I sincerely hope you begin to question our government propaganda and the mainstream media’s promoted narrative, best wishes for you in seeking an alternative viewpoint.
I sincerely hope you begin to question our government propaganda and the mainstream media’s promoted narrative, best wishes for you in seeking an alternative viewpoint.
Whether Putin is evil or not is not for you or I to pass judgement. Frankly, it's none of our business, Ukraine has been a corrupted mess for centuries. We should have never stepped our foot into that dogpile. I would rather see our troops brought home to guard our own borders. We have successfully driven our potential adversaries together and for the last two plus years we've help turn tens if not hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into worm food. And for what? A country that suspended elections. Where's the "fight for democracy and freedom?" Kind of like the first gulf War, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, no freedom and democracy in those places either. Just a bunch of people turned into worm food so our defense industrial complex can thrive. We have thoroughly bankrupted this country in exchange for it all. It's all coming to a messy financial disaster as the Saudis just ended trading oil in dollars and this suicidal administration just let it expire without anyone noticing, or maybe they already know the Saudis aren't foolish enough to renew the agreement. I pray this empire ends with just a financial meltdown and not a nuclear flash, but I believe this current administration was truly installed for our destruction. There is no "fighting for freedom" elsewhere when the original "home of freedom" is so filled with a government looking to take it away through suppressing free speech that disagrees with the promoted narrative. The only fight for me is the fight for free speech and Constitutional Rights here at home. The rhetoric and pro war propaganda is just exhausting. Eventually I hope you realize this.
We should give every ounce of support we can muster to Ukraine simply because they deserve it and the future of the free world depends on it.
We should do that in defense of our European allies because they and we can.
We are the last superpower and still the leader of the free world it IS our responsibility and we are sworn to the NATO alliance. If Ukraine fails wider wars will surely result and we will be drawn into direct conflict with the loss of U.S. blood as well as treasure. I spent 10 years in the U.S. military willing to do exactly that.
I believe I just answered that question above, I was never drafted but always a volunteer. But this is not our direct fight, yet, although failure to defend freedom in Ukraine is highly likely to precipitate U.S. involvement in multiple conflicts in the future and there will be no debate on the need to fight those, as any knowledge of history will tell you. If you have any confusion about Putin's intentions in Europe just check the front page of the WSJ today, "A Quiet Married Couple Exposed as Russian Spies." Slovenia is one country in Europe where Russia is having success at undermining opposition and subverting popular cultural narratives via naive quislings like you and F/D.
If your standard is that “We should give every ounce of support we can muster to Ukraine simply because they deserve it and the future of the free world depends on it.”
And you as a military man know how absolutely critical this is. So important that you shout down your fellow Americans for their lack of patriotism. But, but, but…you are unwilling to fight yourself or send your children to do so.
You sounds like Lindsay graham to me. And Lindsay graham is a warmongering coward.
Anyone with a knowledge of history and the challenge facing us in the next 50 years should know how absolutely critical this is. And it's a global choice between authoritarianism vs democracy if you have no such knowledge. Ukraine has a right to self determination and NOT to have the will of an aggressive neighbor imposed on it by force.
A quisling is one who is a sucker for the enemy and his propaganda. It fits precisly. You accept any bit of anti-U.S. nonsense and do nothing but assume the worst of us.
Doesn't everything we do come down to an individual choice? And your individual choice is the same as mine. Neither one of us have volunteered to fight at the front on behalf of Ukraine.
Bottom line. Time for some rational thinking. Is it worth taking the whole earth into a nuclear nightmare? That's where our own truly evil administration is headed.
I remember watching the fall of Saigon in 1975 on the news. The whole reason to fight that useless war was the same warmongers favorite theory about if one falls so will the next. That didn't happen. The Soviet system died from it's inherent economic faults in central planning, which we as a nation seem ready to embark upon now. We were successful in avoiding nuclear war previously by NOT agitating the Soviets in flippant ways like arming bordering neighbors with missiles intended to strike into the USSR. We previously removed our missiles from Turkey and the Soviets removed theirs from Cuba. That rational thinking, not cowering at Sabre ratling.
I think Victoria Nuland's attitude towards our European allies was succinctly displayed on that FOIA requested phone recording. "F@#k the EU" I believe was what she had to backtrack and apologize for. I think we pretty much said the same thing again in not so many words when we promised that Nordstream "would be dealt with"(Joe Biden talking/mumbling to the press). Interpretation: "F@#k your EU economy". We haven't been treating our "friends" very well. Seems we are behaving badly pretty much everywhere, friends, enemies, who cares.
As far as "doing all we can", somehow the phrase: "Just because we can, doesn't mean we should." springs to mind.
After remaining neutral for 80 years Sweden and Finland no longer have any doubt about the true threat from Russia.
There is a difference between strategic missiles and tactical (battlefield) missiles.
If you believe giving Ukraine the means to defend the city of Kharkiv from bombardment from a safe area just beyond their border is "flippant" we have a major difference in our attitude toward the murder of innocent civilians. And if you believe a crude remark made out of frustration ten years ago in a PRIVATE conversation made public by Russian intelligence is a true sign of bad faith, well, congratulations you've just fallen for Putin's psyops again comrad.
And if you believe we did Nordstream just chalk it up to another Putin success with a gullible, disloyal American who craves conspiracies over evidence.
Disinfo Matters is a weekly newsletter that looks beyond fake news to examine how manipulation of narratives, rewriting of history and altering our memories is reshaping our world:
(emphasis mine)
Nord Stream, Seymour Hersh and how disinformation works
Natalia Antelava
BY NATALIA ANTELAVA
14 FEBRUARY 2023
Did the United States blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea? Spoiler: I don’t know.
And Seymour Hersh, a well known U.S. investigative journalist who made the claim last week, has managed to ensure that we may never know the truth. Hersh’s story is a case study in modern-day disinformation.
Published on Substack, a newsletter platform, the piece blew up like…well a bomb under a pipeline, claiming that the Americans conducted a secret operation last September to destroy Russia’s primary means of exporting its natural gas to Germany and the rest of Europe. Hersh’s apparently juicy scoop described a military operation that amounted to an act of war against both Russia and Germany, and was conducted with the full knowledge and active cooperation from the Norwegian government.
Oslo dismissed the accusations, Washington rejected them as “utterly false and complete fiction,” and much of my own journalistic bubble reacted with an equivalent of a collective digital eye-roll.
A Pulitzer-winning journalist, Hersh has in recent years developed a reputation for questionable reporting. Now he once again produced an exclusive that was full of holes: he made scandalous allegations, but based them on a single source. He told a coherent story, but lacked a smoking gun. The verdict was clear: Hersh’s explosive investigation was SELF-PUBLISHED, because it would never get past an editor?
But if we just dismiss Hersh’s story as bad journalism, we risk missing its impact.
The story, tossed aside as not rigorous enough by many in mainstream policy and journalism circles, metastasized elsewhere, spread by Russian propagandists, American leftists and conservatives (“So many details in here, that it is not possible that it’s not true. It is true!” declared Tucker Carlson), Indian and Chinese outlets, Edward Snowden, Sky News Australia and even publications like the Times of London have picked it up. And I am naming only a few.
Those who didn’t pick up the original story, like Al Jazeera, reported on the Russian reaction to it. (In case you are wondering, Russians agreed with Hersh). We will never know who Hersh’s SINGLE, ANONYMOUS SOURCE on this story was, but in the end, the product bears all the hallmarks of disinformation.
“This is how disinfo 101 works,” says Emily Bell, director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in New York. “A piece is published, it triggers a reaction. Media then reports on the reaction, further extending the lifespan of that original piece.”
The result: millions of people around the world now believe that the United States conducted an act of war against Russia. Even though they haven’t seen any actual proof.
And millions more who will one day hear the allegation and google “Nord Stream pipeline” will find themselves lost in the avalanche of information that will either confirm their pre-existing biases or just confuse them further. Either way, truth and nuance are lost in the noise. Disinformation wins.
It is a poignant sign of the weirdness of our era, that this disinformation tale centers around one of the great legends of American journalism.
I remember my first, brief meeting with Seymour Hersh in Beirut in 2009. I was based there for the BBC, while he regularly came through the city on his way to Damascus, where he socialized with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his family. I remember being taken aback by how close he seemed to the Assads, but starstruck nevertheless. Hersh was a hero, whose dogged, brave, incredibly smart reporting exposed the My Lai massacre by U.S. troops in Vietnam, a number of Pentagon cover-ups and revelations of U.S. torture in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
But by the time the Syrian civil war sent shockwaves through the Middle East, Hersh’s relationship with the Assads seemed to affect his journalism. In Syria’s ugly, bloody civil war, he took the dictator’s side, claiming — against all existing evidence — that it was the rebels and not the regime who used sarin gas in chemical attacks. Unlike Hersh’s investigations into America’s chemical warfare in the 1960s, his Syria reporting seemed to be based on his assumption that the U.S. government lies, rather than witnesses or evidence.
In 2012, the New Yorker ended its decades-long relationship with Hersh, refusing to publish a piece about the death of Osama Bin Laden that challenged the official narrative. “We tried and tried, but "IT JUST DOESN'T CHECK OUT,” a friend, an editor at the New Yorker who was involved, told me at the time.
A couple of years later, I saw Hersh at a journalism conference in Barcelona. He sounded BITTER AND DISILLUSIONED as he addressed the crowd and there was an awkward moment when he got booed for making a toxic remark about women in journalism. I was surprised — there was never a hint of any sexism in my personal interactions with him.
Later that day, I watched reporters from Russia Today, Sputnik and some Arabic media outlets line up to interview Hersh in the corridor. It looked like he had found his new crowd.
THE BIG PICTURE
We may never know all the details that led Hersh down this particular path. What led Hersh from being a hero of American accountability journalism to being a darling of dictators and their propaganda channels. It is a mystery to me how exposing the lies of his own government led Hersh to forget that other governments lie too.
But, in some ways, the details of Hersh’s journey don’t matter. What matters are the details of how his now self-published stories travel through the digital information network and help create the global mood music.
Hersh’s story illuminates the extraordinary power that platforms like Substack have when it comes to infecting public opinion with bad information. Tow Center’s Emily Bell believes Substack is particularly problematic because it hosts plenty of credible journalists and is “perceived as a legitimizing platform.”
Substack prides itself on its hands-off approach to content and it has faced some backlash for refusing to tackle the misinformation and hate speech being published on the platform. But Substack mostly flies completely under the radar of any discussion about platform regulation. It shows why current regulatory efforts focused on particular platforms are a whack-a-mole game that aspiring regulators are bound to lose. The damage being done though is permanent.
Objectively, the blowing up of the pipelines continues to be a mystery. Questions about the incident have not been answered. Still, different versions of history have already been written, and millions of minds have already been made up. “By the time the truth comes out, whether corroborated or debunked, there is a good chance no one will care,” says Emily Bell.
Before you despair about the state of the world, here’s the good news: this tale of Seymour Hersh’s Substack is also a reminder of, and testimony to, the power of the journalistic process. For all the millions spent on debunking and combating disinformation, one solution is the good, old-fashioned journalistic process — use multiple sources; attribute quotes whenever possible; and question everything.
I'm not the one buying into government propaganda. Disloyal American? Because I question the actions of our out of control government? The same government and it's myriad of corrupted officials and corrupted agencies that lied throughout the pandemic about the origin of COVID-19 because they helped fund gain of function in Wuhan, lied about vaccines and tried to force everyone to take that dangerous,useless crap? The same government that preached "six feet apart", "social distancing", masks and lockdowns that we now know had no science behind it? You need to start questioning whatever our government tries to tell us. QUESTION EVERYTHING. Seymore Hershe no longer a "useful journalist"? Interesting phraseology. No longer useful for government propaganda like the rest of the TV whores posing as journalists. You sound like a jack booted nazi yourself. Accusing people of being "disloyal", "stooge for Putin", all your phrases drip with propaganda. It didn't end well for the Nazis and unfortunately, this won't end well for us either if we keep going down this path. China is making inroads with Mexico. I guess we'll soon see how we feel about tactical missiles on our Southern Border, what there is of it. Don't worry, those will only be tactical missiles, I'm sure it's nothing.
Disinfo Matters is a weekly newsletter that looks beyond fake news to examine how manipulation of narratives, rewriting of history and altering our memories is reshaping our world:
and this
Snopes:
Alex Kasprak
10 Feb, 2023
Who is Seymour Hersh?
Hersh's most notable work has exposed government and military abusers and cover-ups, and his past work has revealed U.S. military abuse. He uncovered the U.S. military's role in the My Lai Massacre — work that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1970. He described the U.S.'s role in a covert bombing campaign in Cambodia. He reported on the U.S. military's mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War.
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His later work, however, has been controversial and widely panned by journalists for promoting conspiratorial claims that hinge on dubious anonymous sources or speculation.
Examples of controversial claims made later in Hersh's career include allegations that Turkey, not Russia, was behind a chemical weapons attack in Syria, and that Trump authorized an airstrike in Syria in response to Russia's alleged use of chemical weapons, even while knowing Russia did not use such weapons.
His work, increasingly, has become popular with Russian state-controlled media. Like the aforementioned stories, his most recent article alleging a U.S. attack on a Russian-owned pipeline has seen heavy Russian promotion, as reported by Insider:
In Russia, Hersh's story was immediately greeted with a sense of vindication. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the state outlet RIA Novosti that Hersh's article was not a surprise in Moscow and said it would bring "consequences" for the US.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova seized on the article, citing the multiple times that Russia suggested the US was behind the attack, also without evidence. Russian politician Konstantin Kosachev wrote on Telegram that … the reporting is "impossible to dismiss."
Those remarks were shared by TV personality Vladimir Solovyev, arguably Russia's leading propagandist, to his 1.3 million Telegram followers.
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What Does Hersh Allege About the Nord Stream Pipeline?
Hersh's Substack post alleges that the U.S. Navy, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, conducted a covert operation using a NATO training exercise as cover to sabotage the Russian-owned Nord Stream pipelines by using explosives and a sonar-based remote detonation device:
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines …
The story builds this argument by mixing factual background information about past covert operations and recent statements made by politicians about their disdain for the pipeline with a wildly engrossing narrative based on the often secondhand testimony of a single person Hersh describes only as "a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning."
What Are the Uncontested Facts?
Stripped of the bold claims of Hersh's single source, his report contains several factual statements or anecdotes that superficially support his narrative. There has, indeed, been bipartisan opposition to the construction of the Nord Stream pipelines, which would have transported Russian natural gas to Germany. There were concerns, prior to and directly following the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion, that such a pipeline could make German support for a unified response to Russian aggression in Ukraine harder to come by.
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It's true, as well, that Operation Ivy Bell was a U.S. Navy-run covert operation against the former Soviet Union that used deep sea divers within Soviet territorial waters. It is also true that NATO held a training exercise in the Baltic sea in June 2022 that involved Navy diving units.
Finally, it is true that senior government officials in and outside the Biden administration explicitly stated their support for "ending" in some way the operation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. On Feb. 7, a week before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Biden told reporters that, "If Russia invades … there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."
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Both the White House and the CIA have categorically denied Hersh's claims.
Claims All Stem From One Source
Hersh uses the testimony of one person, mixed alongside that aforementioned historical or political commentary, as evidence for every significant aspect of the alleged conspiracy. Here is the first mention of that source:
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
The source is first described as "a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning" and a second time as "the source with direct knowledge of the process," indicating these were the same person. All other references to a source refer, in the singular, to "the" source. This source, for example, is responsible for the claim that Biden created a task force to look into options to destroy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline:
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In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin's impending invasion. …
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.
The source, evidently a legal expert, is also behind the claim that Biden's actions at a news conference created some sort of loophole that allowed a covert sabotage mission to go ahead without notifying high-ranking congressional leaders:
According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline "no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it."
Under the law, the source explained, "There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea."
This same source, evidently, is knowledgeable about internal CIA, State Department, and deep sea diver politics in addition to the specific deliberations held by a secret interagency panel. He is, in Hersh's reporting, the sole basis for claims of Norway's knowledge of and involvement in the operation:
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Norway was the perfect place to base the mission. … Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway's prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014.
He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. "He is the glove that fits the American hand," the source said.
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. "They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration," the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. …
"The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington," the source said.
The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it. …
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms …. "What they were told and what they knew were purposely different," the source told me. … The Norwegians proposed [that BALTOPS 22] would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.
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The only other source mentioned in Hersh's report is a retired professor with no connection to, or ability to confirm the existence of, any potential covert operation in the Baltics. His information, regarding a sonor-activated detonator, does not confirm the existence of the operation, and is speculative.
The Bottom Line
This story, when deconstructed, is merely a pile of purported second-hand information allegedly collected by someone connected in some unknown way to deliberations of a highly secret, multi-agency task force. Such a story falls prey to the same criticisms of other more recent work published by Hersh, which has relied on similarly questionable anonymous sources.
If the U.S. did conspire to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline, Hersh's reporting has not proved that case. Hersh has, instead, made a very successful blog post that essentially transcribes a compelling story someone unknown to the general public told him.
Hersh was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, "It's a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what's going on."
The fact that the U. S. Government is the first one I first heard to start using the term “disinformation “ and continues to use that term is most disturbing of all. I will remain suspicious of anything anyone says, but especially when they start by using this term. It’s insulting.
I sincerely hope you begin to question our government propaganda and the mainstream media’s promoted narrative, best wishes for you in seeking an alternative viewpoint.
So Putin isn't evil? Do you want a list of political opponents he's poisoned or imprisoned and assassinated and countries he's invaded?
I sincerely hope you examine in yourself why you're so gullible to destructive 5th column foolishness.
Whether Putin is evil or not is not for you or I to pass judgement. Frankly, it's none of our business, Ukraine has been a corrupted mess for centuries. We should have never stepped our foot into that dogpile. I would rather see our troops brought home to guard our own borders. We have successfully driven our potential adversaries together and for the last two plus years we've help turn tens if not hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into worm food. And for what? A country that suspended elections. Where's the "fight for democracy and freedom?" Kind of like the first gulf War, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, no freedom and democracy in those places either. Just a bunch of people turned into worm food so our defense industrial complex can thrive. We have thoroughly bankrupted this country in exchange for it all. It's all coming to a messy financial disaster as the Saudis just ended trading oil in dollars and this suicidal administration just let it expire without anyone noticing, or maybe they already know the Saudis aren't foolish enough to renew the agreement. I pray this empire ends with just a financial meltdown and not a nuclear flash, but I believe this current administration was truly installed for our destruction. There is no "fighting for freedom" elsewhere when the original "home of freedom" is so filled with a government looking to take it away through suppressing free speech that disagrees with the promoted narrative. The only fight for me is the fight for free speech and Constitutional Rights here at home. The rhetoric and pro war propaganda is just exhausting. Eventually I hope you realize this.
See my answer to Matthew Smith.
Let’s assume you’re right and Putin is evil. He certainly has done things that I wouldn’t ever do. The question is what should be done about it?
Is it our responsibility to fight him? If so, would you be willing to enlist to fight? Would you send your son to war against him?
"what should be done about it?"
We should give every ounce of support we can muster to Ukraine simply because they deserve it and the future of the free world depends on it.
We should do that in defense of our European allies because they and we can.
We are the last superpower and still the leader of the free world it IS our responsibility and we are sworn to the NATO alliance. If Ukraine fails wider wars will surely result and we will be drawn into direct conflict with the loss of U.S. blood as well as treasure. I spent 10 years in the U.S. military willing to do exactly that.
Would you enlist to fight? Do you have a son? If so, would you encourage him to fight the menace?
I believe I just answered that question above, I was never drafted but always a volunteer. But this is not our direct fight, yet, although failure to defend freedom in Ukraine is highly likely to precipitate U.S. involvement in multiple conflicts in the future and there will be no debate on the need to fight those, as any knowledge of history will tell you. If you have any confusion about Putin's intentions in Europe just check the front page of the WSJ today, "A Quiet Married Couple Exposed as Russian Spies." Slovenia is one country in Europe where Russia is having success at undermining opposition and subverting popular cultural narratives via naive quislings like you and F/D.
quisling? Really?
If your standard is that “We should give every ounce of support we can muster to Ukraine simply because they deserve it and the future of the free world depends on it.”
And you as a military man know how absolutely critical this is. So important that you shout down your fellow Americans for their lack of patriotism. But, but, but…you are unwilling to fight yourself or send your children to do so.
You sounds like Lindsay graham to me. And Lindsay graham is a warmongering coward.
Anyone with a knowledge of history and the challenge facing us in the next 50 years should know how absolutely critical this is. And it's a global choice between authoritarianism vs democracy if you have no such knowledge. Ukraine has a right to self determination and NOT to have the will of an aggressive neighbor imposed on it by force.
A quisling is one who is a sucker for the enemy and his propaganda. It fits precisly. You accept any bit of anti-U.S. nonsense and do nothing but assume the worst of us.
Doesn't everything we do come down to an individual choice? And your individual choice is the same as mine. Neither one of us have volunteered to fight at the front on behalf of Ukraine.
Bottom line. Time for some rational thinking. Is it worth taking the whole earth into a nuclear nightmare? That's where our own truly evil administration is headed.
If you're going to hide in the shadows and abandon allies every time some bully rattles a nuclear saber you've already lost.
Say hello to your new master Kim Jong Un.
I remember watching the fall of Saigon in 1975 on the news. The whole reason to fight that useless war was the same warmongers favorite theory about if one falls so will the next. That didn't happen. The Soviet system died from it's inherent economic faults in central planning, which we as a nation seem ready to embark upon now. We were successful in avoiding nuclear war previously by NOT agitating the Soviets in flippant ways like arming bordering neighbors with missiles intended to strike into the USSR. We previously removed our missiles from Turkey and the Soviets removed theirs from Cuba. That rational thinking, not cowering at Sabre ratling.
I think Victoria Nuland's attitude towards our European allies was succinctly displayed on that FOIA requested phone recording. "F@#k the EU" I believe was what she had to backtrack and apologize for. I think we pretty much said the same thing again in not so many words when we promised that Nordstream "would be dealt with"(Joe Biden talking/mumbling to the press). Interpretation: "F@#k your EU economy". We haven't been treating our "friends" very well. Seems we are behaving badly pretty much everywhere, friends, enemies, who cares.
As far as "doing all we can", somehow the phrase: "Just because we can, doesn't mean we should." springs to mind.
After remaining neutral for 80 years Sweden and Finland no longer have any doubt about the true threat from Russia.
There is a difference between strategic missiles and tactical (battlefield) missiles.
If you believe giving Ukraine the means to defend the city of Kharkiv from bombardment from a safe area just beyond their border is "flippant" we have a major difference in our attitude toward the murder of innocent civilians. And if you believe a crude remark made out of frustration ten years ago in a PRIVATE conversation made public by Russian intelligence is a true sign of bad faith, well, congratulations you've just fallen for Putin's psyops again comrad.
And if you believe we did Nordstream just chalk it up to another Putin success with a gullible, disloyal American who craves conspiracies over evidence.
Did you read seymour hersh's account of the Nordstream? Would you describe Hersh as a gullible, disloyal American who craves conspiracy theories over evidence? https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
Disinfo Matters is a weekly newsletter that looks beyond fake news to examine how manipulation of narratives, rewriting of history and altering our memories is reshaping our world:
(emphasis mine)
Nord Stream, Seymour Hersh and how disinformation works
Natalia Antelava
BY NATALIA ANTELAVA
14 FEBRUARY 2023
Did the United States blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea? Spoiler: I don’t know.
And Seymour Hersh, a well known U.S. investigative journalist who made the claim last week, has managed to ensure that we may never know the truth. Hersh’s story is a case study in modern-day disinformation.
Published on Substack, a newsletter platform, the piece blew up like…well a bomb under a pipeline, claiming that the Americans conducted a secret operation last September to destroy Russia’s primary means of exporting its natural gas to Germany and the rest of Europe. Hersh’s apparently juicy scoop described a military operation that amounted to an act of war against both Russia and Germany, and was conducted with the full knowledge and active cooperation from the Norwegian government.
Oslo dismissed the accusations, Washington rejected them as “utterly false and complete fiction,” and much of my own journalistic bubble reacted with an equivalent of a collective digital eye-roll.
A Pulitzer-winning journalist, Hersh has in recent years developed a reputation for questionable reporting. Now he once again produced an exclusive that was full of holes: he made scandalous allegations, but based them on a single source. He told a coherent story, but lacked a smoking gun. The verdict was clear: Hersh’s explosive investigation was SELF-PUBLISHED, because it would never get past an editor?
But if we just dismiss Hersh’s story as bad journalism, we risk missing its impact.
The story, tossed aside as not rigorous enough by many in mainstream policy and journalism circles, metastasized elsewhere, spread by Russian propagandists, American leftists and conservatives (“So many details in here, that it is not possible that it’s not true. It is true!” declared Tucker Carlson), Indian and Chinese outlets, Edward Snowden, Sky News Australia and even publications like the Times of London have picked it up. And I am naming only a few.
Those who didn’t pick up the original story, like Al Jazeera, reported on the Russian reaction to it. (In case you are wondering, Russians agreed with Hersh). We will never know who Hersh’s SINGLE, ANONYMOUS SOURCE on this story was, but in the end, the product bears all the hallmarks of disinformation.
“This is how disinfo 101 works,” says Emily Bell, director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in New York. “A piece is published, it triggers a reaction. Media then reports on the reaction, further extending the lifespan of that original piece.”
The result: millions of people around the world now believe that the United States conducted an act of war against Russia. Even though they haven’t seen any actual proof.
And millions more who will one day hear the allegation and google “Nord Stream pipeline” will find themselves lost in the avalanche of information that will either confirm their pre-existing biases or just confuse them further. Either way, truth and nuance are lost in the noise. Disinformation wins.
It is a poignant sign of the weirdness of our era, that this disinformation tale centers around one of the great legends of American journalism.
I remember my first, brief meeting with Seymour Hersh in Beirut in 2009. I was based there for the BBC, while he regularly came through the city on his way to Damascus, where he socialized with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his family. I remember being taken aback by how close he seemed to the Assads, but starstruck nevertheless. Hersh was a hero, whose dogged, brave, incredibly smart reporting exposed the My Lai massacre by U.S. troops in Vietnam, a number of Pentagon cover-ups and revelations of U.S. torture in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
But by the time the Syrian civil war sent shockwaves through the Middle East, Hersh’s relationship with the Assads seemed to affect his journalism. In Syria’s ugly, bloody civil war, he took the dictator’s side, claiming — against all existing evidence — that it was the rebels and not the regime who used sarin gas in chemical attacks. Unlike Hersh’s investigations into America’s chemical warfare in the 1960s, his Syria reporting seemed to be based on his assumption that the U.S. government lies, rather than witnesses or evidence.
In 2012, the New Yorker ended its decades-long relationship with Hersh, refusing to publish a piece about the death of Osama Bin Laden that challenged the official narrative. “We tried and tried, but "IT JUST DOESN'T CHECK OUT,” a friend, an editor at the New Yorker who was involved, told me at the time.
A couple of years later, I saw Hersh at a journalism conference in Barcelona. He sounded BITTER AND DISILLUSIONED as he addressed the crowd and there was an awkward moment when he got booed for making a toxic remark about women in journalism. I was surprised — there was never a hint of any sexism in my personal interactions with him.
Later that day, I watched reporters from Russia Today, Sputnik and some Arabic media outlets line up to interview Hersh in the corridor. It looked like he had found his new crowd.
THE BIG PICTURE
We may never know all the details that led Hersh down this particular path. What led Hersh from being a hero of American accountability journalism to being a darling of dictators and their propaganda channels. It is a mystery to me how exposing the lies of his own government led Hersh to forget that other governments lie too.
But, in some ways, the details of Hersh’s journey don’t matter. What matters are the details of how his now self-published stories travel through the digital information network and help create the global mood music.
Hersh’s story illuminates the extraordinary power that platforms like Substack have when it comes to infecting public opinion with bad information. Tow Center’s Emily Bell believes Substack is particularly problematic because it hosts plenty of credible journalists and is “perceived as a legitimizing platform.”
Substack prides itself on its hands-off approach to content and it has faced some backlash for refusing to tackle the misinformation and hate speech being published on the platform. But Substack mostly flies completely under the radar of any discussion about platform regulation. It shows why current regulatory efforts focused on particular platforms are a whack-a-mole game that aspiring regulators are bound to lose. The damage being done though is permanent.
Objectively, the blowing up of the pipelines continues to be a mystery. Questions about the incident have not been answered. Still, different versions of history have already been written, and millions of minds have already been made up. “By the time the truth comes out, whether corroborated or debunked, there is a good chance no one will care,” says Emily Bell.
Before you despair about the state of the world, here’s the good news: this tale of Seymour Hersh’s Substack is also a reminder of, and testimony to, the power of the journalistic process. For all the millions spent on debunking and combating disinformation, one solution is the good, old-fashioned journalistic process — use multiple sources; attribute quotes whenever possible; and question everything.
I'm not the one buying into government propaganda. Disloyal American? Because I question the actions of our out of control government? The same government and it's myriad of corrupted officials and corrupted agencies that lied throughout the pandemic about the origin of COVID-19 because they helped fund gain of function in Wuhan, lied about vaccines and tried to force everyone to take that dangerous,useless crap? The same government that preached "six feet apart", "social distancing", masks and lockdowns that we now know had no science behind it? You need to start questioning whatever our government tries to tell us. QUESTION EVERYTHING. Seymore Hershe no longer a "useful journalist"? Interesting phraseology. No longer useful for government propaganda like the rest of the TV whores posing as journalists. You sound like a jack booted nazi yourself. Accusing people of being "disloyal", "stooge for Putin", all your phrases drip with propaganda. It didn't end well for the Nazis and unfortunately, this won't end well for us either if we keep going down this path. China is making inroads with Mexico. I guess we'll soon see how we feel about tactical missiles on our Southern Border, what there is of it. Don't worry, those will only be tactical missiles, I'm sure it's nothing.
See above in answer to Matthew -
Disinfo Matters is a weekly newsletter that looks beyond fake news to examine how manipulation of narratives, rewriting of history and altering our memories is reshaping our world:
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Alex Kasprak
10 Feb, 2023
Who is Seymour Hersh?
Hersh's most notable work has exposed government and military abusers and cover-ups, and his past work has revealed U.S. military abuse. He uncovered the U.S. military's role in the My Lai Massacre — work that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1970. He described the U.S.'s role in a covert bombing campaign in Cambodia. He reported on the U.S. military's mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War.
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His later work, however, has been controversial and widely panned by journalists for promoting conspiratorial claims that hinge on dubious anonymous sources or speculation.
Examples of controversial claims made later in Hersh's career include allegations that Turkey, not Russia, was behind a chemical weapons attack in Syria, and that Trump authorized an airstrike in Syria in response to Russia's alleged use of chemical weapons, even while knowing Russia did not use such weapons.
His work, increasingly, has become popular with Russian state-controlled media. Like the aforementioned stories, his most recent article alleging a U.S. attack on a Russian-owned pipeline has seen heavy Russian promotion, as reported by Insider:
In Russia, Hersh's story was immediately greeted with a sense of vindication. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the state outlet RIA Novosti that Hersh's article was not a surprise in Moscow and said it would bring "consequences" for the US.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova seized on the article, citing the multiple times that Russia suggested the US was behind the attack, also without evidence. Russian politician Konstantin Kosachev wrote on Telegram that … the reporting is "impossible to dismiss."
Those remarks were shared by TV personality Vladimir Solovyev, arguably Russia's leading propagandist, to his 1.3 million Telegram followers.
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What Does Hersh Allege About the Nord Stream Pipeline?
Hersh's Substack post alleges that the U.S. Navy, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, conducted a covert operation using a NATO training exercise as cover to sabotage the Russian-owned Nord Stream pipelines by using explosives and a sonar-based remote detonation device:
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines …
The story builds this argument by mixing factual background information about past covert operations and recent statements made by politicians about their disdain for the pipeline with a wildly engrossing narrative based on the often secondhand testimony of a single person Hersh describes only as "a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning."
What Are the Uncontested Facts?
Stripped of the bold claims of Hersh's single source, his report contains several factual statements or anecdotes that superficially support his narrative. There has, indeed, been bipartisan opposition to the construction of the Nord Stream pipelines, which would have transported Russian natural gas to Germany. There were concerns, prior to and directly following the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion, that such a pipeline could make German support for a unified response to Russian aggression in Ukraine harder to come by.
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It's true, as well, that Operation Ivy Bell was a U.S. Navy-run covert operation against the former Soviet Union that used deep sea divers within Soviet territorial waters. It is also true that NATO held a training exercise in the Baltic sea in June 2022 that involved Navy diving units.
Finally, it is true that senior government officials in and outside the Biden administration explicitly stated their support for "ending" in some way the operation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. On Feb. 7, a week before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Biden told reporters that, "If Russia invades … there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."
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Both the White House and the CIA have categorically denied Hersh's claims.
Claims All Stem From One Source
Hersh uses the testimony of one person, mixed alongside that aforementioned historical or political commentary, as evidence for every significant aspect of the alleged conspiracy. Here is the first mention of that source:
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
The source is first described as "a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning" and a second time as "the source with direct knowledge of the process," indicating these were the same person. All other references to a source refer, in the singular, to "the" source. This source, for example, is responsible for the claim that Biden created a task force to look into options to destroy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline:
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In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin's impending invasion. …
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.
The source, evidently a legal expert, is also behind the claim that Biden's actions at a news conference created some sort of loophole that allowed a covert sabotage mission to go ahead without notifying high-ranking congressional leaders:
According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline "no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it."
Under the law, the source explained, "There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea."
This same source, evidently, is knowledgeable about internal CIA, State Department, and deep sea diver politics in addition to the specific deliberations held by a secret interagency panel. He is, in Hersh's reporting, the sole basis for claims of Norway's knowledge of and involvement in the operation:
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Norway was the perfect place to base the mission. … Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway's prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014.
He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. "He is the glove that fits the American hand," the source said.
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. "They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration," the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. …
"The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington," the source said.
The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it. …
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms …. "What they were told and what they knew were purposely different," the source told me. … The Norwegians proposed [that BALTOPS 22] would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.
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The only other source mentioned in Hersh's report is a retired professor with no connection to, or ability to confirm the existence of, any potential covert operation in the Baltics. His information, regarding a sonor-activated detonator, does not confirm the existence of the operation, and is speculative.
The Bottom Line
This story, when deconstructed, is merely a pile of purported second-hand information allegedly collected by someone connected in some unknown way to deliberations of a highly secret, multi-agency task force. Such a story falls prey to the same criticisms of other more recent work published by Hersh, which has relied on similarly questionable anonymous sources.
If the U.S. did conspire to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline, Hersh's reporting has not proved that case. Hersh has, instead, made a very successful blog post that essentially transcribes a compelling story someone unknown to the general public told him.
Hersh was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, "It's a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what's going on."
The fact that the U. S. Government is the first one I first heard to start using the term “disinformation “ and continues to use that term is most disturbing of all. I will remain suspicious of anything anyone says, but especially when they start by using this term. It’s insulting.