A fascinating Whodunnit... more on the Nordstream pipeline blow-ups

“Whenever the impossible has been eliminated 
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”

A comment from an Occasional Reader, to my post the other day on  the bombed out Nordstrom pipelines: whodunnit? 

I listened to the link on your blog with the interview of Jeffrey Sachs. Comments as follows:

 

• Prof Sachs sounds like a younger version of Chromsky. The US is the source of all evil in the world. And the CIA is the tip of the spear.
• Sachs does support well the case by the writer alleging that the US was behind the blow up of the pipelines.
• Sachs ends with the statement that diplomacy must prevail. Don’t we all agree with that. But we also must be realistic here, which the good professor seems to ignore. We are dealing with an imperialistic dictator who, in my estimation, will only stop if 1) he gets what he wants or 2) is removed from power.
• However, in the end, I am still not convinced that the US did this, and refer you to the interesting podcast by Anders Puck Nielsen that I sent you the link to.

 

Would like to hear your thoughts.

Let’s have a look at the evidence.

References:

• "It was Russia": Anders Puck Nielsen, Videos: (1) Nordstream sabotage, 5 Oct 2022. (2) Why is the West not reacting? 9 Feb 2023
• "It was the U.S.": (3) Seymore Hersh, How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline, Substack, 8 Feb 2023. (4) Video with Democracy Now! 15 Feb 2023

Motives: 

Russia: according to Nielsen to foment a “hybrid war”. He says this is a tactic that is more often resorted to by someone who is losing, not one who is winning, per (1) above. Granted, but speculative. Moreover, it has failed, per Nielsen’s own assessment (2) above. That’s about the totality of Russia’s motive, according to Nielsen, as far as I understand. 

The U.S.: according to many observers and as recounted by Hersh in his essay, (3), the motives are clear and powerful. A selection from Hersh: 

President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions....

From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance....

... state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.

America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy....

As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.

Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:

“It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”

More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “​Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Means and Opportunity:

Russia: Nielsen doesn’t go into this, though I guess we can assume Russia has the Means. Did it have the Opportunity, though? Not so clear, given how closely NATO partners follow what the Russian are up to in the Baltic and that the explosions took place in shallow water off an island near both Sweden and Denmark. Without being seen? I class this as unlikely. 

U.S.: The United States had both the Means and the Opportunity. The Means was the US Navy’s Mining corps and the Opportunity was the joint Nato exercises in and around the region, which made it easy to hide their activity. Hersh sets this out in detail in (3), above, and talks about it in (4).

Other:

1. President Biden and Victoria Nuland, Under-Secretary of State, both said that the US would close down the Nordstream pipelines if Russia invaded Ukraine. That’s in Hersh (3). Nielsen dismisses this outright, for reasons that I can’t fathom. It’s like dismissing a murder suspects comments “I’m going to kill that dude”, when he later stands over the dead body of said dude. In particular, Biden’s smirk as he says “I promise we will be able to do that [bring an end to the pipeline]” is pretty much probative!

2. The Russians have tried to repair the pipeline, as reported in the New York Times. Why would they do that, if they had just deliberately bombed it? And why does Nielsen say nothing about that?

3. In his second video (2) Nielsen refers to the Hersh Substack essay, but only to say that it’s “not credible”, without explaining why. It’s best not to address it, I guess, when you’ve made a clear case for its being Russia (1), some months before. 

4. The U.S. has made no obvious efforts to find out who it was, if it was not them. They could easily send a submersible to the seabed to collect debris and to test it for the explosive type, which would quickly identify who did it. They had not done that. 

So, on the one hand we have Anders Puck Nielsen, a Danish military strategy teacher, impressive in his videos, but no deep connections inside the US military as far as I can see. And on the other we have Seymore Hersh, of whom the New Yorker magazine, a magazine of the elite left, famed for its reportage, said: 

Seymour M. Hersh wrote his first piece for The New Yorker in 1971 and has been a regular contributor to the magazine since 1993. His journalism and publishing awards include a Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting. As a staff writer, Hersh won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest for his 2003 articles “Lunch with the Chairman,” “Selective Intelligence,” and “The Stovepipe.” In 2004, Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces in the magazine; in 2005, he again received a National Magazine Award for Public Interest, an Overseas Press Club Award, the National Press Foundation’s Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award, and his fifth George Polk Award, making him that award’s most honored laureate.

One should not argue a case on the basis of authority, but... it’s hard not to note that one of these has access to the US establishment and the other does not. 

One has given us a few videos, the other has given us a detailed essay, with time, place, method, as well as powerful motive. All from a whistleblower involved in the planning and execution of the plot. We can only dismiss the whistleblower if either (a0 we think Hersh is lying. I don’t find that in the least credible. or (b) if Hersh was lied to. Maybe. But he’s been around the paddock quite a few times. I doubt he would be lied to and believe it. On the other side, what about the denials from the Biden administration? I count those for nothing. Not only have they done that time and again to Hersh’s reporting which has been found to be truthful and accurate; but we have seen in recent months, courtesy the Twitter files, just how much officials and the intelligence community has lied to us. 

And so I amend Sherlock’s famous saying, at top, as: “whenever the improbable has been excluded, whatever remains, however much the government denies it, must be the truth.”

If it’s a vote: I go for the Hersh case. Overall, US: 90%. Russia: 6%. Anyone else: 4%.