Did Biden order bombing of Nord Stream pipeline? Seems so

For those of us of younger generations, Seymour "Sy" Hersh is not a well-known name. But in days past, his investigative journalism was nothing short of award-winning. Hersh earned his 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for exposing the 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam and the ensuing government cover-up. His resume includes writing as a first-rate reporter for The New Yorker and the New York Times, participating in the reporting on the 1972 Watergate scandal. His 2004 article in the New Yorker called "Torture at Abu Graib" covered the disgusting abuse of prison inmates by U.S. intelligence officials, proving culpability to the highest levels of federal government.

Hersh has apparently determined to go independent at this point in his career and open a substack page – and his first post is a doozy. He has alleged that it was U.S. intelligence and military that blew up Russia's Nord Stream pipeline in northern Europe with the help of the Norwegian navy, Sept. 26, 2022. The report indicates that this was being planned as early as December of 2021.

Hersh notes, regarding the U.S. government's motives, "As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia." I would add to that the possibility of Germany losing its motivation to participate fully in international sanctions against Russia, refusing the natural gas needed to keep its factories humming and its people from freezing to death in winter. When the people rise up with good reason, the government, no matter how elitist and hard-nosed, generally has a hard time not capitulating. With the Nord Stream pipeline out of the picture, Germany is much more likely to play along.

Considering the way Hersh wrote about Panama City and the little navy base here, I would guess that his writing cannot be believed. Things he says may be true but one cannot guess that from the fact that he says them.

This from a blogger whom I know but who does not wish to be identified.

The internet is very excited about Mr. Hersh's recent hit-piece implicating the US in the pipeline explosions.

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

I have issues with it. I have no trouble at all believing the US could have done it. Any number of countries could have done it. Arguments can be made, our government is mostly bastards, etc. But here's the thing. Hersh is trying to get my hometown bombed, so I have a bone or two to pick with his article.

I've read through it, and the impression I get is not so much that Hersh has evidence that this is how things went down. To me, it sounds like Hersh went for a beach vacation in PCB and got a surly waitress and food poisoning, and now holds a grudge about it.

I'm not particularly interested in his theories about the pipeline blast. I'm super interested in all 8 mentions of my hometown, and how horrible he sounds in all of them. Let's go through them one by one: 1)"The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border."

That is how the article opens. Lawd. Tell me you're not from around here, without telling me you're not from around here. Where the FRACK is "the southwestern panhandle" of florida? I'm serious. Where is that? There is no "southwest" in the Panhandle. There's West, Central, and Big Bend. PC is Central. Maybe even south-central. But as soon as you put "West" in there you're talking about Pensacola, maybe Destin/FtWalton at a stretch. Journos: when you're writing about a specific geographic location, try looking at it on a map. Then skim the county website and see how it describes the area. Try not to sound like a rube.

Also, I'm having a hard time figuring out how it can be "obscure" but also be a "booming resort city". Pick one. You can't have both. And for people not from around here: there are two cities: Panama City, and Panama City Beach. Different mayors, different police chiefs, different towns. On the west side of the bridge, is PCB. PCB might, on a good day, be described as a "booming resort city". Panama City, on the east side of the bridge, is in no way a resort town. All the resorts are on the Beach side. But if you're a journo who can't be bothered to get his facts straight, you might miss this detail.

This is the only place in the article where he even *tries* to name the facility he thinks is involved, and he gets the name wrong. "Diving and Salvage Center" Sigh. Even google maps could have told him it's the US Naval Diving & Salvage Training Center. And this guy is an award-winning journalist. Is he getting old? Maybe not on top of his game anymore? Or has he always been careless about details? Or is he for some weird liability reason deliberately *not* saying it so he can pretend he was talking about something else later? Like "hey you can't prosecute me because I wasn't even talking about you, see?"

2) "The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea." OK, that's the complete sentence. Read it a couple of times. WTF does that even mean? Minus ten for kludgy style, bad editing, and poor syntax. Why does he zero in on our dinky little navy base, when the sooper-special deep-sea diving techniques he's talking about were developed in the 60s, definitely not a secret anymore, and probably every government with a coastline has a program like it by now? We literally went on elementary school field trips to the facility he's talking about, where they explained all about the cool stuff the deep-sea divers could do with helium and rebreathers. And that was thirty years ago. But hey, "journo" can pretend it's news I guess?

Funny enough, the first big saturation-diving experiments were conducted out in the Gulf of Mexico in a giant metal gas tank that was converted into a watertight bunkhouse and dropped by crane onto the seafloor. How do I know? Because another popular field-trip destination for all the local schools is the little Museum of Man and the Sea out on the beach. Sealab I sits in their parking lot. You can walk around and touch it without even paying the museum entry fee. Thousands of us did, as kids. I can't remember if there was an educational video to go with it, or just a placard. Pretty sure it was a video.

I have no idea why you'd go to PC to recruit "taciturn" navy divers. For real. Is he suggesting that they send the quiet ones to PC to train? That the navy trains them in tightlipped-ness there? Is this poetic license? If we're doing creative prose now, why does everybody think this is a hard-hitting, serious piece of journalism?

3) "There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City."

Hardcore, baby. Smell that totally unbiased journalism.

4) "Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline."

Sigh. The capabilities. Of the deep-sea divers. In Panama City. That are so secret they talk about them to large groups of schoolkids. Saturation diving isn't a bloody secret. Everybody who's interested in anything related to it, knows about it by now. It's been around for half a century, and you can read about it on wikipedia. This is like watching someone build a spy narrative around some top-secret new tech, and finding out that technology is... fuel injection systems.

5&6) "At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the cover of popular magazines."

Again with the "obscure"! Except now he goes on (and on, and on) with that theme: "unwanted backwater" "less desirable" "least glamorous" never Hollywood... blah blah blah. Screw you, Hersh. Really. Does he think the best, most essential, dive training program in the country is really where they send the illiterate screwups?

He's also implying, somewhere in that word salad, that the mine-warfare divers are the same as the deep-sea guys. And I'm pretty sure those are different specialties.

7) "The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion."

The Panama City boys. Not the navy divers. Not the deep-sea squad. The Panama City boys. As though military bases were all staffed by local guys, same as any other employment. Have a look at a map sometime. The base is only in Panama City by a weird technicality. It's across 1 street from the city of Panama City Beach (a separate municipality), and across an entire bay from Panama City proper. And nearly everyone who works there is from somewhere else, and will go on to finish their careers somewhere else. Why is Hersh so fixated on attaching these divers to Panama City, the town, specifically (the town that he can't figure out is *not* the beach resort town of Panama City Beach, even though he knows there's a laundromat across from the base), instead of to the Navy, or the base they trained at, or the unit they are part of? Does he not know any of the specs? Is he deliberately evading? This is weaselly.

And it also makes me think he hates my hometown and wants to get us bombed by Russia. What other reason is there for portraying the place as an obscure backwater, and then pinning a heinous act of international sabotage affecting millions of people, on it. Not the Navy, but us, the obscure, backwater town that happens to host an obscure, backwater Navy base. Why do that? That's spiteful.

8) "The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines..."

Again. Not the Navy divers. Not the deep-sea divers. Not even the American divers. No, the Panama City divers. WHY?? Mr. Hersh, WHY do you hate my obscure hometown? Why the insults? Why paint a target on us? Nearly 200,000 people live in that county, and most of them have nothing to do with the Navy. Did a Coram's waitress spit in your grits? Did you get bedbugs at a seedy beach motel (and then, like every other tourist, not know the difference between PC and PCB, and also not care)? Were you snubbed by a Russian exotic dancer on an exploitative temporary work visa? What gives? Got sandspurs in your shoelaces? Stepped on a prickly pear in your flip-flops?

I don't know enough to know whether what he's alleging is true or not, but I know my hometown well enough to know he didn't do his homework there, so why on earth should I trust him on the rest? This doesn't look like good journalism-- more like rumor-mongering.

Southwestern panhandle my arse.

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