Posted on 02/15/2023 2:36:32 PM PST by Kazan
John Brennan agrees with you
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.
Danny is like that,
about most things.
-fJRoberts-
Consider what was truly at stake before settling your mind on the culpability issue.
If Germany had a very bad winter with people literally freezing to death and all the government had to do to fix things was turn the valve on again...you’re looking at mass insurrection and a weakened German government either caving or falling, or more probably both.
Germany HAD to hold strong on the sanctions because it is the economically strongest European country in both NATO and the EU.
If Germany caves or falls, other member nations will bail out as well and that is the end of NATO and the EU.
The deep state was staring its doom in the face when it struck the pipelines.
It is the nature of man to keep fighting for survival to the bloody end.
Speaking of truth: it’s A.D. not BCE
but some people will have an aversion to truth.
-fJRoberts-
“The Norwegians in particular are howling with laughter.”
In reality any sentient being is incredulous at your naive imbecility.
-fJRoberts-
B.C.
And small peckers too, one would assume.
So you think Hersh is the best investigative journalist, and has superior sources? So tell me who is the liar here, the Navy Seals who raided the Bin Laden compound and killed Bin Laden, or Hersh, because this is what he claims:
“In 2010, Pakistan agreed to sell bin Laden to the US for increased military aid and a “freer hand in Afghanistan.” Rather than kill him or hand him over discreetly, Hersh says the Pakistanis insisted on staging an elaborate American “raid” with Pakistani support.”
“According to Hersh’s story, Navy SEALs met no resistance at Abbottabad and were escorted by a Pakistani intelligence officer to bin Laden’s bedroom, where they killed him. Bin Laden’s body was “torn apart with rifle fire” and pieces of the corpse “tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains” by Navy SEALs during the flight home (no reason is given for this action). There was no burial at sea because “there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case.”
You do know it’s all together possible that the Norwegians didn’t even know that they were detonated the explosive. it wouldn’t be a beyond the United States intelligence community to do this to both isolate Germany and rope Norway at the same time
None of this is important. We have flying objects with possible aliens aboard don’t you know. That is the news fabrication to take away the interest on the pipeline.
That was hard to read. But worth it.
Criticism of the Deep State’s theatrics are not criticisms of the operatives - they can only work within the scope of the information they are given.
Hersch lies: “Navy SEALs met no resistance at Abbottabad and were escorted by a Pakistani intelligence officer to bin Laden’s bedroom, where they killed him”
Either the SEALS are lyings, or Hersh is lying, there is no dumb conspiracy cover story you can come up with to bridge that gap.
Hersh is repeating a story that Pakistan wants out because it saves face for them. Pakistan was either complicit with Bin Ladin or incompetent regarding Bin Ladin or both.
The truth is they were both if you don’t understand that you don’t understand Pakistan.
Pakistan is not so much a nation as they are a collection of tribes, warring\competing factions\clans\families\criminal mobs. The only thing that they can agree on and unites them (sort of!) is their hatred of India.
“Hersh is repeating a story that Pakistan wants “
OK, so he is a liar and a tool of foreign governments. Thanks, we agree. Sometimes he serves Pakistan, and sometimes he serves Russia.
Well, that's kinda subtle... can be read in different ways... /s
Actually, he mostly serves himself. He usually uses as “sources” whatever will give his “stories” the biggest bounce so he can sell them. Keep his “rep” going as the reporter who roots out the big scandal. Remember he’s still living off the glory of the “1969 My Lai Massacre” report. Desperate to recover or shine up some past glory, prove his “big score” wasn’t a fluke.
“Actually, he mostly serves himself”
Good point
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