Washington and London were behind the explosions that destroyed the two Nord Stream gas pipelines, the chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, has said.
The energy links, built to bring Russian natural gas directly to Germany, were destroyed by unknown perpetrators in a series of explosions in September 2022. Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, who share economic zones in the area, have each launched separate inquiries after failing to agree on a joint effort. Last month, however, Stockholm and then Copenhagen closed their inquiries.
“Certainly, we had indirect clues to who did it. These indirect signs were left by the perpetrators themselves. The mosaic has come together. And this mosaic obviously points to the authors,” Naryshkin stated on Tuesday on the ‘Solovyov Live’ show.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and senior officials in Moscow have previously alleged that the US had the most to gain from the sabotage and pointed to Washington’s public opposition to the construction of the pipelines. Moscow also accused the West of stonewalling the investigation.
In a recent interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin pointed the finger at the CIA, claiming that the US was behind the destruction of Nord Stream. He declined to say what evidence led him to that conclusion.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said in February 2023 that, according to his source, US President Joe Biden personally ordered the bombing of the pipelines. Hersh claimed Biden was seeking to cement Germany’s antagonism towards Russia in the Ukraine conflict and ensure the EU’s long-term reliance on Western energy. The White House denied the allegation, but Putin has said he found Hersh’s reasoning plausible.
This is so obvious and everybody looks the other way because the American media told them so. Brain-dead sheeple are subscribed to all the garbage media out there.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the record, is now sending an unmistakable message: Forget the Suez Canal. The way to go is the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, call the Arctic Silk Road.
In a single move, Yemen’s Ansarallah has checkmated the West and its rules-based order…
Whether invented in northern India, eastern China or Central Asia – from Persia to Turkestan – chess is an Asian game. In chess, there always comes a time when a simple pawn is able to upset the whole chessboard, usually via a move in the back rank whose effect simply cannot be calculated.
Yes, a pawn can impose a seismic checkmate. That’s where we are, geopolitically, right now.
The cascading effects of a single move on the chessboard – Yemen’s Ansarallah stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea – reach way beyond global shipping, supply chains, and The War of Economic Corridors. Not to mention the reduction of the much-lauded US Navy force projection to irrelevancy.
Yemen’s resistance movement, Ansarallah, has made it very clear that any Israel-affiliated or Israel-destined vessel will be intercepted. While the West bristles at this, and imagines itself a target, the rest of the world fully understands that all other shipping is free to pass. Russian tankers – as well as Chinese, Iranian, and Global South ships – continue to move undisturbed across the Bab al-Mandeb (narrowest point: 33 km) and the Red Sea.
Only the Hegemon is disturbed by this challenge to its ‘rules-based order.’ It is outraged that Western vessels delivering energy or goods to law-breaking Israel can be impeded, and that the supply chain has been severed and plunged into deep crisis. The pinpointed target is the Israeli economy, which is already bleeding heavily. A single Yemeni move proves to be more efficient than a torrent of imperial sanctions.
It is the tantalizing possibility of this single move turning into a paradigm shift – with no return – that is adding to the Hegemon’s apoplexy. Especially because imperial humiliation is deeply embedded in the paradigm shift.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the record, is now sending an unmistakable message: Forget the Suez Canal. The way to go is the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, call the Arctic Silk Road.
Map of North-East and North-West Passage shipping routes
For the dumbfounded Europeans, the Russians have detailed three options: First, sail 15,000 miles around the Cap of Good Hope. Second, use Russia’s cheaper and faster Northern Sea Route. Third, send the cargo via Russian Railways.
Rosatom, which oversees the Northern Sea Route, has emphasized that non-ice-class ships are now able to sail throughout summer and autumn, and year-round navigation will soon be possible with the help of a fleet of nuclear icebreakers.
All that as direct consequences of the single Yemeni move. What next? Yemen entering BRICS+ at the summit in Kazan in late 2024, under the Russian presidency?
The new architecture will be framed in West Asia
The US-led Armada put together for Operation Genocide Protection, which collapsed even before birth, may have been set up to “warn Iran,” apart from giving Ansarallah a scare. Just as the Houthis, Tehran is hardly intimidated because, as West Asia analyst ace Alastair Crooke succinctly put it: “Sykes-Picot is dead.”
This is a quantum shift on the chessboard. It means West Asian powers will frame the new regional architecture from now on, not the US Navy “projection.”
That carries an ineffable corollary: those eleven US aircraft carrier task forces, for all practical purposes, are essentially worthless.
Everyone across West Asia is well aware that Ansarallah’s missiles are capable of hitting Saudi and Emirati oil fields and knocking them out of commission. So it is little wonder that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi would never accept becoming part of a US-led maritime force to challenge the Yemeni resistance.
Add to it the role of underwater drones now in the possession of Russia and Iran. Think of fifty of these aimed at a US aircraft carrier: it has no defense. While the Americans still have very advanced submarines, they cannot keep the Bab al-Mandeb and the Red Sea open to Western operators.
On the energy front, Moscow and Tehran don’t even need to think – at least not yet – about using the “nuclear” option or cutting off potentially at least 25 percent, and up, of the world oil supply. As one Persian Gulf analyst succinctly describes it, “that would irretrievably implode the international financial system.”
For those still determined to support the genocide in Gaza there have been warnings. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has mentioned it explicitly. Tehran has already called for a total oil and gas embargo against nations that support Israel.
A total naval blockade of Israel, meticulously engineered, remains a distinct possibility. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander Hossein Salami said Israel may “soon face the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar, and other waterways.”
Because if the Straussian neo-cons in the Beltway get really unhinged by the paradigm shift and act in desperation to “teach a lesson” to Iran, a chokepoint Hormuz-Bab al-Mandeb combo blockade might skyrocket the price of oil to at least $500 a barrel, triggering the implosion of the $618 trillion derivatives market and crashing the entire international banking system.
The paper tiger is in a jam
Mao Zedong was right after all: the US may be in fact a paper tiger. Putin, though, is way more careful, cold, and calculating. With this Russian president, it’s all about an asymmetric response, exactly when no one is expecting it.
That brings us to the prime working hypothesis perhaps capable of explaining the shadow play masking the single Ansarallah move on the chessboard.
When Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Sy (Seymour) Hersh proved how Team Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, there was no Russian response to what was, in effect, an act of terrorism against Gazprom, against Germany, against the EU, and against a bunch of European companies. Yet Yemen, now, with a simple blockade, turns global shipping upside down.
So what is more vulnerable?
The physical networks of global energy supply (Pipelineistan) or the Thalassocracy, states that derive their power from naval supremacy?
Russia privileges Pipelineistan: see, for instance, the Nord Streams and Power of Siberia 1 and 2. But the US, the Hegemon, always relied on its thalassocratic power, heir to “Britannia rules the waves.”
Well, not anymore. And, surprisingly, getting there did not even entail the “nuclear” option, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which Washington games and scaremongers like crazy.
Of course, we won’t have a smoking gun. But it’s a fascinating proposition that the single Yemeni move may have been coordinated at the highest level between three BRICS members – Russia, China, and Iran, the neocon new “axis of evil” – plus other two BRICS+, energy powerhouses Saudi Arabia and the UAE. As in, “if you do it, we’ve got your back”.
None of that, of course, detracts from Yemeni purity: their defense of Palestine is a sacred duty.
Western imperialism and then turbo-capitalism have always been obsessed with gobbling up Yemen, a process that Isa Blumi, in his splendid book Destroying Yemen, described as “necessarily stripping Yemenis of their historic role as the economic, cultural, spiritual, and political engine for much of the Indian Ocean world.”
Yemen, though, is unconquerable and, true to a local proverb, “deadly” (Yemen Fataakah). As part of the Axis of Resistance, Yemen’s Ansarallah is now a key actor in a complex Eurasia-wide drama that redefines Heartland connectivity; and alongside China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the India-Iran-Russia-led International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), and Russia’s new Northern Sea Route, also includes control over strategic chokepoints around the Mediterranean Seas and the Arabian peninsula.
This is another trade connectivity paradigm entirely, smashing to bits Western colonial and neocolonial control of Afro-Eurasia. So yes, BRICS+ supports Yemen, who with a single move has presented Pax Americana with The Mother of All Geopolitical Jams.
The idea that a US president commissioned a move aimed at a close ally, however, remains taboo in the West
“In the ten months since I published my first account of the Nord Stream sabotage the German government and media, as in the United States, have either ignored or provided alternate accounts of how and why the pipelines were destroyed. The idea that a sitting US president would deliberately destroy a vital source of energy and of a close ally has been, as Freud would say, taboo,” Hersh wrote.
The attack on the Nord Stream pipelines commissioned by US President Joe Biden was primarily aimed at Germany rather than Russia, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has claimed. The decision to destroy the key pipelines was prompted by US fears that Berlin might not follow Washington’s lead amid the Ukraine conflict, Hersh wrote in a new article on the affair on his Substack blog on Friday.
The sabotage of the pipelines was ordered weeks before the conflict between Russia and Ukraine began in February 2022, Hersh wrote, adding that the American operatives assigned to it believed it was meant to deter Moscow. The attack on the pipelines was ready by late May, but “the plan was called off on short notice by Biden,” the journalist claimed.
Instead, the team was tasked with planting explosives on the pipelines, which could be detonated remotely at a later date, he said. The timing of the attack, which ultimately occurred in late September 2022, appeared to be aimed at Berlin rather than Moscow.
“Biden’s timing seemed aimed at Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz. Some in the CIA believed that the president’s fear was that Scholz, whose constituents were lukewarm in their support for Ukraine, might waffle with winter coming on and conclude that keeping his people warm and his industries prosperous was more important than backing Ukraine against Russia,” Hersh wrote.
The destruction of the pipelines played a major role in Germany’s economic hardships – the country, which once “dominated the world’s markets with its luxury cars and industrial machinery… is now in a process of what some have called rapid deindustrialization,” Hersh said. Apart from this, Germany has experienced a surge in the popularity of right-wing parties, including Alternative for Germany (AfD), and its economic woes have contributed to this.
However, Washington’s “most controversial factor in Germany’s recent hard times” – the Nord Stream sabotage – remains largely ignored in the West, according to the journalist.
“In the ten months since I published my first account of the Nord Stream sabotage the German government and media, as in the United States, have either ignored or provided alternate accounts of how and why the pipelines were destroyed. The idea that a sitting US president would deliberately destroy a vital source of energy and of a close ally has been, as Freud would say, taboo,” Hersh wrote.
The veteran journalist provided his first detailed account on the pipeline attack on February 8, 2023, publishing a lengthy article relying on anonymous sources “with direct knowledge of the operational planning.” The allegations prompted strong denials from Washington, with US National Security spokesman John Kirby dismissing the report as a “completely false story” at the time.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in March that he “fully agrees” with Hersh’s findings, suggesting the attack only benefited Washington to reinforce its position as a competing gas supplier to Europe.
The US has used the ongoing Ukrainian crisis to drive a wedge between Russia and the EU while alleviating its own economic troubles at their expense, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s National Security Council, has said.
The security chief made the remarks on Tuesday during an offsite meeting of the council in the Siberian city of Tomsk. Patrushev squarely assigned blame for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines last fall to Washington, pointing out that the incident has greatly benefited the US.
“The US, using the Ukrainian crisis, managed to sever economic relations between Europe and Russia and eliminate its economic competitors. They solve their economic problems at the expense of other countries. And to make sure Europe could not receive gas from Russia, the Nord Streams were blown up,” Patrushev asserted.
The US has demonstrated a similar pattern in other regions as well, the security chief suggested, stating that Washington’s efforts to link the Ukrainian crisis to the new escalation in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas were an example of such behavior. Moreover, the US itself has largely provoked the new crisis in the region, the official asserted.
“They act in exactly the same way in Ukraine, where they provoked a coup d’etat, condoned the growth of neo-Nazi ideology, turned Ukraine into a testbed for military-biological experiments, turned a blind eye to the killings of civilians in Donbass, and prepared for military action against our country,” Patrushev told the council.
Now, he added, “representatives of NATO countries are already openly saying that Russia prevented them from approaching its borders, and the Ukrainians are an instrument for the West to contain Russia.” At the same time, the double standard and belligerent actions of the US – and the collective West that it leads – have severely damaged their own credibility, which is now effectively “exhausted,” he said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The terrorist attack on the Nord Stream pipelines was somehow organized by the United States and the United Kingdom, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Pulitzer Prize-winning US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report said that the US involved in the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines left no traces, no significant information about the mission was entered into any computer in the United States.
“It is not so much important who typed on what mechanical typewriters, it is important that de facto such a terrorist attack against critical energy infrastructure, which belongs to an international joint venture, was somehow organized by the United States, the United Kingdom, of course. And they are somehow involved in this terrorist attack,” Peskov told a briefing.
A British newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing findings by Norway’s NORSAR seismic data center, that there were four blasts on the Nord Stream pipelines, and not two, as it was previously believed.
One explosion occurred southeast of the Danish island of Bornholm, and the other three occurred northeast of the island, the report said. The seismology center also does not rule out the possibility that there could have been more explosions.
The Nord Stream pipelines, built to deliver gas under the Baltic Sea from Russia to the EU, were hit by explosions in September 2022. The pipelines’ operator, Nord Stream AG, said that the damage was unprecedented and it was impossible to estimate the timeframe for repairing them.
Denmark, Germany, and Norway have left Russia out of their investigations into the attacks, prompting Moscow to launch its own investigation. Russia designated the attacks as international terrorism.
No official results of the investigations have yet been announced, but Hersh published a report in February saying the explosions were organized by the US government with the support of the authorities in Norway. Washington has denied any involvement in the attack.
In addition, the Kremlin spokesman commented on the words of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the expansion of NATO addressed to Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that it is an attempt to substitute concepts.
Earlier in the day, Clinton said “too bad, Vladimir, you brought it on yourself,” commenting on the expansion of NATO, according to a video published by an American news agency.
“Mrs. Clinton is known in our country for her attempts to turn everything upside down and substitute concepts,” Peskov told a briefing.
“As for the sequence of actions of President Putin, it is probably necessary to remind Mrs. Clinton of the numerous waves of NATO expansion and the movement of the alliance’s military infrastructure closer to our border, then President Putin’s insistent proposals to Western countries to discuss this situation and come out to sign a certain document, the draft of which was, by the way, prepared by the Russian side, and a decisive refusal of Western countries to discuss anything. And here it becomes absolutely clear what was the reason for the special military operation that is being carried out and continues,” Peskov said.
“Once the mission was completed, the typed papers and carbons were destroyed, thus leaving no physical trace,” the journalist wrote
WASHINGTON, September 26. /TASS/. The Americans that carried out the operation to destroy the Nord Stream underwater pipelines have left no traces, said US journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh.
“The American men and women who moved, under cover, in and out of Norway in the months it took to plan and carry out the destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea a year ago left no traces—not a hint of the team’s existence – other than the success of their mission,” he said in an article published on the Substack website.
“No significant information about the mission was put on a computer, but instead typed on a Royal or perhaps a Smith Corona typewriter with a carbon copy or two, as if the Internet and the rest of the online world had yet to be invented,” Hersh wrote. “The White House was isolated from the goings-on near Oslo; various reports and updates from the field were directly provided to CIA Director Bill Burns, who was the only link between the planners and the president who authorized the mission to take place on September 26, 2022. Once the mission was completed, the typed papers and carbons were destroyed, thus leaving no physical trace – no evidence to be dug up later by a special prosecutor or a presidential historian. You could call it the perfect crime.”
Hersh on February 8 published an article where he said, citing a source, that explosives under the Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were planted by US Navy divers, helped by Norwegian specialists, under the guise of the Baltops exercise in June 2022. The story stated US President Joe Biden personally authorized the operation after nine months of deliberations with the administration’s national security staff. The White House strongly denied that was the case.
German and US media later reported, citing sources, that a certain “pro-Ukrainian group” was allegedly involved in the sabotage. Ukraine strongly denied any involvement.
The Dutch broadcaster Nederlandse Omroep Stichting, or NOS, reported in mid-June, that a tip-off about the plot to attack the gas pipelines had been received from an informant in June 2022. The agency immediately passed the information to its counterparts at the CIA and to some other European countries, including Germany. The Die Zeit newspaper reported that the CIA then warned Ukraine against carrying out the attack.
The Biden administration blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in order to not lose its longstanding primacy in Western Europe, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
Exactly a year ago, three of four Nord Stream pipelines, designed to deliver 110 billion cubic meters per annum of Russian natural gas to Europe, were destroyed by a series of powerful blasts.
Less than half a year later, on February 8, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh exposed Team Biden’s apparent clandestine plan to destroy the pipelines, citing a knowledgeable anonymous source.
On the first anniversary of the sabotage, Hersh revealed that the secret operation’s major flaw, which resulted in the leak of the cover-up, was that Team Biden hid the real purpose of the plot even from its own intelligence operatives.
“There was a flaw – a gap in understanding between those who carried out the mission and President [Joe] Biden, as to why he ordered the destruction of the pipelines when he did,” the investigative journalist wrote on Tuesday. “This is the first account of that flaw, on the one-year anniversary of the explosions, and it is one President Biden and his national security team will not like.”
In December 2021, when Russia handed over its draft security agreements to the US and NATO concerning the military bloc’s non-enlargement and Kiev’s neutrality, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan convened a series of high-level national security meetings that included CIA representatives. The idea was to come up with a deterrent that would stop Russian President Vladimir Putin from “invading” Ukraine.
It was decided that the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines would be a perfect deterrence. Per Hersh, these pipelines were picked by Team Biden because they ran directly from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany, which made them accessible to the plotters and “totally deniable.” The US intelligence operatives tasked with the implementation of the plan believed that “the president would use the threat against Nord Stream as a deterrent to avoid the war,” the source told Hersh.
After the plan was agreed, then Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland and two weeks later Joe Biden stated that if Russia were to start a military operation in Ukraine, the Nord Stream pipelines would be stopped “one way or the other.”
On February 7, 2022, at a joint White House press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Biden signaled: “If Russia invades — that means tanks and troops crossing . . . the border of Ukraine again, there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
The Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations had repeatedly expressed their strong opposition to the development of the Nord Stream project. In 2021, the Biden administration imposed pressure on Berlin, with Olaf Sholz suspending the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was ready to go in September 2021.
The investigative journalist highlighted that he was recently told that after Biden’s extraordinary public threat to blow up Nord Stream 2, “the CIA planning group was told by the White House that there would be no immediate attack on the two pipelines.” The group was directed to plant the necessary bombs and be ready to trigger them “on demand” — after the conflict began.
It was then that the small US planning group that was working in Oslo with the Royal Norwegian Navy and special services on the project understood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent, because when the conflict started, they did not get the command, Hersh wrote, citing his source.
“We realized that the destruction of the two Russian pipelines was not related to the Ukrainian war […] but was part of a neocon political agenda to keep Scholz and Germany, with winter coming up and the pipelines shut down, from getting cold feet and opening up [the shuttered Nord Stream 2],” the journalist’s interlocutor said.
What’s more, the leadership of the CIA team saw the Biden administration’s “misleading guidelines for its order to destroy the pipelines” as taking “a strategic step toward World War III,” according to Hersh.
“Within days of the bombing, officials in Denmark and Sweden announced they would conduct an investigation. They reported two months later that there had indeed been an explosion and said there would be further inquiries. None has emerged. The German government conducted an inquiry but announced that major parts of its findings would be classified,” the investigative journalist wrote.
Hersh pointed out that even though Swedish and Danish officials continue to insist that they have no idea what happened in their territorial waters, they clearly saw the activities of American and Norwegian crews, but turned a blind eye to it: “The American team of divers and support staff on the mission’s mother ship—a Norwegian minesweeper—would be hard to hide while the divers were doing their work,” he remarked.
Moreover, Hersh revealed that Chancellor Scholz “was considered then – and now – by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines.”
“Last winter German authorities allocated $286 billion in subsidies to major corporations and homeowners who faced higher energy bills to run their business and warm their homes. The impact is still being felt today, with a colder winter expected in Europe,” the investigative journalist underscored.
While the US government continues to deny the sabotage attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, all the facts, including the Biden administration’s unwillingness to investigate the issue, point to Washington, per the journalist. And the reason to do this was to tighten control over the US European allies, who are now suffering from inflation, economic slowdown, and energy uncertainty.
“The Biden administration blew up the pipelines but the action had little to do with winning or stopping the war in Ukraine. It resulted from fears in the White House that Germany would waver and turn on the flow of Russia gas – and that Germany and then NATO, for economic reasons, would fall under the sway of Russia and its extensive and inexpensive natural resources. And thus followed the ultimate fear: that America would lose its long-standing primacy in Western Europe,” Hersh concluded.
VIENTIANE, May 23. /TASS/. The United States should pay Russia for undermining the Nord Stream pipeline explosion as well as for the cities it is responsible for destroying in new regions, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said.
Medvedev responded positively to a question about whether the US should compensate Russia for the damage caused by the Nord Stream pipeline’s sabotage in an interview with the RT TV channel broadcast on Tuesday. “And not only this damage. Let them repay or at least give them the means to restore Artyomovsk, Mariupol and a host of other places that were ruined with their help and support. Using their money,” the official noted.
He reiterated that the US should reimburse Russia for undermining the [Nord Stream] pipeline. “Let them compensate here also, though there is still room to talk with respect to the evidence,” Medvedev said. “This process is not over yet and this page has not been turned,” he noted. “In any case, they deny it [their involvement – TASS] but their arguments do not appear to be very sound,” the official added.
Washington hasn’t responded to Moscow’s demand for an explanation of what happened to the Nord Stream pipelines after veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published a bombshell report blaming the US for destroying the key gas route, high-ranking Russian diplomat Konstantin Gavrilov has said.
“We haven’t received any clarification yet and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get any,” he told Izvestia newspaper on Monday. “There’ll be nothing new [from the US],” added the official, who heads Russia’s delegation at the Vienna talks on military security and arms control.
Gavrilov said he was surprised by the behavior of the EU nations that were most affected by the sabotage of crucial energy infrastructure, which was built to deliver Russian gas to Europe through Germany.
Germany, Sweden and Denmark, which have been carrying out probes into the explosions on Nord Stream 1 and 2 last fall, have so far been reluctant to open up about their findings. They also rejected offers from Russia to assist with the investigations.
“The stance of Europe, which is being openly humiliated, is something that I can’t fully understand,” Gavrilov said.
In early February, Hersh authored a report claiming that US President Joe Biden had given the order to destroy Nord Stream. According to an informed source who talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the explosives that were detonated last September had been planted at the pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise.
Hersh later suggested that Biden had chosen that very moment to blow up the infrastructure because the conflict between Russia and Ukraine “wasn’t going great” for Kiev and its backers in Washington.
US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson denied the report, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
In late March, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he “fully agreed” with Hersh’s findings that the Nord Stream sabotage had been organized by the American Special Forces.
Other Russian officials have also noted that the only party to benefit from the destruction of Nord Stream was the US, which has seen supplies of its more expensive liquefied natural gas to Europe increase massively since the blasts.
This is yet another example of how the ‘fact-checker industrial complex’ serves to censor legitimate information at the behest of governments by posing as an independent, non-bias actor when in reality it is merely a front for state control.
Facebook is censoring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s story about US involvement in the destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines using a ‘fact checker’ with links to the Norwegian government in what represents a clear conflict of interest.
Earlier this year, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation which was organized with the aid of the Norwegian government, Norwegian Secret Service and Navy.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger first noticed the issue when he tried to post Hersh’s article to Facebook, but saw the social media giant had slapped a warning label on the link stating, “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.”
Except the ‘fact-checkers’ in question aren’t independent at all.
As Shellenberger notes, “Hersh is infinitely more independent than Facebook’s Norwegian fact-checker. The fact-checking organization is a partnership with a Norwegian government-owned media company, NRK, which has a direct self-interest in censoring the story.”
By censoring the article with a dubious ‘fact check’, Facebook is preventing it from reaching a much wider audience, relegating it in the algorithm.
This is yet another example of how the ‘fact-checker industrial complex’ serves to censor legitimate information at the behest of governments by posing as an independent, non-bias actor when in reality it is merely a front for state control.
Facebook’s claim, made a few years ago, that it cannot act as “the arbiter of the truth” for any contentious issue, has been proven dishonest once again.
“Whether Hersh is wrong or right, his reporting should be debated publicly, not censored. Facebook’s actions are antithetical to America’s tradition of free and open debate and its rejection of secretive, authoritarian censorship,” writes Shellenberger.
“The American people have given Facebook broad liability protections under Section 230 that other media companies don’t get. And yet Facebook is acting like a media company, not a platform. As such, Facebook is putting its Section 230 protection at risk. And censoring Hersh may only attract more attention to it.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who revealed the discovery of the object earlier this month, said experts believe that the object could be a signal antenna to activate an explosive in that part of the pipeline.
Russia says it is supporting efforts to recover forensic evidence from the underwater site of the Nord Stream sabotage blasts, which may provide clues as to the culprit behind it. Images of a new mystery object have emerged, with Moscow saying it is vitally important that it be carefully examined.
The Kremlin in a Friday briefing called the recovery and examination of the object “critically important” as it has been discovered lying next to one of the damaged Nord Stream pipelines.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a daily briefing: “It is critically important to determine what kind of object it is, whether it is related to this terrorist act – apparently it is – and to continue this investigation. And this investigation must be transparent.”
The Danish Energy Agency has invited the Russia’s Gazprom (owner of Nord Stream 2 AG) to assist in salvaging the mystery object. It was actually Putin who was the first to publicly reference the object and ongoing investigative efforts to ascertain what it is, per the AFP:
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who revealed the discovery of the object earlier this month, said experts believe that the object could be a signal antenna to activate an explosive in that part of the pipeline.
…The Danish energy agency released a photo late Thursday of the cylindrical object standing near the Nord Stream 2 pipeline at the bottom of the sea.
The agency said it is “possible” that the object is a maritime smoke buoy, 40 centimeters tall and 10 centimeters wide, and that it “does not pose an immediate safety risk.”
Peskov meanwhile said regarding the ongoing German, Swedish and Danish investigation that it is “certainly positive news” that Copenhagen invited Nord Stream 2 AG to take an active role in the investigation.
Since the September 26 clandestine bombings which permanently disabled the Russia to Germany natural gas pipelines running under the Baltic Sea, the prevailing narrative has shifted dramatically. Initially, Western officials and media pointed the finger at Moscow, but then in February legendary journalist Seymour Hersh issued an investigative report detailing that it was a CIA and US Navy covert operation.
After the Hersh report, allegations that Russia bombed its own pipeline have largely died down (given also it would obviously run counter to Russia’s self-interests), and instead, a new theory has been advanced by mainstream media – that a small group of rogue Ukrainian operatives did it. However, the Kremlin has blasted this as ludicrous, pointing out that only a state and military would have the resources to carry out such a difficult and complex operation. Hersh has since alleged based on his sources that the CIA itself planted the “Ukrainian partisans” narrative in friendly media outlets in order to shield the White House.
Dmitry Birichevsky says Moscow intends to insist on a comprehensive and open international probe.
March 27, 2023
Published On 27 Mar 202327 Mar 2023
Moscow may seek compensation over damage from last year’s explosions on the Nord Stream gas pipelines, according to news agency RIA Novosti which cited a Russian diplomat.
The pipelines, which connect Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea, were hit by unexplained blasts last September in what Moscow called an act of “international terrorism”.
“We do not rule out later the raising of the issue of compensation for damage as a result of the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines,” Dmitry Birichevsky, the head of Russia’s Foreign Ministry department for economic cooperation, said in an interview with the news agency.
He added that Western countries were opposing a Russia-prepared draft UN Security Council resolution urging an independent international investigation of the Nord Stream blasts.
“Despite this, we intend to continue to insist on a comprehensive and open international investigation with the mandatory participation of Russian representatives,” Birichevsky said.
The Nord Stream pipelines were intended to bring Russian gas to Germany, though since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago, Berlin has taken steps to reduce its reliance on Russian hydrocarbons.
Putin’s comments
In mid-March, President Vladimir Putin dismissed as “sheer nonsense” allegations that Ukrainians could be behind the explosions that crippled the Nord Stream gas pipelines, suggesting the United States may have been responsible.
The Russian leader insisted the US had a motive to carry out the attack in the Baltic Sea last year, saying it wanted to halt supplies of cheap Russian natural gas to Europe and provide the continent with more expensive liquefied natural gas.
September’s explosions that hit the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines rendered them inoperable and caused significant leaks of methane gas.
The leaks in the Baltic Sea led to what is likely the biggest single release of climate-damaging methane ever recorded, the United Nations Environment Programme said.
Western countries, including Germany, have said they believe the blasts were a deliberate act but declined to say who they think was responsible.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone