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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   34912 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Breaking news from the Spiegel (German weekly center left newspaper) on the sabotage of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline:

Sweden, Denmark and Germany, contrary to initial plans, will not form a joint investigation team to investigate the leaks at the Nord Stream pipelines. According to SPIEGEL information, Sweden refused to set up an international Joint Investigation Team (JIT). According to information from security circles, Sweden is said to have justified the rejection with the fact that the security rating of its investigation results was too high to share with other states.

While the article itself doesn't speculate at all what this could mean, commenters are less reluctant. General tenor: this indicates that the saboteur was a state actor within NATO, probably the US, maybe Poland with US backing, and Sweden is paying ransom in order to be able to join NATO.

I keep hearing this "I bet all the other intelligence agencies wiretap the NSA too" line, but do we have any evidence for this? What would even be the mechanism by which they do this? I've never heard of a French or Lithuanian spy network in Langley being busted, nor do the Americans host BND collection sites. It always struck me as a likely cope because the unbridled supremacy that would be implied by America unilaterally keeping tabs on friend and foe and nobody being able or willing to stand up against it would offend the sensibilities of the public in both America and its allies (with or without scare quotes). Blue-tribe Americans, too, laughed about "Team America World Police" jokes, but it was always an uncomfortable sort of laughter. For all we know, combined US soft and hard power does really reign that supreme. Out of all the world's intelligence agencies, I would personally maybe trust Israel's to find out if the US ran a reasonably well-compartmentalised operation to blow up the pipelines, and that's only because they have the political clout to prevent the US from unleashing its full counterintel powers against them.

Lithuanians won’t be doing that, obviously, given that they are a tiny country with population smaller that Tampa, Fl metro area, and very little capacity to act on any scoops they might get from US. But, for example, Israel spies in US are regularly caught. See, eg. this

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