I mean the dude was living in a cave and you expect me to believe that he pulled off 9/11? Doesn’t sound plausible.
Confessing ignorance, but if the source deliberately misled Hersh are there are any civil or criminal penalties for doing so?
It would seem that if there were, it is hard to imagine why one would do so, given the (1) near certainty corroboration will be sought; and (2) the lack of any discernible upside for making it up (at least for what I assume is someone involved in the Navy).
I did find the following humorous:
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines
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oh shit the CIA said that
I think the source can only be punished if he or she were trusted not to leak classified information. If someone in the CIA tells me that there are aliens at Area 51, and then I tell Hersh, it’s the CIA agent on the hook, not me.
As of right now, it’s not certain the source is a real person.
I can easily believe it was the US but this report is not exactly screaming credibility to me, you’re going to need to show me something better than a single anonymous sauce.
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Is it a single anonymous source? Hersh always has a bunch of anonymous sources in his stories and it’s not always clear who’s who. I didn’t read it closely enough to tell that though.
There are multiple references to “the source”, one described as having “direct knowledge of the process”. There don’t appear to be references to other sources, which makes this a potential exercise in stenography for a single anonymous source.
Re-reading more closely might be a better use of your time than responding to some people in this thread.
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Hersh does a good job of crafting a plausible narrative, but I don’t know nearly enough about the situation to know plausible alternatives.
Given that virtually all politicians have said that there won’t be any US troops in Ukraine, anything more than sanctions and direct aid to Ukraine would be very risky.
I still think the US did it but the CIA doing this without buy in from Congress in some form seems unlikely.
He is referring to “the source” throughout. It’s one guy.
I find the idea that the Norwegians were involved kind of dubious. You can see the benefit from their point of view in terms of petroleum prices, but the NordStream pipelines weren’t running anyway and the risk is enormous. Norway has a ton of underwater and offshore infrastructure itself, all of which would be vulnerable if the Russians figured out their involvement. And it looks like the US were going to go through with the plan anyway? It’s not clear to me what the Norwegians actually provided, like:
The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.
The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.
“Adapting to the specific salinity of the water”? I’m no military scientician, but is this plausible? Ocean salinity barely varies at all at that depth. Would coming up with camouflage really depend critically on water salinity? And the second paragraph is pretty lol, like planting the devices during a military exercise is fucking obvious, surely.
So I don’t know, it’s possible, but I am going to want a lot more evidence than this.
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Agree, I’d bet that the gang of eight were briefed if this happened
Who knows, but if it did this seems like the kind of operational detail that an actual DoD official would not put out there unless he/she is going completely gonzo. Pretty sure you def go to jail for leaking that kind of thing out.
Right. Seems like very casual leaking of the military capabilities of an ally for no reason. This “source” also seems like they’re providing a shitload of information that would personally identify them.
If four months ago I’d have said 10% US did it and this morning I’d have said 20%, I’m now going with 15% after noticing this coincidence of Lavrov switching from Britain did it in the immediate aftermath to the US just before the Hersh story came out.
Lavrov provided no evidence for his claim.
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This seems to me to be a likely Igon Value Problem where the only things Sy knows about this is from interviewing an expert (or worse, not an expert). But I think I’ve read the salinity of the Baltic is not like the ocean, it’s basically a huge estuary with lower salinity than the ocean.
The seawater of the Baltic Sea is classed as low-salinity brackish water. In the surface layers of the Baltic Sea, the average salinity is only seven grams per kilogram of water . By contrast, in the oceans, it is 35 grams per kilogram.
That is pretty interesting, had no idea.
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A dude was living in a cave.
The dude is still alive and well in Branson, Missouri.
https://twitter.com/PostLeftWatch/status/1623535352362459141?t=vuTt86-d0cPCFKQyEPZNmA&s=19
Moving the information through the ecosystem.
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