Excerpts from the paywalled article:

Seymour Hersch, the investigative journalist, has published a powerful exposé titled “How America took out the Nord Stream Pipeline.” The subtitle says: “The New York Times called it a ‘mystery,’ but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now.”

Seymour Hersh: Prigozhin’s Folly

In an interview with Seymour Hersh, an anonymous Intelligence Officer gives a condensed analysis of the recent Wagner PMC Rebellion and how it has strengthened Putin's position:

Seymour Hersh was also given access to some intelligence on the great so-called counter-offensive that began about three weeks ago, and has only led to the capture of a number of small, depopulated hamlets, a few fields and some abandoned trench networks.

At the end of the article, Sey Hersh goes on to give his own assessment of the current iteration of the Democratic Party:

"as the Democrats move closer to the intellectual and moneyed classes" is the key sentence here. But unacknowledged in this assessment is the fact that the Democratic Party made this decision long, long ago.

The Democratic Party represents one coalition of Capitalist Class Elites, while the Republican Party represents another coalition of Elites.

The Republican Party represents the old moneyed elites, the Fossil Fuel companies, old Wall Street, big traditional Investment Banks, Military Contractors, Energy and Natural Resource extraction and processing companies, and some traditional Manufacturing, Shipping and trading companies.

The Democrats represent the new moneyed interests, the Silicon Valley tech giants (this is why Dems talk about Net Neutrality and breaking up tech giants but magically never bring a bill to vote), other Tech and Engineering companies, Renewable energy companies getting massive subsidies under Democratic budgets along with favorable regulations (amazing how much they can get done for their donors even as they can never manage passing anything in favor of workers who vote for them).

But despite the parts of their coalitions that are different, the Democratic and Republican Parties have far more of their parts of their coalitions in common: Defense Contractors, Energy companies, Insurance companies, Big Banks and Wall Street.

THAT is who the two parties truly represent: the donors and Lobbyists they share together.

That is why they can always find money for war, new military bases, big weapons procurement projects, Imperialist actions abroad, oil drilling, deregulation, austerity, disinvestment in American communities, subsidies and tax breaks for the rich and giant corporations, all the while inflicting censorship and political repression of alternative views and media domestically.

Anything done positive for workers and civilians is incidental to their goals and policies, or is an attempt to throw a bone to people to keep them engaged with the system.

Try a little mind game here: If Trump had ever done anything this reckless and stupid, Democrats and the mainstream media would be building a gallows. The selective silence of the partisan media borders on criminal collusion and puts our nation at risk of yet more Biden idiocy.

          When the Nord Stream pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia to Germany were damaged last September, U.S. officials were quick to suggest Russia had bombed its own pipelines. But according to a new report by the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, it was the U.S. Navy that carried out the sabotage, with help from Norway. Citing a source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning," Hersh writes on his Substack blog that planning for the mission began in December of 2021. The White House and the Norwegian government have since denied the claims. Hersh joins us for an in-depth interview to discuss his report and says the U.S. decision to bomb the pipelines was meant to lock allies into support for Ukraine at a time when some were wavering. "The fear was Europe would walk away from the war," he says. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his reporting on the My Lai massacre. His reporting on CIA spying on antiwar activists during the Vietnam War era helped lead to the formation of the Church Committee, which led to major reforms of the intelligence community, and in 2004, he exposed the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq.

Accusé de sabotage des Nord Stream, Washington cherche à esquiver, selon Seymour Hersh

Selon le journaliste Seymour Hersh, l’hypothèse d’une piste ukrainienne dans l’explosion des Nord Stream, relayée par plusieurs médias occidentaux, vise à détourner l’attention de son enquête désignant Washington comme commanditaire. Il a aussi mis en valeur le non-sens de cette piste, les Ukrainiens n’ayant pas de moyens de réaliser un tel acte. Les États-Unis tentent de passer sous silence…

View On WordPress

Watch "U.S. Media Refuses To Cover Bombshell Nord Stream Story!" on YouTube

No one's surprised by this the corporate media is willingly cheerleading this war. They don't want any reporting that tries to shed light on this proxy war. They are deliberately ignoring a story and smearing a legendary journalist because this story is an inconvenience to the military industrial complex they all serve.

Seymour Hersh discusses his latest scoop on Biden bombing the Nord Stream pipelines, on Radio @TheWarNerd

.

.

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

Terrorism? Hersh's Bombshell On Nord Stream Pipeline Ignored By Mainstream Media

I was planning to write this week about the expanding war in Ukraine and the danger it poses for the Biden Administration. I had a lot to say. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman has resigned, and her last day in office is June 30. Her departure has triggered near panic inside the State Department about the person many there fear will be chosen to replace her: Victoria Nuland. Nuland’s hawkishness on Russia and antipathy for Vladimir Putin fits perfectly with the views of President Biden. Nuland is now the undersecretary for political affairs and has been described as “running amok,” in the words of a person with direct knowledge of the situation, among the various bureaus of the State Department while Secretary of State Antony Blinken is on the road. If Sherman has a view about her potential successor, and she must, she’s unlikely ever to share it.

Biden is believed by some in the American intelligence community to be convinced that his re-election prospects depend on a victory, or some kind of satisfactory settlement, in the Ukraine war. Blinken’s rejection of the prospect of a ceasefire in Ukraine, voiced in his June 2 speech in Finland that I wrote about last week, is of a piece with this thinking.

Putin should rightly be condemned for his decision to tumble Europe into its most violent and destructive war since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But those at the top in the White House must answer for their willingness to let an obviously tense situation lead into war when, perhaps, an unambiguous guarantee that Ukraine would not be permitted to join NATO could have kept the peace.

Ukraine’s counter-offensive is going slowly in its early days, and so news of the war briefly disappeared from the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. The newspapers’ fear of another Trump presidency seems to have diminished their appetite for objective reporting when it delivers bad news from the front. The bad news may keep coming if the Ukraine military’s limited air and missile power continues to be ineffective against Russia.

It is believed within the American intelligence community that Russia destroyed the vital Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River. Putin’s motive is unclear. Was the sabotage aimed at flooding and slowing the Ukraine Army’s pathways to the war zone in the southeast? Were there hidden Ukrainian weapons and ammunition storage sites in the flooded area? (The Ukraine military command is constantly moving its stockpiles in an effort to keep Russian satellite surveillance and missile targeting at bay.) Or was Putin simply laying down a chip and letting the government of Volodymyr Zelensky understand that this is the beginning of the end? 

Meanwhile, there has been an escalation in rhetoric about the war and its possible consequences from within Russia. It can be observed in an essay published in Russian and English on June 13 by Sergei A. Karaganov, an academic in Moscow who is chairman of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. Karaganov is known to be close to Putin; he is taken seriously by some journalists in the West, most notably by Serge Schmemann, a longtime Moscow correspondent for the New York Times and now a member of the Times editorial board. Like me, he spent his early years as a journalist for the Associated Press. 

One of Karaganov’s main points is that the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine will not end even if Russia were to achieve a crushing victory. There will remain, he writes, “an even more embittered ultranationalist population pumped up with weapons—a bleeding wound threatening inevitable complications and a new war.”

The essay is suffused with despair. A Russian victory in Ukraine means a continued war with the West. “The worst situation,” he writes, “may occur if, at the cost of enormous losses, we liberate the whole of Ukraine and it remains in ruins with a population that mostly hates us. . . . The feud with the West will continue as it will support a low-grade guerrilla war.” A more attractive option would be to liberate the pro-Russian areas of Ukraine followed by demilitarization of Ukraine’s armed forces. But that would be possible, Karaganov writes, “only if and when we are able to break the West’s will to incite and support the Kiev junta, and to force it to retreat strategically.

“And this brings us to the most important but almost undiscussed issue. The underlying and even fundamental cause of the conflict in Ukraine and many other tensions in the world . . . is the accelerating failure of the modern ruling Western elites” to recognize and deal with the “globalization course of recent decades.” These changes, which Karaganov calls “unprecedented in history,” are key elements in the global balance of power that now favor “China and partly India acting as economic drivers, and Russia chosen by history to be its military strategic pillar.” The countries of the West, under leaders such as Biden and his aides, he writes, “are losing their five-century-long ability to siphon wealth around the world, imposing, primarily by brute force, political and economic orders and cultural dominance. So there will be no quick end to the unfolding Western defensive and aggressive confrontation.”

This shakeup of the world order, he writes, “has been brewing since the mid-1960s. . . . The defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the beginning of the Western economic model crisis in 2008 were major milestones.” All of this points toward large-scale disaster: “Truce is possible, but peace is not. . . . This vector of the West’s movement unambiguously indicates a slide toward World War III. It is already beginning and may erupt into a full-blown firestorm by chance or due to the incompetence and irresponsibility of modern ruling circles in the West.”

In Karaganov’s view—I am in no way condoning or agreeing with it—the American-led war against Russia in Ukraine, with the support of NATO, has become more feasible, even ineluctable, because the fear of nuclear war is gone. What is happening today in Ukraine, he argues, would be “unthinkable” in the early years of the nuclear era. At that time, even “in a fit of desperate rage,” “the ruling circles of a group of countries” would never have “unleashed a full-scale war in the underbelly of a nuclear superpower.”

Karagonov’s argument only gets more scary from there. He concludes by arguing that Russia can continue fighting in Ukraine for two or three years by “sacrificing thousands and thousands of our best men and grinding down . . . hundreds of thousands of people who live in the territory that is now called Ukraine and who have fallen into a tragic historical trap. But this military operation cannot end with a decisive victory without forcing the West to retreat strategically, or even surrender, and compelling [America] to give up its attempt to reverse history and preserve global dominance. . . . Roughly speaking it must ‘buzz off’ so that Russia and the world could move forward unhindered.”

To convince America to “buzz off,” Karaganov writes, “We will have to make nuclear deterrence a convincing argument again by lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons set unacceptably high, and by rapidly but prudently moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder.” Putin has already done so, he says, through his statements and the advance deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus. “We must not repeat the ‘Ukrainian scenario.’ For a quarter of a century, we did not listen to those who warned that NATO aggression would lead to war, and tried to delay and ‘negotiate.’ As a result, we’ve got a severe armed conflict. The price of indecision now will be higher by an order of magnitude.

“The enemy must know that we are ready to deliver a preemptive strike in retaliation for all of its current and past acts of aggression in order to prevent a slide into global thermonuclear war. . . . Morally, this is a terrible choice as we will use God’s weapon, thus dooming ourselves to grave spiritual losses. But if we do not do this, not only Russia can die, but most likely the entire human civilization will cease to exist.”

Karaganov’s notion of a thermonuclear weapon as “God’s weapon” reminded me of a strange but similar phrase Putin used at a political forum in Moscow in the fall of 2018. He said that Russia would only launch a nuclear strike if his military’s early warning system warned of an incoming warhead. “We would be victims of aggression and would get to heaven as martyrs” and those who launched the strike would “just die and not even have time to repent.”

Karaganov has come a long way in his thinking about nuclear warfare by comparison with his remarks in an interview with Schmemann last summer. He expressed concern about freedom of thought in the future and added: “But I am even more concerned about the growing probability of a global thermonuclear conflict ending the history of humanity. We are living through a prolonged Cuban missile crisis. And I do not see the people of the caliber of Kennedy and his entourage on the other side. I do not know if we have responsible interlocutors.”

What should we make of Karaganov’s warming of doom? Do his remarks in any way reflect policy at the top? Do he and Putin kick around the idea of when or where to drop the bomb? Or is it nothing more than an expression of Russia’s decades old inferiority complex when looking to the gleaming West, where it finds—as we see in the Biden Administration today—endless hostility toward Russia.

“This could be the clarion of a movement in Russia,” one longtime Kremlin watcher told me, “for a dangerous shift of policy or it could or the off-the-wall ramblings of a concerned but deeply Russian academic.” He added that any serious Nato political strategist should read and evaluate the essay. 

Is the future of the world really only in Russia’s hands—and not in ours?  

Happy Father’s Day.

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh breaks down how and when the US sabotaged the Nordstream I & II pipelines

🇺🇸Seymour Hersh - Wie Amerika die Nord Stream-Pipeline ausschaltete

Die New York Times nannte es ein "Mysterium", aber die Vereinigten Staaten führten eine verdeckte Seeoperation durch, die geheim gehalten wurde – bis jetzt…

Even for “Democracy Now” Putin’s To Blame for the Rock Concert Massacre

Last week at least 137 Russians were killed at the Crocos rock concert outside of Moscow. Untold numbers were wounded, some remaining in critical condition. ISIS K has claimed responsibility. However, do you know who’s truly responsible according to DN? “Putin!” That’s the takeaway the program’s audience was left with at the end of today’s program (3/25/24). The presentation said little about…

View On WordPress