU despite Europeans being utterly ungrateful for any of it. If you lot had to pay for your own defense, you'd have a lot less social programs to go around, a lot less to gloat about to the Americans you hate so much.
The European Union can collectively defend itself against any conceivable invader. What it can't do without US help is bombing countries far away, as it lacks the military logistics and force generation to do that well. That's the main purpose of NATO since 1991, and the UK along with France really like having the option to bomb meddlesome African countries into civil war, so they play along.
There is no scenario in which Russia could successfully invade an appreciable part of the EU, even without taking into account European nukes.
The only nukes Germany has are those that America charitably allows Germany to borrow. If Germany grew up like UK and France and bought/made their own toys, then maybe Germany would find itself to have more autonomy.
Ukraine, in January 2022, had more tanks than Germany, France, and the UK combined.
They had more air defense than Germany, France, and the UK combined, though the systems were not quite as capable individually.
They had nearly as many active duty military as Germany, France, and the UK combined, and a huge number of reservists with experience fighting in the War in Donbass against Russian military and paramilitary forces with tanks and artillery, as opposed to jihadists with no real heavy weapons of any kind.
Their airforce was mostly comparable in size to any one of the above, though again not as capable qualitatively.
And they had a hell of a lot more artillery and artillery shells than Germany, France, and the UK combined. By a massive margin, although again not quite as capable individually. Nearly all of the NATO-standard artillery ammunition that has been provided to Ukraine has come from US stockpiles, because at the rate Ukraine consumes artillery ammo Germany, France, and the UK would be collectively tapped out in about 10 days. Not to mention HIMARS ammunition.
The Russians were also rather handicapped by the reckless, arrogant stupidity of their plan and extreme secrecy resulting in soldiers selling their fuel rations for alcohol, because until a day or two beforehand they thought was all a bunch of western lies because that's what the government was saying publicly. With the result that a bunch of vehicles ran out of fuel halfway to Kyiv. Had the invasion been done according to doctrine rather than as what they expected to be an immediate victory as the Ukrainians laid down their arms, awed by their superior military power, the story may still have turned out very different.
Anyway, Ukraine had, by a very significant margin, the largest military in Europe excluding Russia, and certainly the most experienced in fighting "real" wars. Take this into consideration when boasting about how easily the rest of Europe would be able to handle a Russian invasion.
> Ukraine had, by a very significant margin, the largest military in Europe
Italy has a much more capable armoured force than Ukraine did at the time.
You are comparing T64s, vehicles designed in 1951 to modern vehicles? How do you think they are performing when it comes to firing on the move, engaging at night, accuracy, survivability?
Tanks newer than T64 have been long retired to reserve in Europe. There are many IFVs today capable of putting holes in T64s' in service today.
> The Russians were also rather handicapped by the reckless, arrogant stupidity of their plan
Such disrespect! Russia is an exemplary conservative society with traditional values!
Europe is 27 countries, not 3. Its's half a billion people.
Europe combined has more operational vehicles than Russia does. Has a larger standing army than Russia does.
A much better air force, and relies on it for air defence, not on ground-based missiles.
I never said 'easilly' but imagining that Russia can occupy half a billion people is downright crazy
Whether the Russians can occupy successfully isn't the point, they can do a ton of damage in a short amount of time, not to mention the torture and rape.
That option disappeared when Russia invaded Ukraine, not when the pipeline was blown up (at least if you rate human life over economics). Nobody should buy anything from a regime like Putin's Russia.
It’s telling that this post includes stopping a genocide as a bad thing, I.e. the UN stopping the Bosnian genocide in the fracturing Yugoslavia as a bad thing.
Coincidentally, the Russian sphere is one of the groups mad about the UN involvement in Bosnia and Serbia
No-one opposes stopping the genocide. The argument is generally that bombing Belgrade was unnecessary (and if anything, a distraction from the UN's failure to prevent the genocide).
When that "action to stop it" is bombing a civilian capital quite distant from the warring groups, you can understand people might not be enthusiastic about that.
I'll just leave this here, in case you haven't heard of it.
It's about a documentary which made some waves, accusing the involved politicians of outright lies and exaggerations as justification for military action, which in turn then lead to the things they fabricated.
It was called 'Es begann mit einer Lüge/It started with a lie'
Great! because two Germans put together a documentary the thousands that died are back alive? The former victims will be relieved by their new circumstances.
What is it that you want to say? The documentation showed that the things didn't happen as presented. By people who were there at the times, and before. For instance rows and rows of bodies lined up, or stacked up in vans, on pickups.
They were like that because of cleaning up after some skirmish. To be identified, and buried.
These pictures were used to present it like that was common. Which wasn't the case.
The military intervention created the circumstances which made that common.
Yes, it's even sweeter because EU industry is quickly becoming unable to compete successfully on global markets and the Russians are getting poorer. Two birds with one stone!
I agree, very well written and full of detail, but with no shred of evidence, it’s just a theory.
The credibility of the author should never be taken for granted, especially with stories of this sensitive nature. The veracity also depends on an anonymous source, which will likely never be revealed nor verified or verifiable.
I think the danger here is that many people will take the author’s credibility for granted and will be influenced to take some action based on their belief.
I guess that’s okay, but it feels like people ought to come to the conclusion that this is nothing more than an interesting theory, then move on.
He’s protecting his source. You can think what you want, but the circumstantial evidence that supports the assertions is voluminous. And it certainly makes more sense than any of the other “theories”, especially the absurd idea that Russia blew up its own pipeline.
That’s my point though. Voluminous circumstantial evidence is still just that, circumstantial.
The most likely theory is still just that, a theory.
With great credibility comes great responsibility. Many people will read this and other stories as fact. It’s been an issue since the dawn of man, but with the reach a single voice has today, it has far more impact.
I had read a comment on HN once that said a course on critical thinking ought to be mandatory in school. I agree with that more and more.
I also think an author with this degree of influence ought to include a disclaimer reminding people to think critically about what is the truth and what could be the truth. A warning before using these words in anger would be the right thing to do.
Critical thinking would make one far more skeptical of a government that has lied repeatedly to its own people about every armed conflict, foreign policy intrigue, etc., rather than doubt a legendary journalist who has repeatedly exposed that government’s lies and has provided enough operational detail to make a very convincing case. I don’th think we should accept anything at face value, but weighing the credibility of the two parties and the evidence provided, it’s pretty easy to determine which story is closest to the truth.
Funny you should cite those two examples, both notorious for being faked by the US government to justify military action. It’s amazing how many times some people can be convinced “this time is different” in one lifetime.
And yet the default reaction of the "rational" chattering class has been to defer to the government. Over and over, no many how many times they're lied to. Brilliant.
That doesn’t mean he has a source though. He could have fabricated the entire story.
He could also have a source who fabricated the entire story.
Even if he did have a source or sources, the level of detail is astonishing. The source or sources would have needed to be omnipresent across multiple agencies and government offices. That alone seems improbable.
Top comment of course is reassuring nothing-to-see-here platitude, definitively framing this thoroughly-sourced investigation by a Pulitzer winner (whatever that means) as a harmless entertaining fabrication (mad props to the mmastrac, it's quite a skill to deftly dismiss and trivialize months of work with two sentences)...aahhhh, so reassured....because we want to be "soothed and comforted, not challenged and confronted" and anything against the mainstream narrative and Chinese-spy-balloon-distraction is clearly "not anchored in reality". SMH...expect more from you HN.
Pretty much any country bordering the baltic sea + US + China + Ukrain have groups which a) have interest in it being destroyed b) have the capabilities to do so.
I don’t reckon that the leaks are accidental either. The Biden Administration waited until the tide of public opinion turned further against Russia. They waited until the rest of the West had committed MBTs to Ukraine before allowing this to be leaked. There’s a message being sent here.
Assuming this is an blog from Sy Hersh and it's not made up by Sy Hersh and it's not made up by the person Sy Hersh interviewed (all of which might be possible and can't be easily claimed to be unlikely (or likely)):
The US still doesn't need to send a message now and it's still not profitable for them for the article to go public now.
More likely is that both Sy Hersh and the informant didn't want to risk it before. E.g. due to fear of personal consequences or due to fear of causing political consequences in ways they don't want to cause.
Wrt. the the normal citizens in the EU the US doesn't need to send a message, nor would it be received. Wrt. politicians messages already have been send clear enough.
Perhaps some folks care very much that it was the US that executed the plan instead of Sweden or the UK or some other country, but for me you could swap out all the names of entities in the reporting and it would still be very interesting reading. For me, I take the story as, "this is a plausible explanation for how a modern nation state plans and executes targeted subterfuge as part of a web of global politics".
It's not entirely fiction such as, "And then Biden sacrificed a peahen, waved his magic wand, and spoke the incantation and the pipeline exploded!" The events, organizations, equipment, and strategy described in the document is all real-life stuff!
> The only anchor in reality appears to be Biden suggesting that they knew how to take it out which seems like a pretty weak place to build a large story.
we can also choose to ignore the american material movements in the area at more or less the exact time. Coincidence im sure, after all, the good old uncle sam is an ally to europe and would NEVER do anything against citizens of other countries
You’re free to not believe his anonymous source, but this vapid “Tom Clancy” nonsense is uncalled for given that you have no counter-arguments whatsoever.
Not a few hours later, 17 hours apart. No military is going to arrange for two pipes in the same general area to be destroyed 17 hours apart. 17 hours to find the second floating sonar device. 17 hours to get caught with your pants down.
I'm saying this as former US military here. the Idea that in the middle of a OPORD, of any kind, POTUS would come in last minute and change a detail, like an explosive on a timer (fairly simple,) to what is effectively some new technology no one has ever heard of, that allows for remote sonar detonations is Tom Clancy stuff.
In the United States Military, there's this thing called the Chain of Command.
This exercise was under the U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, which is under the United States European Command & United States Africa Command.
The "work" that being described here would have been under SOCOM (United States Special Operations Command), which is the only command that could do this kind of work, they are the only ones that even have the assets to do this kind of work and theres absolutely no mention of that in this piece.
It's complete conjecture and should absolutely be treated as such until theres hard evidence.
SOCOM does actually get a brief mention, but in a way that makes the whole story even less plausible. At the beginning, Hersh claims that the divers used were chosen because they were just "Navy only" and not part of SOCOM, which is allegedly a legal loophole to avoid having to report the activity to the Gang of Eight in Congress, apparently done because of concerns about leaks.
Setting aside how legally questionable that premise sounds, especially because the entire rest of the article is full of references to the involvement of clandestine organizations beyond "Navy only", Hersh then goes on to describe an operation apparently involving an absolute clown car full of a bunch of other people including 3 foreign countries, at least some people running a major NATO exercise, and what sounds like half the Norwegian Navy. Operations so secret you can't tell 8 Congressional leaders (as required by law) but you can tell Norway, Denmark, and Sweden about do not sound like a thing.
> Operations so secret you can't tell 8 Congressional leaders (as required by law) but you can tell Norway, Denmark, and Sweden about do not sound like a thing.
I'd like to preface everything that Ive written thus far with the following.
Yes, I'm former military.
The United States does shady things and has a long history of doing so.
The United States is a capitalist imperialist hell-scape for a lot of people.
Counties/states do not have friends, they have interests.
That being said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
What was written in that piece does not mesh at all with what my mental model of how the US military work, How pipelines work, etc.
As not ex military, the article sounds plausible. Likely, even.
My main objection is, who would be the source? It sounds like there are maybe 20 people in the world who would have this level of information. Each of those individuals would presumably have been selected largely on the basis of commitment to national security. That's why people sign up for these roles in the first place. None of these individuals have anything in particular to gain by leaking this information. All of them have _a lot_ to lose by the same.
I can't imagine any of these individuals as the source, which throws the rest of the story out the window. Even if it ends up being true in the end.
The President sets the strategy for all of the combatant commands through the National Security Strategy and ultimately every military action has a line drawn to the President through the SecDef. Saying POTUS doesn't have away over the other COCOMs is misleading at best. (To be clear, this article is still bs, having "Navy only" divers doesn't make any sense in the way operations are done in the US military.)
What I'm trying to illustrate is that POTUS isn't sitting in on OPORDs, The Joint Chiefs of Staff advise the president on all military matters, the president goes through them, the Secretary of Defense, etc.
I think his argument is that the explanation offered by the author is implausible. When someone comes forward with such claims, the main means of determining it's veracity is to verify the details provided. Typically fabrications will contain small inconsistencies that don't match facts known only to investigators, verified witnesses, or experts in the subject matter.
I think their implication is that none of us really know what happened, much less the author of this article.
He is right that sonar buoy detonation thing sounds like absolute bullshit. Incredibly risky and 17 hours.. I mean you want to do this, send a submarine, it fires few torpedoes. No more pipeline. Fast, simple, reliable.
Let's say I am a Ukranian patriot, with few million in the bank. I bet given few month I could put together a team of divers to plant some C4 with a simple timer and blow this thing to hell. Or Polish patriot, or Polish government or any of the Baltic states. It is an existential struggle for all of them, and russkie understand one thing and one thing only, this was a very clear communication straight to Putin.
I think it’s the Polish. Apparently their relationship with Russia is similar to a very angry pitbull has with steak. They were mass rapes by the Soviets at the end of World War II and horrible conditions for the Polish during the Soviet empire.
Polish friends say there’s no shortage of young men who want the glory of blowing up something owned by the people who gang raped Grandma.
Yeah, Poles hate Russians, and the polling numbers back it up. Pew found 94% of Poles think Russia is a "major threat", and 91% have "very unfavorable views of Russia".
I can totally see it being the Polish, but I don't think there is a clear finger that points to anyone (including the US and Russia.) This does sound more plausible than the US. If the US did it, it would literally be done with support of other NATO allies (including Germany itself, and in secret.) It's simply too risky for them to end up destroying the entire NATO relationship, which they would not risk at this juncture...so it doesn't really make sense. Poland on the other hand, would still be a buffer between the rest of Europe and Russia even if Ukraine falls...so they have a lot less to lose, because no one is going to really punish them. I still feel it as -probably- Russia, but I don't think there is enough evidence, and it's very likely we'll just never know. The US theory to me is just logically bunk.
I said this in another comment, but the Polish would be very stupid to do something like that, which jeopardises the German economy.
I think it's moderately unlikely. This is obviously something that many Polish people would cheer for, but would their actual government really be that stupid?
Yeah right, and you would be picked up by a Russian patrol boat pretty quickly. The article doesn't insinuate that the operation itself is difficult, but to do it without anyone detecting it and not leaving enough of a trace that things can be tracked back to you.
I immediately told my friends that it could have been the danish submarine guy who killed tournalist and was supposedly in prison, when actually an intelligence agency got him out to do this task.
It was fun how far we could speculate this random fake story. It was at least as plausible as this story.
Pipelines of all types are fragile things and break all the time for numerous reasons.
Do not attribute to malice which can be explained by negligence/incompetence with out evidence.
The Nordstream pipelines were not in operation, which indicated the need for maintenance. The pipelines, which carry methane under saltwater, require frequent preventive maintenance checks and services, however, it is believed that these checks may have been neglected since the Russians took over. The pipelines were officially shut down for maintenance in July 2020 and July 2021, but were met with various issues and disruptions in gas flow.
Given the pressurized and highly flammable nature of the pipelines, it is imperative to determine the causes of these issues.
Sabotage cannot be ruled out, especially given the current geopolitical climate.
However, the most likely cause could be related to the formation of methane hydrates, which can cause blockages in the pipeline known as hydrate plugs. These plugs can be difficult to remove and require a slow and simultaneous depressurization from both ends of the pipeline.
Remember, both sides, this is important!
If the depressurization is not carried out correctly, it can result in the rapid launch of the hydrate plug towards the depressurized side, causing significant damage to the pipeline. The Diesel Effect, which occurs when the valves are closed ahead of the fast-moving plug, can also cause significant damage. It is crucial that the removal of hydrate plugs be carried out by experienced professionals, given the potential consequences of a failure to do so.
Was it ever established whether the fourth pipeline was even attacked? Did it have explosives attached that didn't go off? (And if so do they have a convenient "made in ..." sticker?)
Would have been interesting to hear the alleged source give a reason for only blowing up 3 of 4 pipes in a plan they call "perfect".
Was it established that it was caused by explosives? The last time the US did this, it was by adding malicious code into pipeline control software (before the USSR stole the software from a US company).
to counter, a lot of people in this thread are saying that the united states is the only country that benefits, (hind sight is 20/20), therefor they must have done it. And all of this is without a shred of evidence.
If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on the site guidlelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." We don't want political or nationalistic flamewar here, and any substantive point can be made without it.
If anyone else had written this, would it be significant?
Wouldn't it just be written off as a conspiracy theory that provides little to no evidence for its claims?
If the only thing that gets this on HN is Seymour Hersh's reputation (which has lately become somewhat questionable) then you might want to reconsider. Plus, the quality of the comments has not been very good so far.
No, I don't think it would be. Hersh is inevitably part of the story because of his historical significance and the network of government sources that he's cultivated for decades. It doesn't follow that his claims are true (even if he's accurately reporting, his sources must have their own agendas). That's why I added the question mark to the title above. The story being on HN doesn't imply anything about that—only that it's interesting.
Btw, I haven't gone back and looked at the history but I'd be willing to bet that the same things were said about Hersh's reputation from the beginning. That's standard fare for counterargument.
p.s. It's astonishing how narrow the space is for someone to say they don't know the truth about X but it's interesting. If X has any charge at all, you get pounced on by people who feel sure that they do know what the truth is. But if you think about it, it's a precondition for curiosity not to already know (or feel one knows) the answer—and this is a site for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So I don't feel that this is particularly a borderline call from a moderation point of view.
It does strike me as odd that (by my reading) there's only a single, unnamed source for all these claims. Hersh's reputation as a journalist is significant and worth considering, but for me it makes it stranger that there's so little evidence in this piece which, as it notes, alleges an act of war.
> but for me it makes it stranger that there's so little evidence in this piece which, as it notes, alleges an act of war.
It makes it less surprising to me. Back in 2006 I believed Hersh when he reported that the U.S. had troops inside Iran laying the groundwork for an imminent American attack. This was also based on anonymous sources. After the attack failed to materialize, I learned to take such reporting with a large grain of salt.
I have to sympathize with Hersh; being on the outside yet being taken seriously by some has to be hard on you. Paranoia strikes deep; into your life it will creep.
He used to be credible. Then unfortunately a lot of shady people learned they could manipulate him and get away with it, and so they've done. He can publish something like this and when anyone says, "prove it" he can't. Because Top Secret.
When he reported on it before the alleged attack happened, it could always have been called of for one reason or another. I don't know how likely or possible such an effort would be, but at least on a small scale it checks out: If I wanted to poison someone, and someone credible enough to be believed in stated that I was going to do just that, who's to say that I can't just change my mind at that very moment? Without finding the poison it would be nigh impossible to prove.
This is something that will always be problematic when reporting on something that hasn't happened yet. As the future hasn't been written, there's always room for all actors to adapt and change their plans.
Dan I’ve emailed you privately but I simply don’t think this is appropriate to keep on HN given the framing of the article as fact and the current evidence provided. Hearsay is not new evidence. Give us a recording, a photo, anything. As written this is a compelling fiction presented as fact which is dishonest to the community. Especially considering these articles are simply clicked and read more often than debated, only a fraction of us are silly enough to write comments on the internet.
I don't mind the submission (although I am skeptical of its thesis), but I think the lack of transparency about how flagging and moderation operates is Not Great, and I have raised this issue for years. I do want to see and discuss significant non-technology news on HN, because the hacker ethos is a matter of motivation as much as capacity.
But such submissions also suck up a lot of oxygen and it's understandable that they are often flagged or discouraged when they get too flamey. It might be worthwhile to have a designation like 'Chat HN:' which is understood to be non-technical, and which users can filter in or out of their feed.
No moral objection to the content, only ethical. I don’t care what beliefs you have, I simply think it’s irresponsible to parrot — or provide a platform for parroting — unsubstantiated claims. The beauty of Hacker News, and my enjoyment of it, is that it’s moderated and I don’t often see content like this.
I honestly panicked reading this! At first I was under the impression that this was breaking news. And if true it has major implications. But that’s a really big if. It wasn’t until I read the article that it became obvious I was being manipulated to believe a narrative without evidence. The most disingenuous part of the article is that it starts with a bold claim presented as truth, and then immediately includes two sentences about the White House denying the claim before jumping into thousands of words of hearsay and a story presented as fact. As if to say, “what you’re about to read is a story, and you should know that, but you have to be smart enough to parse between the lines to see that — and I’m avoiding stating it directly so that I can get away with writing the story the way I want to write it on the chance it’s true.”
Substantiate the claims and I’ll rescind criticism. I like to believe I’m a thoughtful and relatively apolitical person, I just have a visceral reaction to being manipulated in this way (bold claim, no evidence) and I’d hope other people share the same standards.
Given who authored this, and who is referencing it, this is now a “thing.”
This being published is for sure going to have an impact on diplomatic relations. Removing it from HN doesn’t stop anyone of relevance in this from seeing it. Presidents, ministers, ambassadors, senators, etc. are probably being briefed on this. The White House is going to have to deal with this regardless of its truthiness.
I suspect countries are going to want answers. The U.S. saying “this is not true” probably isn’t going to cut it for the countries involved.
This story has relevance regardless of its truthiness.
> I suspect countries are going to want answers. The U.S. saying “this is not true” probably isn’t going to cut it for the countries involved.
After seeing how Germany handled the USA spying on Merkel (phone saga), I do not expect them countries involved asking further questions or taking appropriate actions.
Welp, maybe taking no action IS the appropriate action. The west must stay united and trade must flow.
The submissiom was, apparently, flagged into almost oblivion before the flagging was switched of as a mod decision.
When Modi-critical submissions get flagged to death, just to pick another flame war guarantee as an example, there is no such intervention. So it is odd it happened in this case.
a) I don't understand the relevance at all to Hacker News. There are plenty of interesting things going on in the tech world that aren't making the front page.
b) There is a lack of evidence in the article. I can claim that you destroyed the pipeline and it would be equally as valid at this point.
c) His previous reputation is important but history is littered with examples of people making mistakes and relying on their own hubris. That is why we demand evidence.
> I can claim that you destroyed the pipeline and it would be equally as valid at this point.
An established reputation is the difference between those claims. You making a claim without evidence is just that.
Hersh making a claim without sharing his evidence is something different. That isn’t to say we don’t need evidence, but there’s a better reason to believe him than you, given the context of the situation.
> His previous reputation is important but history is littered with examples of people making mistakes and relying on their own hubris.
And it’s also full of the opposite. The existence of hubris is not evidence of it.
But even then, that claim doesn’t fit, unless you are implying that he made the whole thing up and concluded that it must be what happened.
Another conclusion is that he has a source, and simply has not shared it yet.
Reputation absolutely is evidence. I think you mean it’s not “proof”.
If John Carmack says there is an exciting breakthrough in 3D rendering that will give 8k 120fps ray tracing on commodity hardware, that’s noteworthy, and his reputation is evidence that there is substance to the claim.
HN would be super boring if only topics that had been conclusively proven could be discussed.
> (...) and his reputation is evidence that there is substance to the claim.
No it isn't. The guy's reputation is reason to give the benefit of the doubt, but either his claims are proven sound or else they are just as bullshit if Joe blow himself made them.
It’s still an evidence based stance, but temporarily substitutes one form of evidence for another. The notion of reputation is itself built on evidence, e.g. we observe that someone is generally truthful, so we are later justified in concluding that they might be telling the truth.
The concept of the benefit of the doubt still relies on this form of evidence. That doesn’t imply that this is sufficient.
Regarding Hersh vs. Joe Blow, there is still a meaningful difference in them getting things wrong.
When it’s Joe, you don’t care to begin with, and the revelation of wrongness doesn’t change your opinion of Joe.
When it’s someone like Hersh, such a revelation brings reputational harm, and raises more questions about how he became so convinced of this information to begin with.
If I were claiming that I agreed with the article and found it to be convincingly true, and so should you, I’d agree. I am not doing any of those things.
Judging how incredulous one should be of an author’s writing based on their reputation is something else.
I would be incredulous of any author who doesn't provide evidence. Do you agree that the burden of proof should be applied equally to all authors regardless of reputation?
> Do you agree that the burden of proof should be applied equally to all authors regardless of reputation?
No.
Especially in stories involving classified information it's very rare to get unequivocal proof at first. For better or worse leaks are how stories break, and the leakers are careful about how they do it so to avoid criminal charges.
Given this, all you have is the reputation of the person doing the reporting. Historically have they shown good judgement in discarding the crackpots and do many of their breaking stories from unnamed stories subsequently turn out to be true?
In this case I think Hersh's reputation isn't what it used to be. This century only one of his major claimed stories (the Abu Ghraib prison story - which I don't think he broke anyway?) has turned out to be true, while most (all?) of his other major claims have turned out to be either false or completely unverified after many years.
>Especially in stories involving classified information it's very rare to get unequivocal proof at first. For better or worse leaks are how stories break, and the leakers are careful about how they do it so to avoid criminal charges.
>Given this, all you have is the reputation of the person doing the reporting. Historically have they shown good judgement in discarding the crackpots and do many of their breaking stories from unnamed stories subsequently turn out to be true?
Appeal to Authority is an argument that what they say is automatically true.
If you read what I said, it's the opposite ("In this case I think Hersh's reputation isn't what it used to be") but the point is that reputation is a signal that something is worth paying attention to in the absence of any other useful information.
I often think "false appeals to a logical fallacy without understanding nuanced argument" should be a fallacy itself. Nothing wrong with understanding logical fallacies of course - but often people just mindlessly use them without understanding what the fallacy says.
Expert witness in legal trials is a good counter-example to this fallacy for example. Expert witness testimony is given extra weight because of their reputation in the field. Sometimes this is wrong, but often it is not.
While I understand that you're not equivocally saying that their claims are true, but you are absolutely appealing to someone's reputation as an authority on the topic to suggest what they say is "worth paying attention to in the absence of any other useful information".
Which seems little different to an appeal to authority. Maybe you better understand the nuance between an appeal to authority and an appeal to someone's reputation as an authority.
It’s still not an appeal to authority because Hersh’s status is not being invoked as evidence that this story is true - only as evidence that we should withhold judgement until it can be corroborated with hard evidence. These are very different stances.
No one is claiming that a journalist’s reputation removes the burden of proof.
>When it’s someone like Hersh, such a revelation brings reputational harm, and raises more questions about how he became so convinced of this information to begin with.
Hersh is 85 and in the past decade he has already done quite a bit of damage to his prior reputation
good point, we gotta keep discussion of this topic hidden, so people don't get any weird ideas about questioning our blessed three letter agencies or the holy MIC.
> I can claim that you destroyed the pipeline and it would be equally as valid at this point.
No, it wouldn't. The narrative provided by Hersh's source, whether it's true or not, explains many of the facts that demand an explanation. It provides plausible answers to the questions "How were the explosives placed", "How were the explosives triggered" and "how weren't they detected". Not necessarily true ones! But plausible ones that are internally consistent, and don't in themselves raise huge new questions.
If you want to be in the running, that's what you need to supply too.
This is not a defense of Hersh, it's a defense of his article. You should consider the claims in an article for their internal consistency, and consistency with public evidence, even if you don't trust the source.
This article is remarkable for how different it is from Hersh's Syrian gas claims. There, to the degree Hersh has answers at all to the similar questions how were the chemical weapons acquired, how were they placed and how were they triggered, they just raise impossibly hard questions (like "how was this coordinated", "how did all the participants go along with it" and "how did Russia and the Syrian government utterly fail to expose and document any of it convincingly")
>This article is remarkable for how different it is from Hersh's Syrian gas claims.
It really isn't:
>What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines …
>… Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
>… Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City."
That's exactly the sorts of things from his other recent articles that people who know how things actually work would immediately know is BS.
It looks like most of what you're objecting to is the style of the storytelling.
But to the parts that aren't, I'm open to be convinced. Tell me what you think is unrealistic in the substance of the narrative, and tell me how you came to know how these things work better than the rest of us.
I know from many jobs that the image we would like to preserve for outsiders about how you work, especially in leadership and decision making, is a lot prettier and competent than how it actually works. Hearsh's source tells a story about a messy process, which he sounds, despite it all, kind of proud that still worked. Only he thinks the whole thing should never have happened. I can totally relate to that. It's completely different from typical conspiratorial stories (including some of Hearsh's).
And you sound, unfortunately, like one trying to defend the reputation and preserve the prestige and mystique of planners and decision makers in hierarchical institutions. All that's missing now is that you reply with some variant of a huffy "think what you will" to this.
But you can try to prove me wrong, by spelling out in detail what's so implausible about the sources story.
> a) I don't understand the relevance at all to Hacker News. There are plenty of interesting things going on in the tech world that aren't making the front page.
It's possible the tech stack for the detonator was written in Rust.
a) I don't understand the relevance at all to Hacker News. There are plenty of interesting things going on in the tech world that aren't making the front page.
an incredible amount of tech is involved in these pipelines, building them, blowing them up, figuring out who blew them up, etc.
the war/defense industry is the foundation of all US technology:
1) The US would wait 7 months after Russia invaded Ukraine
2) The US would risk Navy divers for such a petty operation achievable without risking valuable personal
3) The US would not simultaneously detonate (17 hour delay between? wtf)
4) President Biden would not have immediately after taken the opportunity to interrupt broadcast and cable programming to remind us how tough he is.
When you ask yourself who hates the Russians more than anyone else in the world, and when that coincidentally happens to be the same as who benefits economically the most from NS1 & NS2 destroyed, there's only one answer[1], and it isn't Norway, and it isn't Denmark, and it can't be the US. Russia annoys the US, but the US and its citizens do not hate Russia. And US benefits exactly nothing economically from this, and in a global economy, it probably hurts US.
Likely? If Russia spends the considerable resources to send down their own deep sea divers, they can just as easily find trace residues of the C4 or whatever was used and trace that to its origin as well. And how would they trace a Russian torpedo?
The social & physical infrastructure is the story here, not the fact that explosives go boom - although if you don't think explosives are technologically interesting, perhaps that means you just don't know much about them.
Somewhat, but I still think you're being overly dismissive. The story is not expressing wonder at how a thick metal cylinder could be damaged by a relatively small explosion or how a bomb could go off under water where it's hard to light a fire.
I did read the article. Because I at first thought news finally broke on who blew the pipelines up. And news didn't break, becasue the article, if it wasn't for the author, should just be dismissed as conspiracy BS.
It is astonishing how so many people think that others can't read something like this and make their own judgements about it. I guess that they're worried that too many people will just accept this as True, and that will make the world a worse place? I just find it an incredibly arrogant position to take. If there's some other way of justifying that opinion, I'd love to hear it.
> can't read something like this and make their own judgements about it.
What is your judgement based on, intricate knowledge of explosives, experience of deepwater diving or training in black ops?
Because if you have none of those things, then no, you cannot form informed judgement. There hardly any difference between asking me, you, or a random child.
>If there's some other way of justifying that opinion, I'd love to hear it.
If you wanted to hear it, you could just read it as it's been stated repeatedly ITT and it's in the HN Guidelines #1:
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
One of the unironically hardest things about maintaining a community is Saying No. And I'm not just speaking abstractly here, I'm talking personally. When you have a community of interesting and intelligent people who you've enjoyed discussing things with, it's completely natural to start to want to bring everything there for discussion. But some topics inspire far more substantial discussion than others. Some topics are inherently meaty, in particular when they are about things that we, individually or in our direct organizations, can directly take action on, extent further, or otherwise make use of in our lives/work. That helps ground discussion in reality vs emotion and subjective infinities. Other topics risk being more and more intellectual empty calories, where many words can be written that have no actual use of any kind, pure jawboning and ever more self-referential spirals. This is particularly risky for something like this, which is a level removed from hard reports due to lack of hard proof which in turn naturally results in much of the discussion going one or more levels more meta: rather than even discussing the impacts, however useless it might be, it's discussing the report, the author of the report, their credibility etc.
It's not that it's inherently wrong to have those discussions, but does it need to be here? The answer to a lot of us is no. Even if we want to discuss it very much. Self-discipline (and community enforced discipline, and moderator enforced ultimately) is key to maintaining a place like this, and that includes erring towards not having low quality, highly meta and vacuous discussions with no ability for anyone in the community to do any grounding or contribute anything you couldn't read in a newspaper.
I can take issue with some of the other stuff you wrote, but ultimately it comes down to that. Maintaining good communities often involves picking areas and sticking to them, generalization being death. If this was a forum devoted exclusively to space habitats and cats, someone taking out pipelines would still be very important, but it would be neither space habitats, nor cats. It would be completely reasonable for the community to flag it dead. That's not a judgement on the topic nor discussion of it in general. It's just not space habitats or cats.
because of his historical significance and the network of government sources that he's cultivated for decades
This seems a little partial and hard to implement consistently. Can we assume the same metric will be applied to every Robert Woodward story, or any of many single-sector journalists with a lengthy track record, such as Radley Balko who has spent years writing about policing?
I also don't think adding a question mark to the headline clarifies; I can treat an assertion with skepticism, but 'How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline?' reads like a submission from a non-native English speaker, of the sort which often clutter up the New submissions page.
Ok, that last bit is a good point - I'll take out the question mark. Thanks!
Re your other question, the answer is somewhere in the space demarcated by (1) yes, (2) we'll try, (3) consistency is impossible, (4) we're always open to reader input. (I'm sorry that I'm responding in shorthand but I'm being inundated atm)
This gatekeeping is ridiculous. This is the same guy who unveiled the atrocities that occured during the My Lai massacre and at Abu Ghraib, both of which painted the US Gov/military in a terrible light.
This is an actual case of speaking truth to power. He clearly (and rightfully IMO) does not trust the US government and his "somewhat questionable" and recent work has continued that trend. Is it any surprise that the same institutions/people that continuously carry water for the government now rush to label him a conspiracy theorist?
> the same guy who unveiled the atrocities that occured during the My Lai massacre and at Abu Ghraib, both of which painted the US Gov/military in a terrible light
Both were corroborated with evidence. I'm scanning this post for new evidence and coming up empty. The fact that American action was technically plausible has always been known.
One might twist Hersh claiming he has an anonymous source as new information. But that's the closest we get. On its own, that's not sufficient to advance the discussion in a meaningful way because it presents no new facts.
As someone else noted in another thread, Hersh's reputation and the source are absolutely evidence. What he hasn't provided is hard proof for the claims.
I can't find any proof whatsoever as to who actually did it from the western authorities claiming to investigate it either though. In fact, there's been little to no news or updates at all since the incident.
The code name was "Gouda", it was established that it was the Swiss Vatican guard. Ementaler would have been too much into the face and the Vatican wanted to avoid problems with the Italians, so Parmesan was of the table.
> No level of reputation or historical track record should exempt anyone from the basic responsibility of providing evidence for claims they make.
I'm not sure. Bloomberg and Reuters are two media outlets who regularly release information while only citing anonymous sources and not releasing any evidence.
Just posting proofster.png [1] doesn't undo America's long history of doing weird stuff to achieve its goals. Thinking about funding terrorism in Cuba, backdooring all electronic communication ever or saying that your President did not have a stroke.
Also, someone posted further down in the comments that the White House has a history of discrediting witnesses and questioning motives. [2] Interestingly enough, it appears to me that this tactic engages citizens to follow the ad hominem attacks of their policymakers, although they don't gain anything from doing so. Maybe this dynamic is even more interesting than the article itself because the causes of this crime are only for history books. America got what it wanted anyway, and nothing will change that.
>If we cite anonymous sources in a story, say how these people are in a position to know the information, without compromising their identities. Any anonymously sourced story must be reviewed by senior managers.
p. 112; The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Journalists; John Micklethwait, Paul Addison, Jennifer Sondag, Bill Grueskin; John Wiley & Sons; 2017 ed.
> Bloomberg and Reuters are two media outlets who regularly release information while only citing anonymous sources and not releasing any evidence.
It's bad when they do it too. That's what Bloomberg did with their Supermicro Chinese chip story and it was a disaster (and one for which they still haven't apologized or really even acknowledged).
Huge allegations require evidence. Your name is not good enough, no matter what you've exposed in that past.
But maybe, just maybe, other people are willing to to accept claims backed by reputation.
I mean, do you have any idea how difficult some of these stories, throughout history, would be to bring to light with "hard evidence"? What would "hard evidence" even entail? A whistleblower?
I don't think Hersh's reputation is evidence, as such, although it has some persuasive value.
However, evidence is not the only valid form of claim-making. Predictive power also has value: if someone can assert something unlikely without evidence, but with sufficient specificity that it describes a subsequent development very accurately, then it's fair to presume that person probably has insight into the issue.
So while I am somewhat skeptical of Hersh's claims, they're also detailed enough that corroboration could be sought for.
If you could you humor me: if he came out saying Russians blew up the pipeline, would you have the same stance?
These tensions have been brewing between NATO (mostly America) and Russia for at least a decade. It's unfortunate that the situation escalated in Ukraine though, which AFAIK is the victim in the scheming and plotting of those two powers.
I don't support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it seems like that's the only thing people are focusing on because it makes the situation simple for them, and it's easiest to have a single villain and the rest are the good guys.
I assume most people offended by this submission here are American (or at least heavily support America) and want to think of their current government/country as the good guys.
I don't think there's any good guys in this situation.
> These tensions have been brewing between NATO (mostly America) and Russia for at least a decade. It's unfortunate that the situation escalated in Ukraine though, which AFAIK is the victim in the scheming and plotting of those two powers.
As a person from Eastern Europe this is literal Russian propaganda or in simple words - dogshit. You know why somebody like Baltic countries wanted to get in NATO? Because Russia was/is a genuine threat after these countries were deoccupied from the Soviet Union. Russia thinks that these former Soviet Union countries are still their own property, they can't imagine that these countries don't want to live "the Russian way".
Maybe you're right. I honestly don't know. But I only have so much time in a day to veryfy everything. I'm talking from memory of course, but this Ukraine invasion didn't "come out of the blue" AFAIK.
Here's a collection of sources compiled by someone on Quora. I dont know how biased or accurate this person is. However, there were other instances that made me think this isn't so black-and-white or "clean" as I'd like it to be.
A lot of the sources he used are from Ukranian websites so you might need to run them through Google Translate. Some are from reputable (for at least some definition of reputable) western media outlets like CNN, BBC, NYT, etc.
The embedded vidoes don't seem to work in Chrome (they just disappear when I click them) so I've extracted the link for one of them here:
Other videos are shorter clips to prove a point, but if anyone's interested they can see the video ID in the embedded image URL when inspecting the element.
Again, maybe this is all dogshit like you say, but I find that too dismissive of the facts presented.
Just by peaking over the Quora article it is enough to say it is a Russian propaganda piece, things like some UA nazis (Russians also have some nazi admirers), the "referendums" and so on. Even if these referendums were legit, does it really trump a nations sovereignty (I am talking from my own experience as a lot of Russians were imported and locals deported in my country during the Soviet occupation and these people never integrated and probably even today there are regions where the population is mainly these Russian imports who would gladly be part of Russia). The main issue is that Russia has the view of "either you are with us or against us" so if you don't play ball we will going to "fuck you". Personally, i think that nobody understand Russia better than Eastern Europeans and the West is pretty much failing (at least the EU West who thought that playing ball with Russia will get them to back off) - https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-that-warned-about-...
The Baltics have pretty much lived all their freedom years under Russian propaganda, let it be claims that we are nazis, russophobes and any other type of oppressors of the Russian people or even a threat of Russia itself. So seeing how many in the West are falling for Russian bullshit is just sad.
Ah, I am still not fully convinced the situation is so clear even after reading the BI article...
There is definitely propganda on both sides (and how much of it is true is hard to tell). Russia isn't the only one with a propaganda machine, if anything the US is much more successful at it than Russia could ever hope to be.
I encourage you to read more of the Quora article, even if I appreciate that some of the stuff in the article might be hard to stomach, since you seem emotionally closer to the issue than I do. I believe a lot of it is very unlikely to stem from Russian propaganda.
Some of the stuff you attributed (eg you mentioned tribalism and spite) to Russia isn't unique to them or their politics; it's just a very primitive part of human nature that we still struggle with.
And to close with a tangent: it's always good to keep in mind that nobody (neither you or I) is immune to propagand; especially when it's pushed by state actors with a larger agenda. This is why I often indulge in reading stuff I don't agree with (within reason). Does give me a bit of cognitive dissonance occasionally, but alas.
I completely understand that there is a "big boys table" and everybody else, but the hard facts are that Russia occupied territories of a sovereign nation (Crimea/Donbass/Lugansk) and now is waging a full on war with that nation while stating random reasons (nazis/biolabs/Russian integrity/etc.). So i feel that anyone who tries to reason "Russia attacked because of X" is pretty much a Russian supporter.
And it hits close to home because potentially unless we are in NATO, we would be next.
While that Quora article has some important references to see the whole picture better it's still very biased and the conclusion that Russia invaded Ukraine to defend itself from WW3 is pretty wild. Because otherwise NATO would've attacked Russia (a country with nuclear weapons) or what?
Sorry to tell you, but the US think-tanks have been saying it for years that the Baltic states are there in their current configuration to only restrain Russia from forming closer ties with Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UcXiUYLgbo
Oh yes, the mighty Baltic states who are able to somehow lock down Russian ties to Germany. By that logic the NS2 should have never happened or German reliance to Russian gas in general. This sounds like the same stuff Russians were claiming at some point - that the Baltics are the main players in West geopolitics or what not.
What that think tank is saying make no sense, as invading/controlling Ukraine is not making a buffer zone as you can't really call something a buffer zone when it is pretty much in Russias pocket. Something like Belarus today is not a buffer zone.
To be frank, they don't mention a thing about the Baltics' might or political prowess, they only enumerate a preferred political alignment in foreing policies of such states so that it becomes instrumental to the US in their own foreign relations with both Germany and Russia.
Well, they mention Baltics as buffer states simply because Russia wants that. So that is exactly my point earlier - Russia still thinks they have the right to control these states. It is like your neighbour saying that you cannot install a camera on your property (because you have experienced theft from your neighbour) so when you do it, he comes and beats you up for it.
Nothing would be easier than to say "of course we would have the same stance" but I don't want to give you quite that lazy a reply. Your question has too many counterfactual layers to backpropagate an answer through. For example, I doubt that Hersh would publish it in that case. The Hershness of a story depends on it being a blockbuster counter-thing.
Edit: oops, I missed that your question wasn't to me. Sorry!
Ah the comment was aimed at the person replying to the reason why this was unflagged.
I do appreciate you replying! Thanks!
I realise it's an incredibly difficult question to answer because of the what-ifs, though.
I would also like to think you'd have the same stance... And for what it's worth I do believe you would.
I'd argue that your stance is currently harder to uphold since it makes the whole situation a lot morally murkier, and also because it goes against popular opinion (one can only be immune to it so much).
Presumably not with just anyone who reported that claiming to have a source, but only because it’s Hersh.
As far as I can see your position evaluates to ‘dang trusts Hersh‘.
Since it’s 2023 and we use machines to do our thinking now, I consulted ChatGPT about this. I draw your attention to the last paragraph.
—————
strawpeople: Can Seymour Hersh’s reporting always be trusted?
chatgpt:
Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has had a long and storied career. While he has been praised for his investigative reporting and his ability to uncover important stories, it is important to note that not all of his reporting can always be trusted. Like any journalist, Hersh is human and may make mistakes or have biases that affect the accuracy of his reporting.
Additionally, some of Hersh's reporting has been called into question, and he has faced criticism for making claims that are not supported by evidence or for relying on sources that are not credible. For example, in 2017, Hersh faced criticism for his reporting on the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria, which some experts said was based on unreliable sources and was contradicted by a large body of evidence.
In conclusion, it is important to approach Hersh's reporting with a critical eye and to carefully evaluate the evidence and sources he relies on. While some of his reporting has been praised for its accuracy and impact, it is not always reliable and should be independently verified.
No where do I see dang claiming he trusts Hersh. You're just putting words into their mouth now. If anything, they've exlicitly said otherwise in a few threads, but said Hersh shouldn't be so easily dismissed due to his reputation and history with similar reporting. So, his reporting holds more weight than mine or yours.
It should still be approached critically, though.
People here seem largely seem dismissive of this story because they don't like it (or the author).
I've addressed in another thread why the sources are unnamed, but it's plausible it's to protect their safety, and lack of presentable evidence could also be the same reason. Information could be somehow fingerprintes to identify leaks. Hollywood did/does it; printers do it too.
---
> Since it’s 2023 and we use robots now, I consulted ChatGPT about this
On a lighter note, this made me laugh. Somehow makes it seem like we're in 3023, not 2023... but also like it's 2023. What a time to be alive.
> No where do I see dang claiming he trusts Hersh. You're just putting words into their mouth now.
I’m not putting words in anyone’s mouth.
Given that it’s clear he wouldn’t give this post special treatment if it wasn’t from Hersh, we can reasonably infer that dang trusts Hersh more than a random poster as you suggest he should.
I don’t think you represent dang, and at question here is dang’s reasons for giving the story special treatment, which unless you are a dang sock puppet you don’t have special insight into.
I apologise for responding on their behalf. You're right that they can speak for themselves, it was uncalled for on my side.
... And since we're indulging in unnecessary snide comments: They've outlined their reasoning already in a few places. Maybe if you read this thread instead of conversed with ChatGPT, we wouldn't be in this situation to begin with.
I think it's worthwhile that a reputation is able to garner attention for someone, and it may be worth examining why his reputation is coming into question. If it has something to do with "he likes to tout conspiracy theories" I would start to wonder who would gain from this reporting being discredited in such a manner.
Just flagged this in the hopes that you'll reconsider.
It's no secret that Hersh's work has become increasingly suspect in recent years. Every time he writes, he cites a single anonymous source and yet manages to go into an implausible level of detail and completeness with neatly tied up loose ends you'd only expect to find in a Tom Clancy novel. The only reason this story has been rescued from the dustbin is due to Hersh's (old) reputation, which though well earned, shouldn't just give him a pass.
Yeah, instead of blog posts Hersh should write spy thrillers in tje tradition of the early Tom Clancy works. I would even pay for those, I like the setting and the narrative Hersh oresented in this blog, and the writing, are compelling and good. For a fictional book, not for journalism.
Clancy is far and away the most famous and notable writer of this kind of stuff though, and the name that would have come to me first too if I wanted to make a similar point.
He had a lock on the genre like nobody else before or since.
Dan, I respectfully ask you to reconsider. This is a poorly-sourced speculative piece of propaganda and clearly goes against site guidelines.
You repeat, above, that HN is not for nationalist flamewar, and requires substance. But this post is nationalist flamewar and isn't substantive. Allowing it while shutting down similar content from the opposite perspective is... unsettling.
I'll read the article and reconsider. I haven't had time to even look at it yet. The moderation call here isn't based on agreeing, disagreeing, liking, or disliking. It just seems like an obvious interesting event, that's all.
Edit: Ok, I've read the first half and looked over the second half, and I think the moderation call was the correct one. Not saying this to pile on; I just wanted to report back.
I greatly appreciate your willingness to take a second look at it. Even though I would have made a different call in your shoes, it can't be emphasized enough that you do an outstanding job at a difficult and often thankless task. Thank you.
Of course I nearly always do, but in this case the moderation call didn't depend on it, for reasons I've already explained in several other comments in this thread.
I read your decision as - it is worthy because Hersh says, that that is is the notable part and it invites curiosity to ponder. But are you aware that over the last 10 years he has published almost exclusively conspiracy theories that do not stand-up to scrutiny?
I've answered that question repeatedly in this thread already. If you read those comments and have a question I haven't addressed, I'd like to know what it is.
It is neither desirable nor possible to exclude political topics from HN completely. At the same time, it's important that the site be protected from being overrun and dominated by political topics. Lots of explanation of how we handle this can be found at these links, if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
Well, Sandy Hook did happen. And while NS 1 was blown up, besides a repitition of all arguments we had when it was blown up, Hersh's blog post does not provide anything new, does it?
> The HN guidelines are clear about political topics.
I agree with that guideline. I don't want HN in general to devolve into standard tribal mudslinging.
But I don't believe this is the standard 'breaking news' chum of the day, mostly because of the reputation of the author, though I readily admit the sensationalist title is click-baity.
So far (7 hours after this was first posted) most comments seem to be complaining that the HN users can't flag this away. I found the story interesting, it makes you think about just what the USGov is doing, if it's true or not is somewhat immaterial...the story was an interesting read, whether it was a non-fiction story or not.
If the story isn’t true, then it isn’t just making you think about what the US government is doing. It’s making you fantasize about it based on an unknown person’s political agenda.
Thank you. There's such scant citations across the whole article. There are countless factual assertions with no note about the source for the assertion, and absolutely no way for readers to validate any of the new information here. There aren't even multiple anonymous sources, just mentions "some guy", and doesn't even directly attribute the vast majority of the claims to that guy.
I don't actually doubt the veracity of this information. But it's grossly irresponsible to publish "some guy's" claims as facts!!
But also just look at what happened here in the comments. It's totally predictable. Those of us that read the article and flagged the post had prevented this. In this case flagging had worked and was not abused.
Whatever factual errors that comment claims to have found, they're not material to the moderation call here, which is the question I was asking.
I don't think the comments were as disastrous as you suggest. It's true that the majority were negative, but not all—and in any case, it's important that HN's front page not just be a product of majoritarian sentiment. If it were, then we would clearly be failing the core principle of HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Did I pick the right hill to die on at the hands of the majority? Maybe not, but (a) the sentiments would be the same if I had; and (b) we have to take some chances; if we don't, we fail for sure.
You didn't answer my question, so I will: there isn't anything in the second half of the article that would change the moderation call here.
You guys seem to be seizing on my saying I didn't read the whole article as if it were a horrifying gotcha. Let me try to disabuse you of that: it isn't necessary to read all of every article to make reasonable moderation calls, and that's lucky, because it would be physically impossible to do so. I can barely keep up with the titles.
I haven't overridden the will of the community because the community has no single will on this. It's divided along obvious political/tribal lines. It's not my job to align with any political or tribal view, including my own. The moderation principle on HN is simple and clear: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Literally anyone with strong political views can expect to occasionally encounter something on HN that outrages them; if not, then we're doing a lousy job, because one thing's clear: intellectual curiosity ranges across political and tribal fences.
Man, the aithor (no idea who that is...) should write a spy novel around this. As a fictional setting it would be great! As anything else, not so much.
Heck, the Baltic states, along with Poland and the Scandinavian countries, have some of the best naval divers and EODs on the planet, virtue of having the priviledge of cleaning two world wars worth of mines, bombs and torpedoes from the Baltic sea...
This piece should be flagged to death, especially since it is, giving it the most (and IMHO undeserved) credit pure speculation.
Edit: Just looked Seymore Hersh up, now I know why the name rang a bell. Well, for My Lai he had proof and sources, didn't he?
Seymour Hersh, also a advocate of the Syrian rebel chemical weapon conspiracy and is a Osama Bin Laden death truther. Maybe we should also include his later work as well?
Uh, yes. I'm pretty damn certain that the Syrian rebels did not gas themselves. The OPCW just came out with a massive report on the matter this week. Which, unlike this dudes claim, was extremely well sourced.
I'm not even going to continue down this "argument from authority" path. Completely baffling conspiracy drivel
The "mainstream" "establishment" position on the death of Osama Bin Laden is that Bin Laden was living in the middle of Abbottabad, which is the Pakistani equivalent of the town of West Point, and no high level Pakistani Army official knew he was there, and no high level Pakistani government official knew he was there.
It is a completely absurd story. The "truthers" are the people who believe that story. The White House gave a lot of information about bin Laden's death, as well as the Pentagon, and the government had to walk back some of their story shortly after. The New York Times reported the government statements as fact, although later another section of the paper printed some of the questions about the mainstream narrative. This caused an internal Times squabble, some of the "memoes" of which were subsequently leaked.
If you want a better account of what happened, read the Pakistani press.
The ISI worked with the US and bin Laden hand in glove in the 1980s. The idea no one high up on Pakistani intelligence, government or military knew he was there is absurd. Yet you call this "truther".
> a advocate of the Syrian rebel chemical weapon conspiracy
Chemical weapons were released in Douma. The rebels and government blamed each other. If the "conspiracy" as you call it that the rebels released it were true, it would tend to have been a mishandling of them - a mistake. Hersh reported on the attack, including information pointing to the rebels controlling it. I have no idea who had control of the weapons - it could have been the government as you imply. I don't have a problem with Hersh reporting on the information he had on that.
@Dang, you see what I'm talking about? You think this type of content is aligned with HN's guidelines? This is what you get when you allow completely unbased conspiracy theory to go unchecked
Sorry, but this is just pointlessly rude. I've linked to Wikileaks where OPCW was heavily scrubbing its content. Just because that disrupts your narrative doesn't make it "unbased conspiracy theory" and trying to ping a moderator doesn't change the facts here.
In fact, every single one of your comments on this thread have been nothing but hostile. I'm not sure why you seem to think you're in the clear and everyone else is the problem.
"heavily scrubbing its content" does not mean "The syrian rebels gassed themselves". You described an unbased conspiracy theory, and then tossed a page full of unrelated emails up as "evidence".
It’s not propaganda. It’s certainly much less propagandistic than the average coverage of the Ukraine war.
The article has an anonymous source. Your comment complains about “propaganda” and “nationalist flamewar” (unfounded) and asks for moderation. The submission is more substantive than your comment.
Honest question: what about this story seems so far-fetched to you that you can't give the author the benefit of the doubt? There are decades of such intelligence goings-on.
Benefit of the doubt about reporters with a good track record trusting anonymous sources is also kind of how we ended up looking for WMDs in the desert and murdering a bunch of people who did nothing wrong over the course of 20 years so maybe we should hold up a bit.
It's also how we ended up ousting Nixon and his cronies.
That being said, Woodward and Bernstein didn't publish verbatim what Mark Felt (aka Deep Throat) told them; they used his tips as starting points to look for corroborating evidence, which they published to great accolade.
The WaPo and other mainstream media were also institutions of far more integrity at that time: their mission was to publish truth regardless of the implications, and they weren't under the kind of pressure the press is under today. Also, society
(and media outlet owners) trusted truth itself to result in societal good far more than they do today.
There are a large, large number of discrepancies which have been detailed ad nauseam in the larger thread. He also cites a single source, who—by Hersh's own admission—has no personal knowledge about the truth or falsity of these claims. Additionally, Hersh does not claim to have performed even rudimentary checking or his source. He said his source was the operational planner. Did he even try to FOIA the OPLAN to see how much was redacted on the basis of being classified? Not by any indication in his write-up.
But beyond the article itself, it's worth explaining my priors. The first is that the shifting finger-pointing is a classic Russian disinformation campaign. The second is that America would incur enormous risk by doing this and gain nothing; while Russia would risk nothing and had everything to gain. Both of these deserve further explanation.
Disinformation campaigns, especially false flag operations, are a hallmark of KGB operations. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you read The Sword and the Shield, by Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Mitrokhin archive is probably the best primary source the West has about KGB active measures and internal politics. The Mitrokhin archive confirms that disinformation false flags are a common theme of KGB destablization operations, such as fomenting the degradation of race relations in the U.S. by forging hatemail. Most experts agree it's highly likely Putin himself used this domestically, by staging the 1999 apartment bombings that killed hundreds and injured a thousand people, and blaming it on Chechens; the resulting fear and hatred rocketed him to popularity when he then mercilessly persecuted Chechens, gaining him the Presidency for the first time. To this day, the real facts are unknown, but what is known is this: Achemez Gochiyaev rented basement facilities to an FSB officer for storage; those basements had bombs; after the first two explosions, Gochiyaev called police, who found and disabled the remaining bombs; after Putin's ascendency, the official narrative became that Gochiyaev didn't call, but that an unnamed real estate agent turned him in; that Gochiyaev later disappeared without a trace; and that the Russian government refuses any independent investigation. Other examples of Russia flooding the information space with competing false narratives include the conduct of the 2014 Ukraine invasian (little green men); the build-up before the 2022 Ukraine invasian; and the 2016 Presidential election. Their goal in these cases, according to Mitrokhin, is to overwhelm the populace's ability to critically examine every narrative and "give up," distrusting everything instead. Russia officially blaming the U.K., while getting a senile but formerly respected journalist to claim it was the U.S., perfectly fits their SOP.
In addition, there would be no reason whatsoever for the U.S. to do something like this. The cost is enormous: already concerned about disunity in NATO, the risk of doing something like this and it being discovered would be enormous within NATO, not to mention the risk of Russia viewing it as an act of war. The benefit is nil: Germany had already halted Nord Stream 2 on 22 Feb 22, well before the September 2022 explosion, and their gas reserves were over 90% at the time, minimizing Russia's ability to weaponize NS as an incentive for Germany to oppose Ukraine aid. By contrast, there are multiple reasons Russia would do this. It's essentially zero-cost: destroying their own pipeline is unlikely to bring any retribution from any other country, and certainly wouldn't warrant direct NATO involvement. And the benefits are immense: (1) claim the West did it and galvanize the Russian population, just as Putin did in the lead-up to the bombing of Grozny; (2) make it socially unacceptable to continue the then-current protests against mobilization of reserve units; (3) undercut any later claims against Russia for cutting off fuel supplies, as now it would be impossible for Gazprom to perform on its contracts; (4) now that it appeared the war in Ukraine might drag on longer than Putin expected, make it impossible for any successor to back out from Putin's chosen course of action and resume business as usual.
Bottom line is this: Russian disinformation is the KGB/FSB's modus operandi. We saw this all the time in Iraq: a news outlet would make a claim that the U.S. had caused civilian casualities. We investigated every allegation of CIVCAS. But most of the time, when RT would make a claim of CIVCAS, it wasn't even in a location we had performed a strike. All they were doing was flooding the information environment with the narrative that the U.S. was killing civilians.
This post by Hersh is deeply disappointing. It would hardly be a clearer case of Russian propaganda if it had a giant Z plastered above the fold. It doesn't deserve any credit, and—with respect to dang and the decision he has made—it doesn't deserve to be on HN.
> This is a poorly-sourced speculative piece of propaganda
You mean like most mainstream news that parrot state-sponsored talking points? It seems counterpropaganda propaganda pieces are the only way to balance out state propaganda these days.
Amazing the lengths people will go to censor anything that goes against the US proxy war narrative, even on HN. The mental gymnastics are truly breathtaking.
I just asked you to stop breaking the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34712768. Doing exactly what we just asked you not to do is a fast track to getting banned.
I'm not going to ban you because you might not have seen that other comment, but please look at it now and please stop posting like this. Regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are, you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
> Hersh reporting on this counts as significant new information
This is from 2015:
"The way to understand Hersh is to visualize most of his sources as Michael Scheuer-like individuals. It is not difficult to find such people in the intelligence world: obsessive, frustrated idiot savants who perceive themselves as stymied by the paper pushers, the bureaucrats"
"Hersh’s problem is that he evinces no skepticism whatsoever toward what his crank sources tell him, which is ironic considering how cynical he is regarding the pronouncements of the U.S. national security bureaucracy. Like diplomats who “go native,” gradually sympathizing with the government or some faction in the host nation while losing sight of their own country’s national interest, Hersh long ago adopted the views of America’s adversaries and harshest critics."
> Hersh’s problem is that he evinces no skepticism whatsoever toward what his crank sources tell him, which is ironic considering how cynical he is regarding the pronouncements of the U.S. national security bureaucracy.
i don't have opinions about journalists, because i'm a normal person, but that sounds like a needed antidote to, say, slate's complete lack of skepticism regarding the pronouncements of the U.S. national security bureaucracy.
I'm surprised at the reaction here. There's plenty of stuff posted on HN I don't agree with, but don't think I've ever felt so strongly about a submission that I'd want the rest of the HN community not to read it because of my personal reaction to it. If you don't like something you read on HN, why not let the rest of us read it and make up our own minds?
Thanks dang. I'm glad HN has moderators that make calls like.
If you’ve been on HN (or any link-sharing community) for a while, it’s easy to see that certain articles are posted and/or upvoted largely for the sake of zeitgeist-shaping, not out of a sense of intellectual curiosity. This feels like one of those articles.
And who determines what's been posted for zeitgeist-shaping or intellectual curiousity? And what can we say about those who have been frantically flagging this submission so their fellow community members don't get to read it?
Well, the community decides. By flagging. Which was, in this case, ignored by fiat.
Moreover, the article has little to do with tech and has obviously loaded statements such as this:
> From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance.
If we can’t filter out misinformation and propaganda, we are screwed as a community. (Is this misinformation/propaganda? Maybe, maybe not, but better to have false positives in cases like this.)
> Is this misinformation/propaganda? Maybe, maybe not, but false positives are better in cases like this than false negatives.
You question people's motivation when it comes to submissions. Why not when it comes to flagging? Does it foster intellectual curiousity to flag a story by a renowned investigative journalist?
In any case, what's surprising to me here is the reaction to dang's reasonable justification for disabling the flags on this story. I think those who continue to push for its removal after flagging have moved beyond "I personally don't think it's a suitable topic" to "I don't want anyone else to read it". I find the latter attitude very worrying.
> what's surprising to me here is the reaction to dang's reasonable justification for disabling the flags on this story
It doesn't seem so reasonable. It seems bizarre, frankly. It's utterly out of line with (what I percieve to be) the whole history of HN moderation on this kind of subject.
I flagged it because it looks and quacks like propaganda and has little to do with tech. Perhaps Seymour Hersh is another once-reputable journalist who has unfortunately succumbed to anti-West brain-rot like Glenn Greenwald.
I am also worried that HN's moderation has a bus factor of one, and has effectively no recourse. That's a lot of community-shaping power in one person's hands, regardless of how good of a job dang normally does.
> Perhaps Seymour Hersh is another once-reputable journalist who has unfortunately succumbed to anti-West brain-rot like Glenn Greenwald.
Well that explains why you're so against this type of article. You should reconsider whether the rot you're perceiving isn't in the West, rather than in Greenwald's brain.
I’ve been on HN for 10+ years and articles are certainly flagged when they don’t match the zeitgeist.
Anything discussing controversial social topics is nuked. Which would explain the sheer panic and replies to dang: it must be truly terrible to not be able to make undesirable stories disappear instead of having to refute them. :-/
In the end this story doesn’t really present any ironclad proof and should be easy to point that out. Except that would open a discussion which could make the EU and US look quite poorly…
I'm honestly really shocked by your stance on this. Regardless of whether or not this information is credible, this seems like text book flame war kindling. In the past, I've thought HN's policy of "you can discuss things like this in other forums" was wise and I've been corrected by it myself many times. Why wouldn't that apply in this case?
One thing that makes this distinct from much of said kindling is that it hasn't been reported on before. This isn't someone coming into an unrelated comment thread and commenting "9/11 was an inside job!"
I would encourage any who disagree to consider truly why this reporting upsets them.
I'm sure there are countless examples of "breaking" stories that were appropriately shot down by the flagging system. What I don't understand is why that flagging system should be short circuited in this case. HN users often flag stories like this because political discussions almost always devolve into useless flame wars. Again, I don't see why a conversation about this story would be any different. And I'm especially surprised to see this take by @dang, who seems to be forgetting his years of forum moderating experience in this case.
HN is not in a position to determine the success of breaking news and this story fits the mold of things that are usually flagged. Let other credible media sources start picking up on the story if it turns out to amount to anything. Before then, let this one die just as the others like it do on HN.
I'm not even sure it's an "alternative" hypothesis - it's sort of the obvious conclusion, in terms of means, motive and opportunity, that the US sabotaged the pipeline. I bet a poll of US citizens would show a clear majority believe the US to be the culprit, but a minority have a problem with it. And so you get this situation where everyone kind of accepts the truth but different people have varying levels of enthusiasm for publicly arguing about it.
Even extending to the international community (which is generally a reflection of American politics, much to the chagrin of Europeans who are unwilling to admit it), there is mixed levels of enthusiasm for getting to the truth. The countries are all anti-Russia, and so the pipeline sabotage is generally seen as a "good thing" except by the countries with direct profit motive for it. However, those countries aren't about to publicly accuse US intelligence of carrying out the operation, because their relationship with US intelligence is too important to lose, especially given all the weapons and intelligence they provide.
I was extremely mystified by a BBC world report on it a day after making no mention of the US but instead theorizing about russian sabotage.
It just seemed inexplicable to me at the time because of Biden's prior remarks. In that light I can't see how anyone wouldn't immediately assume the US didn't do it-- the US hadn't even denied it at the time!
I get really upset when claims are made without evidence to support them. It might be a moral failing of mine, but for some reason I really loathe when assertions are made without evidence.
One thing to keep in mind is that counter assertions have been made without evidence.
> 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.”
"This is ... complete fiction." is a claim that the story was fabricated. I think it's worth examining who would be doing that fabrication and what they would have to gain, especially considering who is making the counter-claim and what they would have to gain from that.
>One thing to keep in mind is that counter assertions have been made without evidence.
Are you familiar with Christopher Hitchens? That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Until the author provides evidence of their claims, there's nothing required to dismiss them.
Maybe it's because I see a distinction between "dismiss" and "deny". Where someone might dismiss ("There is no evidence to back up these claims") there are instead denials ("They made this up"). Anyway, I don't mean to change your mind, just to provide a different perspective.
I think there's a trivial semantic difference between the two terms. The assertion that someone made up a story is the logical conclusion to the assertion that there is no evidence to back up their claims.
I don't see the difference as so trivial. Using my previous statements, "There is no evidence to back up these claims" is an observation which allows for the listener to draw their own conclusion and "They made this up" is a conclusion that's being asserted.
> The assertion that someone made up a story is the logical conclusion to the assertion that there is no evidence to back up their claims.
It is a logical conclusion. One might still arrive at a different logical conclusion.
I see. For instance, it might not have been them who made it up, it could have been someone else.
However, given all of the information known at the time, there's little evidence to suggest that anyone aside from them was responsible for the assertions without evidence, which again leads to the same logical conclusion.
> That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Until the author provides evidence of their claims, there's nothing required to dismiss them.
Maybe you're not familiar with the practice of journalism where anonymous sources are routine, and have successfully uncovered a great deal of misconduct by governments. Reserve skepticism of course, but dismissal of a routine practice with a proven track record is not justified.
This seems to be an Appeal to Ethos. I don't think that would be justified. Additionally, making unsupported claims is just that. Anyone could anonymously claim anything, but we don't give the same credence to every claim. There's many different ways to support a claim, telling who exactly told you isn't the only path towards supporting a claim.
> Additionally, making unsupported claims is just that. Anyone could anonymously claim anything, but we don't give the same credence to every claim
Right, and these claims are being made by an award winning journalist with a proven track record who has a source. That deserves more credence than just "anyone" making any claim. Not enough to accept it as truth, but far more than claims that can be outright dismissed as you initially claimed.
I assert that you are a Russian agent personally appointed by Vladimir Putin, paid $250,000 through a bank in the Cayman Islands, tasked with sowing discord in the US by posting fictitious stories on Hacker News.
> I think it's worth examining who would be doing that fabrication and what they would have to gain
Sure. Russia and geopolitical destabilization
> who is making the counter-claim and what they would have to gain from that
This part doesn't make sense to me - the accused party naturally is the one making the "counter-claim", and naturally they will make "counter assertions" without evidence - how do you disprove an unfalsifiable claim?
I overall don't think your comments really align. "The US has done bad things in the past" doesn't mean "all accusations of bad things pointed at the US should be treated with credibility and have to be disproved with an ironclad case by the US to not garner further suspicion"
Amusing you should say that given that the author is literally a 9/11 truther (truther light maybe, but still)[0]. Hersh has clearly become a gullible mark the past decade or so who lets otherwise justified skepticism of US policy curdle into useful idiocy.
Because it's interesting. Hersh reporting on it is an interesting story in its own right. Is what he says true? I have no idea. We don't have a truth meter here.
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can't take the human being out of the moderator, nor would it be good to try. No in the sense that I'm not moderating HN just according to my personal interests—it would be very different if I did. As a matter of fact, I spend every day denying my own preferences about HN. That doesn't make me objective (far from it), but I do at least have a lot of practice.
It's a matter of striking a balance: holding space for what the community finds interesting* while allowing for a certain amount of idiosyncracy and unpredictability, but not too much. Without that, things would be more humdrum and therefore less interesting. There are tradeoffs along every conceivable axis with this thing.
* (note: community is not the same as commenters because most readers don't comment)
> community is not the same as commenters because most readers don't comment
Do you have stats on what percent of regular HN readers have ever commented on any story? Or are stats more like, for every 100 readers of a story, 1 will comment on that story? To put another way: if I read 100 stories and comment on 1, would I be counted as lurking 99 times and posting 1?
Basically, I'm curious if engagement is lopsided toward lurking because some users never comment, or because most users never comment on every story they read.
Yes, moderators moderate this site. This has been true from the beginning, 15+ years ago.
Your comment suggests an assumption that without moderation, the ranking system would indicate "what is interesting to everyone". That assumption isn't just wrong, it's super wrong. Here are some past comments about that, if anyone cares: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... The short version is that without moderation, the site would be dominated by the same few hot stories repeated ad nauseum, plus an endless supply of riler-uppers. This is no way to optimize for what is interesting to everyone. As I said elsewhere in a reply to you, there are tradeoffs along every axis of this thing.
The number of attempts to either shame or coerce him into doing things the way you think should be done, versus what he thinks is appropriate -- seems childish to me.
>The level of engagement seems to indicate there is interest
Far more heat than light being generated though, though. Which is predictable with this kind of story, raising emotion is part of the desired outcome of posting it (1). "interest" in baseless speculation and conspiratorial thinking is not a good thing.
Standards are slipping, that this story is protected.
But we do have a proofen and working mechanism: Flagging. If the submission doesn't get flagged, cool. If it does, it does. I don't see a reason to intervene here.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. The flagging system works well, arguably better than the upvoting system does, but you can't just rely on these systems in an unsupervised way—it leads to suboptimal outcomes. Another way of putting this is that moderation is necessary to jig the software+community systems out of their failure modes.
You can of course argue that I've made a wrong call in this case, but the point I'm making here is different: you need moderators who make judgment calls, including to override flags sometimes. And of course no one is ever going to get the calls 100% right; we have failure modes too.
I see far more bickering over whether or not this article is appropriate than actual discussion of the article, which is unfortunate. Unsubstantiated claims can be dismissed, but there's no requirement to do so. The NS2 destruction itself is a notable story, and it's worth discussing as resource dependence is important.
I want to defend this decision from the naysayers here. The geopolitical implications are fascinating, and the technical aspects of how the operation was (may have?) been carried out are an interesting topic of discussion. There are increasingly fewer alternative communities of intelligent people on the internet where these things can be discussed. Why take that away?
If the comments turn into a flame war, blame the commenters, not the article.
Typically three unnamed sources with domain knowledge are required. It's telling that no editor chose to run this and Hersh has to self-publish. I wish you would reconsider the folks flagging this.
LRB was rightfully skewered. They did not apply customary rules such as:
- only use unnamed sources if no other sources will come forward
- highest levels of editorial and legal need to approve
- fact checkers vet the info
A gracious interpretation is that not being a paper of note in news LRB were unaware and published what did not pass rudimentary scrutiny possibly because editors were star struck. A cynical interpretation is that they had motivation to look the other way.
In any case, journalistic outlets had largely long stopped running Hersh because he was penning unsubstantiated and illogical conspiracy theories.
We sometimes add a question mark when a title makes a dramatic and divisive claim, because otherwise readers who read the title might think that HN (or its admins) are somehow endorsing the claim. We don't know what the truth is and are neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the claim.
Edit: I dug up a few other examples where we've done this:
The basic idea is that adding a question is a flame retardant because it tends to dampen the meta-comments about the story, e.g. complaints that the admins are taking a side or whatnot.
In this case it's not really working, because the question mark is also generating lots of meta-comments. But maybe fewer than we'd get without it.
Meta comment of my own: it's not only impossible to please everyone with moderation calls like this—it's seemingly impossible to please anyone. That's why it's really helpful to have a first principle to rely on—i.e. to know what you're optimizing for. It occasionally makes it possible to answer an otherwise hard question rather easily.
Huh, I would have said that a question mark is nowhere near enough.
Your stance seems to be that this unsourced conspiracy theory is a story worth discussing because, and only because, it is Seymor Hersh making the claim. Then make that clear in the title: "Seymor Hersh claims America took down Nord Stream", or something. It goes against the standard HN practice of stripping out any such attribution from the title, but it's also not standard practice for an article to only be worthy because of who wrote it.
Not so—nor the claims that anthropology is in ruins, that this is the year of the RSS reader, or anything about covid and smoking. At this point I'm starting to wonder what's hard to understand about this.
Re flagging: that's supposed to be for comments that break the site guidelines. If you (or anyone) see a comment that breaks the site guidelines and isn't flagged, or a comment that is flagged and doesn't break the site guidelines, remember that we don't come close to seeing everything, and that you can always let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. It's best to only do that in egregious cases though. For non-egregious cases, it's best to remember that consistency is impossible and not sweat the small stuff.
I find it so bizarre that there’s bonafide HN users who so keenly want to protect a narrative that they demand an interesting article with detailed claims be removed, rather than just accepting that many people will want to read it make up their own mind. Who are these people? (rhetorical question)
The original enron pipelines are still moving product. They still 'be'. Biden wasn't talking about Gazprom. His words are very clear and direct. They are congruent with his body language and tone. He looked down at his notes before speaking.
You quoted "governor Abbott's attacks". Are you seriously trying to suggest a group threatened the governor himself? You're working too hard on this angle.
"We will put an end to X" does not mean "we will physically blow up X". Pretending Biden had an "oops, we're gonna do a terrorist attack against Russian and German infrastructure and I said it out loud at a press conference!" moment and that there's no other legitimate explanation for the statement is just goofy.
It wasn't an oops moment, it was scripted. Watch the video carefully. He consulted his notes before saying it. This public announcement removed the requirement to notify Congress. Genius imo.
The other tell is that in the follow-up, Biden was pressured to explain what he meant but he refused to comment. Sanctions could have been mentioned here without repercussions but they weren't.
This angle made me doubt the story Hersh is pushing.
When you're just speculating or building a conspiracy theory then those "ominous" comments are worth quoting.
If you are claiming to be in contact with someone with deep knowledge of the actual operation, why even mention those? Worse still, add some extra twist where the spies have a meta comment on their cover being blown by those comments.
I disagree that we shouldn't question such big claims.
It's safe to assume the reason his sources are unnamed is to protect their safety. Don't know how plausible this is, but I it's possible that the lack of presentable evidence is for the same reason. Maybe the relevant documents could've been somehow fingerprinted, which would identify the leaker/source; the film/tv industry has done this when distributing pilots for private viewings. Heck, even printers did it lol.
However, it's not secret American politicians vehemently disliked the existence of Nordstream, and this outcome is undeniably convenient for them. Maybe too convenient, so they wouldn't dare attempt it? Or maybe they just assumed they'd have a great scapegoat. Maybe it wasn't even them, and it's Russian government playing 5D chess by blowing up their own investment to frame Americans.
Dan there’s no sugarcoating this - you’ve got it wrong on this one. I say this as a supporter of your moderation policies in general. The sooner you reverse this decision, the better for everyone.
That's certainly possible! But I would need to hear an argument about why, which actually addresses the reasons I've given in my responses in this thread. So far I haven't heard that. In fact, no one seems to have even tried (maybe I missed it amid the inundation - I've been trying and failing to keep up for a couple hours now).
Hi, your job is rough sometimes, and hats off. Here is the one of the best arguments I have found here as to why the quality of this article is highly questionable:
> I know nothing of him, but given that there's an entire paragraph about Jens Stoltenberg where almost every sentence is just completely factually wrong in a way that could be verified to be wrong with a look at the first paragraph on his Wikipedia page, I'm not inclined to take what he says seriously.
Isn't this instead a great argument for why the article should be discussed here rather than banned from discussion? It's a great comment, and exactly the sort of useful criticism of the article that might actually change people's minds. If the article is hidden by flagging, these points will never be raised, and everyone stays at their initial position. But by allowing discussion, this insightful information can be shared and learning can happen. This is a good thing, right?
Yes, but in my mind that reason is to call the moderator's attention to an article and force a conscious decision. It's not to automatically allow some tiny percentage of participants to decide what the majority are allowed to read. Probably most of the time, the flaggers are right, discussion would be unproductive, and the article should be removed.
But some of the time, some of the flaggers are ideologically driven to prevent discussion that will damage their ideology. The moderator's goal should be to distinguish these cases. Making it tricky, it's not always a binary whether an article is worthy of discussion or not. Sometimes a good discussion can be created if and only if the moderator has time to spare on guiding the discussion, and sometimes the same article is flagged for different reasons.
A good discussion on a bad article is a great outcome, and bad discussion on a good article is a poor outcome. The "illusory truth effect" is a danger, but failing to properly challenge a false narrative is a danger too. I feel like Dan usually does a good job of trying to weigh these factors, based on the amount of time he is willing to spend babysitting the thread to avoid the worst outcomes, and based on his intuition on what sort of discussion will result.
> "Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg ... He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War."
During the Vietnam War (1955-1975) Stoltenberg (born 1959) was -4 to 16 years old..
Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980.
Links/sources follow:
«Thorvald Stoltenberg and Reiulf Steen visited Hanoi in 1970.»
«In a new biography of Thorvald Stoltenberg, it is described how Norway brokered peace between the parties in the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s.»
I think the argument is pretty simple: if you overrule the flags on any article that by a pretty simplistic reading of the guidelines should be flagged because (1) it is nationalistic flamebait and (2) does not present actual evidence even though the title pretends that it does by stating things as fact when they clearly are not then it is your own judgment about the veracity of the article that drives you to do so.
That judgment normally should not weigh as much as the combined judgment of the community members with flag powers. At that point you may as well disable the flags because your trust in the judgment of the community has eroded to the point of non-existence.
I think at best this should be presented with a title of 'How America could have taken out the Nord Stream pipeline' because as it is the facts are not supported by any evidence and there are some clear flaws in the article (for instance, see the comments by user 'weatherlight'). The reputation of this particular reporter was at one point in time absolutely stellar but has gone steadily downhill and I think you should update your priors as to whether you still want to stand by him when making unverifiable claims. Note that no reputable paper would put this in print, which is why you find it on substack, the place where conspiracy and controversy finds its audience.
Note also that this article essentially claims privileged knowledge about an act of war, gets a whole pile of details factually wrong and yet the main claim apparently should stand and get the benefit of the doubt, including a title that states this all as fact (those quotes and question marks are just confusing). Something that grave should not be amplified until it is presented with more foundation.
Maybe just rename to "Seymour Hersh: How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline". The unique new info is that Seymour Hersh has reported such-and-such.
If you're a supporter of someones work in general, it should be far easier to just ignore what you perceive to be a mistake or blemish, and just move on.
The soon the better you do X, is quite an authoritative stance to take.
Since when does HN allow not only unsourced claims, but unsourced claims about massive geopolitical sabotage operations?
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle
You're just baiting everyone in this comments section. How long have you been moderating this site? Have you ever seen a post like this cultivate a productive comments section?
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
Evidence? I don't see much evidence of anything here
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like
This last one you are guilty of, maybe this post was being flag brigaded for a reason
I find it extremely jarring how many reputable western media outlets immediately jumped to the conclusion that Russia did it even though that made zero sense - but absolutely refused to even consider the possibility that the US or another western state could have done it.
But at this point, the article is basically "cool story, bro". The only independently verifyable bits are the public statements of Biden, Nuland, etc, which are already well-known. But those only show that the US really really really didn't like the pipelines - and that was never a secret. They do not give any evidence for a planned operation to destroy them.
The rest of the article is amazingly detailed but only based on an anonymous source. Even if we trust that the source existed, there is no way to know if that source itself is trustworthy.
So as of now, I don't the information in the article would convince anyone of the "US did it" hypothesis who wasn't already convinced.
I think the only thing that the article is useful for is as a future reference. It could be useful to remember the details and keep an eye if they match with any future developments.
> I find it extremely jarring how many reputable western media outlets immediately jumped to the conclusion that Russia did it even though that made zero sense - but absolutely refused to even consider the possibility that the US or another western state could have done it.
One simple hypothesis would be that it is only an illusion that western media outlets are independent from their governments.
That would match my impression in Germany on issues about involvement in the war. Usually, the government is divided, with FDP and Greens taking a hawkish position, arguing for strong support of Ukraine including weapons and not making any concessions to Russia; while SPD and the chancellor are cautious to the point of dragging their feet.
Meanwhile the press is not similarly divided but usually follows the hawkish position. So whatever opinion they are promoting, it's evidently not the government's.
It make sense. russia's agenda is to destabilize Europe. And they were the only ones who had anything directly to gain from it with certainty as they wanted to create an energy crisis in Europe. They knew that after the EU sanctions, Nord stream would be a dead project after their illegal invasion. By blowing up what now had no real long term economic value, they created uncertainty and it helped to get the energy prices to skyrocket in Europe and they succeeded in their goal of destabilizing Europe's energy market. All the Russians want is to create as much havoc for the West they can and create conflicts and make west weak, just of that reason it make totally sense to blow it up.
> jumped to the conclusion that Russia did it even though that made zero sense
It makes a lot of sense. The pipeline was rendered useless anyway, they get to blame the US and sowing division by planting stories such as these, and they also send a message that they can blow up stuff underwater anywhere; in particular, undersea cables, whose destruction would cause major economic problems.
>I find it extremely jarring how many reputable western media outlets immediately jumped to the conclusion that Russia did it
Do you have proof to back up this claim? A more correct observation is that Western media didn't blame any single entity but has the attention span of a goldfish and forgot about this incident after a week or two.
I live in Germany and my proof is that a few days after the explosions, I could read/watch Spiegel, Tagesschau and other outlets quoting speculations about Russia as "expert opinions", while discussing speculations about the US only in context of "russian accusations".
All mainstream media in Denmark has been reporting "No proof of Russian sabotage on Nordstream" this week.
They're simply going for views and readers.
The exciting story back in September was that Russia had sabotaged the pipeline.
It was then more or less established that they probably did, so now the exciting story is that they might not have!
This is not a good faith question. If you wanted to know the arguments that Russia made regarding the invasion of Ukraine, you would have googled them sometime within the past year. What you want is for somebody to type those reasons here so you can respond to them with invective.
Putin thought he could roll into Kyiv like the USSR did in Hungary and Czech, and like he did in Crimea. Bloodless coup. Massive show of strength no rational person would try to fight.
The entire world thought Ukraine was going to collapse.
Diplomats from big countries were telling Zelensky to his face that he had '24 hours' before Russia took Kyiv.
This is detail pretty well in an article I think I found here first.
If Russia ever wanted to take Ukraine “back”, it had to do it now. It would only get harder and less likely as time goes on. Now, as to why of take Ukraine back at all, IDK, beautiful women, I assume.
I’m not sure anyone can answer the why, really, but the why now seems to have reason.
>I find it extremely jarring how many reputable western media outlets immediately jumped to the conclusion that Russia did it even though that made zero sense
> Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.
A lot of what he is saying here is not strictly true. Jens Stoltenberg was the leader of the labour party and while he was not a communist, describing him as a committed anti-communist is just plainly wrong. It was not part of his platform at all and one the parties in his coalition was a socialist, Marxist party.
Also he was not a hardliner on Russia. In fact during his time as a prime minister Norway and Russia peacefully and diplomatically solved the territorial dispute they had in the Barents Sea.
Neither have the Americans always completely trusted him since the Vietnam war. He was vocally anti-NATO in his youth and the Bush administration gave him a cold shoulder for the rest of it's years after he was elected prime minister in 2005. He claimed that during the congratulation call from the American president he said that he wanted all Norwegian troops out of Iraq and the the mission. The Americans were adamant he did not.
I know it's just one paragraph, but when thing gets misconstructed by the source in such a way it kinda losses credibility with me. Also the quote about Norwegians "Hating Russians" while I've never felt anything like that in my dealing with the armed forces (Norway don't have any historical grievances with Russia), really makes me question it.
Also, Supreme Allied Commander Europe is General Cavoli. Stoltenberg is Secretary General of NATO. The former is what most people would call the "supreme commander" since has military operational command. He is American so immediately suspect. In between there is Chair of the NATO Military Committee, who is Dutch admiral.
Yep. Gell Mann Amnesia in full effect here. Everything you two have said are basic geopolitical knowledge blunders and it's clear Hersh has lost his intellectual bearing the last decade as he's now 85...
Hersh: "Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg"
Reality: Jens Stoltenberg is the secretary general of NATO.
This is a mistaken title attribution, but even with a correction do you think it changes much? Stoltenberg is the civilian leader of NATO and having his support is crucial. Hersh may have been mistaken in the title, but not the person nor their importance.
It actually means a lot. Hersh is basing the entire story off one anonymous source. For such a serious implication, he’s unable to even do due diligence on basic verifiable facts. That buries the lede on how much verification he competently did for his source.
A single mistake, maybe. An entire paragraph where every single sentence consists of a separate claim that is either outright wrong or unsupported by any evidence? Well, maybe it is par for the course for modern journalism after all.
I mean, he also claims Stoltenberg collaborated with American intelligence during Vietnam at the tender age of 16 given his birth date and the end of the war. The whole paragraph is just completely wrong.
The US controlled a lot of Social Democratic groups during the Cold War. Remember the European Left was overwhelmingly either Communist or Third Campist Socialists (non-Communist Marxists) in the first decade or two after WWII. Ever since then, the CIA boosted both Atlanticist Soc Dems and New Leftists, the latter perhaps being anti-American on the surface but undermining trade unions and socialist structures.
And now nearly every dumbass Western "progressive" thinks NATO is some holy defensive force and imperialism is somehow only something far lesser powers do.
Moreover, Stoltenberg´s DAD was a pro-NATO Defence and Foreign Minister.
Why is it impossible that he hasn't cooperated with American intelligence since the Vietnam war -- a quick cursory search of his name and Vietnam yield many press release type new clippings that he was quite active in protests during that war -- protests that led to the jailing of his friend but conveniently not him...
The idea that the CIA recruited a teenager to infiltrate a group of Norwegian activists for throwing rocks at the American embassy is the silliest thing I've ever heard of. If he had been arrested, I'm sure you'd be saying that was proof he cut a deal with the authorities for lenience in his punishment for petty vandalism.
I didn't say the CIA recruited him to infiltrate anything. No one is saying he's a secret agent. I'm just saying it's possible that there is a history of cooperation of some form or another since he was a young activist and through an extraordinary career, which has led him to be "trusted completely since."
I don't believe it because I don't know, but I don't think it's insane to consider or that the existence of a relationship is impossible on face value because he was merely a young activist in the 70s.
Beyond Hersh's unnamed source, not that I know of. Again I don't believe it disbelieve it. But I don't dismiss it out of hand because it's not enumerated in an NYT article or a wikipedia page.
1. Stoltenberg didn't get arrested because he was the son of a high-ranking government official.
2. He had a secret history of collaboration with American intelligence going back to his teenage days that is only being mentioned now in a single line in a paragraph with several other factual inaccuracies.
Good points, perhaps he was connected with American intelligence at such an early because his father's positions in defense and foreign affairs. Seems even more plausible.
Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980.
>Thanks, Vietnam was over in '75, Stoltenberg was 16 then. It's just all so absurd.
Not necessarily.
I had thought Hersh's "since the Vietnam War" line to be poorly phrased, or an editing mistake, but /u/michaelmacmanus makes an interesting point <https://np.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/10wx42b/seymour_h...>. Maybe we should take the line literally!
Ah, yes, the CIA were so threatened by a couple of kids throwing rocks at the American embassy, they enlisted a child to uncover the identities of the perpetrators, who presumably were punished with hard labour in the Norwegian gulags for their heinous crime of vandalism.
«lieutenant colonel Tormod Heier said: - In its first years, the Stoltenberg government had a bad reputation in the USA, partly because we did not contribute in southern Afghanistan. After SV was weakened in the 2009 election, Libya became an opportunity to repair relations with the United States. This has contributed to the fact that Norway has now moved up a division in NATO .
And as a thank you for his efforts, Jens Stoltenberg was appointed Secretary General of NATO.«
> "Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg ... He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War."
During the Vietnam War (1955-1975) Stoltenberg (born 1959) was -4 to 16 years old..
Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980.
Links/sources follow:
«Thorvald Stoltenberg and Reiulf Steen visited Hanoi in 1970.»
«In a new biography of Thorvald Stoltenberg, it is described how Norway brokered peace between the parties in the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s.»
> A lot of what he is saying here is not strictly true. Jens Stoltenberg was the leader of the labour party and while he was not a communist, describing him as a committed anti-communist is just plainly wrong.
Would “milquetoast moderate” be more fitting? That’s at least closer to how the Labour Party operates, even though their rhetoric is more left-leaning than the other major party (H).
> He claimed that during the congratulation call from the American president he said that he wanted all Norwegian troops out of Iraq and the the mission. The Americans were adamant he did not.
Seymour doesn’t provide any proof or any evidence. It’s argument by assertion. What he writes is plausible but without any sources or other corroborating evidence. I think it more believable that Seymour has been paid to write this by a Russian aligned entity.
I don’t know the truth of the matter and Seymour could be right. We just can’t tell from the evidence provided.
Seymour Hersh has a very credible background and reputation. Assuming he is still lucid in his age, hasn't become a senile puppet of a ghost writer, then it would be foolish to write off his claims just because he isn't telling you who his source is.
He's lost his credibility over the years. Which is likely why this didn't get published by NY Times.
It's long but after reading this ask why you would believe this man who, in this new article, is making plenty of assertions all based on quotes from a single anonymous source.
Suppose this story was written by a "credible" reporter. Do you think NYT's Foreign Editors would allow it to be published? Would it pass the national security screening?
Claims and sources are supposed verified in journalism. In the case of anonymous sources a journalist can't just bring to his manager a quote and say he's anonymous because that journalist (as many have over the years) might have just made it up. The manager has to know the identity of the source. If the journalist won't share the identity then it won't fly. So if someone else brought this story to NY Times, they would have to give the identity of the source, the manager would need to verify that this source was in a position (time, place, job, what have you) to know the things claimed. And would usually want to hunt down another source that corroborates what this anonymous source says to give it some weight.
> Do you think NYT's Foreign Editors would allow it to be published?
If someone had an inside source on deep background with evidence of an American cover-up? Hell yes they would. And if they wouldn't, the Journal would pay a premium.
The New York Times is not the New York Post. The former has numerous guardrails (including the aforementioned Foreign Editors and NatSec screenings, the latter of which you ignored) to prevent a rogue journalist or editor from publishing a big story that could jeopardize the entire organization's government relations.
His reporting on Syria lost him some credibility. It appears from my perspective that he has a bias toward always thinking the U.S. is the culprit. Given the power of the U.S. and it’s history of shenanigans he’ll often times be right.
The "Dirty War" over Syria is ongoing (US boots are literally on the ground right now) and there are many documented disinformation campaigns revolving around it from both sides, including from Western intelligence mouthpieces like Bellingcat. To assert that it is "settled" and Hersh is therefore "debunked" is deeply disingenuous.
What is settled is Russia’s crimes in Syria and their indiscriminate bombing of civilians. Seymour lost credibility by disregarding these facts in his reporting. The U.S. is still involved there and the U.S. hardly can take the moral high ground when it comes to the Middle East but neither can Russia and Seymour acts as if they can.
The US is actively occupying Syria, facilitating the theft of its natural resources including oil to (also occupied) Northern Iraq, while backing AQ-affiliated terrorists like Abu Mohammad al-Jolani to advance its goal of overthrowing the legal Syrian government.
US state media literally aired a puff piece for Jolani, including interviews from top DoD officials. It is staggering [1].
These are all undisputed facts which I can supply primary evidence to support. Russia is doing nothing of the sort. Some civilians possibly died as collateral as Russia targeted extremist strongholds in extremist-controlled Idlib. In fact, outside the West, Russia is credited with preventing Syria from turning into an Iraq/Libya-style disaster.
PBS is not state media. Jolani is still designated as a terrorist by the U.S. And northern Iraq is occupied by... the people who have lived there for probably 4,000 years (but admitted were only identified as a separate demographic in the 16th century).
What do you call it, then, when a media group uncritically platforms active DoD officials on current affairs? Ask yourself, how do they even get that level of access? It's de facto state media. In this case, PBS is directly acting as a mouthpiece for the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies.
Northern Iraq, like Eastern Syria is currently occupied by US military forces. The Iraqi government has asked them to end the illegal occupation.
I never used the words "extreme bias". I said "state media", the act of propagating the official government narrative. This is what PBS frequently does, and why it gets unprecedented access to government officials. It's not morally wrong, but we shouldn't be afraid to call it out for what it is.
Seymour Hersh is also 85 years old, long into his retirement with likely partially declining faculties. When you get older your "bullshit filter" starts to go away as well. Also he has a long career of attacking the US government so anything that "rhymes" with that is going to fit his own confirmation bias.
Your logical fallacy: Dismissal by referring to general facts that don’t necessarily pertain to a particular individual. You don’t know anything about his age-related cognitive decline, i.e. if there even is any. Some people get it relatively young, some relatively (and absolutely) older.
on the other hand, the older i get, the less patience i have... with checking out facts, with stupidity, with LOTS of things (it becomes a waste of what is becoming a more and more precious resource - my time). In hersh's case, he has been immersed in the muck for so long, it's become his frame of reference. and if something reverberates he trusts his "instincts". maybe rightfully so, maybe wrongully so - nobody but an insider with the facts really knows. and we as outsiders have to decide on a purely subjective basis if to believe him or not.
(sorry for being so long winded - it comes with the age)
Hersh was once a reputable journalist. But now he is predominantly a cheerleader for authoritarian regimes that makes up "anonymous sources" to back up his claims.
As soon as he has made an assertion he cites a 'source' to back it. In every case this is either an un-named former official or an unidentified secret document passed to Hersh in unknown circumstances. […] By my count Hersh has anonymous 'sources' inside 30 foreign governments and virtually every department of the U.S. government.
If you look at all the players, their interests, and their capabilities, I think the most logical conclusion is that the US likely did it. Of course this is not evidence but this the sort of operation where success means no evidence (at least no evidence available to the public at large as it is possible and, one might hope, likely that neighbouring countries know).
> If you look at all the players, their interests, and their capabilities, I think the most logical conclusion is that the US likely did it.
How so? The pipeline(s) was/were already off, so the US and Norway already had a new customer because of this. If the US risked blowing up the pipeline(s) (which was already not delivering,) it would put NATO in jeopardy which is explicitly against US interests and WAY more valuable than natural gas. The entire theory doesn't even make sense from the standpoint of US needs/wants.
The pipeline was already not operational. What are you missing? If you think the US had a profit motive (which it seems you are saying this), NATO is much much more profitable than gas which will be diversified over time. So why would they risk the entire NATO alliance for this? Again, the theory makes no sense.
I didn’t say a thing about US profit motive. I was very clear: Russia can’t blackmail the EU with energy if they don’t have a way to deliver it. Why would they want to lose that leverage (and their billions in investment)?
And EU industry very much depends on low cost gas (chemical manufacturing, vehicle and other industrial manufacturing, greenhouse heating, etc). There’s report after report of vital industrial facilities shuttering due to high gas prices.
> Russia can’t blackmail the EU with energy if they don’t have a way to deliver it. Why would they want to lose that leverage (and their billions in investment)?
Because the pipeline was already off. The second pipeline was not operational. They already had no leverage.
> And EU industry very much depends on low cost gas (chemical manufacturing, vehicle and other industrial manufacturing, greenhouse heating, etc). There’s report after report of vital industrial facilities shuttering due to high gas.
So, your theory is that the US not only endangered the entire NATO alliance, but also sought to weaken NATO members? Again, how does that make any sense? You also fail to mention that gas prices currently are actually pretty low relative to before this event occurred and Europe never ran out of gas.
Gas prices are low due to American LNG imports. The US have fought entire wars for profit motives and are certainly willing to weaken any country for it, NATO or not.
You are missing the very, very obvious fact that NS could have become operational at any point. Taking it out physically means that it's impossible without lengthy and costly repairs.
The profit motive is there - diversification (if possible) takes time. Companies can and do take advantage of that.
I'm not making a claim that Russia did it, but they would have -more- to gain than the US would have to lose if the US were found to have actually done it...given it would upend and basically destroy NATO and completely isolate the US from its own allies. Hence the theory doesn't hold water.
Why leave one of the brand new, larger pipelines undamaged, so that Russia could then offer after the event to work with Germany to activate it? Which naturally they did.
This pipeline had been completed but activation was stopped due to the start of the war. If Germany had capitulated and activated it with Russia that would be a major political win for Russia and blow for the suggested goals of the US and other allies. To me this seems to be the biggest hole in the theory that the US was responsible.
Another thing that gets overlooked is that in the months prior to the explosion, Russia had cut off the gas and lied about the reasons why it was cut off twice. Europe kept asking them to send the gas Russia had agreed to send, and Russia kept making up false excuses for not sending it. And then the pipelines exploded, giving them an actual excuse.
The pipe that survived? It would need Germany to backtrack on sanctions to open it. Russia said the gas was ready to flow as soon as they did so.
The US have been hostile for a long time to Germany getting closer to Russia. The war in Ukraine has just been a convenient event to push their strategic agenda forward and so far, irrespective of those pipelines, it has been very good for the US.
Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 are not just two pipelines. It's four total. The two pipelines of Nord Stream 1 were demolished. But only one of the pipelines of Nord Stream 2 was demolished, the second was untouched.
For an elaborate operation like this as described in Hersh's story, would you rig just one? Or would you have multiple redundancies? Is it likely that all of the redundancies failed on the same pipeline, that is also the new pipeline?
This comeback applies to whoever did the job. Americans or Russians, or Knights Templar, this was an elaborate operation, and somehow one pipeline out of four did not blow up. Why? Why does this implicate more the Americans rather than anyone else?
Start from the beginning.[1] The point is there is no good reason for the US to leave one operational, defeating the whole purpose suggested by those claiming the US did it, and worse, leaving open the possibility of a major political victory for Russia. This is a big hole in the theory that the US did it. There may be good reasons for other parties to leave one operational though. You can speculate.
I'm not sure how 3 out of 4 instead 4 out of 4 (which we don't know why, might have failed, might not have been possible) says anything about who might have done it.
So for the US angle to work here what is the motivation?
At the outset of the war Germany stopped NS2 activation plans and started diversifying its energy away from Russia.
Leading up to the explosion Russia had been trying to blackmail Germany by reducing the supplies of gas. And gas was fully turned off at the time of the explosion. Russia was also playing games with Germany to try to get propaganda wins over the subject of gas by cutting gas supplies on NS1 and saying it was because Germany needed to ship it a turbine. Then Russia was claiming it couldn't receive the turbine from Germany because of the sanctions imposed by other countries. Russia was also saying, well pity that we can't supply enough gas because we don't have the turbine, but we could activate NS2 with you instead. [1]
So the clear motivation for the US could be that they did not want Germany to capitulate to Russian blackmail and give Russia some kind of political or sanction relief. That's actually somewhat reasonable as a theory if you believe Germany was susceptible to it (was it?), and assume all the other levers that the US and other EU allies had wouldn't be enough to keep Germany on the team.
The risk is that doing this and being caught would be a huge breach of trust. The claim of Hersh is that these explosives sat on the pipeline for three months.
The US even warned Germany about potential attacks on the pipeline. [2]
So now if that is the motivation, in this context leaving one of the newer, larger NordStream 2 pipelines untouched would make absolutely no sense. As you leave open the possibility for Germany to still capitulate and worse give Russia a massive propaganda win by forcing Germany to reverse its position and activate NS2.
> If you look at all the players, their interests, and their capabilities, I think the most logical conclusion is that the US likely did it.
I disagree.
The most logical explanation is tha Russia did it as a capacity demonstration and threat against Baltic Pipe to pressure contries in the region regarding Ukraine, but that, like all their threats against the West over Ukraine policy so far, the threat was hollow.
There is one thing that might point towards Russia blowing up their own pipeline: Before the pipes were destroyed completely, the Russians were coming up with all sorts of strange excuses for why they were reducing the amount of gas delivered through the pipes. Even though it was obvious to everyone that the reductions were for political reasons, the Russians kept insisting that there was force majeure. So its not completely unthinkable that they would blow up their own pipeline just to not have to announce they are stopping sales of gas to europe.
It's important to point out here that Russia has done MANY brainless things during this war, things that actively harmed their position in the world. Miscalculating an attempt to change the calculus is definitely a possibility.
Or Russia did it for the internal audience: "Look at what they did the big evil US just wants europe to suffer we are the best"
I'm not sure it makes sense for either the US or Russia to have done it. I bet it was some smaller NATO country or ukraine just whistling in the corner and giggling a little as everyone points fingers.
Or could be Putin cementing his position. Even if you do a coup there is no thawing of energy policy with Europe so now the elites as less likely to try
> If they were gonna destroy critical international infrastructure wouldn’t it make more sense to blow up something else?
No, if they were going to make a threat and capacity demonstration against other, active natural gas pipelines in the region, destroying an idle natural gas pipeline makes a lot more sense than “something else”.
(There’s a certain extent to which it doesn’t make sense to make idle threats without the will to carry them out, but that clearly hasn’t factored into Russian action related to pressuring European countries over Ukraine policy.)
Uh, yeah, Russia already describes the current war in Ukraine as against “the collective West”.
> they don't need to threaten that at all,
Whether or not you think Russia needs to issue war threats to Western states, rhey’ve been doing it a lot inn last year.
> if it got to that point they might as well just nuke Berli
The point of a threat is to dissaude an opponent before it becomes necessary to execute on. Yhe threat. So other attacks that they might do if the threat fails don’t really effect whether the threT might be seen as useful. Also, Russia has made implicit nuclear thrrats to Germany, most, recently over the decisions to send MBTs to Ukraine.
Neither of the two sources you linked claim that Russia destroyed those pipelines.
Play out the game theory here. Russia has nothing to gain and lots of leverage to lose by destroying the pipelines. They can just keep the gas flows off FFS!
That doesn’t mean the US was involved but it makes zero sense for the Russians to do it to themselves.
> Play out the game theory here. Russia has nothing to gain and lots of leverage to lose by destroying the pipelines. They can just keep the gas flows off FFS!
Keeping the gas flows off has manifestly not given the leverage they are seeking over Ukraine policy, Considering that there is every reason to believe (whether or not this was initially the case, but note that is one of the explicit Russian justificafions foe the war) that Putin sees Western assistance to Ukraine as both an imminenr ans existential threat to Russia, or at least the present regime, scarificing leverage that had already been exhausted without effect on that issue foe something that has a chance, even remote, Of budging that can be worthwhile.
The leverage had not been exhausted. Gas flows had been reduced, and the possibility of restoring full gas flows is the bargaining chip Russia had to offer to the EU.
This was why Germany was hesitant to impose full sanctions requested by the US and other NATO countries. They were hesitant to supply tanks and other military equipment.
Since the destruction of the pipelines Germany has capitulated on the tanks issue. Now there’s nothing to gain by working with the Russians because their industrial gas-dependent economy cannot benefit from renewed gas flows.
> If your standard of proof is that Russia admits it this conversation won’t go far.
The sources themselves do not make the assertion that Russia destroyed the pipelines. I’m not looking for an admission from Russia!
> Russia weaponizes energy.
100% agree. Destroying the pipelines eliminates Russia’s ability to continue weaponizing gas flows. The German economy now has nothing to gain by easing sanctions or military aid to Ukraine.
> Russia would have to pay penalties in the contract. They don’t want to do that.
Destroying a pipeline in foreign economic zones does not absolve you of your contractual obligations. That would be a massive escalation and an overt act of war. It’d be much easier and less risky to manufacture justifications for reduced gas flows.
I don’t know who destroyed the pipelines but Russia seems to be the least likely perpetrator of all the players.
> The sources themselves do not make the assertion that Russia destroyed the pipelines. I’m not looking for an admission from Russia!
There are no other suspects and Russia does benefit.
> 100% agree. Destroying the pipelines eliminates Russia’s ability to continue weaponizing gas flows. The German economy now has nothing to gain by easing sanctions or military aid to Ukraine.
What makes you think Germany doesn't want gas from Russia? That's the whole reason they sent a few thousand helmets to Ukraine at the beginning of the war. I think the German dream is that the war ends and they get their cheap gas again from Russia.
> Destroying a pipeline in foreign economic zones does not absolve you of your contractual obligations. That would be a massive escalation and an overt act of war. It’d be much easier and less risky to manufacture justifications for reduced gas flows.
No one can prove that you did it. That's the whole point. I really don't understand your comment here.
The US have been overtly against those pipelines and the close relations between Germany and Russia, including and especially energy dependency. In fact, a major win of the US so far in the Ukraine war has been the Europeans' and especially Germany's shift in gas supplies from Russia to themselves.
Russia destroying their own pipelines (both NS 1 and the new NS 2 were sabotaged) looks like them shooting themselves in both feet at once. Like doing 'capacity demonstration' by nuking the Kremlin... They could, but would that be a likely scenario?
Many, if not most, expert observers strongly suspect the US for a reason.
Germany gets its gas natural gas from Norway now. It would be unlikely that the U.S. would attack the gas supplies of a major NATO ally. Especially when that ally has been less than enthusiastic in helping Ukraine.
They get a lot from Norway because it is near and there are pipelines, but US' LNG exports to the EU are through the roof and will keep growing as things get organised.
Joe talks a lot:
"If Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2, we will bring an end to it." -- Joe Biden, Feb 2022, with the German's Chancellor standing next to him! [1]
So at the very least the US thought that they indeed had control over that "major NATO ally" and could make thinly veiled threats to their face. Why you think that the US would be above sabotage on a matter of strategic national interests is unclear.
On February 22, 2022 German Chancellor Scholz suspended certification of Nordstream2 following Russia formally recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk as republics. I believe that, but can’t find a confirming source, that Russia was obligated to make deliveries via Nordstream1 even though it did not have access to SWIFT. By it no longer being operational it was no longer required to make deliveries.
It is inconceivable that Biden made that comment without consulting Germany. Also it was primarily Nordstream1 that was attacked.
Gas prices spiked and it seems likelier that Russia was behind it. At least to me. I don’t know the truth of the matter.
Washington, under Obama, was caught spying directly on Angela Merkel and her government. What leads you to believe that Washington has ever respected Germany, which it occupies with tens of thousands of troops, as a sovereign equal?
It requires one to be fairly detached from political reality to describe U.S. military forces in German as an occupation. You lose credibility by saying such a thing. You should reconsider the sources of your information.
On the contrary, it is an objective portrayal of the facts which is not clouded by political smoke and mirrors.
Washington defeated Germany and Japan in the 1940s and proceeded to demilitarize them and occupy them with its own forces. This is historically standard military practice. It is not a "nice gesture" from Washington. It was all part of a coherent strategy to contain and confront the rival USSR, around which Germany and Japan represent critical nodes.
The US pays Germany to be there. Germany leases the land US military bases are on to the US. For Germany this provides security guarantees as Germany doesn’t want to increase funding to its own military and provides economic booms to the local areas. This is far from an occupation.
British taxation of the colonies (e.g. the Stamp Act and others) was in the opposite direction. The British government was not paying the colonies for its presence in what would become the US.
Are you listening to yourself? Trump threatened to pull out US troops, which the Germans didn't want. How is it an occupation when Germans are saying "please don't leave." Germans weren't contributing enough is 100% uncontroversially about German contribution to their own military / defense. US wants European countries to spend their own money on their own defense, at least 2% of GDP. Of course EU countries don't want to spend that money if they don't have to, because they're more than comfortable outsourcing it to the US having to spend $ on those countries' defense in the interest of Pax Americana.
What was true 75 years has long since stopped being true. Today no one can reasonably describe U.S. presence in Germany as an occupation. Please reconsider your sources of information. They are duping you and preventing you from understanding present day political reality.
You remind me of the leftists I met when I lived in Kreuzburg in Berlin.
My sources are the well-established historical fact that US has a permanent standing army of tens of thousands of soldiers inside Germany's national borders. There is no need to resort to name-calling.
> Washington defeated Germany and Japan in the 1940s and proceeded to demilitarize them and occupy them with its own forces.
Yes, part of Germany was occuppied by the Western Allies until 1955. And there were sone technical restrictions on the sovereignty of Germany-as-a-whole until the 2+4 Treaty went into full effect in 1991.
But even the later of those dates was almost 17 years before Obama became President.
> It was all part of a coherent strategy to contain and confront the rival USSR
The occupation of the Axis Powers by the Allies, including the USSR, was not part of a strategy to contain the USSR. It may have formed part of the context of such a strategy, but that’s a different thing.
All governments spy on all others to the best of their ability. If Germany isn't spying on the US that only means their intelligence service is not competent. Of course more effort is and should be spent on potential enemies, but there is too much in play to not spy on your friends if you can get by with it.
Note that success of spies is not guaranteed. It is possible Germany doesn't have spies in the US because despite trying they haven't found any.
> Germany, which it occupies with tens of thousands of troops
As a German, not just me, when Trump threatened - yes threatened! - to withdraw lots of troops from Germany there was lots of Angst about the economic fallout. US troops are in areas that have benefited, and still benefit, very heavily from their presence.
The opinion that US troops are "occupiers" can only be found in some tiny minority fringe groups, left and right, if even that.
I'm East German even, who even maintained interest in the ex USSR territories, visiting a few times (Ukraine and Russia, both, even taking a two month long Russian language course to refresh my knowledge, so I should be biased towards the Russian PoV, but there is no way I would find your assertion anything but nonsense. Having US troops in Germany is mostly looked upon favorably, even when Germans have not agreed with some of the wars the US fought using them.
There also is a significant difference in public opinion before the Russian invasion and after. Also, opinions and the relationship were worst, by far, during the Trump years. So, during that time, and before the invasion, and definitely after Trump, the opinion was indeed more in favor of the US leaving. For some strange reason Russia decided to help out European-US alliance and to give it a huge boost...
Just as an example, it's not like that hasn't been reported many times since last February:
They include their methodology at the top, including the questions asked.
> Data collection began a week prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Japan.
.
Oh and I'm of the - weakly held - opinion that it was the Russians who blew up the pipeline. I don't understand the questions here about benefits and motives - this has all been discussed to death elsewhere, anyone seriously interested in the topic, and not just wanting to annoy somebody here, would/could just have gone there and read it all. I'd suspect Poland more than the US, they've been visibly mad and very outspoken about Germany's Russia reliance and close ties for a long time, they've felt threatened by the Russians and are right next to them.
There is no shortage of candidates, and if the governments don't want to talk, not even the Russians making much noise, I see no good purpose behind all this speculation. Especially when people start making strong assertions left and right, based on carefully selected pieces of facts. What a waste of time, but I didn't want to let the "US troops occupy Germany" stand, it's just too silly. Oh, and one pipe of NS2 remaining does seem kind of significant to me. Hardly an accident.
Also as a German, I respectfully disagree with your opinion on this matter.
For the most part, I agree that the US occupation has been benign. Really, they are not protecting Germany from anything, but also not causing many problems. They are perhaps creating some jobs even.
However, when Washington starts blowing up critical national infrastructure to advance its narrow geopolitical interests, that changes.
To be clear, the economic fallout of Germany having to export LNG across the Atlantic instead of through already-existing pipelines is vastly more severe than US closing its military bases (which could be partially reappropriated by a growing Bundeswehr).
> However, when Washington starts blowing up critical national infrastructure to advance its narrow geopolitical interests
Well, that is an unsubstantiated opinion not held by the majority. I did not claim nobody with such opinions exist, one just has to look at the AfD.
Oh and it was Russia that stopped sending gas, long before the pipelines were blown up. You also conveniently don't address my last point, which does not fit the "the US was it" so that's understandable on some level.
> they are not protecting Germany from anything
And the reason for that is that we can hide behind Poland, which is protected by NATO.
There's this from George Friedman in 2015 The Chicago Council on Global Affairs (@1:38 mins) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eyfTX5n_fdI
where he mentions economic relations between Russia and Germany are the biggest threat to the United States.
You don't need to demonstrate ability to blow up your own pipeline close to your own territorial waters.
If it's Russia (which I don't think is very likely) I find it more believable that it's the result of internal politics as an option of killing the tzar, withdrawing from Ukraine and making a deal with the West to go back to old normal is now off the table.
This is the second time in the comments here that I've seen this claim. I don't remember any such events, so could you point me to what you're referring to?
I think it’s plausible that Putin wanted it done. It got Russia out of a contractual obligation and greater isolation of Russian companies makes the oligarchs’ position tied to Putin. The oligarchs can’t go to the West since they’ve been sanctioned and their companies are increasingly barred from doing business in the West. That isolation makes their fortunes tied to Putin’s survival. Think Cortex burning the ships.
In a personalist authoritarian regime the rationality of actions sometimes depends on wether or not the dictator is being rational on a given day.
The story is credible. Is it true? This is not enough information to decide that, because, as you say it, there are no sources or other corroborating evidence.
But it does host a starting point for future discussion due to the fact that it offers relatively detailed pieces of information.
Now it's up to others to come out and say "this is true, that is not", people who actually do have provable information. It offers them a story to share their information on. This story didn't exist previously in the public discourse.
The story doesn't even claim it is credible. It claims the White House says the rest of the article is fiction, and provides no counterargument or evidence that contradicts the White House's statement.
If this is true and more evidence comes out, the usual suspects will be screaming it from the rooftops, if not this narrative will die in obscurity. There's been a lot of misinformation about this war, and a bunch of people who for a variety of reasons want to blame the US for it and are willing to believe some incredible things if they support that narrative.
I assumed people read the article or any of the comments. In short: Become the EU's main supplier of gas, while weakening Russia. What's not to like? All other actors' benefits pale in comparison. Hell, the US killed millions in for-profit wars, which is a generally accepted fact. Still think it's far-fetched?
If this turns out to be right --and we don't have conclusive evidence, but this would upset the current narrative. Why would Russia be an idiot to shoot itself in the foot (cui bono) and blow up their leverage; though in international affairs the unimaginable is possible, so yeah they may have done it to themselves -though to outsiders it would seem illogical
If true though, it would be as big as the Gulf of Tonkin incident [as in it was us in pursuit of our own interest]
The Gulf of Tonkin involved the US claiming that a US ship was fired upon as a pretense to declare war in retaliation. The idea here is that the US blew up a Russian pipeline in order to... what? Declare war on Russia in retaliation for Russia's own pipeline being destroyed? This makes no sense unless you're accusing Russia of blowing up the pipeline.
For completeness, the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident was two alleged incidents. One of them probably happened and the other almost certainly didn't (admitted by Robert McNamara years later.) The first incident, the one that probably happened, was insufficient casus belli for LBJ and then conveniently for the war hawks the second incident, which never actually happened, sealed the deal two days later.
Please be precise. Who, exactly, are you alleging blew up the pipeline in order to declare war on whom? And then the elephant in the room: nobody declared war on anybody in the wake of this, so how is the possible justification for a war that did not happen being used as evidence that this event was designed to incite a war?
The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
Robbing a bank is stupid... and people do it. But one usually does not use one's own check to write the hold-up note. Sure, it happens, but not typically.
Funnily enough, the article could just as well be commissioned/suggested by an American organization or person. The USA could easily shoulder the responsibility even if they did not do it, and the goals would be:
- show how firm they have been "back then": an interesting narrative in light of recent events (the balloon)
- deflect fire from the allied or friendly country who actually did it: Sweden, Poland who boldly supported Ukraine right from the start of the war?
Seymour could also have been trapped by a source he previously knew at the CIA and who decided to play its own game. Anyway the article lacks credibility on several aspects raised by weatherlight and erentz. The existence of said source just a few monthes after the events is in itself suspicious.
He has a lot of very specific details and quotes, but he doesn't say where any of them are from. Which ones are actual quotes, and which ones are creative writing?
He has links in the article but those links don’t give any evidence of what he claims. For instance, he has a link to the Gang of Eight but this doesn’t provide any evidence to what he ways. He uses links in a clever way to make it seem like he’s acquired evidence. What the linked information shows is that his assertions are plausible.
It’s plausible that the U.S. used the military personnel he claims the U.S. used so that they could avoid Congressional oversight. But where is the evidence they actually used said personnel? He references a source but my source with direct knowledge of Seymour’s work says that Russia paid him to write this.
Given Seymour’s work on Russia’s involvement in Syria I’m skeptical of him having credibility on the topic of Nordstream.
Your evidence against Seymour: “I think it more believable.” (Based on what? Exactly nothing.)
Not to mention that “paid to write” is not even hearsay: you just made it up as a theory, without any hint towards anything happening in the real world.
There is one thing that is really bothering me in this story.
I don't really care who is behind the sabotage, they would certainly not admit it for obvious reasons, and it could be more complex than it seems.
But the press, here in the UK, in France and in the US, has been suspiciously "clueless", avoiding with great care to imply that anyone in the west could be behind it, even if it really seems obvious that it could very well be the case.
Why? Why are they so careful? They usually are not afraid to speculate, especially on such a scale.
I find it disturbing to think that they could either have received instructions from their respective governments or are simply afraid push any inquiries on this subject.
Any US journalistic outlet would KILL to be first to report on this.
The US loves its military, but American news sources have no want to keep a secret like this on behalf of the government. The US media loves to report on US war crimes, and other stupid government shit
It wouldn't surprise me to know that the US government had knowledge of this. It would surprise me if they were directly involved though.
Because the destruction of the pipeline serves american interests, but being directly involved in the destruction of russian state infrastructure that serves a bunch of NATO allies is something the US would not want to be involved in.
In other words, The US very much likes that the pipeline is gone, but it would been politically insane to be involved.
1. Russia would get income from the pipeline, empowering their economy.
2. This sort of infrastructure would represent increased German dependence on Russia for their energy needs.
3. This would also tend to increase economic and diplomatic ties between Germany and Russia.
Destroying the pipeline (even if it's not being used) could theoretically send the message that these infrastructure projects are not safe and that relying on Russia for energy is strategically unwise.
North Stream 2 was never started, no gas was transported through it, and by several political announcements - never would.
North Stream 1 was a blackmail tool since June 2022, Russia manipulated EU gas prices by changing the volume, using supposed turbine failure as an excuse. Blowing up the pipe could be just a next move.
At the moment nobody has no illusion of economical feasibility of Russia already.
Like in case of aliens in Hangar 18? Don't be ridiculous. Any US news outlet will give arm and leg to break the story like this. Self-publishing on mail list platform means there are so little evidence here, that not a single tabloid was interested.
The Western press seems to more or less parrot the government talking points or are even more hawkish themselves. Criticism is offered on minor topics or is feeble and drowned in a torrent of other articles.
One could recognize this also with the Coronavirus fiasco when for example the press was parroting the governments saying that the virus is not going to come to Europe and urging people not to be racist against the Chinese (extra funny given the current mainstream position against China). Then the press was parroting that masks don’t work. Then they were parroting that people should really wear masks. Not all the press, not all of the time, but the trend and direction were obvious.
And the tireless downplaying of AstraZeneca and mRNA side-effects, goodness.
All of these narratives were also mainstream on HN, just as most opinions on the war are unsophisticated and thoroughly mainstream.
It’s so bizarre, imagine having freedom of the press and then doing what’s expected of you anyway.
Or as an individual being able to think, gather facts and information and draw your own conclusions. And having the freedom to present those conclusions go to waste while just repeating some simplistic talking point.
HN is worse than usual at discussing the war. Many non-mainstream commenters have given up or were censored and it’s mostly pockets of conformity now.
I don't thinks this is a conspiracy of any kind (or at least I hope so) but I wonder if this apparent docile conformity of the press at large is a side effect of the changes that occurred in this field during the past 20 years.
It is bewildering how many here are against this post staying up; no matter whether it's true or not, it's an interesting article! If you feel it is not true, why take it down rather than simply state your opinion in the comments? Do we not have the freedom to discuss and form our own opinions about it?
As a former resident in Russia I'm shocked at how all state controlled media from Russia has been completely censored in the west. I understand why it's done (bcs it breeds conspiracies etc) but it's not for free because now people don't get any 'alternative' view on the matter. Censorship is a tricky thing
There are plenty of "alternatives" that are not censored. There's media all over the middle east and asia that's not friendly to the US that isn't censored. It makes perfect sense to censor the aggressor in a war because of course they're only going to say things that benefit themselves, especially in a country that's passed laws against the criticism of the war.
All you're really arguing for here is that the west should openly allow Russian propaganda to infiltrate minds of the general public.
You're right I stand corrected. I'm mainly following these things on YouTube and there the Russian state point of view is actively suppressed. Ironically I've become more pro-Ukraine the more I've learnt about the Russian state view, still can't get over how fast things went downhill.
Yes the state aligned MSM platforms censor or manipulate the news to their aims. Those platforms are all that some people know. Some places where people in the west can find news alternative to the MSM narrative are: Odysee, Rumble, Bitchute, antiwar.com, thegrayzone, fair.org, commondreams, truthout.org, consortiumnews. Please comment with more here to spread the word.
The EU has asked Twitter and Facebook to not allow direct linking to Russian state media. However I can still access TASS, Russia Today, and all other Russian state media.
The US has no such censorship against Russian media.
Because this is Hacker News not Political Conspiracy News.
For every one of these posts that are manually forced to stay on the front page we lose an actual relevant, technical post that we never see and get a chance to comment on.
Gazprom, Russian gas monopoly, has on Kremlin’s orders first threatened to, and then suspended gas supplies to Europe in an attempt to blackmail it to stop supporting Ukraine under a threat of, as they put it, “freezing Europe”. In the process unilaterally breaking existing delivery contracts. There were no Western sanctions targeting Russian gas - it was entirely a political operation initiated by Russian government, “weaponizing energy supplies” as it often referred to, in the course of hybrid war.
Kremlin has miscalculated - Europe was able to largely avoid the intended crisis, while simultaneously Gazprom lost its largest market. The pivot from Russian supplies did come at a significant cost though.
Now that the Western sanctions are strangling Russian economy - if Gazprom wanted to come back to European market - they would be first greeted by billions of dollars of contract charges in arbitration courts.
It has long became obvious that Gazprom will likely attempt to use claims of force majeure to try to avoid financial penalties. And as it became customary for Russia - start preparing fertile ground in the courts of public opinion by planting various stories misdirecting the blame and muddying the waters.
> Now that the Western sanctions are strangling Russian economy - if Gazprom wanted to come back to European market - they would be first greeted by billions of dollars of contract charges in arbitration courts.
This is not merely hypothetical. Uniper, one of Gazproms biggest customers in Europe, is already suing for $12 billion in damages. And that is only one of many former customers.
It’s probably worth adding here that according to a quick google search - the cost of Nordstream2 project is $11B. So one might imagine that the costs of potential repairs are negligible in comparison.
It doesn't make sense that Russia would blow up their own pipeline. They can't blackmail Europe with gas if there's no pipeline to supply the gas.
And force majeure? That's pretty far-fetched. Why would Russia care about financial penalties? This is the country that effectively stole over 400 airliners by refusing to return them when the leases were terminated.
I explained why Russia would care. Because due to financial need Russia may want to come back to European energy markets where they are facing billions of dollars of contract penalties. They can stop shipments unilaterally, but they can’t do the same if they want to resume shipments.
> It doesn't make sense that Russia would blow up their own pipeline.
I disagree, but assuming this were true, that'd mean doing so would offer an opportunity to sow discord amongst the allied nations. Like cops telling a suspect "your buddy confessed already".
The clearest reasoning is this: the pipeline was closed and unused. A potential replacement of Putin could have gotten Western support by promising to quickly reopen the pipeline. If the pipeline is gone, no potential replacement can use the pipeline to gather Western support.
There doesn’t even need to be a physical person that exists right now in Russia to oppose Putin. Just the possibility of it might have been enough for Putin to blow his own goddamn jewel in the Baltic.
Russia is a brutal dictatorship engaging in a war of aggression against the Ukraine and using natural gas as weapon in it's war.
But is that a reason to not to address or even mention the topic of the post, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline? I mean, are implicitly saying that covert act was justified? If people believe that, they should say it.
One of the worst effects of war is an attitude of "not only is everything our side does automatically justified, we're going to stomp on any investigation of what our side does".
You seem to be pretty convinced that US is behind it, where I am not so much.
I wouldn’t presume to know if destruction of the pipeline is justified if you look at it from Russian perspective, if they are responsible, but I can volunteer a few motives why they might be:
- an attempt to introduce a force majeure factor into any future contract disagreements
- an attempt at escalating the seriousness of threats, signalling “we aren’t backing down”
- an attempt to drive a wedge between allies by implicating a sabotage behind ones backs. US vs Germany etc.
… or a little of all of the above.
One of the key strategies employed by Russia in the conflict - is a periodic display of belligerence bordering on unhingement. I think Russia being behind it fits the MO.
Agreed. And all you have to do is understand that the fallout from the US destroying this pipeline in secret would be devastating and pointless. Russia reunited NATO and gave the US a gigantic upper hand and what would be the value in throwing all of that away? It just doesn’t make any sense.
People say “but the gas companies” but that’s just an immature conspiracy fairy tale that projects far, far too much power into the hands of but one corporate constituency among many.
The simple answer is that Russia did it. And since gas was never coming back online anyway might as well blow it up and cause chaos. It also helped further made sure that Russian energy companies wouldn’t go behind Putin’s back thinking if they depose him they can sell oil again.
I find your arguments pretty weak.
- War is enough of a force majeure, literally the first case. There's no need to sabotage infrastructure. Or at least do it on land, where it's easier to fix.
- One very weird way to escalate. I can think of a couple of more effective ways.
- There was no wedge after all. Germany got a bloody nose, the Russians as well. Did anyone dare accuse the US immediately after the explosions? No, but they're starting to now, probably judging that there will be no retribution.
Russia and Europe are not at war. Whether a war that Russia itself started elsewhere on it’s own accord is considered a valid excuse to unilaterally terminate existing contracts - that the courts will decide.
Are they not? Gee, I must've been living under a rock.
I'm sorry, I thought you said that if Russia blows up its own pipes that;s a valid force majeure, but starting a war is not.
As for the courts, they will decide whatever the country they're based in decides. Simple as that.
This almost sounds like you are suggesting that people look at the situation, the motivation and context, to judge the possible consequences and see the reasoning behind those actions. That despite the bad optics of a situation, they can look at the larger picture and consider the unfortunate, grim reality of war. That they are aware of their own blindspots, missing information, lack of understanding of geo politics and judge their own possible ignorance carefully and introspective... before coming up with an opinion on military aid to ukraine.
But no that can't be it, that would be complete insanity.
> are implicitly saying that covert act was justified?
This is still taking the OP at face value. If we're being honest, the destruction of the pipeline doesn't really make geopolitical sense for either the US or Russia, given the information we have. If we must assume that one of them did it, then in the absence of evidence we should prefer to assume that it was the action of an irrational actor, and Putin is clearly the more irrational of the two here (as evidence, allow me to gesture towards the war in Ukraine).
I question this theory. Russia had already throttled NS 1 and was playing games with the turbine certification.
I'm not so sure that they would have had to pay damages. It is true that they were pressuring Germany to certify NS 2 (one explanation is that NS 1 had long term contracts whereas NS 2 would have been higher spot prices).
But the danger of NS 2 certification would also support the U.S. involvement theory.
To all others who focus on NS and Germany: There are a multitude of Russian pipelines through Poland and Ukraine that are still operating. Ukraine collects transit fees for Russian gas as we speak.
So the theory that the attempt was to destroy specifically German/Russian relations, which had been a stated goal of U.S. foreign policy for decades, is pretty solid.
I don't expect much from the Swedish investigation. Another such investigation was the sinking of the MS Estonia. Figures like Carl Bildt (who is now a war hawk) went on to the RAND corporation. Sweden will do what the U.S. prescribes.
> Another such investigation was the sinking of the MS Estonia
Stop believing conspiracy theories. The investigation into the sinking was well executed and most likely correct. Estonia was also never covered, they started the work and then aborted it.
Europe has also had a very mild winter, so luck played a nontrivial role.
> Now that the Western sanctions are strangling Russian economy
I'm very curious about how Western sanctions are affecting the Russian economy (I understand that you're speaking narrowly to Gazprom, but I'm asking about the Russian economy more broadly). My understanding is that Putin has spent the better part of the last decade immunizing the Russian economy from Western sanctions, and that this project has largely succeeded--that Russian oil sales are still making plenty of money to finance his invasion, etc. Can anyone elucidate?
Russian attempts to withstand the economic pressure of sanctions have been successful insofar as to prevent a collapse, but the pressure is crushing on all aspects of the economy, as well as any hopes for Russia for economic and industrial development. Brain drain, loss of foreign investment, technology imports, diminishing consumer activity, falling real estate markets - are just some of the headwinds that are in effect outside the energy sanctions.
The budget revenue deficit for just the January of this year exceeds the deficit for the entirety of 2022. Russia has reserves that it can employ for the time being to mitigate some of the damage, but they are not bottomless. If the pace of losses continues in a similar manner - most of the reserves will be exhausted by years end.
After that - one might expect the usual tools to be employed - cutting budgets to pay for civil workers (everyone other than security), pensions etc, attempts to raise money from already struggling businesses via wartime taxes, issuance of wartime bonds to population to borrow cash, and if all fails - start printing money to plug the budgetary shortfalls, and the resulting inflation.
> Brain drain, loss of foreign investment, technology imports, diminishing consumer activity, falling real estate markets
I dont think the kremlin cares for any of these, except may be with brain drain (which they can easily fix by preventing movement of people).
As long as russia produces enough food for the population, a subsistence living is "good enough" in the eyes of the kremlin, and thus these sanctions doesn't hurt as much as the west had hoped.
It’s hard to wage full-scale war on proceeds from subsistence economy. The sanctions aim to cut off income that Kremlin can use to finance war - they are effective, if slow acting. They also aim to avoid being a double-sided blade and inflict economic hardship on Russia while sparing the West as much as possible - they have largely accomplished that as well.
The EU politicians may have expected to declare an unprecedented economic war on Russia while the latter dutifully continued to fulfill its gas contracts to the EU. Seems plausible given the geopolitical mastery the EU posesses.
But does anyone else actually believe that? The other contract party trying to destroy your economy is a pretty good reason to terminate a contract. Failing that Russia could keep inventing problems with turbines. Or sabotage the pipelines somewhere one can more easily repair them.
I do remember how several media organizations and politicians from the EU jumped at accusing Russia with zero proof. Once the media mania subsided several US newspaper reported that indeed there was no proof whatsoever and they had jumped to conclusions.
The later conspicuous silence from EU governments on a potential culprit, lack of evidence pointing at Russia and several statements from acting US politicians threatening NS and gloating over its demise plus a former Polish politician thanking the US certainly don’t do anything to clear the US from suspicion. Still, this remains all circumstantial evidence.
But not even this kind of circumstantial evidence exists pointing to Russia as culprit. Just far-fetched theories about them wanting to dodge contract penalties or doing it to show that they can. This is as credible as them doing it as an experiment to see what happens when you blow up a pipeline, really.
“Unprecedented economic war” that was only preceded by an “unprecedented actual war” war.
And stoking and supplying separatists, along with mercenaries in Ukrainian territories before that. And downing a passenger jet before that. And annexing Crimea before that. And invading and occupying a quarter of Georgia before that. And doing the same in Moldova before that.
It casts doubt on the unverified claims that US is responsible for the sabotage of the gas pipeline and raises the possibility that it’s a planted piece by Russian propaganda ops.
Kremlin sanctioned themselves? Or are you presenting the suspension of gas supplies to Europe by Russia as a sort of “retaliatory sanctions”? That’s fine of course, it’s like North Korea cutting off themselves from the world and starving as a way to punish the world for interfering in its internal matters as they relate to nuclear weapons.
If you know the way the US often imposes sanctions, it entails prohibition of both buying and selling from sanctioned parties. I work on many sales and procurement systems in the US that call services such as Amber Road or Descartes that scan the government provided lists of sanctioned parties before a PO or SO can be placed, delivered, or billed. Russia not selling its gas to an adversary is a simple sanction of this kind.
They're saying the US did it, in coordination with their "other" sanctions, in agreement with the article and opposition to the commenter. I don't think this was a hard puzzle.
I will try to restate what I understood from VincentEvans' post.
Gazprom unilaterally cut off gas supplies at the direction of the Kremlin, "weaponizing energy supplies" to Europe.
At some point, if Gazprom wanted to come back to European market - they would be first greeted by billions of dollars of contract charges in arbitration courts.
(and I guess the number of billions is probably in the 10's or more)
Therefore, to avoid that fate, Gazprom or the Kremlin surreptitiously blew up Nordstream2 themselves, in order to be able, later, to claim in court that the could not have resumed gas deliveries if they wanted to. This would be an argument against the billions in contract charges. Basically, they incur the cost of blowing up (and later repairing, one presumes) their own pipeline in order to avoid the cost of the fines and legal sanctions for suspending gas delivery unilaterally.
Summarized as: the Kremlin miscalculated in suspending gas delivery, and by blowing up the pipeline is trying to preserve some future access to the European market, after current hostilities cease.
It might be true. But the story rests on the following premise:
*Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. [...]'
This glosses over the legal fact that the President can't just carry out military operations and then never mention them again, not least on the grounds that someone needs to be in the loop in case the executive branch suffers some catastrophic attack. As far as I am aware, 10 USC 130f still requires that Congress be notified of sensitive military operations within 48 hours: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/130f
I don't see where Hersh addresses this aspect of the legal environment, he just waves it away. Of course, it could be that Congress notified but only a small number of sufficiently serious members with the capacity to keep their mouths firmly shut, but the article doesn't seem to contemplate that possibility.
He claims SOCOM covert military operations have to be reported to Gang of Eight but if you use regular Navy forces to do the covert operation you somehow do not. That seems beyond extremely suspect.
> 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.
I'm not sure how courts are interpreting section d) but using a plain reading of the three points:
1) a lethal operation or capture operation...
2) an operation conducted by the armed forces in self-defense or in defense of foreign partners, including during a cooperative operation; or
3) an operation conducted by the armed forces to free an individual from the control of hostile foreign forces.
blowing up infrastructure that has no risk of killing someone for an offensive purpose would not be covered. I think they should have notified congress because that is the clear spirit of this law but the executive is always trying to dodge congressional oversight.
I would argue that it easily falls under section 2, just like blowing up a bridge with nobody on it for strategic purposes. But you raise an interesting argument and I don't know what current jurisprudence or guidance is on the topic.
I wonder what Biden was referring to when he stated
> "If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."
> When asked how, the president says, "I promise you, we will be able do that."
Considering the context was about sanctions, and no one at the time thought he was suggesting he would blow it up, then it’s not reasonable to try to retroactively change the context.
I realize I'm just some guy on the internet, but damaging/destroying a section of the pipeline is exactly what I thought President Biden meant when he said that.
He didn't say no gas would flow. He said the pipeline would no longer exist. Also, why would he be hesitant to use the word "sanctions?" Sanctions would be a totally reasonable explanation. What he said clearly implied the pipeline would be forcefully made inoperative.
Like the Europeans, Biden miscalculated that income via Nordstream would be crucial to Russia. Nobody would have predicted that the Russians are so crazy to cut off Europe on their own in an attempt to force them (Germany in particular) into submission. Alas that didn't work as European customers saved on Gas and shouldered the increase in cost.
Prima facie, in the context of Hersh's story, it sounds a lot like there's a plan to blow up the pipeline, doesn't it?
I'm anticipating there are more plausible explanations of what his words "We will bring an end to it" might refer to, and was hoping replies might provide them.
Bringing an end to it can just imply calling chancellor Scholz and making it clear to close the pipelines. Germany could have stopped receiving Gas if they were pressured to.
It does, but there is a good argument that it was in Russia's strategic interest to blow up the pipeline and blame it on NATO. 'Burning your boats' exists as a catchphrase because it is a real historic strategy to impose force cohesion. In the context of gas supplies, it shuts down internal political dissent about whether the military object outweighs the economic object.
I don't have a firm opinion on who destroyed the pipeline; there are valid strategic arguments for doing so on both sides, and the ambiguity over who did it is the geopolitical equivalent of a smoke bomb.
My thoughts on the incident, organised as a series of nested propositions.
0. The Nord Stream pipeline incident was not an accident.
1. The pipeline was sabotaged by a state actor.
a. Only a state had the capability to carry it out undetected.
b. The sabotage was in violation of international law.
c. Evidence of the sabotage would cause a diplomatic scandal.
d? Either Russia or the United States sabotaged the pipeline.
e? The sabotage was authorised at the highest levels.
3. Russia did not sabotage the pipeline.
a? Russia had no motivation to destroy it.
b. Russia controls the pipeline, and could choose to turn it off.
c. No state has presented evidence that Russia was involved in the sabotage.
d. The area is highly monitored by US and US-aligned countries.
4. The US sabotaged the pipeline.
a. The US had strategic and economic motivations to prevent the pipeline from operating.
b. The US govt made public statements prior to the sabotage that, had they been made by the Kremlin, would have uncontroversially implicated Russia in the eyes of the American public.
c. The US has the means to destroy it.
d? The US has the means to hide their involvement in the sabotage from European allies and the US public.
e. The Western public have no appetite for stories which portray Russia as a victim, or US/EU as villains. Hiding their involvement is therefore trivial, since media outlets have no motivation to investigate the truth.
f. Conversely, Russian state and media have no incentive to investigate, since the Russian audience takes it for granted that NATO was responsible.
Russia wanted to cause panic and meltdown on EUs energy markets, but to no avail. Russia tried to sabotage gas supply by fiddling with turbines for months, but was in the end out of options, and EU gas prices were still too far from panic and collapse. Blowing up underwater gas pipes the same day that a gas pipe from Norway started to work - too good to be coincidence.
> Russia controls the pipeline, and could choose to turn it off
No, Russia cannot just turn off the gas without a force majeure cause (and even declaring the war to Ukraine, which will never be an option, is not a force majeure enough). Otherwise there are contractual obligations to fulfill, and enormous penalties in case of breaching contract.
> enormous penalties in case of breaching contract.
penalties they could simply just ignore if they choose to. After all, they forced the sale in rubles, despite this not being part of the initial agreement of gas sales.
blowing it up seems just too much of shooting-self-in-the-foot for russia, unless russia can confidently lay the blame onto the west (particularly, the US) as the culprit.
One cannot ignore penalties if one is on the supply side. Gazprom pumps the gas, Germany says "thank you, we will not pay for it because you owe us penalties". All they can do is stop pumping.
And Russia immediately laid the blame onto the West, and never stopped. Maybe we are now looking at the part of that continuous effort.
Yea this pretty much sums it up. Although it seems clear to me that the nordic states were either in the loop or involved in the operation. As for the rest of NATO and the media, it took them a few days to assess the situation and shut up.
Nowadays the media is much more polarised though, all stories that oppose the American imperial establishment must be censored and deleted as "disinformation", I'm sure people are flagging this right now and calling OP a Russian bot, etc.
Project Azorian was a crazy conspiracy theory, and also true. You discredit yourself by using "conspiracy theory" in the "obviously false" sense. Intelligence agencies really do conspire to do things. That's their job.
b) recovering a submarine is not the same as saying, actually Assad is an innocent bystander and the rebels gassed themselves, The CIA worked with Putin and Assad to undermine Obama...also US soldiers raped children and video recorded it, oh and let's not forget that the US planned to fake how OBL was killed in coordinate with Pakistan because stealth helicopters aren't possible (so how could the US fly below deck and get into Pakistan undetected!).
The very premise of stealing a Soviet submarine wreck off the ocean floor with nobody noticing is pants-on-head insane. The USN thought the CIA was being moronic to even consider this plan. The USN's idea was a lot saner; to simply use submersibles to extract intelligence-relevant materials from the wreck underwater, not lift and take the entire wreck. No surface ships needed, much less an expensive purpose-built attention-drawing surface ship.
Almost every serious recent scandal that goes against dominant hegemonic interests was "a crazy conspiracy theory" until the day when the evidence for it became overwhelming, then it switched instantly into a "nothingburger", "everyone always knew it was true," old news. The most important thing, both before the switch and after, seems to be to prevent people from talking about it.
> According to Hersh's story, Navy SEALs met no resistance at Abbottabad and were escorted by a Pakistani intelligence officer to bin Laden's bedroom, where they killed him. Bin Laden's body was "torn apart with rifle fire" and pieces of the corpse "tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains" by Navy SEALs during the flight home (no reason is given for this action). There was no burial at sea because "there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case."
> The first hints came in the latter years of the Bush administration, when Hersh reported repeatedly that the US was on the verging of striking Iran. These included reports stating that the US might even bomb Iran with a nuclear warhead, and later that the administration had considered using US special forces disguised as Iranians to launch a "false flag" attack as a premise for war.
> The moment when a lot of journalists started to question whether Hersh had veered from investigative reporting into something else came in January 2011. That month, he spoke at Georgetown University's branch campus in Qatar, where he gave a bizarre and rambling address alleging that top military and special forces leaders "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta ... many of them are members of Opus Dei." He suggested that they belong to a network first formed by former Vice President Dick Cheney that is steering US foreign policy toward an agenda of bringing Christianity to the Middle East.
> The next year, in 2012, Hersh reported in the New Yorker that the Bush administration had secretly armed and funded an Iranian terrorist group known as the MEK in 2005. Two sources, neither with direct knowledge, told Hersh that American special forces had flown the Iranians all the way to Nevada to train at a base there. This detail was both spectacular and puzzling: the US has bases throughout the world, including several in the Middle East; why bring terrorists to Nevada?
I never said "It's possible, therefore it's true". All of your "debunks" are relying on the claims being prima facie absurd. I provided some evidence, and can provide more, of historical precedent.
The last one in particular is deeply embarassing and shows the Vox blogger has little grasp of history.
> I never said "It's possible, therefore it's true". All of your "debunks" are relying on the claims being prima facie absurd.
The burden of proof is on HIM. It isn't up for us to debunk what he's saying (though I'm sure many can), he has to prove it, and he hasn't. No single corroboration from other big sources? Seems odd.
> The next year, in 2012, Hersh reported in the New Yorker that the Bush administration had secretly armed and funded an Iranian terrorist group known as the MEK in 2005. Two sources, neither with direct knowledge, told Hersh that American special forces had flown the Iranians all the way to Nevada to train at a base there. This detail was both spectacular and puzzling: the US has bases throughout the world, including several in the Middle East; why bring terrorists to Nevada?
Here's a fawning local Nevada news segment about a former Green Beret training the mujihadeen, aired two months after 9/11:
I don’t have a strong opinion about who blew up Nord Stream.
I do believe one thing: with US AWACS and other assets, and in that part of the world, I believe that the US government (and perhaps other governments, like Germany) know who did it. There a many reasons why they would not share information, such as an ally could have done it. Or, of course, Russia may have done it.
I am glad this story is posted on HN because I like getting many different opinions in one place.
yeah I'm sure the US and probably European governments know exactly what happened. Also if Russia did do it, its officially an attack on NATO and requires a response? It makes sense that USA/Europe didn't officially blame Russia with evidence.
> Also if Russia did do it, its officially an attack on NATO and requires a response?
In either the case of America attacking a pipeline jointly owned by the Russians or the Russians attacking a pipeline jointly owned by a NATO country, you could call this an act of war. But in neither case will either side use it as their casus belli to start WW3, because nobody wants that. Nobody is waiting for a 'legitimate' excuse to start such a war. It is much safer for everybody to pretend they haven't noticed such attacks, or to pretend that the culprit is uncertain or maybe that it was done by accident. Pretending to be ignorant of the provocation is preferable to WW3, for both sides of the conflict.
>The White House on Wednesday dismissed a blog post by a U.S. investigative journalist alleging the United States was behind explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines as "utterly false and complete fiction."
>...
>"This is utterly false and complete fiction," said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. Spokespeople for the CIA and State Department said the same.
Is there anything they could say or do, without providing undeniable evidence someone else did it that you would believe? If "we didn't do it" reads as "we did it", what do you expect them to do, not respond at all? That would be more suspicious to me.
Sure. I'm just curious about who did it and hey if Hersh is providing one narrative, it's better than the lack of answers or even any attempt at an investigatory effort from any party, whether NATO or Russian.
No official or well supported narrative does not mean you should jump on whatever narrative is out there or offered. Be open minded, but not so open your brain falls out
The lack of real concern on all parties about trying to figure out who did it is essentially proof of who did it. You have multiple PMs and FMs saying in the days afterward that "everybody knows" who did it. Who did it? If it was Russia and "everybody knew" then that'd have entered the press.
> The lack of real concern on all parties about trying to figure out who did it is essentially proof of who did it.
Given that Nord Stream AG is (majority owned) by Russia, this would point at Russia since it's remarkably silent. But to me this doesn't make sense since I still don't understand how it benefits Russia. But perhaps it's another FSB plan which went wrong, as many others did in 2022.
Russia would probably be silent if they had proof America did it, because they don't want WW3. And America would probably be silent if they had proof Russia did it, for exactly the same reason. Neither side wants to escalate this into WW3, because then everybody loses.
It's a lot more convenient to explain that you totally would retaliate if only you knew who did it, rather than claiming you knew who did it but you're not going to retaliate anyway because you fear escalation. So everybody plays dumb.
> Russia would probably be silent if they had proof America did it, because they don't want WW3.
That doesn't make sense. Russia can use this as a propaganda tool without having to act on it. And it's not like that Russia didn't accuse USA from blowing it up - they did, just not very forcefully. It's strange, because they could have used it in e.g. Germany to split the society: "bad Americans want you to freeze, they blew up your gas pipelines".
> That doesn't make sense. Russia can use this as a propaganda tool without having to act on it.
To acknowledge such an attack and not respond in kind would cause them to lose face, but responding in kind risks escalation. Ignoring the attack is their safest option.
Then it was Switzerland. Nobody suspects them, everybody was fine with Nord Stream gone but there was no agreement on who gets to blow it up. So Switzerland volunteered. Proof me wrong!
Close. It was not the Swiss proper, but specifically the Papal Swiss Guard acting under the command of the Holy See. Since it is not a nation-state like Switzerland, this adds another additional layer of neutrality and deniability to satisfy all parties involved.
Can someone explain why would they blow up inoperational pipeline that Germany even said is not planning to operate in near future? And if they would have remote explosive wouldn't it make more sense to explode it in the moment of starting the pipeline to make it look more like an accident?
To make absolutely sure Germany does not go behind the US and makes a deal with Russia irregardless of the situation in Ukraine. Backstap before the others can backstap you.
Alternative hypothetical take - US did it on behalf of German government to avoid the potential political meltdown. Removing this toxic option removed a path to split the society and politics.
Allegedly a "burn the ships" [1] moment. The goal is to prevent any energy spent on even considering going back, the only way is forward.
If Germany has no Russian gas (it's not possible) they won't spend any time even broaching that possibility - the only way forward is to look for other sources (which happened concurrently with the opening of the Baltic pipeline - convenient).
Please don't break the site guidelines like you did here and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34712682. We're trying to avoid flamewar. If you want to make your substantive points thoughtfully, that would be fine.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
> My Lai was first revealed to the American public on November 13, 1969—almost two years after the incident—when Hersh published a story through the Dispatch News Service. The article threatened to undermine the U.S. war effort and severely damage the Nixon presidency. Inside the White House, officials privately discussed how to contain the scandal. On November 21, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger emphasized that the White House needed to develop a "game plan", to establish a "press policy", and maintain a "unified line" in its public response to the incident. The White House established a "My Lai Task Force" whose mission was to "figure out how best to control the problem", to make sure that administration officials "all don't go in different directions" when discussing the incident, and to "engage in dirty tricks". These included discrediting key witnesses and questioning Hersh's motives for releasing the story. What soon followed was a public relations offensive by the administration designed to shape how My Lai would be portrayed in the press and understood among the American public.
> Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.
This is not exactly the view of the Swedish navy here in Sweden. No Russian submarine has ever been “forced to the surface” in Swedish waters to the best of my knowledge [1]. The only case where the Swedish navy claimed they had proof of a foreign submarine it turned out to probably be minks and herrings.
1. Closest case I’m aware of is Soviet submarine U137 that ran aground on the Swedish east coast due to navigation error.
In most cases it’s debatable if there were any submarines. E.g. professor Anna Christensen who was on the 2001 government commission with access to all information has said that she does not think there is solid proof of a single foreign submarine in Swedish waters between 1981 and 1992 (other than U 137 of course).
In 2001 the anti-militarism in Sweden was peaking so that a government appointed commissioner came to the conclusion that there were no subs(except for the sub that were) is hardly surprising.
Did I miss anything? Because the rest is conjectures, one anonymous source, and references to historical events. I don't understand what does this add to the discourse.
Adding Hersh's name to the conspiracy theory (in a very literal sense) does not add any factual weight to it, it's still an unfounded conspiracy theory. It's (again, literally) an "ad hominem" argument, which is widely understood to be a fallacy.
I take this with a grain of salt. The 'source' (or sources) here are un-named and unclear if just the one or more.
The author, Seymour Hersh, has accused the Obama administration of lying about the events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden, and disputed the claim that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on civilians in the Syrian Civil War.
This all sounds very plausible. It may even be true, but I do not trust the messenger that much.
An unsubstantiated story that’s presented as if it’s fact doesn’t really belong on Hacker News. The fact the submission has to be edited to include a question mark when the source material does not is an implicit admission of such by the moderation team. Why it hasn’t been removed I have no idea.
It's no such admission. In fact it's the opposite, because if we thought the story didn't belong on HN, nothing would be easier than to let it sink without a trace.
I think the story belongs on HN because I know a little bit about the historical significance of Seymour Hersh and I think the appearance of this story is intellectually interesting. Maybe I'm the only commenter who feels that way, since most appear only to want to score points for their pre-existing political side, but it's our job to serve the intellectual interest of the larger audience, most of whom don't comment.
But do you know a little bit about how shaky Seymour Hersh's later writing has been:
>… But his allegations are largely supported only by two sources, neither of whom has direct knowledge of what happened, both of whom are retired, and one of whom is anonymous. The story is riven with internal contradictions and inconsistencies.
>The story simply does not hold up to scrutiny — and, sadly, is in line with Hersh's recent turn away from the investigative reporting that made him famous into unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.
Nothing I’ve argued about the quality of this submission — either publicly or privately — has been political. This is hearsay presented as fact. It is simply not intellectually honest source material.
It could be true! I’ve read lots of compelling narratives over the years. Many of them are wholly true, some have elements of the truth, some are fiction. But there’s no verifiably new information presented here; only a compelling narrative.
I really urge you to reconsider your stance but this is the last comment I’ll make on the topic.
Dang, the question mark is not significant enough in my mind to present this story in a proper light. I think you should preface the title with "Theory:", "Hypothesis:", or some other disclaimer to immediately signify to the readers that it does not have substantial evidence to back up its extraordinary claims.
I respect and appreciate your opinions on all things HN related, but in this instance I think we need to make readers more urgently aware.
Thanks for standing by your principles on this one dang.
I was hoping there would be some discussion of the SONAR buoy remote detonation story - is it plausible (from a technical perspective)? Has it been done before?
The fact that this story has been allowed to live on HN's front page for so long has really knocked my confidence in the forum and its moderators. I thought HN had taken an enlightened stance on avoiding juicy topics like this since they clearly lead to lots of useless speculation and uncritical thinking. They are a net drain on community health. This story does not belong on HN. I think I can say that even if it turned out to be entirely true. It's been shown over and over again that civilized discussion about high stakes political topics is impossible. For every hard fact that deserves attention, a thousand hypotheticals are thrown up with misplaced confidence. The instinct to want to believe what you wish were true is just too high. And being witness to it makes you stupider, whether or not you participate. None of the behaviors I've seen on display in this thread indicate that this story is any different.
I agree with you a lot—let's say 80%—but there's a big difference between 80% and 100%, and experience has shown that it's impossible to operate the forum 100% this way.
In terms of how we handle the issue of political/divisive topics on HN, there are some pretty complete explanations here, if you (or anyone) are interested: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you read those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is and would be happy to take a crack at it. Here are a couple of good places to start:
People have a love/hate relationship with their favorite internet forums. If you (again, I don't mean you personally, I mean anyone here) aren't occasionally running into something you hate, then we're probably doing a bad job—we're either too predictable, or too narrow, or both. I think that follows from the core idea of this place, which is intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... It's quite amazing how many unexpected and interesting things follow from that principle, but maybe this isn't the moment to make that case.
The blog post is mostly a sea of text with no real citations and loose quotes. The author, though a famed journalist for his breaking of a story 50 years ago, has also made claims recently to defend dictators such as Assad; even going so far as to claim the US was going to fake Bin Laden's dead by dragging his body back to Afghanistan from Pakistan to pretend like he died in a missile strike. His reasoning for this? Well, basically apparently flying below the deck and stealth helicopters are impossible.
People need to come to grips that people can slowly become kooks over time (or maybe they were always crazy, but did one good thing and now have clout.) Snowden, Greenwald have made similar kooky remarks of late defending bad actors all over. It's bizarre, but not unusual.
No he didn't, the AP did based on a whistleblower (followed by a 60 Minutes report.) He may have reported on it, but he didn't break it. He did however make a claim not reported by the anyone else that the US soldiers raped children, which no one else ever reported, then offered no evidence of said claim.
> US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh disclosed the torture scandal of Abu Ghraib 10 years ago.
> He was the first to describe in detail what was happening in Abu Ghraib, quoting from the Taguba Report, a secret, internal investigation by the US army about atrocities committed against the prisoners.
The article goes on to discuss how even though second hand accounts of abuses already existed, he was the first to get access to and disclose the report, giving a detailed first party account and giving proof of chain of command involvement for the first time.
He actually did though. Saying the Syrian rebels gassed themselves (common Assad talking point [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/seymour-m.-hersh/who...] parroted by people like Tulsi Gabbard/Tucker/etc), and also said the Pentagon had a secret agreement with Assad and Putin to undermine Obama. He also offered absolutely no evidence of any of this.
The OPCW leaks confirmed that the “rebels” staged gas attacks. That has never been refuted by anyone— only attacks against the messengers, similar to yours.
Except the OPCW says themselves they have grounds to believe Assad did it. Any "leaks" were part of an ongoing investigation, and not conclusive. I'm absolutely baffled how naive people are in defense of people like Assad & Putin.
The original investigators called BS. Then the OPCW worked to silence them and brought in chumps who would stick to the script. Their latest report only confirms that it was a coverup, doubling down on fake “evidence” provided by the white helmets.
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/02/06/in-douma-cover...
> Literally no one outside Europe and North America (or maybe Australia?) ever believed it was anyone besides USA and its vassals. Only people who are constantly dosed with USA war media bullshit consider this an "extraordinary claim". Not all of us are that foolish, however.
This is completely irrelevant. Some people in Iran and Russia think the US is run by Satan. That doesn't make it so. Being anti-US is very in vogue, but that doesn't change the fact that your post offers no evidence itself and neither does this article.
I'm not going to include "evidence" about "Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, Vietnam, Korea, Guatemala, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, etc" in a four-sentence comment. It's no one's fault but your own that you are ignorant of history.
I agree that it's not an extraordinary claim, given the few players with the capability and at least theoretical motives. But it's an extraordinarily detailed claim.
And it seems to hinge on a single source (is my understanding of journalism broken, aren't you supposed to have confirmation of sources?), who clearly has an agenda given this quote: "The only flaw was the decision to do it." So even if the broad strokes are true, seems weird to publish off of a single source to me.
Sure, skepticism is warranted, as is usually the case. Those who already suspected the USA military-industrial complex of taking this action that massively benefited the USA military-industrial complex are less likely to dismiss TFA out of hand. Others will have to see a great deal more reporting, and as seen here loads of credulous fools (or impersonators of such) won't believe it even 75 years from now when we have complete FOIA documentation. [0]
However, we may make a few predictions. Over time, as more details emerge, TFA will be shown to be basically correct yet wrong in some important details. As Hersh stipulates, he relies on a single source, which source probably slants a few points in self-interest. The same apologists for imperialism seen here in high dudgeon in total denial, will over time move to more nuanced positions: "of course USA did it, but Hersh portrayed it as something USA shouldn't have done rather than something that muh security demanded! USA couldn't have known that it would lead to European penury and/or nuclear holocaust! Also he claimed that Biden made a decision, when we all know he has been non compos mentis for years... You can't take credit for being right about USA militarism all the time just because you assume it's always evil and stupid." As the avaricious crackpot realism that has pulled us so close to the brink of extinction takes over more and more Western media, we'll see far fewer independent moderation decisions like that of 'dang here today. We can be sure that phone calls have already been made.
[0] That's a joke; USA definitely won't exist 75 years from now, and this event is both contributing cause and justification.
The fact that Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, the countries investigating the explosions, are refusing to point any fingers at Russia suggests to me that they have serious reasons to believe that it may have been an ally nation that destroyed the pipeline. Pointing the finger at the USA, even if they had very concrete evidence, would be a massive diplomatic problem - so it stands to reason that we would not hear about it. By contrast, especially in the context of the war, pointing the finger at Russia would not particularly affect diplomatic ties - especially given how Russia has already been pointing the finger at everyone else.
So, even though this report itself is rather thin on evidence, it is presenting a version of what seems to be the most plausible hypothesis.
This story requires one to believe that, on one hand, the mission was so secret that US Special Operations could not be used, because then the "Gang of Eight" in Congress would need to be notified, and according to Hersh that would have been a problem.
But on the other hand, Norway and other countries were invited to be intimately involved in the planning and execution.
It was implied that Norway would benefit from such a mission - they are directly going to be able to sell more gas. However, it does seem implausible that so many are informed and involved.
None of this is proof, of course. But it logical. Who else would do it? And why?
I think it's great the topic has been brought up again. This was a major event that somehow got swept away like nothing happened. The propaganda machine even tried to sell it as Russians blowing up their own pipe. Cause you know, at this point they could be blamed for the most ridiculous thing and it would still "track" because crazy.
What really matters is who else here in Europe helped them. And why. Norway stands to gain but did they help with the sabotage? Things don't look good at all. I am scared. Russia is just across the black sea. I don't want war
> Russia is just across the black sea. I don't want war
russia is the one perpetrating war. And yet, it is somehow the US that is questionable?
It isn't really logical for the US to do it - risk vs reward wise. And i doubt any european country would want to help the US do this either - they stand to gain very little. Even if Norway stands to gain more gas sales - those aren't guaranteed, and the reputational damage is not worth the financial reward imho.
Not trying to be snarky, but genuinely what is the most articulate and sensible piece on why the most likely culprit is Russia?
All the commentary I read from reputable media seem to boil down to "Putin did it because that is the sort of thing that Putin does", without providing any further analysis on why it would make strategic or tactical sense for Putin to do so.
The more serious journals such as Foreign Policy seem to have ignored the issue entirely as far as I can see.
But the theory presented in the video hinges on the idea that if the americans were to have done it, they would've chosen a more covert means to do it - aka, undetectable (such as cyber warfare).
For example, they would've done something similar to Stuxnet to sabotage the iranian nuclear material processing.
However, i cannot imagine what method of covert sabotage is possible for a pipeline. If everyone believed the pipeline is working, even if it was sabotaged, then they will behave as though it wasn't sabotaged (until they realize it actually is broken). So the effect of the sabotage won't be felt until they turn back on the pipeline, by which, it is too late to for the sabotage's effect to change policy!
So i don't completely buy that the americans aren't a culprit, based purely on the operational design of the attack.
However, i do buy that the risk taking vs risk adverse behaviour does fit. America would not want to risk fracturing NATO from such covert activities. They gain very little - as the pipeline is already closed, and financial and diplomatic pressure on germany is enough to keep it closed. If russia wants to use the pipeline and prospect of cheap gas to lure germany out of the alliance, they've already showed to have failed at it. May be it will change in the future (like 5 yrs down the line), but that seems to be very far to predict, given the current risks of being discovered in between that time.
Lastly, the idea that Putin would covertly destroy the pipelines because they are at a state of war does seem a bit plausible - he's trying to remove the pipeline from being used as a negotiation leverage by any potential successor in ousting him! If germany could sponsor a political opponent in russia with which the gas and economy of russia could be rescued, they might get popular support. This removes the possibility, despite hurting russia in the short term (they're already lost the ability to sell gas from the pipeline, so blowing it up doesn't hurt as much). Coupled with the deniability, the kremlin could blame the act on the US, and hope to cause fracture within NATO for some added effect.
> The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
This is the hardest part to believe in the piece. Making this kind of very technical change (timer to remote detonation) at essentially the last minute seems very hard to pull off. I think the piece could have benefitted from more than one view (besides Postal) on how difficult such a change would be.
That said, that last quote by Postal offers an alternative explanation. Namely, that the explosives were rigged for remote detonation but exploded accidentally.
What I don't get is the risk of an accidental signal triggering it. The system as described sounds similar to some existing tech used to communicate with submarines when they are under deep cover... presumably those comms come with both strong encryption and strong authentication off the rack. seems unlikely that random noise would be a concern for a trigger...
A more likely rationale for a fixed time line would simply be a concern on the life of the battery in the receiver, and the diplomatic fallout that would happen if the battery died, and an intact detonator was recovered on a later routine inspection that could be traced back to the USA.
I don't think it sounds that difficult to pull off. The underwater communication technology is probably something already developed, they just had to modify the devices with a new trigger mechanism.
There are a lot of details presented so it seems further investigation is warranted. As far as "Why American would want to take out the Nordstream pipeline", there's been an ongoing desire to get Europe to buy US LNG tanker gas to meet domestic energy demand, instead of Russian pipeline gas, and blowing up the pipeline is a step in that direction.
Of course, the optimal solution for Europe would have been to start massive renewable infrastructure development over a decade ago, then they'd be on their way to not needing any gas imports, instead of having their domestic economy held hostage like this. The rest of the world would be wise to think in these terms - fundamental necessities like energy should not be subject to the random fluctuations of global supply chains due to wars, pandemics, etc.
It's very reckless behavior if true, essentially an act of war. I can't imagine Washington politicians responding with calm deliberation if someone was blowing up US LNG tankers, for comparison.
The story does sound a little strange, but who knows? I'd have suspected the explosives were planted by underwater rover / submarine but maybe human divers are less detectable.
Modern Norway is one of the wealthiest and most developed societies that has ever existed. To give an example: Their population is only 5.4 million but they are the third biggest market for premium/luxury electric vehicles after the US and China.
Why would people living in what is an actual paradise on Earth risk all that by blindly following Joe Biden's orders to shoot at Russia?
Sorry but the Norwegian involvement claim doesn't pass the smell test.
i think any article that is a bad look for country 'x' will have that country's nationalists up in arms.
it's not just a natural reaction for nationalists, it's a strategy for people in power generally - nationalist or otherwise - it's just one way to try to make a story go away, and it's obviously had some success here on HN today:
What I don't get is that from my perspective this is not really a bad look.
A lot of Putin strategy relied on the weakness of the leaders on the other side.
He very likely expected to see most government caving or at least stay away.
The narrative is that Biden is an old almost senile dude and Zelensky is a clown.
Well, we now know that this narrative turned out to not be entirely accurate, and IMHO Biden cutting the big pipe of Putin can be seen as a good thing if you expect your leader to be strong and decisive.
From my experience European techies are one of the most pro-Ukrainian and anti-Putin/Russia demographics in the world right now so that shouldn't be surprising.
Looks like the only 100% benefactor of this is Ukraine. Russia now must pump all its gas to Europe through Ukraine. And they are already at war with Russia, so there is no risk of escalation. And they have pulled other impressive stunts no one believed were possible, like Moscow cruiser, Kerch bridge, Engels airport. They kept it secret because didn't want to alienate Germany.
But would ukraine devote resources to do this sabotage, when they're actually short on resources? And where did they get the ship and the movement of troops/operatives to pull such a thing off? Surely, a rogue ship in the most heavily monitored sea would throw off alarm bells.
Not saying they can't have done it, but it would have required more resources than ukraine would spare imho. And if they have such resources, would they not use it instead to sabotage something else of more importance to russia? Such as their oil or gas fields that are still operational?
Interesting, but "While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline..." is not true. There was/is a very good rationale for why Putin (not "Russia") would seek to destroy the pipeline. It wasn't bringing in any money, but it could (a lot) if Russia gave in to Western demands to pull out of Ukraine. There are persistent rumors that Medvedev and other high-ranking Russian officials were upset at the loss of western money, and Putin might have simply wanted to burn his bridges, for the same reason Vikings were said to have burned their bridges: to put out of your side's minds the option of retreat. With no NordStream, there was less temptation to try to get the West's business back (and at the point it was blown up, neither NordStream was actually bringing in much money anyway due to sanctions).
Now this doesn't mean Putin actually ordered it. But it's not true to say that there was no plausible reason w he would.
Conceivably this is a pro-Biden article. It demonstrates what Biden is willing to do and/or is capable of when it comes to big, complicated foreign policy questions. If you know ahead of time that a Russian invasion is inevitable (as all intelligence assessments made very clear) wouldn't it be a prudent strategy to relieve Russia of one of its most prominent economic weapons?
Considering the much rumored campaign announcement, I can absolutely see a large portion of "centrist America" respecting Biden for this move, and rewarding him for it. I think this quote from TFA encapsulates the sentiment:
> The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
I think that's a reasonable spin. And I'll admit that there's a repressed neocon in the back of my brain that secretly wants to believe that the US is still capable of taking decisive and effective action in defense of world order.
But... this is just really, really thin. Hersh had no editor on this, it's literally a self-published blog with one entry[1], created for just this article. No one else wanted to run it, one has to assume. There's one source, with only the thinnest of descriptions[2] and no independent verification described.
Everyone wants to lean hard on Hersh's reputation from My Lai and Abu Ghraib. But those stories had evidence! The vietnam story was about a covered-up-but-very-real prosecution of an actual person for actual crimes. Abu Ghraib had the famous photographs and people willing to go on record with their own names. This isn't the same at all.
I mean, maybe it's true. Again, the Freudian Neocon would like that. But realistically this could also be someone feeding Hersh a fake story sourced from anywhere. I don't think this really tells us much of anything.
[1] When I saw this the first time, I immediately thought it must be a fake!
[2] Just "someone familiar with the planning", I mean, were they even looped in on the execution? How does that description square with all the Tom Clancy prose about operation processes?
If any part of Hersh's claims are true, which I doubt, the U.S. Senate and House U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will demand immediate classified hearings with DoD & IC since this was done all wrong.
If they don't demand them (SSCI is still rather bipartisan) within 24-48 hours, you know it's complete BS.
It would be a shame if any real-world decisions where made based on the validity of an opinion piece without any, and I mean ANY, substantial evidence.
This smells strange. A Pulitzer winner, 60+ years in journalism, starts Substack just to post this one investigation. He has about one million chances to have at least Twitter, not mentioning a website, but no.
BTW, I checked the text with GPT detector, it didn't sound alarm, so at least it is a human-written.
The Nordstream pipeline was blown up by Russia. They have done this twice before. Russia weaponizes its energy. That has been the pattern. I don't believe America would attack an ally like this and I don't believe Hersh has found the truth.
I don't believe Russia is capable to do that the way it was done... and sorry: They are not even capable to be that stupid also (stupid enough, but that would top it by magnitudes).
Your only concept for what the Russians were thinking when they invaded Ukraine is what western media and politicians have fed you. You don't actually know anything about what they were thinking. lol.
I'd love to read sources on why they started a war they thought they'd win in 2 weeks which now has come to 100,000+ troops lost (on both sides separately.) Please share, because I'm interested in their strategy.
Why was a question make added to the submission here? It makes it look like a (incorrectly written) question about a thing that happened, rather than… whatever it is, speculation I guess.
Odd, haven’t seen titles like this before. It seems like a weird policy, to change headlines in a manner that is misleading if parsed following normal English grammar rules. And especially to only apply that rule in controversial cases.
If the goal is to make it clear that the claim is not endorsed by HN, why not something like
AuthorName: “This is clearly a quote because it is in quotation marks”
The Swedish team currently investigating the explosion might be able to confirm or refute parts of this account: can they find fragments of the sonar-activated detonator?
I think I would be very skeptical that this was actually written by Seymour Hersh. This Substack was created today. There's no previous history on it. I can't find any credible evidence that this is actually Seymour Hersh.
If it's not Seymour, it sure is very effective propoganda.
Does anyone see any proof that this is indeed written by the claimed author?
Can someone more in tune with global politics explain to me why it hasn't just been assumed that the us did it?
We had the motive. We had the means. oh yea, and our president said we would do it in advance of it happening:
"If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." (reporter: "How will you do that, exactly, since the project is within germany's control?") "I promise you we'll be able to do it. (smirks, silence)"
The political risk for the US is zero. Just look at any other similar situation, for instance where the US has killed civilians by drone as collateral damage: there's a bit of outcry, a bit of finger wagging and after a couple of weeks there's some other big news and it's all forgotten.
> In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a new memoir by a Reagan White House official.
> At the time, the United States was attempting to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas.
This narrative points to no proof expecting motive to suffice. I think the US is not the only motive hypothesis. It would have made more sense for the US to blow it up earlier. Given that the pipeline was unused at the time of destruction it seems more likely a Russian intelligence ploy executed from Baltic ports.
I think the Swedish investigation, with no public announcement, might be the only source of primary information. Add to this the sabotage against German trains etc, and the overall lack of ability of the Russian government to negotiate for its interests but instead choose subterfuge (they denied the invasion, and claim themselves the victim), it is more likely such a secret operation is in the interests of the aggressor.
A single sourced "news story" by anyone, is a non-starter. It isn't a news story, it is hearsay. First hand testimony with fanfic levels of correlating data have caused untold misery throughout History, of late being a particular sorry swing of that pendulum.
When someone like Hersh is behind it, I expect _WAY_ more. His single source could be President Biden on the record and I'd still take issue with this.
All of this could turn out to be nearly 100% correct and it would still be irresponsible. The implications of getting this even slightly wrong are potentially catastrophic, in so many unpredictable ways.
Perhaps I'm showing my age, but I grew up learning not to F around with the implications of a land war in Europe.
Perhaps the discussion should be phrased instead as
how likely can a hypothetical operation as sketched by Mr Hersh, involving so many people in so many governments, remain without hard evidence leaking out for years?
Personally, I wonder what would have happened to the sonar buoy that was alledged to have triggered the explosives. Wouldn't they have to come back and pick it up to avoid leaving evidence of the triggering mechanism? And if they have to come pick it up anyway, why drop a buoy at all? Why not use that presence to send a time delayed trigger?
I don't get it. US wanted it gone, Russia wanted it gone, Norway wanted it gone. Other comments suggest other countries wanted it gone too. Now it's gone. Shouldn't countries be lining up to take credit? What's the big deal?
(I'll admit I don't follow politics and had not even heard of this event before today).
Maybe not today with the internet and the speed at which this stuff gets out. Things get hacked and documents leak digitally which is way easier than someone breaking into a physical building and riffling through old documents. Additionally as we have seen with Trump, Biden and Pence it appears that the way the administration deals with secret documents can be quite sloppy.
Yes, it seems really hard to keep things secret. I guess it would be easier for a country known to kill journalists (thinking of Russia here, Assange is alive).
And everything is recorded nowadays.
(people like Biden are great security risks)
JFK was one of many contemporaneous high-profile political assassinations that share a common theme -- those assassinated were strong leaders that basically opposed the global ambitions of the growing transatlantic military-industrial-white-supremacist complex.
JFK, RFK, Dag Hammarskjöld, MLK, Malcom X, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, et al. to just name a few.
When you put it all together in historical context, it seems improbable that these were random unrelated events that just happen to advance the interests of a very powerful class that felt victimized by the end of European imperialism/American slavery and the rise of Communism and the Global South.
Otto Skorzeny is emblematic of the character that was central to this history.
No matter what the truth is, in EU there seems to be a touch of "of course it was the Americans", often justified by "that's just what the Americans do".
Well, in hindsight, Russia does not seem to gain from it, in the EU we were lucky that the winter was not very bad, but the US somehow conveniently gets to sell us overpriced gas...
It’s interesting how pro-russian propaganda has massively spiked in the recent days. They are bringing pretty much every talking head with half a name to it they can get. Putin and his cronies must really feel the pressure. I have to say it kind of makes me happy. Means that Ukraine and Allies are doing things right.
Its crazy that people prior to this thought this was some kind of conspiracy when it was so blatantly obvious who blew it up. Ask anyone working in commodities trading who blew it up, they all knew exactly who it was. The US had the most to gain and they even told us on 2 different occasions thats they would do it.
I think I would be very skeptical that this was actually written by Seymour Hersh. This Substack was created today. There's no previous history on it. I can't find any credible evidence that this is actually Seymour Hersh.
If it's not Seymour, it sure is very effective propoganda.
Does anyone see any proof that this is indeed written by the claimed author?
Have you seen the White House refutation somewhere other than in the piece which is the subject of the questioning you’re responding to? If not, that’s a null point.
There are quite a few articles popping up saying the same thing from various "news" sources, however they don't appear to be including any links to the supposed "White house" source they're talking about.
Considering the NY Post, a paper Hersh has a personal relationship with, has already written about this blogpost, I’d be really surprised if it was some kind of impersonation.
Hersh is an online individual like the rest of us, I’m quite sure he’d be aware of papers all over the world reporting on something he hadn’t written.
The substack was created today, then Russian outlet Sputnik ran the story hours later. Then a hacker news account with pro CCP content submitted this substack.
> In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
Wouldn't there be satellite imagery of said ship in the area? Can't you get that from the likes of Planet Labs? If so, this should be a pretty easy theory to (dis)prove.
Definitely not Russia which was using it as significant leverage over the Europeans.
Definitely not the Europeans who were relying on it for energy.
That leaves the US, with willing help from accomplices of course.
We can squabble about Hersh's credentials - no doubt to be dragged through the mud in the coming days as establishment types attempt to discredit him - but the base case for this is that the US is responsible.
> Definitely not Russia which was using it as significant leverage over the Europeans.
There's still one pipe of NS2 left unscathed; Russia had offered to start delivering gas over this pipe, prior to the winter turning out to be incredibly mild.
So the potential leverage is still there, and would perhaps have been useful had the climate cooperated. Maybe Russia took out three of four pipes just to ratchet up the sense of risk to Europe.
The argument that Russia would've taken out it's own pipeline is ludicrous. It's like a store owner blowing up his own store front to punish shop thieves, or something. It doens't make sense. If you want to know who did it, ask yourself: who benefits? Spoiler: it isn't Russia, and it isn't Ukraine or Europe either.
Correct, with a couple exceptions. The Norwegians (listed by Hersh as collaborators in this piece) certainly benefit as well because they can sell more of their own gas too. This was an alliance of convenience between essentially mafioso gas exporters and the US security state that will do anything to harm Russia.
https://peoplesworld.org/article/pipeline-ploy-how-u-s-natur...
It seems like the only consistent aspect of Seymour Hirsch's reporting is that it supports whatever narrative the Kremlin is pushing, whether that's the Kremlin of 1970 or the Kremlin of 2023.
The dude could have been a Cold War asset from day one!
HN has been host to all sorts of articles so to see the storm this article has raised is telling.
Do people realise that once the article is on the internet, removing it from HN is self censorship, the equivalent of pretending something doesn’t exist?
Well, it is surely not wrong about the main detail: who gave the order to blow the pipeline.Unless you are living in a fantasy world, as most commenters here. But then, americans know so little about the world outside of their empire, that it is not very surprising.
I agree that sources should be given. But this is the name of a famous journalist, so instead of flagging the article, perhaps the Substack people could weigh in:
a) Is this the real Seymour Hersh?
b) If so, perhaps people should ask him for sources.
I feel like too many outlets are glossing over this question and are reporting it as fact that he wrote it. I haven't found a single confirmation that he actually did so if anyone has one I'd love to see it.
You won’t need a source once the news comes out. This little text bomb thrown by CIA at the Executive can only mean that the Swedes have found conclusive evidence.
> This little text bomb thrown by CIA at the Executive can only mean that the Swedes have found conclusive evidence.
That’s a bizarre interpretation, since what the Swedish government says in that article, which is no different than non-US-government news source reporting on the same Swedish statement, is additional evidence of sabotage but no evidence of by whom.
> Please note that Radio Free Europe is run by CIA.
No, its run by a private 501(c)3 that used to be (more thab 59 years ago) covertly funded by the CIA, but is now overtly funded by the federal government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
To put a name to this organization, it is called the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
It is widely understood to be a propaganda arm of the US, developing media presences in countries where the US wishes to increase its power by manipulating narratives around contentious political topics. "Radio Free Europe/Asia/etc." is a common offering of theirs, typically skeptical or outright critical of regimes the US wishes to weaken in those regions through civil unrest.
> To put a name to this organization, it is called the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
No, NED is a completely unrelated organization. The 501c3 that runs Radio Free Europe is RFE/RL, Inc. (the name conbining the abbreviations for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.)
> Radio Free Europe/Asia/etc." is a common offering of theirs
No, Radio Free Asia is a separate 501c3, which is, like RFE/RL, funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors through the U.S. Agency for Global Media; NED isn’t connected to it.
Turns out the Board at the USAGM is disbanded. It is now controlled by a Senate-confirmed (presumably president-appointed) CEO. Now they are even less accountable than before!
> NED is a completely unrelated organization
Interesting, then what are they involved in, and why the common refrain that they control Radio Free X?
You're right that I misattributed, but it is still fact that both organizations (NED and USAGM) fund propaganda-style campaigns in foreign nations with the goal of changing public opinion toward pro-Western viewpoints.
The article was -just- a link to the latest official news. Yes, I am implying that whoever is “the source” for Mr. Hersh knows much more than you and I and the internet about this matter.
Just do a ctrl-f on “the source” on the OP. And read those lines. That’s the message.
Wait, what.. found enough evidence? Wasn't the Swede's (aka as most US obliging, as not only profoundly shown e.g. in the Assange case) reaction after they were first to the site and "removed" all the evidence already sign enough of that, or even being accomplice?
In this essay, I will use the same number and quality of sources as Hersh did in his article to support my claims. Hersh had an incentive to take out the Nord Stream pipeline so he could write the aforementioned article and become slightly relevant again, therefore he did. In conclusion, Seymour Hersh took out the Nord Stream pipeline.
It’s not that u/cde-v doesn’t have sources, it’s that he has a secret source, there’s a difference. So yes, Seymour Hersh did take out the Nord Stream pipeline.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that do it.
I actually just briefly banned your account, but had second thoughts because it's been around for a while and has also posted good comments. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules and definitely stop posting like this, we'd appreciate it.
Okay, I'll bite. If he's a mouthpiece for the U.S. intelligence community, why is he implicating the U.S. in this? Does it discredit that narrative by making it ridiculous, thus aiding the CIA's position? What's going on?
So let me understand this clearly, all of this is based on an "unnamed source"? How does this have even an ounce of legitimacy and isn't just mere fiction?
This is 100% hearsay and has a high probability of being a Russian psyop either directly or through breadcrumb plants of false information for Hersh to run across. This has no business being on Hacker News.
U.S. is worried Russia will use the pipeline that's supplying Europe with gas as a bargaining chip, and blackmail them. Threatening with higher prices, or switching it off.
Which makes zero sense, why blow up your own cash cow?
So the U.S. come in and blow it up. Causing sky high prices across Europe, poor families and elderly to choose to either freeze to death, or starve. Causing chaos for potentially years. Possibly more damage than Russia could ever have done.
People who did good work and have fame are getting old. Instead of retiring they just start to do sloppy work, or fall prey to people who exploit their reduced cognitive capacity. They get publicity because internet has no editors.
Hersh is 85. He has been on decline for some time.
Remember Michael Atiyah few years back. One of the greatest mathematicians in the last century. He claimed he solved the Riemann hypothesis little before he died. It was clear that he was in cognitive decline, but media and social media had their day.
Usually destroying 40% of a countries energy resource is considered an act of war but I guess if it's your ally that also spies on your top officials it's OK. /s
I wouldn't be surprised if Germany OKayed it (IF USA did it). Germany returning to Nord Stream would be a disaster for everybody (including Germany). Paradoxically, removing Nord Stream from the consideration helped Germany and its political situation.
I always thought it's more likely that somebody from the West did it, since from my perspective it helped West and not Russia. But what's confusing me is the rather muted reaction from Russia. If it wasn't them and if they believed it's the West, why are they so silent about it?
Russia does that every day on a mass scale and so far is getting away with it, unfortunately.
If US is truly behind it, the Swiss company can sue US (and perhaps Germany) and I believe they would have a chance. Certainly better chance than Ukrainians have with reparations from Russia.
Because without an indisputable evidence it would only play for "RUSSIANS DID IT" narrative, "See! Because they say it was US means it was themselves!".
Russian propaganda machine keeps spouting lies about everything without much regard to credibility (firehose of lies), it's actually difficult to orient yourself in all the contradictory propaganda narratives.
It's just strange they keep largely silent on this, even though it seems like a golden opportunity. Why are they not attacking German society with "Americans are trying to freeze you, they blew up the pipes"?
Russia has an extensive network of influence campaigns within "unfriendly" countries, sponsoring parties like AfD, operating foreign language troll farms on Facebook and other networks, websites like Sputnik and "alternative media" etc. The list goes on. They absolutely do operate in Germany and try to split the society.
Sorry, got emotional, can't seem to be able to delete it anymore. It's extremely infuriating situation having to deal with the consequences of what a few top officials decide the world should look like and expecting at least one side to play fair.
No need to delete. I know these things can be intensely infuriating—all of us have some topic that hits us like that. Managing that without bursting into flames is a work-in-progress and we're all learning together (myself definitely included).
You can't delete once there's a reply. As a hack, some people edit the message to contain only the text "deleted": it's often poor practice, but since the only reply is from dang I think it'd be okay here.
