“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

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".

Seymour Hersh has decades of credibility from reporting the My Lai Massacre to the abuses at Abu Graib.

But he does often rely on sources who remain anonymous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Use_of_anonymous...

I did find it interesting in that Wikipedia article to read that The New Yorker's editor insists on knowing the identify of all of the anonymous sources that Hersh has used when his reporting is published in that magazine. That suggests to me that while Hersh can probably be generally trusted, his work is of a higher quality when it's published in an outlet like The New Yorker, as the editor-in-chief and other staff submit it to a more rigorous internal discussion. That's in comparison to probably no internal review or discussion by Substack.

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi... goes over how his more recent work verges on conspiracy theory.

That even that inconsistent Bin Laden story purportedly relied on two distinct sources, and yet his Nord Stream story purportedly relies on only a single anonymous source, should be a significant red flag here. I have no reason to doubt that Hersh heard the quotes in his Nord Stream story from at least someone in government, but that source's motivations and truthfulness were not independently verified even, by his own admission, by Hersh. And that's just... not credible reporting.

Thanks for that angle. The desire to repeat ones brightest hour can certainly be a strong force and might lead even the most careful astray when a big scoop like Abu Graib makes all further successes seem trivial. I'm not suggesting that he personally made it up, but his desire to believe could be spectacularly strong, turning him into an instrument that is easy to play by people with an agenda.

But I'm biased as well, my desire to believe is strong, only that I'm in team "'t was an inside job" so my bias is in clear opposition of these claims (but in limited to speculation, I find "Russia jumped from excuse to excuse to keep the pipelines closed anyways, so the only immediate winners of the explosions were people in Moscow who felt threatened by some real or imagined "make money not war" faction" logically compelling, but that's all there is, I guess, strongly, but can't claim to know)

> the only immediate winners of the explosions were people in Moscow

Come on now. I get the desire for people to believe their own government could just never possibly engage in this kind of skullduggery (at least, not until they're comfortably removed from the incident in question by many decades and can safely file it under "well we don't do that kind of thing anymore"), but the idea that the Russians were the only ones with motive?!