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Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream
I am not qualified to judge, dear Reader, but I distrust Mr. Hersh and I love a good debunking. I give you the blogger’s set-up, with the rest available for your perusal at the link.
[OliverAlexander] On the surface Seymour Hersh's story looks passable, but as you dig deeper it has more holes than the Nord Stream pipeline.

Update #3 includes debunks of Norway’s claimed financial incentives, provides information on past BALTOPS mine detection and clearance exercises and my email correspondence with Seymour Hersh

Update #2 includes detailed data debunking the use of any Alta-class vessel in the operation

Updated to include information given by Seymour Hersh in interviews in the days following his original post.

I would like to preface this post by stating that I will not be making any conclusions on who is responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline explosions in this piece. While I have my suspects, all publicly available information regarding the earth-shattering kabooms is circumstantial and there is none that conclusively points to a specific culprit. The purpose of this post is to debunk the claims made in Seymour Hersh’s Substack post titled "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline" using publicly available information.

In this post I do not take any stance on any of Seymour Hersh’s past articles or viewpoints, be they his Pulitzer Prize story in the 1970s and his recent work. This post will solely focus on the claims made in the recent Substack post.

Seymour Hersh’s recent Substack post claims to provide a highly detailed account of a covert US operation to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines in order to ensure that Russia would be unable to supply Germany with natural gas through them. All the information in Hersh’s post reportedly comes from a single unnamed source, who appears to have had direct access to every step of the planning and execution of this highly secretive operation.

When first reading through Hersh’s account of the events, the level of detail he provides could add credence to his story. Unfortunately for Hersh’s story, the high level of detail is also where the entire story begins to unravel and fall apart. It is often stated that people who lie have a tendency to add too much superfluous detail to their accounts. This attempt to "cover all bases" is in many cases what trips these people up. Extra details add extra points of reference that can be crosschecked and examined. In Hersh’s case, this is exactly what appears to have happened. On the surface level, the level of detail checks out to laymen or people without more niche knowledge of the subject matter mentioned. When you look closer though, the entire story begins to show massive glaring holes and specific details can be debunked.

Early in Hersh’s article, he states that the secrecy of mission to destroy the pipelines was the top priority of the Biden Administration. This he states is the reason why diver graduates from The Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center were chosen instead of SEALs or other SOCOM units. Doing this Hersh states would bypass reporting of the operation to members of Congress or the "Gang of Eight". In Hersh’s initial story, it appears that every precaution is being taken to avoid any leaks or bringing any unnecessary actors in on the mission.

Already in the accounts of the early top-secret planning meetings between high level US military, CIA and Biden Administration officials, some of the proposals seemed more akin to Tom Clancy fan fiction than plausible suggestions. The US Air Force officials reportedly proposed "dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely". One could write an entire post on the reasons why sounds entirely made up by someone with no real grasp of what that suggestion would actually technically entail.

During the supposed initial planning of this operation, from the way it is described by Hersh and his source, it appears that the CIA and entire interagency group were unaware of the fact that the Nord Stream pipelines were in fact pipelines.
Posted by: trailing wife 2023-02-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=659700