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Turns out USA did blew out Nord Stream: How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.
It was obvious to anyone paying attention, but now it's pretty much confirmed.
Of course I already see the people married to the opposite conclusion trying to discredit the journalist (on of the most decorated and impactful journalists of all time), and his sources: anonymous: (as if established publications didn't use anonymous sources).
Anyone who considers themselves a rationalist should have wide error bars on their conclusions for the pipeline bombing. Previously, there had been basically no evidence one way or the other as to who did it. People were just guessing based on their priors, which is fine, but being supremely confident in those guesses is bad epistemic hygiene.
This claim by Hersh is fairly weak evidence. The main problems:
Its only evidence is a single anonymous source. Journalists use anonymous sources all the time, but it still makes it less credible than someone who's willing to stake their reputation on the claim. Some of Hersh's previous claims (like his ridiculous Bin Laden story) used anonymous sources, but the claims crumbled under internal contradictions.
Most of the story is unfalsifiable.
One of the few bits that could actually be falsified, doesn't support Hersh's claim.
I'm not saying this claim is guaranteed to be wrong, but it needs a lot more evidence before it's convincing.
Yeah, obviously, because how much you believe this story is based entirely on Hersh's reputation. Most of this story cannot be verified, so you're trusting that Hersh did his due diligence on this anonymous source to make sure they weren't a Russian agent or some nobody that was blowing smoke out of their ass. Hersh's previous work should be concerning in this regard. He's a journalist who seeks to attack US foreign policy no matter what. He'll always err on seeing the US as the Big Bad. Sometimes this leads to him being right like with Mai Lai, other times it leads him to be wrong like with Bin Laden or Syrian chemical weapons.
You're just more likely to trust him because he's claiming something that conforms to your preconceptions.
Because the US, you know, the country that hacked control software of airgapped centrifuges and thus wrecked them wouldn't be able to, after months of preparation mess up badly secured data on a couple of websites in order to deflect attention ?
If the secrecy of the operation was so important as to hack flight-monitoring websites, why bother with a flight as the delivery mechanism at all?
Set aside that this is inventing new claims that the author didn't make, or that it turns a lack of evidence into evidence of the conspiracy- it still relies on the conspiracy taking a number of needless risks (tampering of websites not being detected, covering all websites, letting there be no observable discrepency to those with their own airspace monitoring) compared to... not using a plane in the first place.
The plane is unnecessary, and requires multiple additional steps not identified by the author, and still doesn't deliver a unique capability required to make the plot work.
Do you even need to hack any websites? Obviously transponders can be turned off, and if I were running a military and wanted to engage in covert ops using planes I'd think that the ability to spoof the transponder output might be a thing that I'd be interested in?
If you're operating in 'how to run a conspiracy' mode, then any routine event that suddenly deviates from norms becomes an indicator of interest when looking back at specific periods of interest. For routine military flights that routinely have their transponders on, suddenly turning them off- or having verifiable mismatches between claimed trackers and other forms of observation- becomes an observable item of interest to anyone who's interested in looking in the data afterwards. To prevent such a discrepancy from occurring during what you know will be a time of interest- such as an alleged command-detonated mine explosion- you'd need to plan on how to affect the public record if you were committed to maintaining a relevant level of secrecy.
There is no evidence or even allegation of such an event occuring- suggesting either a hyper-capable cabal and surprisingly limited Russian attention, or that there wasn't such a manipulation at all- but then, if you were running a military covert operation, there's no reason to use a plane to deliver a sonar device in the first place. You could just use a boat, for a fraction of the cost and detection risk.
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