They’re “suspending participation”, not pulling out. Putin is just implying he’ll nuke us if he doesn’t get his way, for the nth time.
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prigozhin’s pictures with hundreds of wagner dead from a single day is a change from his previous bravado behavior. let’s see how this works out for him.
WW3 is about as likely to be fought on US soil as WW1 and WW2 were.
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https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1627749218902282253
Hersh doesn’t sound unhinged here. What he’s saying is making sense, but it kind of leaves us in a lurch. Like sure, maybe the CIA messed with duped the open source reporting in some way but we can’t just dismiss anything that conflicts with Hersh’s reporting
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Hersh thinks the “open source” guys like Bellingcat and this guy are straight up spies.
He did an interview with Mark Ames last week and Ames asked him about the Bellingcat guys attacking him and to paraphrase he said something like “Bellingcat…[scoff]…look, a spy’s a spy, I don’t have to answer to spies, OK?”
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Right. Like these very specific details are all his piece consists of, he didn’t provide any evidence. In his telling the whole purpose of using BALTOPS22 and involving the Norwegians, etc, was to act as the cover-up of the operation. When his facts are challenged he’s like “oh well maybe there was a cover-up of the cover-up”. For whose benefit? Absent his published claim that Norwegian warships were the ones who did the deed, any BALTOPS22 conspiracy theorist who dug through intel and found that Norwegian ships didn’t approach NordStream would just assume that some other ship did it. A discrepancy between claimed and actual positioning of Norwegian ships during a wargame would just invite Russian attention, surely, especially if this misplaced ship was in the vicinity of their infrastructure.
I don’t think anyone doubts that the US has the capability to blow up a pipeline in 80 metres of water. This Ocean’s Eleven story where he’s like “the US brought the divers, the Norwegians had the BALTOPS22 cover story, and we had to bust Jim out of jail because he’s the only guy who knows how to cope with the salinity” is what the piece stands or falls on.
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OK but some “open source intel” clown saying the Norwegian navy’s transponder showed the boat in question wasn’t in the right spot isn’t any sort of proof. You think the Norwegian navy can’t spoof their own transponders? It’d be trivial.
And the other criticisms this guy has are similarly hilarious. Hersh’s account reads like Tom Clancy fan fiction? Well the pipeline got blown up in 300 feet of water. That’s some real Tom Clancy shit, to be sure. But it actually happened, which isn’t in dispute. Whoever blew it up did some Tom Clancy type shit, pointing that out isn’t exactly a defense, and your quote here is buying into that narrative.
It’s obviously takes much more effort to spoof one or more transponders than it does to spoof a single anonymous source.
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He corroborates the position of the boats with satellite imagery. But the larger question is, why would the Norwegians spoof their transponder? Who is the audience for this? Like is the answer “because they looked into the future and saw that they would need to discredit a Seymour Hersh story about which boat placed the explosives”?
The whole point of using BALTOPS22 as the cover is supposed to be that NATO vessels have a legitimate reason to be in the vicinity of NordStream. If you have 10 henchmen who could have carried out a crime, it doesn’t help to provide an alibi for one of them. And I would assume the Russians are conducting surveillance of NATO wargames on their doorstep and not relying on transponders. If there was a discrepancy between a ship’s transponder and its actual position on Russian surveillance, that would merely seek to draw attention to it. Like only one Norwegian Alta-class ship was involved in the exercise and:
At 6 locations during the BALTOPS22. exercise a ship matching the size of the KNM Hinnøy was pictured by satellite imagery in the exact location where AIS data showed the KNM Hinnøy was.
That’s open source satellite imagery. So again, who is the audience for this? If the Russians are going to go back and review surveillance data to check if any ships went close to the explosion site during BALTOPS22, do you imagine they’re going to be relying on transponder data?
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This?
I mean what the fuck are we even looking at here? Can you even begin to identify what ship is in these pictures (you cannot). The “spoofing” doesn’t even have to be sophisticated, they could have tossed the transponder into a boat about the same size and how would anyone know the difference?
They probably thought that their publicly-available transponder data showing that they were loitering over the bombed pipeline for a few days would be incriminating. They knew that bombing the pipeline would be a big story and were concerned journalists would look into it (although apparently they only had to worry about Hersh, no one else seems terribly interested).
If that’s even how it went down. I don’t know if the ship would need to loiter there to do the dive. You don’t know if the ship needs to loiter there to do the dive. This crack open source analyst doesn’t know. And Hersh didn’t say that the ship did loiter there for days.
Of course they aren’t trying to fool the Russians. The Russians know who did it. Who’s the audience? You I guess? People who want to believe the US didn’t blow up the pipeline. They really don’t have to try too hard to be convincing. Like high ranking US government officials can say that they’re going to blow up the pipeline, the pipeline gets blown up, those same officials say how pleased they are that the pipeline blew up, and oh who knows probably Russia did it. Oh OK makes sense.
This is all Hersh says about the ship:
The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
He doesn’t say that the ship loitered over the site for days or even hours. So let’s say that the publicly-available transponder data is correct. Just because that data doesn’t match up with how this Alexander guy imagines how the operation might have happened doesn’t mean that Hersh’s story is false. The ship was right in the explosion locations, it just didn’t spend enough time there to satisfy Alexander’s imagination (and he seems so open minded). I’d love to hear more about how the operation actually went down, hopefully Hersh writes some follow up pieces with more details.
When you resort to lying, it doesn’t help. (And no, talking about ending nord stream 2 isn’t it)
Would love to see any example of hersh independently confirming a part of this story.
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They called a UN Security Council meeting on NordStream two days ago. They made an accusation. Evidence? Hersh and what Biden said. If they know, they can do better than that. If they know, the most likely reason is because they did it.
Yeah that’s what I mean. They know if they did it, and if they didn’t do it then it’s basically the US or UK. And I don’t think the UK would have done it alone. I doubt they’d have any direct evidence, the US would know when their recon satellites would pass overhead and would plan the operation accordingly.
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