‘Deconstructing the Obvious’ – From My Lai to Nord Stream
“The politics of the destruction of the gas-line – whether it’s an act of war or what – but it was a slap in the face of Europe, saying, you know, “if you’re not going to play ball with me in Ukraine,” said the president… “I don’t care if it’s going to be harder for you to keep your people wealthy and warm.” Basically, that’s what he’s done. And that’s the real input of the story.”
– Seymour Hersh, from this week’s interview
When politicians right across the political spectrum, in support of NATO’s role in supplying military support for Ukraine, when major media support this position with extremely one-sided, context-free coverage, and when recent demonstrations in support of peace pale in comparison with the “Stand With Ukraine” rallies, people with a dissenting opinion can feel extremely lonely.
Early in the Vietnam War, people could totally relate. When the war was in its first year, one tenth of Americans said they felt the need to organize a protest and of those individuals one in ten said they would protest the Vietnam War. One in six by contrast said they were more inclined to protest the antiwar demonstrators! [1]
But it was actual journalism doing incisive work that arguably helped turn the tide and contributed to the Vietnam War finally coming to an end. One of many critical pieces of work in this regard was the reporting of a cover-up of the My Lai massacre, in which as many as 500 civilians in South Vietnam were murdered by several members of the 11th Infantry Brigade. The deaths included women and children and infants.[2]
This story helped massively shift attitudes about the promise of a military effort bravely “freeing the people from communism.” Despite bipartisan support, the U.S. was defeated in large part by massive domestic popular opposition.[3]
The author who wrote this report was Seymour Hersh. The story earned him a Pulitzer prize for International Reporting in 1970. He has since done more reporting on other major issues, including Watergate, the detention and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and the dispute of the Syrian government’s attacking citizens with chemical gas in a Damascus rebel-held suburb in 2013. [4]
In February, just a month ago, the investigative journalist now at 85 has now written another bombshell of a story, this time in relation to the sabotage of pipelines responsible for supplying Germany with copious amounts of natural gas. He claims, based on an anonymous source, that the action was orchestrated by the United States government! [5]
The consequence is that the cost of heating and electricity across Europe is rising and will get even worse by next year. If any independent non-partisan investigation could confirm that the U.S. was indeed to blame, what could this mean for the future of the war? How does it make sense that members of a hostile organization like NATO can be attacked by a fellow member and then be expected to help cover it up?
The future of the “unity of NATO” is questioned in the streets, if not in Parliaments everywhere. The future of NATO, like the future of the Vietnam War may be in jeopardy…
Thanks in large part to Seymour Hersh!
On this episode of the Global Research News Hour, we spend a great deal of time speaking to Sy Hersh about details of the pipeline story not addressed in his report, about the positions of the various individuals at the UN not supporting a non-partisan investigation of the Nord Stream Explosions, the differences between the way investigative journalism of his caliber has changed from the 60s and 70s to the present, and his attitude toward the My Lai massacre nearly 55 years later.
Filling out the show, Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst once focusing on Soviet foreign policy, disagrees with mainstream appraisals of Putin suddenly becoming a sick, irrational, war-mongering despot. He speaks about how he makes sense of the Russian intervention in Ukraine.
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
Edited Transcript of Seymour Herst interview (March 6, 2023)
Global Research: The founder of SpaceKnow, Jerry Javornicky, reported that there were two dark ships in the vicinity just a few days previous to when these attacks happened. And Otto Tabuns, director of the Baltic Security Foundation said it would not – “It would not be common practice to have AIS turned off, unless the vessels have a declassified military mission or they would have some clandestine objectives, because the Baltic Sea is one of the busiest seas in the world in terms of commercial traffic.” I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with your facts or anything like that, but I’m saying that, you know, is this a part of the bigger picture, you know? Or is it just a red herring? What are your thoughts about that?
Seymour Hersh: I’m not sure what you’re asking. Are you asking that – are you asking that because there are others who work in open-source intelligence have a different understanding? Well, people in open-source, they’ve sort of quieted down in the last couple of weeks.
GR: Yeah.
SH: But basically they said, for example I describe an airplane, an American surveillance airplane that was flown out of a base in Norway, was to trigger the bombs. And the bombing took place on September the 26th. They were – about sometime in the morning they dropped the sonar beam which was going to go through – you know, you have to use very low frequency in low water. If you go to a high frequency, the water just absorbs it. Low frequency hits a receiver down below, that’s 260 feet where the pipeline’s end and they trigger device that triggers the explosion. And all it takes is 20, 30, 40, I don’t know how long. Usually about two minutes for the divers to get out – two hours, rather, for the divers to get out to safety. So, they usually set for 48 hours, but I have no idea how long they set them for in this case.
And so, the open source guys, they said there’s no such claim there. And they also described the ship I use, it was Alta-class minesweeper – or minelayer, there are two different designs, I don’t remember which it was. One lays the mine, and one finds it – hunts it. There’s a mine hunter and a mine sweeper, and they’re slightly different. And one couldn’t find that at any time that’s compatible with the time that I said the explosion took place.
And I will tell you about open-source intelligence. I can just tell you about what happened a couple – about 10 days ago, more than that: our president, President Biden, flew to see Zelensky, if you remember. They had a visit – he went to Kyiv, he showed up in Kyiv and took a walk with him. I don’t know if you remember reading that but it was in the newspapers. And the account – it was either the Washington Post or the New York Times account, a very detailed account of this security risk that he took.
And it describes as the plane got into Poland, at some point it turned off their transponder. If you don’t know what a transponder is, it’s an IFF signal, IFF signal that all commercial – all planes have to use, so everybody knows where they are in case of a problem. They turned it off. Why did they turn it off? Because they didn’t want to be seen. So, maybe just the American plane that dropped the buoy on a very highly classified mission, maybe they did tune off their transponder rather than be – you know, open-source intelligence doesn’t see anything. When they’re talking about two dark ships, they’re talking about images, electronic pulses. And I can tell you that, on a mission like this – I’ve actually asked that question – open-source becomes a great asset, because you can make up anything.
People in the intelligence community, that I know of, this is – the NSA, the National Security Agency was involved in this too, the mission to build – to give the President an option to bomb the pipelines. They could have recreated a major Japanese task force scheming towards Hawaii, you know, for Pearl Harbor, you know. They could have created anything they wanted in the water. So, when you start talking about, ‘They couldn’t track this and they couldn’t track that,’ they’re just ignoring the possibility that there are people that know exactly what an open-source intelligence does. And rather than ignore it, you use it as part of a cover. Of course he didn’t have his transponder on, of course he wasn’t seen, of course the ship, the Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper, whatever it was – it could have been squawking on a different frequency. It turns out, when you’re given a code, detonating code, you have to punch in the code. But you can punch in any code in an emergency, you don’t have to punch in your own. You could fake it up, it’s that simple. But you know, you can’t fight people who are… And you know, the whole source issue…
I left some string in there that people in the White House – there were a couple of phrases I used that they knew I had something going, you know. So they just denied the story, they’re going to deny it, they’re never going to admit it, I don’t think, the White House, how could they? Even if somebody came out and acknowledged that they did it,
GR: Yeah.
SH: I’ve been in this business for 50 or 60 years and I’ve never had anybody that – who talked to me ever get in trouble.
GR: Right, yeah.
SH: That’s because I take the heat, being opaque about sources. I say a source who accessed the information. I don’t indicate that there’s no sign that anybody I knew was actually in a meeting, none whatsoever. And that’s all purposeful. It makes it – if you really don’t what the story, it makes it easier just to pretend that it’s not a good story.
You know, the President, when he went to Kyiv he took a walk in mid-day. And you know what happened? The bombing alarm signal, the sirens that indicated a Russian bombing was coming, a Russian attack – their warning signal, I guess, I forget. In Worl
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