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seymour hersh
Denmark Finds 'Deliberate Sabotage' of Nord Stream—But Ends Probe With No Charges
The country is the second U.S. ally in the past month to end an investigation into the pipeline explosions.
Feb 26, 2024
Denmark became the latest country to close its investigation into the underwater explosions that caused leaks in two pipelines that were built to carry gas from Russia to Germany, with authorities saying they had found that "there was deliberate sabotage" of the infrastructure but would not go further in their probe to confirm who was behind the blasts.
"The assessment is that there are not sufficient grounds to pursue a criminal case," said the Danish police, prompting criticism from Russian officials and other critics.
Since the gas leaks were discovered in September 2022, seven months after Russia invaded Ukraine, various observers have accused the two countries as well as the United States of being at fault.
The leaks—which experts said led to the single largest release of methane gas due to human activity—were discovered beneath the Baltic Sea, off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm. Seismic institutes found that two explosions had occurred underwater just before the leaks were recorded.
Russian energy giant Gazprom owns a majority stake in the pipelines, with German, Dutch, and French companies also owning interests. Weeks before the leaks were discovered, Russia had intensified tensions in Europe by cutting gas supplies in suspected retaliation for sanctions against Moscow.
The U.S. was a longtime critic of the Nord Stream pipelines, arguing they would increase European dependence on Russia for energy.
Just before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden said in a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that a Russia offensive would push the U.S. to "bring an end to" the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
But the U.S. has denied involvement in the explosions, saying in February 2023 that one report alleging U.S. sabotage published by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh was "false and complete fiction."
Hersh reported, based on a single anonymous source who had "direct knowledge of the operational planning," that Biden had authorized U.S. Navy divers to plant remotely triggered explosives that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, enlisting the help of the Norwegian Navy and secret service.
In March 2023, weeks after Hersh's report was released, the U.S. and several Western allies opposed a United Nations Security Council resolution that aimed to launch an international probe into the Nord Stream explosions.
Earlier this month, Sweden concluded its own investigation, saying the case did not fall under its jurisdiction and noting that they had given "material that can be used as evidence" to German authorities for their probe. Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said that the "primary assumption is that a state is behind it."
The German federal prosecutor's investigation is ongoing.
Journalist Thomas Fazi suggested U.S. allies have dropped their probes because they are "terrified of actually finding the culprit."
The question of who caused the Nord Stream gas leaks, said author Tony Norfield, "has troubled Swedish and Danish investigators so much, they have closed their inquiries. Just in case they uncover something embarrassing."
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How the CIA Destabilizes the World
If only the CIA’s rogue operations had been consigned to history as a result of the crimes exposed by the Church Committee, or at the least had brought the CIA under the rule of law and public accountability. But that was not to be.
Feb 12, 2024
There are three basic problems with the CIA: its objectives, methods, and unaccountability. Its operational objectives are whatever the CIA or the President of the United States defines to be in the U.S. interest at a given time, irrespective of international law or U.S. law. Its methods are secretive and duplicitous. Its unaccountability means that the CIA and president run foreign policy without any public scrutiny. Congress is a doormat, a sideshow.
As a recent CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, said of his time at the CIA: "I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment."
The CIA was established in 1947 as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS had performed two distinct roles in World War II, intelligence and subversion. The CIA took over both roles. On the one hand, the CIA was to provide intelligence to the US Government. On the other, the CIA was to subvert the “enemy,” that is, whomever the president or CIA defined as the enemy, using a wide range of measures: assassinations, coups, staged unrest, arming of insurgents, and other means.
It is the latter role that has proved devastating to global stability and the U.S. rule of law. It is a role that the CIA continues to pursue today. In effect, the CIA is a secret army of the U.S., capable of creating mayhem across the world with no accountability whatsoever.
When President Dwight Eisenhower decided that Africa’s rising political star, democratically elected Patrice Lumumba of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), was the “enemy,” the CIA conspired in his 1961 assassination, thus undermining the democratic hopes for Africa. He would hardly be the last African president brought down by the CIA.
The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding.
In its 77-year history, the CIA has been held to serious public account just once, in 1975. In that year, Idaho Senator Frank Church led a Senate investigation that exposed the CIA’s shocking rampage of assassinations, coups, destabilization, surveillance, and Mengele-style torture and medical “experiments.”
The expose by the Church Committee of the CIA’s shocking malfeasance has recently been chronicled in a superb book by the investigative reporter James Risen, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy.
That single episode of oversight occurred because of a rare confluence of events.
In the year before the Church Committee, the Watergate scandal had toppled Richard Nixon and weakened the White House. As successor to Nixon, Gerald Ford was unelected, a former Congressman, and reluctant to oppose the oversight prerogatives of the Congress. The Watergate scandal, investigated by the Senate Ervin Committee, had also empowered the Senate and demonstrated the value of Senate oversight of Executive Branch abuses of power. Crucially, the CIA was newly led by Director William Colby, who wanted to clean up the CIA operations. Also, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, author of pervasive illegalities also exposed by the Church committee, had died in 1972.
In December 1974, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, then as now a great reporter with sources inside the CIA, published an account of illegal CIA intelligence operations against the U.S. antiwar movement. The Senate Majority Leader at the time, Mike Mansfield, a leader of character, then appointed Church to investigate the CIA. Church himself was a brave, honest, intelligent, independent-minded, and intrepid Senator, characteristics chronically in short supply in U.S. politics.
If only the CIA’s rogue operations had been consigned to history as a result of the crimes exposed by the Church Committee, or at the least had brought the CIA under the rule of law and public accountability. But that was not to be. The CIA has had the last laugh —or better said, has brought the world to tears—by maintaining its preeminent role in U.S. foreign policy, including overseas subversion.
Since 1975, the CIA has run secretive operations backing Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan that utterly wrecked Afghanistan while giving rise to al-Qaeda. The CIA has likely run secretive operations in the Balkans against Serbia, in the Caucuses against Russia, and in Central Asia targeting China, all deploying CIA-backed jihadists. In the 2010s, the CIA ran deadly operations to topple Syria’s Bashir al-Assad, again with Islamic jihadists. For at least 20 years, the CIA has been deeply involved in fomenting the growing catastrophe in Ukraine, including the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 that triggered the devastating war now engulfing Ukraine.
What do we know of these operations? Only the parts that whistleblowers, a few intrepid investigative reporters, a handful of brave scholars, and some foreign governments have been willing or able to tell us, with all of these potential witnesses knowing that they might face severe retribution from the U.S. government. There has been little to no accountability by the U.S. government itself, or meaningful oversight or restraint imposed by Congress. On the contrary, the government has become ever-more obsessively secretive, pursuing aggressive legal actions against disclosures of classified information, even when, or especially when, that information describes the illegal actions by the government itself.
Once in a while, a former U.S. official spills the beans, such as when Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed that he had induced Jimmy Carter to assign the CIA to train Islamic jihadists to destabilize the government of Afghanistan, with the aim of inducing the Soviet Union to invade that country.
In the case of Syria, we learned from a few stories in the New York Times in 2016 and 2017 of the CIA’s subversive operations to destabilize Syria and overthrow Assad, as ordered by President Barack Obama. Here is the case of a dreadfully misguided CIA operation, blatantly in violation of international law, that has led to a decade of mayhem, an escalating regional war, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of displaced people, and yet there has not been a single honest acknowledgment of this CIA-led disaster by the White House or Congress.
In the case of Ukraine, we know that the U.S. played a major covert role in the violent coup that brought down Yanukovych and that swept Ukraine into a decade of bloodshed but to this day, we don’t know the details. Russia offered the world a window into the coup by intercepting and then posting a call between Victoria Nuland, then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State (now Under-Secretary of State) and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (now Assistant Secretary of State), in which they plot the post-coup government. Following the coup, the CIA covertly trained special operations forces of the post-coup regime the U.S. had helped bring to power. The U.S. government has been mum about the CIA’s covert operations in Ukraine.
We have good reason to believe that CIA operatives carried out the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, as per Seymour Hersh, who is now an independent reporter. Unlike in 1975, when Hersh was with the New York Times at a time when the paper still tried to hold the government to account, the Times does not even deign to look into Hersh’s account.
Holding the CIA to public account is of course a steep uphill struggle. Presidents and the Congress don’t even try. The mainstream media don’t investigate the CIA, preferring instead to quote “senior unnamed officials” and the official cover-up. Are the mainstream media outlets lazy, suborned, afraid of advertising revenues from the military-industrial complex, threatened,
ignorant, or all of the above? Who knows.
There is a tiny glimmer of hope. Back in 1975, the CIA was led by a reformer. Today, the CIA is led by William Burns, one of America’s long-standing leading diplomats. Burns knows the truth about Ukraine, since he served as Ambassador to Russia in 2008 and cabled Washington about the grave error of pushing NATO enlargement to Ukraine. Given Burns’ stature and diplomatic accomplishments, perhaps he would support the urgently needed accountability.
The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding. In Afghanistan, Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Kosovo, Ukraine, and far beyond, the needless deaths, instability, and destruction unleashed by CIA subversion continues to this day. The mainstream media, academic institutions, and Congress should be investigating these operations to the best of their ability and demanding the release of documents to enable democratic accountability.
Next year is the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee hearings. Fifty years on, with the precedent, inspiration, and guidance of the Church Committee itself, it’s urgently time to open the blinds, expose the truth about the U.S.-led mayhem, and begin a new era in which U.S. foreign policy becomes transparent, accountable, subject to the rule of law both domestic and international, and directed towards global peace rather than subversion of supposed enemies.
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With US Opposed, UN Security Council Rejects Russia-Led Push for Nord Stream Probe
Brazil and China supported Russia's request while the U.S. and other members of the United Nations Security Council abstained.
Mar 28, 2023
The United Nations Security Council on Monday rejected a Russia-led effort to launch a fresh international probe into last year's sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in the wake of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh's reports accusing the U.S. of carrying out the attack.
Brazil and China supported Russia's resolution while the U.S., France, the United Kingdom, and other Security Council members abstained, leaving the proposal short of the nine votes needed for passage.
The Security Council said in a press release that, if adopted, the resolution would have requested that the secretary-general establish "an international, independent investigation commission to conduct a comprehensive, transparent, and impartial international investigation of all aspects of the act of sabotage on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines—including identification of its perpetrators, sponsors, organizers, and accomplices."
Ahead of Monday's vote, Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said that "without an objective and transparent international investigation, the truth will not be uncovered as to what happened."
Robert Wood, the deputy U.S. ambassador to the U.N., countered that the Biden administration "was not involved in any way" in the Nord Stream explosions and accused Russia of attempting to "discredit the work of ongoing national investigations and prejudice any conclusions they reach that do not comport to Russia's predetermined and political narrative."
Denmark, Sweden, and Germany told the U.N. Security Council last month that their investigations into the Nord Stream blasts—which nations agree was an act of deliberate sabotage rather than an accident—are still ongoing.
A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department told reporters that the Biden administration is "not a party" to those investigations "because there are countries on whose sovereign territory this attack occurred, and we're deferring it to them."
The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill reported over the weekend that Russian officials have complained in letters to the U.S. and European governments that "they have been barred from examining evidence gathered from the sites where the blasts occurred."
Scahill noted that "despite Russia's majority ownership of the pipelines, Russian officials said, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden have rejected Russia's repeated requests for a joint investigation—confirming their 'suspicions that these countries are trying to conceal evidence, or to cover up the sponsors and perpetrators of these acts of sabotage.'"
"Denmark and Sweden have cited procedural matters and national regulations as to why they aren't collaborating with Russia," Scahill added. "But it's pretty obvious that they have also adopted the position that Russia should be viewed as a suspect in the sabotage and wouldn't want to invite it into the probe, particularly given Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
Citing an anonymous source, Hersh reported last month that U.S. President Joe Biden ordered the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline system, believing it posed a threat to "western dominance." According to Hersh, the Biden White House was particularly concerned about Nord Stream 2, which would have carried gas from Russia to Germany.
Germany put the pipeline on hold a day before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Weeks after Hersh published his initial report, The New York Timesran a story alleging that "intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials" implicates a shadowy "pro-Ukrainian group" in the Nord Stream attack.
Last week, Hersh alleged that U.S. intelligence agencies have been "feeding" the Times and other outlets false information in an attempt to cover up the Biden administration's involvement in the Nord Stream operation. Hersh also blasted the U.S. press corps for failing to ask why the Biden administration has thus far been unwilling to launch its own investigation.
At a congressional hearing a day after Hersh published his follow-up story, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) asked U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken whether he can "assure the world that no agency of the U.S. government blew up those pipelines or facilitated that action."
"Yes," Blinken responded, "yes I can."
Scahill noted Saturday that he asked the Biden White House Hersh's question about why American intelligence agencies have not formally announced a probe of the Nord Stream attack.
"In a statement, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson did not directly address any of my questions," Scahill wrote.
Instead, she repeated the White House's dismissal of Hersh's reporting as "totally false concoctions."
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