Friday, February 17, 2023

Don't jump to conclusions about the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage

 

There's been a big kerfuffle in the media about Seymour Hersh's claim that the USA destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline.  Many appear to have accepted it as the truth.

However, Oliver Alexander doesn't agree.  He highlights what he believes are serious errors in Hersh's assessment.


Seymour Hersh’s recent Substack post claims to provide a highly detailed account of a covert US operation to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines in order to ensure that Russia would be unable to supply Germany with natural gas through them. All the information in Hersh’s post reportedly comes from a single unnamed source, who appears to have had direct access to every step of the planning and execution of this highly secretive operation.

When first reading through Hersh’s account of the events, the level of detail he provides could add credence to his story. Unfortunately for Hersh’s story, the high level of detail is also where the entire story begins to unravel and fall apart. It is often stated that people who lie have a tendency to add too much superfluous detail to their accounts. This attempt to “cover all bases” is in many cases what trips these people up. Extra details add extra points of reference that can be crosschecked and examined. In Hersh’s case, this is exactly what appears to have happened. On the surface level, the level of detail checks out to laymen or people without more niche knowledge of the subject matter mentioned. When you look closer though, the entire story begins to show massive glaring holes and specific details can be debunked.


There's much more at the link.  Mr. Alexander examines each of Mr. Hersh's claims in detail, and provides evidence against many of them.

On the basis of the evidence currently available to us, I wouldn't accept Mr. Hersh's claims as true.  There are many other possibilities, some of them appearing to be considerably more likely.

Peter


20 comments:

  1. Have you seen MethylEthyl's take on this so-called report? (on dreamwidth dot org)

    I know the area he is talking about, and he is wrong on so many points, I suspect either flagrant libel, or a recent alteration in cognitive function.

    That report reads more much like a "YO! PANAMA CITY NEEDS A NUKE!" than "Here are the receipts."

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  2. Very interesting. I don't think the brandon-pentagon-statedept bunch are capable of pulling something like this off. That is more of a point to say that Mr. Hersh's information could be wrong in my mind.

    JSA

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  3. The US had the means, motive and opportunity. Unless someone comes up with some convincing evidence to the contrary, I'm sticking with blaming Biden. Shoot, I blame Biden regardless. I mean he wants to be blamed.

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  4. The only reason to think either the US (or to a lesser extent the UK) did it are: Biden, Nuland, et al's statements, our capablity, proximity (Baltops), and que bono

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    Replies
    1. Additionally, the stupid story they pushed so hard when it happened.
      Screaming that someone intentionally blew up their own infrastructure and destroyed their own leverage over the neighboring power bloc to make Biden look bad, was laughable on its face.
      It also implied either unhinged narcissism or a guilty conscience on the part of our administration.

      I think LawDog’s analysis is convincing and correct.
      But our government did threaten to do it, had the opportunity to do it, and then acted like it was guilty.
      If I were leading another country, I would be obligated to act as though our government had.

      Delete
  5. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, or to quote House's razor from House MD (my favorite TV show of all time) : The simplest explanation is usually that somebody screwed up".

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  6. Still thinking that Lawdog's analysis of Russian maintenance and incompetence. Especially since the pipelines had been dormant for 10 months and starting up a nat-gas pipeline from dormancy requires almost nuke plant level of competence and caution.

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    1. My understanding is that explosive residue was found on the debris by Norwegian investigators. Don't know that they specified the type, but I'd be interested in their results.

      Delete
    2. There are LOTS of materials that test as explosives residue, I'd have to see them name a specific explosive to have faith in test results.
      Simple explosive/ gunpowder tests look for nitrates, which are all over, ESPECIALLY on a relatively shallow sea floor.

      Delete
  7. "President Biden remains 'a healthy, vigorous, 80-year-old male who is fit to successfully execute duties of the presidency,' his physician wrote..."
    "... in a memo released hours after the president underwent a routine annual physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Thursday morning.

    Everybody here read and accept the teleprompter stumblebum is healthy and vigorous?

    You HAVE TOO A "Official Doctor" at Walter Wonderful SAID SO.

    Anybody can write words that are questionable, for the right price it seems.

    Cui Bono is my only comment on who destroyed the pipeline.

    cui bo·no?
    [kwē ˌbōnō]
    EXCLAMATION
    who stands, or stood, to gain (from a crime, and so might have been responsible for it)?

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  8. FWIW

    Nord Stream bubbles

    ” Right after I said yesterday that the Russians were being a bit too quiet about Nord-Gate, Reuters ran a sobering story headlined, “Russia to Call U.N. Security Council Meeting Over Nord Stream Blasts.” ”

    “Some analysts think that Russia wants the security council meeting to create a public record of its justification for some planned retaliatory act. Whatever it is, it’s probably going to be something we won’t like. ”

    From today’s Covid and Coffee

    Plus other waves – some of Florida’s making

    https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/revived-friday-february-17-2023-c?r=1vxw0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

    Subscribe at no cost is worth the reading so far (IMO)

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  9. I'm not sure why anyone would have put any trust in Hersh's reporting. He has a track record of making dramatic claims that turn out to be at best massively exaggerated when not entirely false.

    I've always felt that the most likely candidate (presuming Lawdog's cockup theory is wrong) is Ukraine followed by Russia itself due to factional infighting between oligarchs. I have yet to see anything convincing that says otherwise

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  10. Beans have you googled how many natural gas pipelines Russia runs? How many of them and how many thousands of miles of them are running right now?

    How many decades they have run them and maybe googled the accident rate of US run pipelines vis a vis Russian ones? Our numbers are almost the same as the Russians.

    How many are under water and in the artic and so on?

    Maybe they are not unqualified to maintain the MOST Valuable process of their economy?

    cui bo·no?
    [kwē ˌbōnō]
    EXCLAMATION
    who stands, or stood, to gain (from a crime, and so might have been responsible for it)?

    Now look up what companies have made serious Bank on this Russian "incompetence." US and Norway so far.

    A pretty nice "Lucky Break" for them being able to sell natural gas at a nice price boost from the price of the Russian natty gas, eh?

    But then again, Americans seem ok with gasoline at what price compared to what 2 years ago? BUT Hey, No Mean Tweets, eh?

    What really matters to this father and grandfather is if the meatheads running the Biden Puppet are bright enough not to prod the Russians into a Pre-WW2 Japan situation.

    It will not be some old Battleships burning but Dresden across our country.

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  11. I wouldn't put it past our Intel Community to have planted both the Hersh story and this debunking story, to deflect and give them plausible deniability. Imagine the power of putting out a story that indicts yourself, but make sure it is full of plenty of errors and inconsistencies so then the focus is no longer on you. They are trying to deke us out.

    Nobody telling these stories has been fully truthful. Quit following the shiny lights they are beaming down the rabbit holes. Believe nobody.

    But there still only one saboteur that makes sense and had something to really gain, and that still is the US Government. You can bet that they are sure sorry the Biden and Nuland opened their big yaps and threatened about it long before it happened.

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  12. Hersh's entire story is based on "Trust me! Would I lie to you?", followed by pages and pages of unsourced fantasmic airballs.

    Call me when he brings something substantive, with an actual source besides his underpants.

    Diaper spackle has been his primary source on story after story, going back decades.

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  13. How much Boom can Boomer Boom isn't much of a toungue-twister. But maybe it's enough to trip up the drool cup brigade who still cannot grok that their country is now the foaming at the mouth slavering wolf Bad Guy.

    Jaysus Wept.

    You
    You

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  14. Do not forget the possiblity of failed maintenance/ incompetence that our friend Lawdog put on the table.... sounded plausible to me!

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  15. We're never going to know the truth with certainty. Because there are SO many different stories from SO many different sources it's going to be impossible to know for sure
    what really happened. And that is likely deliberate. Did our government do this?
    It's sure as hell is within the realm of possibility. Did Putin do it? Another possiblility.
    No way we will ever know the truth about much of anything anymore.

    Believe NOTHING you hear and doubt everything you see with your own eyes.

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  16. “America has the means, motive and opportunity”

    Means?
    I Anyone with relative qualifications at diving at that depth, or an underwater drone, and a limpet mine.
    In other words, every nation that has both an undersea oil or mineral industry (or an undersea cable) and a functional special-forces unit.

    Motive? Any country that isn’t Russia and has gas to sell.
    Russia, to have an excuse for not selling gas to Europe while sowing discord amongst non-thinking citizens of NATO.
    Any European country that wants to maintain the embargo on the Russians and fears that others will crumble.

    Opportunity?
    The Baltic is one of the busiest seas in the world. In other words, anyone who owns, can hire, or is willing to steal one. Tracking transponders only accurately identify honest Captains with nothing to hide. Power can be switched off, codes can be changed. (The Russian Navy is a frequent offender in this regard)

    Thoughtful people consider two other points.
    1. Can the offender get away with it? Who here really thinks that the Biden Administration is actually clever enough to do this, especially as all the “clever” people suddenly decided that the US was their first choice.
    2. What is the cost of getting caught? If the US was proven to have done this, it has the potential to destroy the entire sanctions edifice and the mutual trust required to maintain NATO.

    It’s even less probable when you consider that - even then - support for Ukraine and sanctions in Germany was an election-winning 2:1, and the German government was so convinced that it could get Germany through the winter WITHOUT millions dying of frostbite that it wasn’t even imposing much in the way of mandatory restrictions on use. All the predictions that Germany was going to freeze and the German government was going to be putting down massive riots, where have they gone?

    Naaah….

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