Sy Hersh's claim on the Nord Stream pipeline bombing draws a (weak-tea) rebuke from the EU's (anti-) disinformation crew
Sy Hersh's claim on the Nord Stream pipeline bombing draws a (weak-tea) rebuke from the EU's (anti-) disinformation crew
It basically amounts to: Hey, the Russians repeated it!!!!
The journalist Martin Thür, an anchor on the Austrian ORF news service, calls attention to an internal EU report1 on how Russia promoted the Sy Hersh article alleging that the US sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022:
The EU’s Disinformation Review site provides a less jargon-laden version of the report.2 But it’s written in a bureaucratic propaganda style that in this case is a sneering dismissal of not just this particular report but of Hersh himself as a reporter. It expresses no reservations at all about the two sources it cites here with approval: “The White House dismissed Hersh’s report as ‘utterly false and complete fiction.’ Similarly, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the allegations ‘nonsense.’”
Which provides a good reminder of my favorite quote from another legendary investigative reporter, I.F. Stone: "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."3
The practice of governments at war using news reports, accurate or otherwise, to boost their own war propaganda against the Other Side in real time is basically as old as the existence of news reports, wars having presumably started even earlier. While it’s interesting to see the EEAS assessment of the channels by which they claim it spread, that in itself says nothing about the informational value of Hersh’s Nord Stream report. (If anyone is wondering, FIMI is the EEAS acronym for “foreign information manipulations and interference.”)
Early takes after the event
A Reuters article from October 64 gives an idea of the initial public speculations and official positions on the sabotage action (there was little question that it was sabotage):
A British defence source told Sky News the attack was probably premeditated and detonated from afar using underwater mines or other explosives.
"Something big caused those explosions which means ... Russia could do it. In theory, the United States could also do it but I don't really see the motivation there," Oliver Alexander, an open source intelligence analyst, told Reuters.
The United States had long called for Europe to end its reliance on Russian gas, he said, but Washington had little obvious motivation to act now because Nord Stream was no longer pumping gas to Europe at the time the leaks were found, although the pipelines had gas under pressure inside them.
"They already succeeded in stopping Nord Stream 2. It was already dead in the water, it wasn't going anywhere," he said.
Analysts say it is possible the damage was inflicted by devices that are available on the commercial market but that given the scale and precision, it was more likely carried out by an actor with access to more sophisticated technology.
The U.S. news channel CNN, citing three sources, reported that European security officials had observed Russian navy support ships and submarines not far from the sites of the Nord Stream leaks. Asked about the report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there had been a much larger NATO presence in the area.
If we put ourselves back in that time, it seems pretty obvious that either the US or Russia were by far the likeliest culprits. Russia stood to not only make money from a resumption of shipments through the pipelines but it gave the Russians a perceived tool for coercing the EU and Germany in particular with threats of shutoffs. It’s conceivable that Putin’s government could have decided that blowing the pipelines was somehow a more powerful deterrent to the EU nations from backing Ukraine. Or that the Russians wanted to do it as one of the fabled “false flag” operations to blame it on the West.
Since Russia and the US were immediately blaming each other, we could also have thought it was an American “false flag” to pin on Russia. But there was little of the kind of elaborate finger-pointing and hype that we might have expected in such a case from the US either.
The most likely suspect was always either the US or another NATO nation or group of nations acting at least with the permission of the US.
The Hersh scenario
Hersh published his report on his Substack site5 and has expanded on it somewhat in interviews with Fabian Scheidler6, and with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now!7
In his report, he focuses on the concern within the Biden Administration that as long as the pipelines were available, Germany might be tempted to back away from the Western boycott of Russian gas.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.
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, [Undersecretary of State] Victoria Nuland [famous for her hardline anti-Russia views] 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.”
Should we take Hersh seriously? Yes
It would be hard to accuse the mainstream US press of jumping on the story enthusiastically! Kelley Vlahos8 notes:
Absolute crickets. That is the sound in the major mainstream media — both foreign and domestic — following the charges by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that the United States led a covert operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.
The story, released on Hersh’s new Substack last week, unleashed a Twitter war between Hersh’s defenders and detractors, but a simple Google search betrays a dearth of mainstream coverage, with only brief reports by Bloomberg, Agence France Presse, The Times (UK) and the New York Post (a conservative holding of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire). The Washington Times editorial board, also squarely on the right, wrote sympathetically about it on Monday, and Newsweek has covered it as well.
All other newspapers of record — the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal — and European outlets — BBC, the Guardian, and most German newspapers (an interview on Berliner [Zeitung] dropped late Wednesday) — have ignored it. Tucker Carlson and other hosts covered it on FOX News, another Murdoch staple, but the rest of the cable news circuit — CNN, MSNBC — are seemingly on board with what appears to be a total MSM blackout.
Maybe not an entire blackout: Business Insider published an unflattering report topped with this unwieldy headline: “The claim by a discredited journalist that the US secretly blew up the Nord Stream pipeline is proving a gift to Putin.”
Hersh is no more above criticism than any other journalist. But his experience and his achievements with exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and Abu Ghuraib torture crimes in Iraq were particularly important.
It's worth noting that a more recent (2017) story of his dealt with a much murkier situation, concerning one particular Syrian attack which allegedly used sarin gas and which was used by the Trump Administration to justify a particular military operation against Syria in retaliation.9 Hersh's article focused on whether Trump had made a shoot-from-the-hip decision in a report focusing on the decision-making process in Washington at that specific time. One example of criticism that Hersh received for that article came from Stephen Shalom10, who seemed to worry that Hersh's report might give unwarranted credibility to defenders of the Syrian government who tried to cast doubt on well-founded evidence that Syria had used illegal chemical weapons against rebel forces at all.11
An official report from October 26 of that year from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism concluded, "On the basis of the foregoing, the Leadership Panel is confident that the Syrian Arab Republic is responsible for the release of sarin at Khan Shaykhun on 4 April 2017."12 But Hersh's report in question was about the internal decision-making process inside the Trump Administration in the April 4-7 period when the Administration decided on one of its most significant early foreign policy acts about a direct attack by the US against Syria.
I was unable to locate the document itself elsewhere online. But it comes from a serious journalist and is identified as a Strategic Communication, Task Forces and Information Analysis (SG.STRAT.2.DT) coming from the EEAS (European [Union] External Action Service).
Nothing to See Here, Look Over There (2023). EU vs. Disinfo 02/16/2023. <https://euvsdisinfo.eu/nothing-to-see-here-look-over-there/> (Accessed 2023-19-02)
I.F. Stone https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/I._F._Stone I. F. Stone. Wikipedia 06-March-2022. <https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=I._F._Stone&action=history> (Accessed: 2023-11-02)
Plucinska, Joanna (2022): Nord Stream gas 'sabotage': who's being blamed and why? Reuters 10/06/2022 <https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/qa-nord-stream-gas-sabotage-whos-being-blamed-why-2022-09-30/> (Accessed 2023-19-02)
Hersh, Seymour (2023): How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline. Substack 02.08.2023. (Accessed 2023-09-02).
Scheidler, Fabian (2023): Seymour Hersh: The US Destroyed the Nord Stream Pipeline. Jacobin 02/15/2023. <https://jacobin.com/2023/02/seymour-hersh-interview-nord-stream-pipeline> (Accessed 2023-19-02). Also published by The Wire 02/16/2023. <https://thewire.in/world/seymour-hersh-us-destroyed-nord-stream-pipeline-interview> (Accessed 2023-19-02)
Reporter Seymour Hersh on "How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline". Democracy Now! YouTube channel. 02/15/2023. (Accessed 2023-19-02)
Vlahos, Kelley Beaucar (2023): The Sy Hersh effect: killing the messenger, ignoring the message. Responsible Statecraft 02/16/2023. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/02/16/the-sy-hersh-effect-killing-the-messenger-ignoring-the-message/> (Accessed 2023-19-02)
Hersh, Seymour (2023): Trump‘s Red Line. Welt 25.06.2017. <https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article165905578/Trump-s-Red-Line.html> (Accessed 2023-19-02)
Shalom, Stephen (2017): The Chemical Attack at Khan Sheikhoun. Jacobin 07/24/2017. <https://jacobin.com/2017/07/syria-chemical-attack-assad-trump> (Accessed 2023-19-02)
The particular attack in question at Khan Sheikhoun took place on April 4 and the US retaliation ordered by Trump was on April 7. Here is a BBC News report from April 26 on the attack: Syria chemical 'attack': What we know 26 April 2017. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39500947> (Accessed 2023-19-02)
Seventh report of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism. United Nations Security Council 10/26/2017. <https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/s_2017_904.pdf> (Accessed 2023-19-02)
10
Shalom, Stephen (2017): The Chemical Attack at Khan Sheikhoun. Jacobin 07/24/2017. <https://jacobin.com/2017/07/syria-chemical-attack-assad-trump> (Accessed 2023-19-02).
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