>The White House on Wednesday dismissed a blog post by a U.S. investigative journalist alleging the United States was behind explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines as "utterly false and complete fiction." >... >"This is utterly false and complete fiction," said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. Spokespeople for the CIA and State Department said the same. https://www.r…
Was this included for comic relief? Or did you actually think we should take the CIA or State Department PR seriously?
Seymour doesn’t provide any proof or any evidence. It’s argument by assertion. What he writes is plausible but without any sources or other corroborating evidence. I think it more believable that Seymour has been paid to write this by a Russian aligned entity. I don’t know the truth of the matter and Seymour could be right. We just can’t tell from the evidence provided.
My thoughts exactly.
If this is true and more evidence comes out, the usual suspects will be screaming it from the rooftops, if not this narrative will die in obscurity. There's been a lot of misinformation about this war, and a bunch of people who for a variety of reasons want to blame the US for it and are willing to believe some incredible things if they support that narrative.
>The White House on Wednesday dismissed a blog post by a U.S. investigative journalist alleging the United States was behind explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines as "utterly false and complete fiction." >... >"This is utterly false and complete fiction," said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. Spokespeople for the CIA and State Department said the same. https://www.r…
The problem is they lie all day, every day, even about trivial stuff that’s easily verified. This looks more like an admission of guilt.
Is there anything they could say or do, without providing undeniable evidence someone else did it that you would believe? If "we didn't do it" reads as "we did it", what do you expect them to do, not respond at all? That would be more suspicious to me.
The blog post is mostly a sea of text with no real citations and loose quotes. The author, though a famed journalist for his breaking of a story 50 years ago, has also made claims recently to defend dictators such as Assad; even going so far as to claim the US was going to fake Bin Laden's dead by dragging his body back to Afghanistan from Pakistan to pretend like he died in a missile strike. His reasoning for this?…
Exposing uncomfortable truths about the US/NATO dirty war in Syria hardly constitutes “defending Assad.” Highly recommend the entire LRB series. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n01/seymour-m.-hersh/mil...
He actually did though. Saying the Syrian rebels gassed themselves (common Assad talking point [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/seymour-m.-hersh/who...] parroted by people like Tulsi Gabbard/Tucker/etc), and also said the Pentagon had a secret agreement with Assad and Putin to undermine Obama. He also offered absolutely no evidence of any of this.
In this essay, I will use the same number and quality of sources as Hersh did in his article to support my claims. Hersh had an incentive to take out the Nord Stream pipeline so he could write the aforementioned article and become slightly relevant again, therefore he did. In conclusion, Seymour Hersh took out the Nord Stream pipeline.
All: Whether he is right or not or one likes him or not, Hersh reporting on this counts as significant new information ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... ), so I've turned off the flags on this submission. If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on the site guidlelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ) and note this one: " Comments should…
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Do you see any sources for their claims?
If you look at all the players, their interests, and their capabilities, I think the most logical conclusion is that the US likely did it. Of course this is not evidence but this the sort of operation where success means no evidence (at least no evidence available to the public at large as it is possible and, one might hope, likely that neighbouring countries know).
> If you look at all the players, their interests, and their capabilities, I think the most logical conclusion is that the US likely did it. How so? The pipeline(s) was/were already off, so the US and Norway already had a new customer because of this. If the US risked blowing up the pipeline(s) (which was already not delivering,) it would put NATO in jeopardy which is explicitly against US interests and WAY more valu…
it prevents the pipeline from being turned back on.
If you look at all the players, their interests, and their capabilities, I think the most logical conclusion is that the US likely did it. Of course this is not evidence but this the sort of operation where success means no evidence (at least no evidence available to the public at large as it is possible and, one might hope, likely that neighbouring countries know).
Why leave one of the brand new, larger pipelines undamaged, so that Russia could then offer after the event to work with Germany to activate it? Which naturally they did. This pipeline had been completed but activation was stopped due to the start of the war. If Germany had capitulated and activated it with Russia that would be a major political win for Russia and blow for the suggested goals of the US and other alli…
Both NS 1 and NS 2 were sabotaged.
The US have been hostile for a long time to Germany getting closer to Russia. The war in Ukraine has just been a convenient event to push their strategic agenda forward and so far, irrespective of those pipelines, it has been very good for the US.
The problem is they lie all day, every day, even about trivial stuff that’s easily verified. This looks more like an admission of guilt.
Is there anything they could say or do, without providing undeniable evidence someone else did it that you would believe? If "we didn't do it" reads as "we did it", what do you expect them to do, not respond at all? That would be more suspicious to me.
Sounds like they should provide undeniable evidence then!
He's lost his credibility over the years. Which is likely why this didn't get published by NY Times. It's long but after reading this ask why you would believe this man who, in this new article, is making plenty of assertions all based on quotes from a single anonymous source. https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi...
Suppose this story was written by a "credible" reporter. Do you think NYT's Foreign Editors would allow it to be published? Would it pass the national security screening?
Claims and sources are supposed verified in journalism. In the case of anonymous sources a journalist can't just bring to his manager a quote and say he's anonymous because that journalist (as many have over the years) might have just made it up. The manager has to know the identity of the source. If the journalist won't share the identity then it won't fly. So if someone else brought this story to NY Times, they would have to give the identity of the source, the manager would need to verify that this source was in a position (time, place, job, what have you) to know the things claimed. And would usually want to hunt down another source that corroborates what this anonymous source says to give it some weight.