I weigh in on the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline explosion.

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These days, as I pursue research into human consciousness in the age of artificial intelligence, I try to avoid getting sidetracked too much by political maneuvering. But I was drawn away, I hope briefly, by an inbox Substack piece by Aaron Mate' announcing that Seymour Hersh had his own Substack blog now, and that his opening piece was "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline." This is bombshell stuff. And its political epicenter is still expanding and who knows what beachhead will be littered with the flotsam and jetsam of truths thrown overboard from the ship of state of America's free-falling empire.

But first, I was just immensely grateful that Sy was back -- indeed, that he was still with us. People from my era (the 60s) these days seem to fade and disappear quietly in the whitewaters of our false deliverance from pain down the river Internet, a trip during which we lose our musician to the river and Lewis, our alpha mensch, to bone-break, and have visions of an inbred local boy shaking his banjo No as we begin our journey down the rapids, soon finding ourselves off-grid (Yay!) but off-grid in the dark net (Nooo!) and pig-whistling over a pork barrel as some Proud Boy has his way with our humey homey. All because we gave a damn about the commonweeeal.

Hersh's first blog avers one main proposition: What the CIA and company did to the Nord Stream Gas Lines was "AN ACT OF WAR." Sabotage. Sabotage when the action is in the context of active war between two nations (Ukraine-Russia) is not a proxy entry into the war but a full entry as an ally of Ukraine. Americans are now legitimate targets of payback, thanks to this deliberate subversion of first-choice, where possible, of diplomacy. That's if it's all true, that the Americans did it. They are denying it. The blog even quotes "the source" amidst his (presumably male) fellow conspirators in a 2021 meeting that:

The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. "This is not kiddie stuff," the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, "It's an act of war."

So, they know it's war. Nevertheless, they moved on their play and, Hersh reports, "in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan's interagency group: "We have a way to blow up the pipelines." But first, the Super Bowl.

Hersh has been taking hits lately, one or two times, you could argue, legitimately. Much of the media on the left, and also the working class right (NY Post), are touting Hersh's glory years, including the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his My Lai Massacre revelations, while the right is simply looking to hate on Joe Biden and his presumed devious machinations regarding the Ukraine-Russia war. There seems to be plenty of circumstantial evidence that Bide and Victoria Nuland exposed the administration's hand when, before the Russian invasion, they each insinuated that the Nord Stream II would cease to exist if the invasion occurred. Of course, by blowing up Nord Strean I, along with II, the US was also sending a message to Europe. After all, it was an established pipeline and, in itself, not controversial, other than its running through Ukraine to Europe, which received flow-through fees.

Both Biden and Nuland had personal vested interests in Ukraine -- Biden was the capo for Ukraine under Obama and has direct affiliations with the controversial Burisma Gas company that hired his son, Hunter, for its Board (along with former director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black -- still there); and, Nuland was ambassador to Ukraine and, some argue, the architect of the US-led coup there the following year. The Wikipedia entry for Nuland has a tidy summary, with links, of her work there. It's worth noting the observation that Ed Snowden made, in his memoir, Permanent Record, that "The worst-kept secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as a platform for espionage",[p.126] making Nuland a kind of station manager of the CIA there.

The unresolved shenanigans of the US involvement in Ukraine, especially from the 2014 coup on, would most likely served as good pretext for the now-Republican-led House to have begun impeachment proceedings (they promised revenge after the Trump double-impeachment fiasco), but Biden has stalled the inevitable by making sure he's a wartime president now, so expect the war to continue in Ukraine for at least another year. Of course, Biden could get impeached anyway -- even members of the left have called for his ouster. In 2024, both Biden and Putin are up for re-election, so fasten your seatbelts, as Bette Davis would say.

It's difficult to sort out the sordid details of what's happening with American policy in the post-PNAC era, as so much effort has been made by ultra-conservatives to muzzle even the lapdogs of the MSM. The major networks have hired national security liars, such as John Brennan and James Clapper, to anal-ize the news and provide cover for myriad deceptions, especially after the 2016 DNC hack-in. It seems at times that our Republic has been buried by a tsunami of playful and dangerous deceptions. Dark feel-good fun. The Turd Blossom rule (skew reality to keep them busy), in hyperdrive.

To sort things out until I can get a breather, I rely on the takes of my regular reads of Jeffrey St. Clair, the fearless Caitlin Johnstone, and Consortium News's guest pundits and scribes, among a few others. Often this olio has sharp-eyed information not covered by the MSM. St. Clair, while generally supporting Hersh's revelation about Nordstrom sabotage, suggests caution about a story that relies on an unknown "source," which is often how the MSM operates. You can be played by a "source" who likely has an agenda, and you will be risking an accurate understanding by putting your chips down on the authority of the reporting. As St. Clair puts it,

Hersh has built a dazzling career based on the use of anonymous sources, with major expose's over the decades in the New York Times, New Yorker and London Review of Books. In most of those cases, the anonymous source was backed up by tangible evidence of some sort. That's not the case here. There's no documentary or evidentiary trail.

So, it remains to be seen whether Hersh will add some corroboration to his source's information.

The source would almost certainly have come from one of the members of December 2021 conspirators mentioned in Hersh's piece:

In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force""men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments""and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin's impending invasion.

Hersh says the recommendation coming from this group was to blow up Nord Stream 2. The excellent reactionary blogger Caitlin Johnstone wants the reader to accept that the Biden administration's blustering before the invasion is all the corroboration we need. Maybe. And she further delineates the motivation and stakes for the MIC members involved in the war, from the State Department to Raytheon. Her passion for this and every subject she writes about with her blog is welcome, but is itself its own kind of bluster. Still, a better read than most anything coming out of the MSM.Aaron Mate,from whom I first learned about Hersh's revelations and his new Substack blog, reiterated Hersh's information, adding his own take, and pointing out that the Biden's administration's reaction, denying involvement, was also balanced out by how the US would benefit from the opportunities coming for Big Gas.

And Consortium News ran a piece from Craig Murray, a regular contributor, who decried the need for Hersh to resort to self-publishing when the MSM refused to go after the Nord Stream story. In "Sy Hersh and The Way We Live Now," Murray begins by saying,

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 The New York Times, but has to self-publish on the net.

We recall that the controversial Glenn Greenwald quit The Intercept, which he co-found, because they were wanting to "censor" his journalism -- specifically his intended 2020 October Surprise story about Biden family corruption. Murray continues with his piece by laying out -- with graphs -- just who benefitted monetarily from the explosion of the pipelines. Norway, most of all.

I have also followed the doings in Ukraine, from the 2016 DNC doings leading up to the Russian invasion last year here, here, and here. I think it's telling what Victoria Nuland stated, in 2014, according to one of her Wikipedia entries, drawn from a book: Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy, "Following the Maidan Uprising of 2013, Nuland stated that the United States had 'invested' $5 billion to bring about a 'secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.'" What the US brought about is the miraculous rise of Volodymyr Zelensky, a former dance contestant and comic actor on TV, with zilch previous political experience, who rose because he was a grooming project for Ukrainian oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky.

The oligarch has been banned from entering the US by the State Department, due to his "significant role" in corruption in Ukrainian politics. According to a Daily Beast article,Secretary of State Antony Blinken said "he was also concerned about Kolomoisky's 'current and ongoing efforts' to 'undermine Ukraine's democratic processes and institutions.'" This is funny. Zelensky played a highschool teacher, in the hit series Servant of the People, who was outraged by the nations's corruption, and fired up so many fellow citizens that they elected the actor, Zelensky, leader of Servant of the People Party, president of Ukraine.

Deputy Prime Minister and man behind Zelensky, Mikhail Federov explains why it doesn't matter if Zelensky has any political savvy and what he can bring to the table. And yet this CIA asset is almost daily asking/pleading/demanding US billions -- and US jet fighters -- to defend its oligarchs against Russia (and, presumably, its oligarchs). Recall that the US totally understands that the economic sanctions placed on Russia and its oligarchs could well lead to regime change. Like Federov says, Zelensky has already "monetized and made "something out of nothing" to the tune of many billions.

It should also be remembered that the US policy of infiltrating various Russian infrastructure, including its grids and communication structure, with worms and malware are an act of war, too. Or, so it seems, according to a 2019 NYT article, "U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia's Power Grid," in which the authors strongly formally suggest, as many of us have long suspected, that the Internet is a literal battlefield, with all of the implications of that designation applied. The authors (David Sanger and Nicole Pertroth) tell us:

"the action inside the Russian electric grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of "clandestine military activity" in cyberspace, to "deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States ["] Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval ["] Because the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional military activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such briefing would be necessary, they added.

A similar authorization --without direct presidential approval -- was behind the Nord Stream sabotage, according to Hersh. Handy plausible deniability for any commander-in-chief up for re-election, should something go wrong.

By the way, where in the world is Cofer Black?

An Ed Snowden Coincidence

It has made me wonder for some time why Ed Snowden had only one Substack post of 2022. Not too long ago in an interview on unrelated matters, I asked JFK Assassination researcher Jefferson Morley to weigh in on Snowden's one post for the year -- his first since Christmas Eve 2021. Morley wise not to overspeculate mere thought that Snowden had a growing family, was in a difficult position, and needed to keep them safe by sticking to a regimen of tweets instead of analytical Substack blog entries. Fair enough. But it doesn't explain why he wrote that one piece, which stands out for its loneliness. And the subject of the one piece for the year is the CIA: "America's Open Wound:The CIA is not your friend." What follows is a well-written article on the Agency's history of subterfuge from blowing things up to mind control. Presumably it was written to address the 75th anniversary of the Agency's founding (New Yorker took stock of the CIA a month after Snowden's piece and could even be derived from it.) But now it seems an interesting coincidence that his blog piece was published just a week before the Nord Stream explosion. There have been no Snowden Substack pieces since. And it remains to see whether they'll be any other Hersh pieces.

And BTW, Ed, I love ya, man, but what am I paying you $5 a month for to subscribe to your Substack site if youintend to pony up one story a year?

Strange times.

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Authors Bio:

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.