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“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

(seymourhersh.substack.com)
688 points hunglee2 | 1 comments | 08 Feb 23 12:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.325s | source
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mmastrac ◴[08 Feb 23 19:03 UTC] No.34713024[source]▶
It's a great story, but it's all unsourced and could be a decent Tom Clancy story at best. You could probably write a similar one with Russia or German agents as the key players and be just as convincing.

The only anchor in reality appears to be Biden suggesting that they knew how to take it out which seems like a pretty weak place to build a large story.

What I find particularly odd is that this entire thing appears to be based on a single, unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning".

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vanviegen ◴[08 Feb 23 19:11 UTC] No.34713169[source]▶
> What I find particularly odd is that this entire thing appears to be based on a single, unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning".

Why is that weird? Assuming this is true, there would be rather many people with such knowledge. One of them may feel the need to talk. Would you expect such a source to be named?

Also, I find it a lot easier to imagine why the US would want to do this, than why Russia or Germany would want to do this.

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indymike ◴[08 Feb 23 20:02 UTC] No.34714046[source]▶
> Why is that weird? Assuming this is true, there would be rather many people with such knowledge. One of them may feel the need to talk.

The level of detail about the operation is basically, some divers from the US Navy attached bombs to the pipeline during a military drill that were detonated with magical sonobouy signals according to some professor who said that might work.

Another red flag: The vast majority of the article was about a political narrative, which really is focused around hurting Russia, and not who is benefited by the destruction of the pipeline. The US government does not own our energy industry and is often at odds with the gas and oil industry here, and this article assumes a level of integration that does not exist in the US political system.

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1. cycomanic ◴[08 Feb 23 23:24 UTC] No.34717166[source]▶
> Another red flag: The vast majority of the article was about a political narrative, which really is focused around hurting Russia, and not who is benefited by the destruction of the pipeline. The US government does not own our energy industry and is often at odds with the gas and oil industry here, and this article assumes a level of integration that does not exist in the US political system.

I am not really qualified to judge on the verity of the article, but the statement that's there is no strong "integration" between the US government and the gas and oil industry (and other ones for that matter) is absurd. The US fought wars over access to cheap oil (Gulf war 1) has put extremely lucrative deals for their own oil companies into place after forcing regime change (gulf war 2), has highest officials transition to highest jobs in industry (Cheney), has shown multiple times that it will use intelligence apperatus for industry advantages (the spying scandal in Germany, airbus vs boring contracts...). Many (most) US military operations over the last 30 years can be directly attributed to economic motivations.