Category Archives: Geopolitics

In Nord Stream attack, US officials use proxy media to blame proxy Ukraine

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One month after Seymour Hersh reported that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, US officials find a scapegoat in Ukraine and stenographers in the New York Times.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Nearly six months after the Nord Stream pipelines exploded and one month after Seymour Hersh reported that the Biden administration was responsible, US officials have unveiled their defense. According to the New York Times, anonymous government sources claim that “newly collected intelligence” now “suggests” that the Nord Stream bomber was in fact a “pro-Ukrainian group.”

The only confirmed “intelligence” about this supposed “group” is that US officials have none to offer about them.

“U.S. officials said there was much they did not know about the perpetrators and their affiliations,” The Times reports. The supposed “newly collected” information “does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” Despite knowing nothing about them, the Times’ sources nonetheless speculate that “the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two.” They also leave open “the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.” (emphasis added)

When no evidence is produced, anything is of course “possible.” But the Times’ sources are oddly certain on one critical matter: “U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.” Also, there is “no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.”

Despite failing to obtain any concrete information about the perpetrators, the Times nonetheless declares that the US cover story planted in their pages “amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.”

It is unclear why the Times has deemed their evidence-free “lead” to be “significant”, and not, by contrast, the Hersh story that came four weeks earlier. Not only does Hersh’s reporting predate the Times’, but his story contained extensive detail about how the US planned and executed the Nord Stream explosions.

Tellingly, the Times distorts the basis for Hersh’s reporting. “In making his case,” the Times claims, Hersh merely “cited” President Biden’s “preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.” In falsely suggesting that he relied solely on public statements, the Times completely omits that Hersh in fact cited a well-placed source.

By contrast, the Times has no information about its newfound perpetrators or about any other aspect of its “significant” lead.

“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” The Times states. Accordingly, US officials admit that “that there are no firm conclusions” to be drawn, and that there are “enormous gaps in what U.S. spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired.” For that apparent reason, “U.S. officials who have been briefed on the intelligence are divided about how much weight to put on the new information.” The Times, by contrast, apparently feels no such evidentiary burden.

In sum, US officials have “much they did not know about the perpetrators” – i.e. everything; “enormous gaps” in their awareness of how the (unknown) “pro-Ukraine group” purportedly carried out a deep-sea bombing; uncertainty over “how much weight to put on” their “intelligence”; and even “no firm conclusions” to offer. Moreover, all of this supposed US “intelligence” happens to have been “newly collected” — after one of the most accomplished journalists in history published a detailed report on how US intelligence plotted and conducted the bombing.

Given the absence of evidence and curious timing, a reasonable conclusion is not that a Ukrainian “proxy force” was the culprit, but that the US is now using its Ukrainian proxy as a scapegoat.

As the standard bearer of establishment US media, the Times’ “reporting” is perfectly in character.  Days after the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Times noted that “much of the speculation about responsibility has focused on Russia” – just as US officials would certainly hope. The narrative was echoed by former CIA Director John Brennan, who opined that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” in the Nord Stream attack. Citing anonymous “Western intelligence officials”, CNN claimed that “European security officials observed Russian Navy ships in vicinity of Nord Stream pipeline leaks,” thus casting “further suspicion on Russia,” which is seen by “European and US officials as the only actor in the region believed to have both the capability and motivation to deliberately damage the pipelines.”

With the story that Russia blew up its own pipelines no longer tenable, the Times’ new narrative asks us to believe that some unnamed “pro-Ukraine group”, which “did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services” somehow managed to obtain the unique capability to plant multiple explosives on a heavily sealed pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

That narrative is already being laundered through the German media. Hours after the Times story broke, the German outlet Die Zeit came out with a story, sourced to German officials, that claims the bombing operation was carried out by a group of six people, including just “two divers.” These supposed perpetrators, we are told, arrived at the crime scene via a yacht “apparently owned by two Ukrainians” that departed Germany. How a yacht managed to carry the equipment and explosives needed for the operation is left unexplained.

The saboteurs somehow possessed the capability to carry out a deep-sea bombing, but not the awareness to properly clean up their floating crime scene. According to Die Zeit, the boat was “returned to the owner in an uncleaned condition,” which allowed “investigators” to discover “traces of explosives on the table in the cabin.” Should this lean “pro-Ukraine” crack team of naval commandos conduct another act of deep-sea sabotage, they will only need to hire a cleaning professional to get away with it.

As for motivation, we are somehow also asked to forget that Biden administration officials not only expressed the motivation, but the post-facto satisfaction. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” senior US official Victoria Nuland vowed in January 2022. President Biden added the following month that “if Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken greeted the news as a “tremendous strategic opportunity.” Just days before Hersh’s story was published, Nuland informed Congress that both she and the White House are “very gratified” that Nord Stream is “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Not only are global audiences asked to ignore the public statements of Biden administration principals, but their blanket refusal to answer any questions. This was put on display in Washington this past weekend, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid Biden a White House visit. Unlike Scholz’s last DC trip, there was no joint news conference. This was understandable: the last time they appeared together, Biden blurted out that he would “bring an end” to Nord Stream, leaving Scholz to stand next to him in awkward silence. This time around, the two briefly sat before a group of reporters who were quickly shooed out of the room, much to Biden’s apparent glee.

US media outlets got the memo: in a sit-down interview with Scholz, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria did not find the time to mention Hersh’s reporting. In covering the German Chancellor’s visit, US media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post adopted a similar vow of silence.   

Inadvertently, the Times’ account exposes new holes in the failed attempts to refute Hersh’s story.

Members of the NATO state-funded website Bellingcat, falsely presented to NATO state audiences as an independent investigative outlet, have attempted to cast doubt on Hersh’s claims by arguing that open-source tracking at the time of the bombing fails to detect the vessels he reported on. But as the Times story notes, investigators are seeking information about ships “whose location transponders were not on or were not working when they passed through the area, possibly to cloak their movements.” Hersh has made this same point in interviews, noting that when Biden flew into Poland before his visit to Kiev last month, his “plane switched off its transponder” to avoid detection, as the Associated Press reported. Unfortunately for self-styled digital sherlocks, major international crimes – particularly those involving intelligence agencies – cannot be solved from their laptops.

Hersh was also pilloried for citing a single anonymous source. The Times’ story, by contrast, relies on multiple anonymous sources, who, unlike Hersh, have no tangible information to offer. After ignoring Hersh’s story for a full month, the Times’ news section was forced to acknowledge it for the first time. And the best that its anonymous sources could come up with is not only an evidence-free, caveat-filled narrative, but a story that does not challenge a single aspect of Hersh’s detailed account.

In another contrast, Hersh is one of the most accomplished and impactful journalists in the history of the profession. Two of the journalists on the Times story, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, have bylined multiple stories that spread demonstrable falsehoods sourced to anonymous US officials.

In the summer of 2020, Barnes and Goldman were among the Times journalists who laundered CIA disinformation that Russia was paying bounties for dead US troops in Afghanistan. When the Biden administration was forced to acknowledge that the allegation was baseless, the Times tried to water down its initial claims in an attempt to save face.

In January, Barnes co-wrote a Times story which claimed, citing unnamed “U.S. officials” more than a dozen times, that “Russian military intelligence officers” were behind “a recent letter bomb campaign in Spain whose most prominent targets were the prime minister, the defense minister and foreign diplomats.” But days later, as the Washington Post reported, Spanish authorities arrested “a 74-year-old Spaniard who opposed his country’s support for Ukraine but appears to have acted alone.” (Moon of Alabama is one the few voices to have called out the Times’ fraudulent reporting).

That same month, Goldman shared a byline, alongside fellow “Russian bounties” stenographer Charlie Savage, on a Times story which argued that Special Counsel John Durham has “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” even though Durham’s findings have yet to be released. As I reported for Real Clear Investigations, the Times made its case by omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts – as is the norm for establishment media coverage of Russiagate.

The US officials behind the Times’ latest Nord Stream tale presumably believe that they have offered the best counter to Hersh that they could. That it is devoid of concrete information, and written by Times staffers with a track record of parroting US intelligence-furnished propaganda, ultimately has the opposite effect.

The Times’ narrative can only be seen as further confirmation that Hersh found the Nord Stream bomber in Washington. That explains why anonymous US officials are now using proxies in establishment media to scapegoat their proxy in Ukraine.

Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires: The Cost of the Nation’s Endless Wars

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.”—President Biden

Oh, the hypocrisy.

To hear President Biden talk about the Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.

Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion and shows no signs of abating.

Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, war is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

A US-Led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ Foreshadows the Splintering of NATO

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By Mike Whitney

Source: The Unz Review

The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline was a gangster act that reveals the cancer at the heart of the “rules-based order”. How can there be peace and security when the world’s most powerful nation can destroy the critical infrastructure of other countries without deliberation or judicial proceedings? If Hersh’s report can be trusted—and I think it can—then we must assume that senior-level advisors in the Biden administration as well as the president himself deliberately perpetrated an act of industrial terrorism against a long-term friend and ally, Germany. What Biden’s involvement in the act implies, is that the United States now claims the right to arbitrarily decide which countries may engage in commerce with which others. And, if for some reason, the buying and selling of energy supplies conflicts with Washington’s broader geopolitical objectives, then the US believes it has the right to obliterate the infrastructure that makes such trade possible. Isn’t this the rationale that was used to justify the blowing up of Nord Stream?

Sy Hersh has done the world a service by exposing the perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage. His expose not only identifies the people involved but also infers that they should be held accountable for their actions. But while we don’t expect any thorough investigation in the near future, we do think the magnitude of the attack has been a “wake up” call for people who cling to the belief that the Unipolar model can produce morally-acceptable outcomes. What the incident shows is that unilateral action inevitably leads to criminal violence against the weak and defenseless. Biden’s covert operation hurt every man, woman and child in Europe. It’s a real tragedy. Here’s a quote from a recent interview with Hersh:

“I think this story has the same potential for destroying the ability of our president to rally the American people behind the war because it shows something that is so dark and so Unamerican. You know, this isn’t us. We’re not talking about us. This is a bunch of intelligence officers and CIA people….” Seymour Hersh 2:29 min

He’s right, isn’t he? The Biden administration has vastly miscalculated the impact these revelations will have on the public. The reputational damage alone is going to be immense, but they will also be used as the prism through which many critics see the war. In fact, there are signs that that may already be happening. On Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed that the real objective of Washington’s war was not simply to “weaken” Russia and eventually splinter it into smaller pieces, but to force a split between Germany and Russia. Here’s what he said on Saturday:

According to Lavrov, the US decided that Russia and Germany cooperated “too well” over the past 20-30 years, establishing a powerful alliance based on Russian resources and German technology.

“That began to threaten the monopoly position of many American corporations. Therefore, it was necessary to somehow ruin it, and do it literally,” the minister said.

“There is an aspect here that’s related to the fact that friendship between countries, national reconciliation between them, as it happened between Russians and Germans, has become an eye sore for those who don’t want anyone to appear somewhere on this planet, who will compete with the main hegemon, which the US has declared itself to be,” Lavrov added.” (Lavrov says US officials essentially acknowledge Nord Stream blasts were US handiwork”, Tass)

Lavrov’s comments reinforce our own view that the conflict was concocted by Washington’s foreign policy experts who realized that German-Russo economic integration posed a serious threat to America’s dominant role in the global order. That is why Nord Stream became the primary target of US aggression, because the pipeline was the vital artery that connected the two continents and drew them closer together into an economic commons that would eventually become the world’s biggest free trade zone. This is what Washington feared most, and that is why Biden and Co. took such desperate steps to prevent the strengthening of economic relations between Germany and Russia. In short, Nord Stream had to be destroyed because Nord Stream marked the end of the unipolar world order.

Instead, of expanding on this belabored theory, let’s take a minute and see if we can figure out something about Hersh’s shadowy “source” of information. Allow me to frame it in the form of a question:

Why did Sy Hersh’s source provide him with detailed, top-secret information about the Biden administration’s sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline?

  • a. The source is a Kremlin stooge who wanted to subvert the war-effort and inflict serious damage on the United States
  • b. The source is an America-hating “Commie” who loathes democracy and freedom
  • c. The source is an adrenaline junkie who enjoys putting himself, his family, his career and his freedom at risk.
  • d. The source is a concerned American who thought that revealing information about the destruction of Nord Stream would prevent the neocons from leading the country into a catastrophic war with Russia

If you chose “d” then pat yourself on the back, because that is the right answer. No one in their-right-mind would take the risks that Hersh’s source took unless he felt the country was in grave danger. And, keep in mind, we might not even know what that what that danger is yet, since we don’t know what future escalations the neocons are planning. For example, it could be that US plans are already underway to deliver F-16s and long-range missile systems that will be used to strike deeper into Russian territory. It could be that the neocons want to detonate a nuclear device in Ukraine as part of a “false flag” operation. Or it could be that Biden plans to organize a ‘coalition of the willing’ (Uk, Poland, Romania) that will fight alongside US Special Forces in combat operations in east Ukraine. Any of these developments represent a serious escalation in the hostilities which would increase the probability of a direct clash with nuclear-armed Russia. In Joe Biden’s own words, “That’s what you call World War 3.”

He’s right, it would be WW3, which might explain why Hersh’s source summoned the courage to provide the author with the damning information about Nord Stream. He might have believed that the world was on the fasttrack to nuclear annihilation, so he risked his own life for ours. “No greater love hath any man…”.

And the source is not the only person who put himself at risk. Hersh could face charges as well. In fact, I would argue, that if Hersh was not as widely-respected as he is, he would probably be sharing a cell with Julian Assange right now. After all, what is the difference between what Assange did and what Hersh did?

Not much, except for the fact that Hersh’s stellar reputation makes him “untouchable. (We hope.)

In any event, if the motive behind the article was to prevent nuclear Armageddon, then we are very grateful for their bravery and selflessness.

Even so, there might have been other motives driving the article which are worth our consideration. Let’s imagine, for a minute, that Hersh’s source has information concerning the neocons plans for the near future. In other words, it is quite possible that the sabotage of Nord Stream alone was not the main impetus for Hersh’s report, but some other sinister plan on the horizon, that is, a military escalation that could trigger a catastrophe of unprecedented severity.

As we said earlier, such a plan might involve F-16s and long-range missile systems, or a nuclear “false flag” operation, or it could be that Biden will organize a ‘coalition of the willing’ that will fight alongside US Special Forces in combat operations in east Ukraine. US combat troops in Ukraine would make a direct clash with Russia effectively unavoidable. It would put the US on-track for another World War, which is what the neocons want. Unfortunately, I suspect that this is the most probable near-term scenario; the forming of a US-backed coalition organized to directly engage Russia in Ukraine. Here’s a “Statement from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on President Biden’s Travel to Poland:

From February 20th – 22nd, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. will travel to Poland. He will meet with President Andrzej Duda of Poland to discuss our bilateral cooperation as well as our collective efforts to support Ukraine and bolster NATO’s deterrence. He will also meet with the leaders of the Bucharest Nine (B9), a group of our eastern flank NATO Allies, to reaffirm the United States’ unwavering support for the security of the Alliance. In addition, President Biden will deliver remarks ahead of the one year anniversary of Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, addressing how the United States has rallied the world to support the people of Ukraine as they defend their freedom and democracy, and how we will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes.” (The White House, Washington DC)

As it says in the official statement, Biden will not merely talk to the Polish president about “collective efforts to support Ukraine”, but will also discuss US-Polish “bilateral cooperation as well”. But what type of bilateral cooperation does Biden want besides more weapons? Combat troops? Is that what Biden is looking for; coalition boots-on-the-ground to make up for Ukraine’s heavy casualties? Here’s an article from a website called Notes From Poland that announces a sharp uptick in Polish recruitment goals. Not surprisingly, the article does not explain the reason why Poland intends to more-than-double the size of its army within a year’s time.

Up to 200,000 people can be called up for military exercises in Poland next year, including some who have never put their name forward for service but are deemed to have “useful skills”…. The exercises can last up to 90 days, and failure to attend is punishable by jail or a fine….

The pool of people who can be called up are those aged 55 and under who have been through so-called military qualification, which is compulsory for all men turning 19 and during which the candidate’s health category and fitness for military service are determined….

Poland will increase defence spending to 3% of GDP next year, one of the highest levels in NATO, to protect itself from “voracious imperial Russia”.

Its new Homeland Defence Act will also more than double the number of troops serving in the armed forces https://t.co/KlEA1cHOo — Notes from Poland (@notesfrompoland) March 19, 2022

Until 2009, Poland had compulsory military service for men, but that was scrapped in favour of a fully professional army. However, in recent years the growing threat of Russia has pushed the government to seek to increase the size and strength of the armed forces.

In 2017, a new Territorial Defence Force was established. This year’s Homeland Defence Act foresees a doubling in the size of the armed forces, from the current 143,500 troops…” (“Up to 200,000 Poles to be called up for military training next year“, Notes From Poland)

Are we expected to dismiss this sudden expansion of the Polish military as a mere coincidence or is it more likely that a deal has already been made with Washington regarding future troop deployments to Ukraine?

According to the White House statement, Biden will “also meet with the leaders of the Bucharest Nine (B9)” which is a group of nine NATO countries in Eastern Europe that became part of the US-led military alliance after the end of the Cold War…and includes Romania, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. All nine countries were once closely associated with the now dissolved Soviet Union, but later chose the path of democracy. Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria are former signatories of the now dissolved Warsaw Pact military alliance led by the Soviet Union…Check it out:

All members of the B9 are part of the … NATO (and all) have been critical of President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine since 2014… Last year NATO adopted its new Strategic Concept, in which all Allies agreed that ,,the Russian Federation is the most significant and direct threat to Allies security and to peace and stability in the Euro–Atlantic area”. Now, on the road to the Vilnius Summit we should make sure that the Alliance is fully prepared to face this threat.” (“Who are the Bucharest Nine, countries on NATO’s eastern flank?”, Indian Express)

An army of Russophobes; is that what they want to create?

It sure looks like it.

Maybe, we’re making a ‘mountain out of a molehill’; that’s certainly a possibility. But now that the Russian army is advancing on all fronts along the Line of Contact, we think that the desperate neocons are bound to do something colossal. In fact, we are sure of it. Check out this clip from an article at Larry Johnson’s web site, “The Son of a New American Revolution”:

Now for the bad news. The Biden Administration and our European allies either are preparing for a major military action in the Ukraine war or they know something bad is going to happen soon, probably in Belarus, because warnings were just issued for foreign citizens to bug out of Belarus and Russia:

The French Foreign Ministry urged its citizens to leave Belarus without delay.

Canada urges its citizens to leave Belarus immediately because of the risk of arbitrary application of local laws and hostilities in Ukraine — Canadian Foreign Ministry.

The U.S. on Monday issued a top-level advisory telling American citizens to leave Russia immediately and cease travel to the country as Russia’s war against neighboring Ukraine continues, citing risks of harassment and wrongful detention for Americans specifically.

“Do not travel to Russia due to the unpredictable consequences of the unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian military forces, the potential for harassment and the singling out of U.S. citizens for detention by Russian government security officials, the arbitrary enforcement of local law, limited flights into and out of Russia, the Embassy’s limited ability to assist U.S. citizens in Russia, and the possibility of terrorism,” reads the alert.

I do not believe in coincidence. This is a coordinated action and signals the situation in Russia and Belarus is going to turn dangerous in the near future. Maybe it has something to do with the United States training Islamic radicals to carry out terrorist attacks in Russia and Belarus.” (“Sy Hersh Speaks and NATO Warns of Escalation in the War in Ukraine?“, Son of a New American Revolution)

Something is afoot although we cannot be certain whether it will materialize or not. But—keep in mind—there would be no need for terrorist attacks, false flags or additional combat troops if the official narrative was actually true and the Ukrainian army was winning the war. But that is not what’s happening. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are losing and losing badly. In fact, they don’t even have sufficient ammunition stockpiles to sustain long-term fighting. Here’s the story from Reuters:

“NATO is expected to ask its members to raise its ammunition stockpiles which have been badly depleted by the war in Ukraine... the pace of deliveries to Ukraine, where Kyiv’s troops are firing up to 10,000 artillery shells daily, has drained Western inventories and exposed holes in the efficiency, speed and manpower of supply chains.

“If Europe were to fight Russia, some countries would run out of ammunition in days,” a European diplomat told Reuters… the stockpiles are running even lower due to the conflict in Ukraine…. The war also cast a spotlight on the lack of industrial capacity necessary to ramp up production quickly, after decades of dwindling government orders saw many production lines vanish….

“I don’t necessarily think that within the next year our stockpile levels will increase massively,” the NATO official said. “Any additional stockpiles we will have will be heading to Ukraine.” (“NATO expected to raise munitions stockpile targets as war depletes reserves”, Reuters)

How do you take a country to war with Russia without enough ammo to fight the enemy?

The incompetence is mind-boggling, and it’s not a short-term problem either. Western nations no longer have the industrial base to provide the necessary supplies and equipment for “large-scale, high-intensity warfare.” Building up capacity will take years. In the meantime, the war will be settled by well-equiped Russian combat troops who will continue to grind away at the demoralized Ukrainians who increasingly find themselves outmanned and outgunned at every turn. This is from an article at the UK Telegraph:

“With Russia back on the offensive after significant Ukrainian combat successes around Kharkiv and Kherson in the second half of 2022, the past few weeks have been the bloodiest so far of an already bloody war, with both sides taking extraordinarily heavy casualties. Expect it to get worse.

Ukrainian defence minister Oleksii Reznikov says Russia has mobilised “much more” than 300,000 troops, perhaps up to half a million, and these are pouring into Ukraine in preparation for what is expected to be a major offensive in the coming days and weeks. Although Kyiv has also been building up its forces and supplying them with modern equipment donated by the West, Putin has a much greater advantage in troop numbers than he did when he invaded a year ago. Despite repeated optimistic reports of Russia running low on artillery shells – a battle winner in this conflict – Putin’s war stocks are vast, and his factories have been working around the clock to churn out even more.

Under pressure towards the end of last year, Russia withdrew its forces to positions of strength, trading ground for time as it massed resources for a planned hammer blow while grinding down the Ukrainians in the east, softening them up for the assault to come..

Until now, the narrative in the West has been that Ukraine is comfortably winning this war…The reality is more complex….: the truth is that recent promises of new combat equipment for Ukraine – especially longer range missiles, tanks and other armoured vehicles – are unlikely to be fulfilled in time to have an impact in this battle if Putin launches his offensive on the timetable Kyiv predicts….

We must therefore be prepared for significant Russian gains in the coming weeks. We need to be realistic about how bad things could be – otherwise the shock risks dislodging Western resolve. The opposite occurred last summer and autumn, as flagging support in parts of Europe and the US was galvanised by Ukrainian success.” (“Vladimir Putin is about to make shock gains“, UK Telegraph)

And this is from the New York Times:

Exhausted Ukrainian troops complain they are already outnumbered and outgunned, even before Russia has committed the bulk of its roughly 200,000 newly mobilized soldiers. And doctors at hospitals speak of mounting losses as they struggle to care for fighters with gruesome injuries.
…
The first stages of the Russian offensive have already begun. Ukrainian troops say that Bakhmut, an eastern Ukrainian city that Russian forces have been trying to seize since the summer, is likely to fall soon. Elsewhere, Russian forces are advancing in small groups and probing the front lines looking for Ukrainian weaknesses.

The efforts are already straining Ukraine’s military, which is worn out by nearly 12 months of heavy fighting.
…
Losses among Ukrainian forces have been severe. Troops in a volunteer contingent called the Carpathian Sich, positioned near Nevske, said that some 30 fighters from their group had died in recent weeks, and soldiers said, only partly in jest, that just about everyone has a concussion.

At one frontline hospital in the Donbas, the morgue was packed with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers in white plastic bags. In another hospital, stretchers with wounded troops covered in gold foil thermal blankets crowded the corridors, and a steady stream of ambulances arrived from the front nearly all day long.” (“Outnumbered and Worn Out, Ukrainians in East Brace for Russian Assault”, New York Times) Note: Lifted from Moon of Alabama

And one more excerpt from the Paper of Record:

The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war. Not, as far as we can tell, because its soldiers are fighting poorly or its people have lost heart, but because the war has settled into a World War I-style battle of attrition, complete with carefully dug trenches and relatively stable fronts.

Such wars tend to be won — as indeed World War I was — by the side with the demographic and industrial resources to hold out longest. Russia has more than three times Ukraine’s population, an intact economy and superior military technology. At the same time, Russia has its own problems; until recently, a shortage of soldiers and the vulnerability of its arms depots to missile strikes have slowed its westward progress. Both sides have incentives to come to the negotiating table.” (“Russia and Ukraine Have Incentives to Negotiate. The U.S. Has Other Plans”, New York Times)

Get the picture? The war will undoubtedly drag on for some time, but the outcome is now certain. And as the noose tightens in the east and the prospects for success grow more remote, we think the neocons are bound to do something even more desperate, foolhardy and violent. We expect the next move will be an attempt to build a coalition of the willing (UK, Romania, Poland and US) that will push the reluctant NATO allies to the breaking point by pitting a makeshift US-led Army against Russia Forces on Ukraine’s killing fields. With every reckless action, Uncle Sam increases the probability of a critical split within NATO that will end Washington’s stranglehold on Europe and lay the groundwork for a new order.

The Hunter Biden / Ihor Kolomoïsky affair

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By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

The Biden Administration is finally reacting to the scandals that have arisen from the computer of the president’s son, Hunter Biden. This loser, whose only known activities are those of a junkie and a pimp, managed to become the director of a large gas company; a job he knows nothing about. A man of straw, he signed all sorts of big contracts, in different countries, where he travelled -without right- in official US planes. His father is now launching an operation to cover up his affairs, which has led him to clean up the Ukrainian government.

As time goes on, American voters are turning away from President Joe Biden. Many of those who say they voted for him tell pollsters they regret it. Some say that if they had known about the Hunter Biden affair beforehand, they would never have trusted his father as president.

During the presidential election campaign, the Republican Party filed a lawsuit with the Federal Election Commission because the social networks Twitter and Facebook censored thousands of accounts that relayed the New York Post’s revelations about Hunter Biden’s computer [1]. The seizure was dismissed, but the Twitter Files, revealed by Elon Musk, attest in detail that the FBI and an intelligence agency (probably the CIA) had intervened with Twitter and Facebook to censor this information.

I was astonished that in the United States, the son of a vice-president, then president, could travel in official planes to the four corners of the world, giving the impression of being an official personality when he was only a junkie [2]. This abuse was, in my opinion, a sign of the decadence of the US Empire.

However, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives intends to carry out various investigations, notably on Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s dirty dealings. If these investigations were to succeed, they could call into question the independence of the President of the United States and therefore lead to his impeachment.

It should be remembered that when Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president, 7 million dollars in bribes were paid to the Attorney General of Ukraine to keep his nose out of Burisma’s affairs. Later, this same prosecutor, who had become too greedy, was ousted by the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) under pressure from the United States, the European Union, the IMF and the World Bank, which wanted to save the owner of Burisma and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko at a lower price.

In a puritanical country like the United States, public opinion first focused on Hunter Biden’s frequent use of prostitutes and his drug use before it became clear that his financial affairs were much more important.

Now the Hunter Biden affair, which had been covered up by very senior members of the intelligence community, for whom the whole saga was “Russian disinformation” [3], is likely to turn the tables. It is no longer appropriate to deny the facts, so much so that Harvard University has just announced that it is closing its Technology and Social Change Project, a structure that had been constantly assimilating the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop to Fake news [4].

Until now, the citizens who cared about this affair were only “conspiracy theorists”, “extreme right-wing” followers of President Trump and readers of the gutter press. On the contrary, almost the entire ruling class had “discerned” that it was just a popular rumor, Fake News. On the one hand, there were the readers of the New York Post, which had revealed the affair [5], on the other hand, those of the New York Times, which kept on denying it.

Among the many financial affairs of the president’s son, two stand out. The first concerns a Chinese spy. It could reveal influence peddling in the service of a foreign power. While the second concerns his activities in Ukraine and particularly his appointment and that of his friend Devon Archer (former roommate of Christopher Heinz, John Kerry’s son-in-law, during their university period) to the board of directors of the oil company Burisma. This is the group that President Vladimir Putin denounced as “a bunch of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” [6] when he called on his armies to end the civil war in Ukraine under UN Security Council Resolution 2202.

This week two seemingly unrelated events have shaken things up. They were probably imagined by or with David Brock, the undisputed agitprop specialist on whom President Biden relied in 2016 against President Trump. Ill, he had disappeared, he is now back [7]

Hunter Biden has hired one of the most famous American lawyers, Abbe Lowell. He has requested a criminal investigation and sent letters to all the people who played a role in the disclosure of the contents of his client’s laptop, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon. He accused them of violating the privacy of his client, urged them to retract the conclusions they drew from the contents of the computer, and thus bury the case. At the same time, a delegation from the Departments of Defense and State, as well as USAID, went to Ukraine to advise the Zelensky government to clean up some of the mess [8]. Officially, it was only to ensure that the money offered at the expense of the US taxpayers was not misappropriated by corrupt officials. Unofficially, it was only a matter of eliminating the annoying pawns without touching the others. In two days, fourteen personalities resigned in a chain. Five regional governors (Valentin Reznichenko (Dnipropetrovsk), Oleksander Starukh (Zaporizhia), Dmytro Zhivytsky Surya), Yaroslav Yanshayevich (Kherson) and Oleksiy Kulba (Kiev)), four deputy ministers (including Viacheslav Shapovalov (Defense) and Vasyl Lozynsky (Infrastructure)) and two heads of a government agency left their posts, in addition to the deputy head of the presidential administration (Kyrylo Tymoshenko) and the deputy prosecutor general (Oleksiy Symonenko).

The Western media reported faithfully on this major sweep. But the most important thing happened on the 3rd day and very few people talked about it. SBU troops searched the home of oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, sponsor of both President Volodymyr Zelensky and the “integral nationalists”, but above all owner of… Burisma Holding, which he had bought from Mykola Zlochevskyi, in 2011, i.e. before Hunter Biden entered it. Of course the Anticorruption Action Center’s article on this change of ownership has long since been removed from its site [9].

Technically, Ihor Kolomoysky is not being prosecuted for the assassinations he ordered, but for rigging a gas lot auction involving two deputy energy ministers for nearly a million dollars.

Arresting mafia boss Ihor Kolomoysky removes the traces of many problems. He is the key witness to link President Volodymyr Zelensky with the “integral nationalists”, i.e. between a defender of democracy and anti-democrats, and between a Jewish personality and mass murderers of Jews. For the “President’s Men”, Kolomoysky is the main Ukrainian personality who can be held accountable for the corruption of Hunter Biden and, eventually, Joe Biden.

It will be remembered that in 2019 the US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry reportedly informed Rudy Giuliani about President Zelensky’s confidences during his inauguration ceremony about Hunter Biden [10]. President Donald Trump then asked the Ukrainians for information about their investigations. But the affair was leaked, President Trump was accused of acting out of revenge, and a new impeachment procedure was launched against him.

The Hunter Biden affair has many facets. One thing is to erase his role in Burisma, another is to erase his role in the activities of US military laboratories in Ukraine. These activities were carried out through Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), one of his companies that he created with Christopher Heinz, son-in-law of the special presidential envoy for the climate John Kerry, who joined him on the board of Burisma [11].

[1] «Republican National Committe Letter to the Federal Election Commission», Octobrer 16, 2020.

[2] « La décadence de l’Empire états-unien », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 6 septembre 2022.

[3] “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails”, Voltaire Network, 19 October 2020.

[4] «Harvard pulls the plug on disinformation research project led by Hunter Biden laptop skeptic», Yael Halon, Fox News, February 3, 2023. «Harvard shuts down ’misinformation’ research program and cuts ties with director who was skeptical of Hunter Biden laptop story (but claims it was for ’bureaucratic reasons’)», Will Potter, Daily Mail, February 3, 2023.

[5] “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad”, Emma-Jo Morris & Gabrielle Fonrouge ; “WH press secretary locked out of Twitter for sharing Post’s Hunter Biden story” , Steven Nelson, New York Post, October 14, 2020.

[6] “A gang of drug addicts and neo-nazis”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 5 March 2022.

[7] “David Brock, Clintons agitprop man, zeroes in to rescue the Bidens”, Voltaire Network, 2 December 2022.

[8] «Defense, State, and USAID Inspectors General Visit Kyiv», Department of Defense Office of Inspector Genral, January 31, 2023.

[9] « Kings of Ukrainian Gas », Anticorruption Action Center, 26 août 2012.

[10] “WSJ News Exclusive“, Timothy Puko & Rebecca Ballhaus, October 16, 2019, Wall Street Journal.

[11] «Hunter Biden Bio Firm Partnered With Ukrainian Researchers ‘Isolating Deadly Pathogens’ Using Funds From Obama’s Defense Department», Natalie Winters & Raheem J. Kassam, The National Pulse, March 24, 2022.

Nord Stream Sabotage Backfires With Historic Demolition of U.S. Image and Lies Over Ukraine War

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Washington is a war-criminal state par excellence along with its European Quislings.

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The Hersh report is a devastating revelation of U.S. and NATO international terrorism as well as Western media complicity. It exposes the lawlessness of U.S. government, the total disregard by Washington for its so-called European allies, the supine nature of European governments, Germany in particular, and the real geopolitical reasons behind the war in Ukraine, and subsequently the shocking servility of Western media in refusing to cover what is an astounding act of criminality.

This is an explosive story in more ways than one and indeed in more ways than we can perhaps even calculate at this stage. Only one week after its publication, the fallout and reverberations continue to amplify. Such is the parlous and pathetic state of Western journalism, Hersh was obliged to publish his account on his resources, knowing that mainstream outlets would not touch it. That systematic media censorship and exposure of propaganda functioning is itself a huge scandal that will grow further. This is while the European Union sanctions and bans Russian media, even though Russian media have been vindicated by Hersh’s revelations while Western media is shown to be an utter disgrace.

On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. European states have since acknowledged that, albeit with muted reports. For its part, Russia has from the outset blamed Western powers for an act of terrorism. Washington initially made the preposterous claims that Russia had carried out the attacks in revenge against Europe. And Western media went along with the ridiculous ride.

There is no disputing that the damage was deliberate sabotage. The 1,222-kilometer undersea civilian infrastructure was the biggest of its kind in the world, involving a consortium of companies from Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands. It took more than a decade to construct at an estimated cost of over €12 billion. The enormous loss of natural gas volumes from the explosion could also be monetized in billions of euros.

State-Sponsored Terrorism

So, without even attributing specific culpability, this sabotage constitutes an egregious act of state-sponsored terrorism that violates international law on numerous counts. And yet Western media have acted like the proverbial monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.

At the time of the spectacular event, many critical observers immediately suspected foul play. In our Strategic Culture Foundation weekly editorial of September 30, the headline stated: “Blatantly Obvious Who Gains From Nord Stream Sabotage”.

We postulated back then only days after the incident that a plausible cause was “deliberate sabotage” by the United States and its NATO allies.

“If that’s the case, then it is an act of terrorism against civilian infrastructure and a grievous blow to Russia’s national interests. It could be construed as a criminal act of war,” we wrote.

Our editorial cited U.S. President Joe Biden’s own words of warning issued at a White House press conference when he spoke on February 7, 2022. Biden appeared to stray off script and cryptically asserted to reporters that the Nord Stream would be “brought to an end” if Russia were to intervene militarily in Ukraine, as Russia did two weeks later on February 24 (as a result of deadly NATO provocations, we should add).

“His [Biden’s] cryptic assertion, over-riding European governments, suggests that a contingency plan had already been authorized to take out the Nord Stream. And, it seems, the nefarious action duly went ahead this week,” we wrote.

(We modestly take pride in the objective perspicacity of our assessment. And yet this online journal is smeared and banned by the United States and European governments as a Russian propaganda tool.)

Seymour Hersh’s investigative report published last week corroborates what many observers had suspected at an early stage. The irrefutable fact is the Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up by U.S. military forces. Not only that, but the Americans were aided and abetted by NATO member Norway, and quite possibly by other NATO members including Poland, Denmark and Britain.

This is an earth-shattering scandal. The repercussions are going to keep cascading and cascading. Hersh has followed up with promises of more indicting details in forthcoming articles. Other journalists are now corroborating his details about U.S. navy divers planting explosives under the cover of NATO war games in the Baltic Sea last June. Hersh claims that some of the C4 bombs did not detonate as planned. That means there could still be evidence to be found on the seabed conclusively implicating the United States.

Then there was the earlier report by Swedish divers who had inspected the site in the aftermath of the explosions. Did they try to clean up the crime scene? The Swedish authorities have refused to disclose the contents of their report. They have a case to answer, as do the Danes, the Norwegians, the Brits and most of all the Americans.

Russia has called for a United Nations Security Council meeting to convene next week on the subject, based on the latest investigative report by Seymour Hersh. China has also called for an independent international commission to study the matter.

Questions are also urgently required from the German government on what it knew about the sabotage. As our columnist Martin Jay pointed out this week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in the White House on February 7 last year when Biden made his clumsy threat to take out the Nord Stream. The implication is that Scholz knew in advance of the demolition plan.

Western Media’s Damning Silence

We are talking here about multiple malfeasance and cardinal crimes. Terrorism, destruction of sovereign property, aggression and incitement of war, treason and an orchestrated media cover-up involving supposed bastions of Western journalism. The New York Times and Washington Post have so far ignored the Hersh report. Western media have stubbornly refused to investigate this urgent story. How damning is that?

Internationally renowned legal expert Professor Francis Boyle has assessed (in email correspondence with SCF) that a prosecution case can be brought against the United States over the Nord Stream incident under the auspices of the International Criminal Court. The U.S. is not a signatory to the foundational Rome Statute but the incident occurred in territory belonging to European states that are. Whether such a prosecution proceeds and whether the UN Security Council takes action later this week are moot points. But at the very least, the whole scandal is blowing up in the court of international public opinion.

Seymour Hersh (now aged 85) is to be commended for his journalistic service. We may quibble about some details in his report. Has he covered the full picture of all the actors involved? Perhaps not. His report is not a geopolitical analysis and some of his premises suggest he is not critical of the U.S. or NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine. These reservations are relatively minor to his main point of understanding what actually took place.

Those caveats aside, however, one can say that Hersh’s report is a blockbuster. His lifetime work is impeccable. He uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 when hundreds of men, women and children were murdered gratuitously by American troops. Hersh also exposed in 2004 the torture practices by the US military in Iraq at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

Historic Impact

Hersh’s reporting in the past has had a historic impact. It mobilized public understanding and opinion about the nefarious nature of U.S. wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

As many analysts and our own weekly editorials at SCF have repeatedly pointed out, the war in Ukraine is a bigger geopolitical cause than the absurd narrative put out by Western governments and news media about “defending Ukraine and Western freedom from Russia aggression”. We have consistently analyzed that the expansion of NATO, the weaponization of Ukraine, and the current conflict are all about the American imperialist ambition for hegemonic control. Destroying normal relations between Europe and Russia and most especially destruction of the strategically important energy trade are all part of the objective. Pursuing that objective has created a most dangerous war that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.

As eminent American commentator Jeffrey Sachs has noted, the criminal conduct of Washington regarding the blowing up of the Nord Stream is totally characteristic of U.S. criminal behavior that has been practiced over many decades since World War Two. The difference now is that this criminality directly impinges on many more people’s lives – from the danger of catastrophic war to the economic misery caused by wanton American aggression.

The Hersh article – despite the Western media shamefully ignoring it thereby exposing their own criminal complicity in U.S. terrorism – has made the world more aware than ever of the rogue state that is the United States and its capitalist, imperialist dynamics.

Inciting war in Europe, antagonizing a nuclear Russia with unprecedented aggression, inflicting mass poverty and hardship on European civilians, and lying about it all the time through its propaganda media. Washington is a war-criminal state par excellence along with its European Quislings.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked several weeks ago, the historic situation is revolutionary.

Nord Stream Terror Attack: The Plot Thickens

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By Pepe Escobar

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris.

Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report on how the United States government blew up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea last September continues to generate rippling geopolitical waves all across the spectrum.

Except, of course, in the parallel bubble of U.S. mainstream media, which has totally ignored it, or in a few select cases, decided to shoot the messenger, dismissing Hersh as a “discredited” journalist, a “blogger”, and a “conspiracy theorist”.

I have offered an initial approach, focused on the plentiful merits of a seemingly thorough report, but also noting some serious inconsistencies.

Old school Moscow-based foreign correspondent John Helmer has gone even further; and what he uncovered may be as incandescent as Sy Hersh’s own narrative.

The heart of the matter in Hersh’s report concerns attribution of responsibility for a de facto industrial terror attack. Surprisingly, no CIA; that falls straight on the toxic planning trio of Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland – neoliberal-cons part of the “Biden” combo. And the final green light comes from the Ultimate Decider: the senile, teleprompt-reading President himself. The Norwegians feature as minor helpers.

That poses the first serious problem: nowhere in his narrative Hersh refers to MI6, the Poles (government, Navy), the Danes, and even the German government.

There’s a mention that on January 2022, “after some wobbling”, Chancellor Scholz “was now firmly on the American team”. Well, by now the plan had been under discussion, according to Hersh’s source, for at least a few months. That also means that Scholz remained “on the American team” all the way to the terror attack, on September 2022.

As for the Brits, the Poles and all NATO games being played off Bornhom Island more than a year before the attack, that had been extensively reported by Russian media – from Kommersant to RIA Novosti.

The Special Military Operation (SMO) was launched on February 24, almost a year ago. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 blow up happened on September 26. Hersh assures there were “more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to ‘sabotage the pipelines’”.

So that confirms that the terror attack planning preceded, by months, not only the SMO but, crucially, the letters sent by Moscow to Washington on December 2022, requesting a serious discussion on “indivisibility of security” involving NATO, Russia and the post-Soviet space. The request was met by a dismissive American non-response response.

While he was writing the story of a terror response to a serious geopolitical issue, it does raise eyebrows that a first-rate pro like Hersh does not even bother to examine the complex geopolitical background.

In a nutshell: the ultimate Mackinderian anathema for the U.S. ruling classes – and that’s bipartisan – is a Germany-Russia alliance, extended to China: that would mean the U.S. expelled from Eurasia, and that conditions everything any American government thinks and does in terms of NATO and Russia.

Hersh should also have noticed that the timing of the preparation to “sabotage the pipelines” completely blows apart the official United States government narrative, according to which this a collective West effort to help Ukraine against “unprovoked Russian aggression”.

That elusive source

The narrative leaves no doubt that Hersh’s source – if not the journalist himself – supports what is considered a lawful U.S. policy: to fight Russia’s “threat to Western dominance [in Europe].”

So what seems a U.S. Navy covert op, according to the narrative, may have been misguided not because of serious geopolitical reasons; but because the attack planning intentionally evaded U.S. law “requiring Congress to be informed”. That’s an extremely parochial interpretation of international relations. Or, to be blunt: that’s an apology of Exceptionalism.

And that brings us to what may be the Rosebud in this Orson Welles-worthy saga. Hersh refers to a “secure room on the top floor of the Old Executive Office Building …that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board”.

This was supposedly the place where the terror attack planning was being discussed.

So welcome to PIAB: the President Intelligence Advisory Board. All members are appointed by the current POTUS, in this case Joe Biden. If we examine the list of current members of PIAB, we should, in theory, find Hersh’s source (see, for instance, “President Biden Announces Appointments to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the National Science Board”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”; and “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”.

Here are the members of PIAB appointed by Biden: Sandy Winnefeld; Gilman Louie; Janet Napolitano; Richard Verma; Evan Bayh; Anne Finucane; Mark Angelson; Margaret Hamburg; Kim Cobb; and Kneeland Youngblood.

Hersh’s source, according to his narrative, asserts, without a shadow of a doubt, that “Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine” and that “alarm was growing in Washington”. It’s beggars belief that this supposedly well informed lot didn’t know about the massing of NATO-led Ukrainian troops across the line of contact, getting ready to launch a blitzkrieg against Donbass.

What everyone already knew by then – as the record shows even on YouTube – is that the combo behind “Biden” were dead set on terminating the Nord Streams by whatever means necessary. After the start of the SMO, the only thing missing was to find a mechanism for plausible deniability.

For all its meticulous reporting, the inescapable feeling remains that what Hersh’s narrative indicts is the Biden combo terror gambit, and never the overall U.S. plan to provoke Russia into a proxy war with NATO using Ukraine as cannon fodder.

Moreover, Hersh’s source may be eminently flawed. He – or she – said, according to Hersh, that Russia “failed to respond” to the pipeline terror attack because “maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did”.

In itself, this may prove that the source was not even a member of PIAB, and did not receive the classified PIAB report assessing Putin’s crucial speech of September 30, which identifies the “responsible” party. If that’s the case, the source is just connected (italics mine) to some PIAB member; was not invited to the months-long situation-room planning; and certainly is not aware of the finer details of this administration’s war in Ukraine.

Considering Sy Hersh’s stellar track record in investigative journalism, it would be quite refreshing for him to elucidate these inconsistencies. That would get rid of the fog of rumors depicting the report as a mere limited hangout.

Considering there are several “silos” of intel within the U.S. oligarchy, with their corresponding apparatuses, and Hersh has cultivated his contacts among nearly all of them for decades, there’s no question the allegedly privileged information on the Nord Stream saga came from a very precise address – with a very precise agenda.

So we should see who the story really indicts: certainly the Straussian neo-con/neoliberal-con combo behind “Biden”, and the wobbly President himself. As I pointed out in my initial analysis, the CIA gets away with flying colors.

And we should not forget that the Big Narrative is changing fast: the RAND report, the looming NATO humiliation in Ukraine, Balloon Hysteria, UFO psy op. The real “threat” is – who else – China. What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris. Knowing that those who really run the show never show their hand.

Sy Hersh and The Way We Live Now

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By Craig Murray

Source: Craig Murray Blog

It is a clear indicator of the disappearance of freedom from our so-called western democracies, that Sy Hersh, arguably the greatest living journalist, cannot get this monumental revelation on the front of the Washington Post or New York Times, but has to self-publish on the net.

Hersh tells the story of the US destruction of the Nordstream pipelines in forensic detail, giving dates, times, method and military units involved. He also outlines the importance of the Norwegian armed forces working alongside the US Navy in the operation.

One point Sy does not much stress, but it is worth saying more about, is that Norway and the USA are of course the two countries who have benefitted financially, to an enormous degree, from blowing up the pipeline.

Both not only have gained huge export surpluses from the jump in gas prices, but Norway has directly replaced Russian gas to the tune of some $40 billion per year. From 2023 the United States will appear in that list in second place behind Norway, following the opening in the last two months of two new Liquefied Natural Gas terminals in Germany, built to replace Russian gas with US and Qatari supplies.

So Russia lost out massively financially from the destruction of Nordstream and who benefited? The USA and Norway, the two countries who blew up the pipeline.

But of course, this war is nothing to do with money or hydrocarbons and is all about freedom and democracy…

To return to Hersh’s account, particularly interesting are the series of decisions taken to avoid classification of the operation in various ways which would require it to be reported to Congress. In terms of United States history, this ought to be a big deal.

For the Executive to commit what is an act of war without the approval of the Legislature is fundamentally unconstitutional. But that is one of those quaint remnants of democracy that the neo-liberal elite consensus can quietly sidestep nowadays.

Hersh sets out the well known background in compelling detail,  including the fact that, from Biden down, the Americans effectively announced what they were going to do, openly.

But what most worries me about the entire story is the unanimous complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring the completely obvious.

The media line, parroted here relentlessly by the BBC and corporate media, was  that the Russians had probably themselves blown up the pipeline on which they had expended such great resources and three decades of intense diplomatic activity, and which was to be the key to Russia’s single most valuable source of income for the next 40 years.

This was always quite literally incredible. You would have to be deranged to believe it.

It actually taught me not just that we truly are in the realm of totalitarianism and the Big Lie, but I learnt something very important about how the Big Lie works.

The secret is not that people genuinely believe an outrageous claim. The secret is that people do genuinely believe that they are in a battle of good against evil, and it is necessary to accept the narrative being promoted, in the interests of fighting evil.

Don’t question, just follow. If you do question, you are promoting evil.

I am sure that is how it works.

State and corporate stenographer journalists are actually intelligent individuals. If they thought about it, they would realise that the narrative that Russia blew up its own pipeline is obvious nonsense.

But they are convinced it is morally wrong to think about it.

Which is why none of them challenged the equally mad claims that Russia was repeatedly shelling its own forces occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, and indeed is why none of them challenged the utterly risible official version of the Skripal story.

I previously told the anecdote from when I worked in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and asked a good friend if he really believed the misinformatioin on Iraqi WMD with which he was involved.

He replied by referring to the video game Championship Manager (now renamed Football Manager), which we used to play together. He said when he was in the game, it was immersive, he was manager of Liverpool, and it fully absorbed him.

Similarly, when he walked through the FCO gates, the world of the intelligence reports was immersive and Iraq did have these WMDs inside that world. He worked in the “reality” of the FCO. Once he left in the evening, he lived in a different reality, the world of us in the pub.

I do know of one or two journalists bright enough to detach their professional output from what they really think, in a similar way. (I once had a conversation along these lines with Jeremy Bowen in Tashkent.)

Most however don’t think like this. They simply think that all right thinking people support the historic struggle against the evil Russians, so it must be right to read out the propaganda without thinking too much about it.

Those of us critical of the aggressive promotion of war in Europe, are not only barred from all mainstream media and confined to corners of the internet, and even then heavily suppressed on social media (which is why Sy Hersh’s article does not have the scores of millions of readers it merits).

We can’t even obtain freedom of assembly.

Two established left wing venues have cancelled the No 2 Nato meeting I am addressing in London on 25 February. Conway Hall’s reasons for cancellation included threats to funding and fears for the safety of staff.

We are now reduced to a guerrilla meeting, the Central London venue for which will not be announced until the evening before.

Is this really a democracy, where it is not possible for dissidents to hold a public meeting without secrecy, subterfuge and hiding from supporters of the state?

I do urge you to come along on the day, whatever your views on the subject, to support the right to freedom of speech.

I have a different view from perhaps all of the other speakers, on the legitimacy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which I oppose.

But I also oppose NATO expansion which is an underlying cause of the war, and indeed oppose the existence of NATO itself.

NATO is a war machine which sucks resources from working people to benefit the military industrial complex, and unleashes devastating destruction on developing states which do not make their natural resources available to western billionaire elites.

It is also a fundamental node of the propaganda apparatus which manipulates and controls our society, particularly as counter narrative and dissident thought is now rigorously and systematically excluded.

There is no longer an Overton window of permitted debate. It has narrowed and should be renamed the Overton letterbox.

One of those small difficult ones right down at the bottom of the door.  With a very fierce spring, and snarling dogs guarding it.

Did the US Blow Up Nord Stream If There is No Media to Report It?

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“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island” (Image: Seymour Hersh Substack)

By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

A respected investigative journalist explains how the U.S. sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines. But corporate media working in service to the state ignore the story and endanger the world.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The idea behind this old thought experiment should not be relegated to the realm of philosophy. Present day reality can be used in place of hypothetical falling trees. If the United States blows up the Nord Stream pipelines but the media ignores it, did the attack ever happen?

Seymour Hersh has all of the credentials that usually give one gravitas in the world of journalism. As a freelance reporter he exposed the U.S. army’s 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts. He later worked at the New York Times and reported on high profile stories such as the Watergate revelations, and the CIA coup against the government of Chile. In 2004 Hersh exposed torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison for The New Yorker.

None of these accomplishments helped Hersh when he recently provided evidence of what had long been obvious, that the Biden administration blew up the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022. In a 5,200 word article published on his Substack entitled How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline , Hersh utilized highly placed sources who presented as one might say the “receipts” of how the deed was done.

Joe Biden and his foreign policy team at the State Department, National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency first discussed the operation one year before carrying it out, and months before Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine began. The fear of deepening integration between Russia and Germany was the cause of alarm. They wanted to end Europe’s resource and financial connections to Russia, and decided that exploding the means of transporting natural gas was a good idea. According to Hersh’s source(s) the plot was carried out with help from Norway, a NATO member nation that made itself the sole source of natural gas in the region by helping in the attack. The current Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, was formerly a prime minister of Norway.

The U.S. had the motive, means, and opportunity and spent many months confessing to the plot and then to the crime after it took place. In February 2022 Biden pledged to stop the Nord Stream 2 project and added for good measure, “I promise you we’ll be able to do it.” After the explosion Secretary of State Antony Blinken said , “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all end the dependence on Russian energy.” Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland smugly said at a Senate hearing, “Senator 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.”

Hersh’s article was a sensation online when it was published on February 8, 2023 but it has been ignored by major corporate media ever since. One has to ask if it really happened when the New York Times, Washington Post and television networks ignore what ought to be a huge news story.

It isn’t hard to understand why the same individuals and institutions who act as state mouthpieces would want to sweep Hersh’s reporting under the rug. For months they have acted as scribes instead of as journalists. The days when they would compete to break a scoop that a president wanted covered up are long gone. They now go along with establishment narratives, and promote imperialism as much as the people they are tasked with covering and confronting. Not one person asked about Hersh’s revelations at the daily white house press briefing the day after it was published.

Not only have the media ignored what Hersh reported but Republicans who claim to oppose Biden and the Democrats have also been silent. There are impeachable offenses committed in Hersh’s account but the people who should be asking questions have demurred. Republicans were as eager as Democrats to end Nord Stream’s existence. The word collusion which was bandied about so much in recent years is apropos here and that means the Hersh story is now at the bottom of the sea politically.

Biden is the fox in charge of the hen house, preparing to ask congress for the biggest defense budget in history, in large part to replenish the weapons used in Ukraine. The people who are asked to accept austerity for themselves are largely ignorant of how the conflict started and why their money is used for every purpose except for those that benefit them.

The Nord Stream sabotage is not the only news story which has been deep sized. The decision to sabotage Nord Stream was very reckless, and a sign that Biden and his team are willing to risk a wider war in order to do what they cannot, weaken Russia or get Vladimir Putin out of office, or destroy Russia economically. At the very moment that people in this country need to know the hard truth, it is being kept from them.

So complete is the indoctrination that Biden’s obvious instability is never discussed, even when the public see it for themselves unfiltered. At the State of the Union address he made this odd remark , “Name me a world leader who’d change places with Xi Jinping! Name me one! Name me one!” The strange outburst was never given the attention that it deserved.

The media are behaving in a manner that violates their own ethics and that may in fact be criminal. Lest anyone forget, the post-World War II Nuremberg trials charged the German press with committing “propaganda as an instrument of war.” Now in the nuclear age the media in what is known as the “collective west” are acting in a similar fashion, covering up crimes and repeating lies as truth in the name of making and continuing war.

The Biden administration did sabotage Nord Stream whether the media say so or not. Their lack of attention doesn’t change facts, but it does disappear them and that is incredibly dangerous to the entire world.