Page 7 - EurOil Week 07 2023

EurOil PIPELINES & TRANSPORT EurOil

Veteran journalist claims Biden ordered US

navy to blow up Nord Stream pipelines

RUSSIA VETERAN journalist Seymour Hersh has US personnel in Iraq.
released an article which claims that the US More recently, he also pushed back against
Hersh was the journalist Navy, at the behest of US President Joe Biden, the narrative that the Russian government
responsible for exposing was responsible for blowing up Russia’s Nord was responsible for the poisoning of former
the My Lai massacre in Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in late September. Russian military officer and UK double agent
the Vietnam war. A series of clandestine bombings and sub- Sergei Skripal in England in 2018. He argued
sequent underwater gas leaks occurred at the that Skripal was likely discussing Russian
Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on September 26, organised crime with British intelligence, and
rendering three of their combined four strings therefore his poisoning was more likely to be
inoperable for the foreseeable future. Russia has carried out by organised crime rather than being
accused the US of sabotaging the pipelines – an state-sponsored.
accusation that Washington has vehemently Fact-checking website Snopes responded to
denied. While Western governments have Hersh’s article, drawing attention to the fact that
stopped short of openly accusing Moscow, there his assertions were dependent on one anony-
is a broad consensus that sabotage was the cause mous source.
of the events. “The story builds this argument by mixing
In an article published on his substack the factual background information about past cov-
85-year-old Hersh –who first gained recogni- ert operations and recent statements made by
tion for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its politicians about their disdain for the pipeline
cover-up during the Vietnam war, cited an anon- with a wildly engrossing narrative based on the
ymous source, revealing that in June 2022, under often secondhand testimony of a single person
the cover of a military training exercise, the US Hersh describes only as a ‘source with direct
Navy placed explosives on the pipelines, which knowledge of the operational planning’.”
were then remotely detonated on September Summarising, Snopes said that the story,
26. The operation was ordered by US President “when deconstructed, is merely a pile of pur-
Joe Biden and planned by Secretary of State for ported second-hand information allegedly col-
Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, and National lected by someone connected in some unknown
Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, he asserted. way to deliberations of a highly secret, mul-
Planning for the attack started in December ti-agency task force.”
2021, two months prior to Moscow launching its “Such a story falls prey to the same criticisms
invasion of Ukraine, Hersh said. of other more recent work published by Hersh,
In his article, the journalist reached out for which has relied on similarly questionable anon-
comment from the White House, whose spokes- ymous sources,” the website concluded. “If the
person described the allegations as “false and US did conspire to destroy the Nord Stream
complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a representa- pipeline, Hersh’s reporting has not proved that
tive for the CIA, similarly wrote: “This claim is case. Hersh has, instead, made a very successful
completely and utterly false.” blog post that essentially transcribes a compel-
The damage to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipe- ling story someone unknown to the general pub-
lines has meant that Russia, even if it wishes to, lic told him.” ™
will be unable to restore significant gas flow to
Germany, which prior to the war in Ukraine
was its biggest gas customer in Europe. With the
Yamal-Europe pipeline incapable of flowing gas
westwards as a result of sanctions imposed by
Russia and Poland against each other, the only
remaining routes for Russian gas into Europe are
through Ukraine and via one string of the Turk-
Stream pipeline under the Black Sea. As of late
January, Russia was only sending just above 10%
of the amount of gas it was delivering to Europe
prior to the war.
In addition to his work on the Vietnam war,
for which he earned a 1970 Pulitzer Prize for
International Reporting, Hersh also covered
the Watergate scandal for The New York Times
during the 1970s and exposed Operation Menu
– the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. He has
also reported on mistreatment of detainees by

Week 07 16•February•2023 www. NEWSBASE .com P7