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Notes -
Did the US blow up the Nord Stream Pipeline?
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
That was linked to me and it appeals to my sense of - conspiracy? warmongering? ... But I also don't really understand if it could be true.
What's the consensus here about the pipeline?
(I don't really even care if we discuss the article, it's long and I don't know who the person is - just interested in all kinds of thoughts)
The US blowing up Nordstream has always struck me as an extraordinarily risky gambit. There may be an economic motive, but if it were uncovered that the US is directly responsible for acts of terrorism on critical infrastructure in the heart of Europe, the diplomatic fallout would certainly outweigh whatever the US would make from the added natural gas exports.
Granted, I don't know how risk-tolerant the US covert-operations apparatus is. I also didn't think Putin would invade Ukraine.
It's not mainly economic, it's geopolitical. USA cannot allow Europe to get cozy with Russia, it undermines their worldwide vision of a strong united West.
If USA thought they would get caught they probably wouldn't have done it.
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Eh, I always thought the argument that the US wouldn't do it because the negative political consequences if it came out would be too great was unfounded. The US has a long history of engaging in actions that, viewed in isolation, seem at least as outrageous, but tribalism, FUD and superior opinion engineering reliably result in them being forgotten quickly and even the mention of those where the evidence of US culpability is unequivocal evoking gut feelings of conspiracy theories and unhinged contrarianism. In the context of MH17 (the plane downed by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine), people would sooner bring up Korean Air 007 (Soviets in the '80s) than that the US did the same thing to an Iranian passenger plane in 1991 in a war they weren't even a party to. More egregiously, during the Cold War, the US organised false flag bombings with actual human victims in Italy, which surely is worse than blowing up a pipeline that nobody would even admit to quite endorsing anymore; but there, the pressure from amenable news outlets and historians over the decades has actually managed to shift the narrative so far away from this that flagship articles of English Wikipedia frame it as an unfounded conspiracy theory and its proponents are widely viewed as cranks. (Other versions and less-popular articles on English Wikipedia, such as the one I linked, still seem to endorse US involvement.)
Could be whitewashed, but even in that article, US involvement seems pretty thin. There's a large difference between supporting a foreign far right group that carries out a bombing and carrying out a bombing on foreign soil yourself. This would be as if there were some links between the CIA and the german eco-terrorist group that blew up the pipeline.
I think that allegations of supplying the material go beyond "some links". In another case, they posit that the attack was committed with C4 explosives from a NATO stay-behind army stash. The Italian Wikipedia article on the perpetrator has some additional information and statements where he heavily implicated US forces after being taken into custody, but then that particular act of opposition is also consistent with his declared political position and so one may or may not choose to trust it.
A lot of the German-language sources unfortunately rest on Daniele Ganser, a Swiss historian (disgraced) who unfortunately also seems to have fallen into the pit where constantly being at odds with establishment truth-finding processes results in your own epistomology being damaged. (His remaining social credit with the Germanic sphere seems to be draining rapidly as he took an anti-US position on Ukraine.) His main book on the topic, in my estimation, indeed does lean rather far out of the window in making inferences at times, and the immediate backlash has some merit, but then it also seems comically unsurprising that it would come from a Dane (this old anecdote is completely in line with my impression from every interaction with them).
In general, I think that the beauty of US psyops is precisely that they are so well-supported by an interlocking network of straight up competent fieldwork, patronage networks in narrative-making institutions and the soft talk and big stick needed to provide hard diplomatic cover when needed that you can't oppose them in the long run without either going crazy, disappearing or being exposed as the crook you coincidentally always were and sent to rot in prison to universal cheers.
But that is what I mean, if that is the extent, it amounts to not guilty. Bombs do not kill people, at least not with mens rea.
US forces involvement is another ballgame.
This wouldn't fit with the straightforward story that biden ordered some marines to do it after hinting that he would. Find some tree-huggers to blow it up, sell that story and use the combine to erase any incriminating links.
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Couldn't they be confident that it wasn't discovered? They have considerable energy leverage over Europe now, they've got considerable media influence, there's strong anti-Russia feeling all over the place.
Besides, the US is not known for its cautious 'light touch' foreign policy. Invading Iraq and Afghanistan was an extraordinarily risky gambit! Sending special forces surreptitiously into Pakistan, a nuclear power, to have gunfights on their soil is a risky gambit. They invade countries all the time: Panama, Grenada, Syria... They've financed terrorism in Europe before via Operation Gladio. They launch various attacks on Iran, created a massive nuclear crisis over a nothingburger when the Soviets decided to base missiles in Cuba.
I was right with you until you framed nukes off the coast of the US as a nothing burger. The fact that we did it too doesn't change that.
The rest is pretty spot on though
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What an amazing reframing of the Cuban missile crisis.
It's not a reframing, it's the correct framing. The US decided to base missiles in Turkey and the Russians didn't throw a massive tantrum about it, they behaved quite reasonably. They felt threatened but they didn't try to blockade the country, botch an attempt to invade the country or threaten to invade it again, or give ultimatums. This is a mature and statesmanlike approach to a potential nuclear crisis.
Kennedy gets far too much credit, he chose to invent a crisis over something that was easily ignorable. At least he cooled the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wanted to start bombing and invade immediately.
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Terrorism seems too strong. This is more like an act of war. But since it’s a proxy war it was done secretly. There wasn’t an attempt to scare people but instead hitting a legitimate military target.
My main complaint if this report is true is congress should not have been worked around. Yes you increase leak risks but as an act of war the people on the appropriate committees should have been informed.
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