How This US Lie Will Likely Lead to War
February 8, 2023, legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh — famous for his 1969 exposure of the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970 — published a shocking article5 claiming the sabotage was carried out by U.S. Navy divers during BALTOPS 22, a NATO exercise that took place in the Baltic Sea in June 2022.
Three months later, the planted explosives were remotely detonated, destroying the two pipelines. According to Hersh:6
“Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal.
For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible. There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the [U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage] center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City.
The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team — National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy — had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas — enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.”
The Threefold ‘Why’ Behind the Attack
According to Hersh’s investigative report,7 the “why” behind Biden’s decision to blow up the pipelines was threefold. First, it would massively impact Russia’s economy, as its oil and gas revenues are estimated to account for as much as 45% of its annual budget. Once Nord Stream 2 got underway, that income stream would increase even further.
Second, eliminating Germany’s and Western Europe’s ability to buy low-cost gas from Russia would force them to buy U.S. gas. As noted by Hersh, Nord Stream 1 was bad enough from the perspective of Washington, but were Nord Stream 2 to open up, Germany would be able to buy more than half of its annual consumption straight from Russia.
Third, with Europe being so reliant on low-cost gas from Russia,8,9 “Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia,” Hersh writes.
A Fateful Plan Was Hatched
According to Hersh, Biden authorized U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to “bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan” for how to address the Nord Stream threat. The task force Sullivan convened allegedly included “men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and the State and Treasury Departments.”
“What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines — and that he was delivering on the desires of the President,” Hersh writes.
“Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly.
The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. 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’ …
Throughout ‘all of this scheming,’ the source said, ‘some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Will Europe View the Attack as an Act of War?
Unfortunately, that’s where we find ourselves today. If the attacks can be definitively traced to the U.S., the Biden administration has not only committed an act of war
Article from LewRockwell
