Seymour Hersh, an investigative reporter whose long career has been spent uncovering dark details about the ruling class in the United States, added another emergent piece to his collection with the recent release on his Substack of “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline.”
The allegation is massive in consequence and substance – suggesting President Biden signed off on a covert attack on jointly owned Russian and German energy infrastructure that “destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines,” in Sept. 2022. Under the guise of a NATO military exercise in the Baltic Sea and with the help of US-ally Norway, Hersh’s source alleged, a team of Navy divers delivered on the plan brainstormed by high officials like National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and, an interloper of the ruling class, Victoria Nuland.
This cast, representing the mercurial conventional thinking of Biden’s foreign policy shift to great power competition, has influence in the administration and tenure as repeat officials from the Obama days. Each official has also made no effort at hiding their proclivity for imperial-first policies or broad support for sanctions, interventions and military-first solutions.
Hersh’s report relies on one source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning.” This, for this reason alone, should not be used to dismiss the article outright. That sort of thinking amongst the public, oftentimes employed by useful nimrods who know in their hearts Uncle Sam wouldn’t do such a thing or bureaucratic mountebanks who have some political or economic stake vested in the continuation of things, derails the path to truth seeking.
The White House and the CIA, to no one’s surprise, denied the allegation and refused to placate propaganda. But what are they going to do? Acquiesce and endure the consequences of blowing up a pipeline which delivered over 50 percent of natural gas to an allied nation? On top of that, as Hersh’s source said, “It’s an act of war.” Ned Price, the propagandist for the State Department, can similarly identify dangerous information and would rather not “let this propaganda get aired in the briefing room.”
The American people have a right to know if this allegation is true, and the entire world deserves to know the true fate of the Sacco and Vanzetti of gas pipelines.
The need for more information – a job for which Congress is intended and, kind of, designed– is at its peak, and it’s in everyone’s interest for this exercise not to divulge into some point your finger at the apologist free-for-all. Instead of denouncing Hersh’s reporting on Twitter like Senator Chris Murphy or affirming it could be an act of war by Washington like Senator Mike Lee, public servants in the nation’s legislative body that decides on questions of war and peace could call for some kind of clarity by means of subpoena or committee hearing. These things don’t really work, but it’s all we got.
It was the CIA’s idea, according to Hersh, to change the legal requirement “from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support.” That slight change, if the report is correct, made all the difference. It would have restricted access to the operation and reduced the likelihood of someone in Congress or someone from the outside whistleblowing or leaking parts about the clandestine operation.
The off-handed comment from the President, which inspired the legal change in the first place, is a small detail in a very complex story, but it shows how quick and easy it is to exploit parts of the legal system – a system about which ordinary Americans know very little. Secrecy is the norm, and the tendency to air on the side of caution and classify makes it difficult to investigate wrongdoing.
The American people are frequently the last to discover the US government’s infidelity. They didn’t discover until Oct. 2022 that covert American operations had been ongoing inside Ukraine since the start of the conflict, despite a decision from Biden to recall most US military personnel shortly before the war broke out. Nor was the news timely shared that a secret CIA training program had prepared Ukrainians to fight an insurgency against Russia during the Trump administration. Neither were bits of the recent interview of the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett covered by corporate American news outlets – or at least the parts in which he said the US and its European allies “blocked” his attempts at ending the Russo – Ukrainian war in its early phases.
What need’s to happen now is more reporting and more debate. The US government surely won’t lead the conversation, not that anyone would want them to, so ordinary Americans must. Information is a means and an end – and free access to it is one of the most important parts of a free society.
Washington has proved perfectly willing to use misinformation to fight disinformation — whatever that means. US officials admitted to NBC News in April that the administration strategically leaked bad information about Russia using chemical weapons and receiving support from Beijing – two pieces of information which the administration knew, as NBC put it, was not “rock solid.”
But, as one US official told the corporate news outlet, whatever it takes to “get inside Putin’s head.”
