MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘NordStream’

If Ukraine Attacked NATO by Blowing Up Nordstream, Why Do They Keep Getting Billions From The U.S.?

Posted by M. C. on June 19, 2023

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Why is Facebook censoring Sy Hersh’s NordStream report? – Responsible Statecraft

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2023

The social media giant says his piece on US responsibility for blowing up the pipeline is false, allows other stories with proven dubious claims.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/04/21/why-is-facebook-censoring-sy-hershs-nordstream-report/

Written by
Branko Marcetic

Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S. policy toward the conflict has inter-mingled uneasily with the U.S. government’s growing convergence with the social media platforms that make up today’s digital public square.

Tech companies have selectively relaxed their bans on violent and hate speech to align with Ukraine’s war effort, shuttered the accounts of media outlets critical of the war and U.S. policy to it, and seen a vast army of bots push content supporting Ukraine and its NATO partners. And now, Facebook is actively censoring and discouraging the sharing of Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the alleged U.S. role in the attack on the Nordstream pipelines.

As of Thursday, if you try to share on Facebook the February 8 Substack post in which Hersh first laid out the anonymously sourced charge, you’ll first be met with a prompt informing you about “additional reporting” on the subject in the form of Norwegian fact-checking website Faktisk, and warning you that “pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways.”

If you decide to “share anyway,” Hersh’s piece is posted but blurred out, and labeled “false information” by the social media platform. (It’s since been unblurred and labeled “partly false information”). The phenomenon was first pointed out by Michael Shellenberger, and has since been replicated by othersincluding myself.

Besides labeling the post as false, Facebook also sent me a notification roughly 10 hours later informing me about the notice they’d added and that I had shared something that “includes information that independent fact-checkers said was partly false.” Facebook cautions that “people who repeatedly share false information might have their posts moved lower in News Feed,” suggesting that if I go on to share any other reporting that’s been challenged by fact-checkers, I’ll be punished by having my account’s reach throttled.

Yet the fact-check in question from Faktisk — Norwegian for “Actually” — leans heavily on open source intelligence whose reliability has itself been recently challenged. Hersh has previously fended off criticism that his reporting doesn’t match up with public data about ship movements by arguing this information can be manipulated. Indeed, in a piece putting forward its own, alternate theory to Hersh’s, the New York Times itself noted that the pipelines weren’t closely monitored by commercial or government sensors, and that there were roughly 45 “ghost ships” whose location transponders weren’t on.

See the rest here

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Mission Accomplished: Seymour Hersh, Nordstream, and What’s Left on the Cutting Room Floor – Gold Goats ‘n Guns

Posted by M. C. on February 13, 2023

What’s obvious to me is that Hersh and his source are either working for someone else or pawns in a larger game (my inkling is the latter). What that game is hasn’t been fully revealed to us. This is Act II of this Whodunit, it’s not the end of the story. By any means.

https://tomluongo.me/2023/02/10/mission-accomplished-seymour-hersh-nordstream/

Author: Tom Luongo

On Wednesday, I turned 55 and I got one of the best birthday presents a guy like me could ever ask for, a major geopolitical bombshell.  Seymour Hersh published his first article in a long time on the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline bombing, directly implicating major players within the “Biden” administration.

Hersh’s story is noteworthy not just because of what it says, but for the timing of him hitting the publish button and to whom this story is directly aimed.

And, more importantly, who it is NOT aimed at.

To be clear, I don’t think for a second that Hersh is whitewashing anything here.  If he is, well, I’ll leave that to the reader.  I believe his story is incomplete and a little too Bourne Identity versus Mission Impossible for my tastes.

Regardless of your conclusions, I think we all can agree we need much better screenwriters than the current crop haunting the halls of SIS in London and at the CIA in Langley.

Their contempt for us is obvious in the shoddy stories they’re telling us now.

Mission Identity: Bourne Impossible

The Bourne story is pretty straightforward.  Agent Bourne is sent on an assassination mission. He has a moment of conscience and his latent humanity asserts itself as he regains his memory.  The mystery was in rebuilding his past which, in the end, is pretty straightforward.

It’s Phil Dick’s We Can Remember it For You, Wholesale, but done right, versus both versions of Total Recall.

Reading Hersh’s article gave me more of the impression of the first act of a Mission Impossible film rather than the whole movie. The missions Ethan Hunt chooses to accept are simple and straightforward, retrieve some Macguffin and stop the bad guys before the boom.

And then as the story unfolds we uncover layer upon layer of what’s really going on. If you’ve seen the last two films, written and directed by Chris Macquarrie, you can probably see where I’m going here.

In Macquarrie’s version of modern spy craft, there are overlapping and contradictory goals of the various intelligence agencies and governments these people work for. These all meet and clash in plot twists so thick and heavy it’s a miracle anyone watching can keep up, given the frenetic pace. {Tom’s note: It speaks to just how good the film-making craft on display is}

In fact, when you parse through the arch-plot of these films, Hunt is fighting The Syndicate — a rogue group of disaffected agents who cause celibre is to tear down the old order through the tragedy of a nuclear event.

It hits a little too close to reality given the post-COVID world envisioned by The Davos Crowd. Cue the arguments about ‘predictive programming’ and all that (see my podcast with former screenwriter Mel K on this.)

These agents are the chaos unleashed by unscrupulous politicians and agency heads on an unsuspecting world. The Syndicate itself was the brainchild of the British government to give the Prime Minister a resource with which he could end-run Parliament to fight terrorism.

Does this not bear some resemblance to Hersh’s story of a “Biden” inner circle trying to do the same thing in keeping the act of war against Russia and Germany a secret from Congress.

In Macquarrie’s scripts, MI-6’s role in trying to cover their tracks over the creation of The Syndicate forms the backbone of the plot of both the aptly named MI:5 and MI:6 films. I’m not accusing Hersh of anything here, except maybe a little myopia. But, the omission of the Brits’ involvement in any part of his story, is, well, curious.

And this is exactly my problem with Hersh’s story, because it puts all the onus of the operation directly on this Gang of 4 in the “Biden” administration and Norway as patsy through NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, which neatly confirms the narrative we’ve been subjected to for nearly two years about an out-of-control US.

Stop me if you’ve heard this studio pitch before:

The US government, desperate to hold onto its global empire, feeling the heat of a failing dollar reserve standard, picked a fight in Ukraine kill two birds with one war: 1) keep Europe a vassal state, especially Germany, tied to the US and 2) destroy Russia with full spectrum multi-theatre warfare.

In this pursuit the “Biden” administration’s neoconservative Cold Warriors were given carte blanche to rain havoc over both its allies and its enemies, no act outside the operational bounds. Bombing the Nordstream pipelines is just another depraved act by a fading global hegemon.

It’s a neat story and Hersh fills the role, sadly in my mind, of useful idiot here advancing what is clearly only half the story.

See the rest here

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The Crisis in Ukraine Is Not About Ukraine. It’s About Germany

Posted by M. C. on August 22, 2022

There it is in black and white. The Biden team wants to “goad Russia into a military response” in order to sabotage NordStream. 

MIKE WHITNEY

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/the-crisis-in-ukraine-is-not-about-ukraine-its-about-germany/

“The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought wars– the First, the Second and Cold Wars– has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united there, they’re the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn’t happen.” George Friedman, STRATFOR CEO at The Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs

The Ukrainian crisis has nothing to do with Ukraine. It’s about Germany and, in particular, a pipeline that connects Germany to Russia called Nord Stream 2. Washington sees the pipeline as a threat to its primacy in Europe and has tried to sabotage the project at every turn. Even so, Nord Stream has pushed ahead and is now fully-operational and ready-to-go. Once German regulators provide the final certification, the gas deliveries will begin. German homeowners and businesses will have a reliable source of clean and inexpensive energy while Russia will see a significant boost to their gas revenues. It’s a win-win situation for both parties.

The US Foreign Policy establishment is not happy about these developments. They don’t want Germany to become more dependent on Russian gas because commerce builds trust and trust leads to the expansion of trade. As relations grow warmer, more trade barriers are lifted, regulations are eased, travel and tourism increase, and a new security architecture evolves. In a world where Germany and Russia are friends and trading partners, there is no need for US military bases, no need for expensive US-made weapons and missile systems, and no need for NATO. There’s also no need to transact energy deals in US Dollars or to stockpile US Treasuries to balance accounts. Transactions between business partners can be conducted in their own currencies which is bound to precipitate a sharp decline in the value of the dollar and a dramatic shift in economic power. This is why the Biden administration opposes Nord Stream. It’s not just a pipeline, it’s a window into the future; a future in which Europe and Asia are drawn closer together into a massive free trade zone that increases their mutual power and prosperity while leaving the US on the outside looking in. Warmer relations between Germany and Russia signal an end to the “unipolar” world order the US has overseen for the last 75 years. A German-Russo alliance threatens to hasten the decline of the Superpower that is presently inching closer to the abyss. This is why Washington is determined to do everything it can to sabotage Nord Stream and keep Germany within its orbit. It’s a matter of survival.

That’s where Ukraine comes into the picture. Ukraine is Washington’s ‘weapon of choice’ for torpedoing Nord Stream and putting a wedge between Germany and Russia. The strategy is taken from page one of the US Foreign Policy Handbook under the rubric: Divide and Rule. Washington needs to create the perception that Russia poses a security threat to Europe. That’s the goal. They need to show that Putin is a bloodthirsty aggressor with a hair-trigger temper who cannot be trusted. To that end, the media has been given the assignment of reiterating over and over again, “Russia is planning to invade Ukraine.” What’s left unsaid is that Russia has not invaded any country since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and that the US has invaded or toppled regimes in more than 50 countries in the same period of time, and that the US maintains over 800 military bases in countries around the world. None of this is reported by the media, instead the focus is on “evil Putin” who has amassed an estimated 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border threatening to plunge all of Europe into another bloody war.

All of the hysterical war propaganda is created with the intention of manufacturing a crisis that can be used to isolate, demonize and, ultimately, splinter Russia into smaller units. The real target, however, is not Russia, but Germany. Check out this excerpt from an article by Michael Hudson at The Unz Review:

“The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27: “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” (“America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies”, The Unz Review)

There it is in black and white. The Biden team wants to “goad Russia into a military response” in order to sabotage NordStream. 

See the rest here

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