If you posit poor weld quality lead to one event but then argue this catelyzed an active attack as the second event, why do you not actively discuss weld quality as the root cause of both events?
I see no need for there to have BEEN a second attack, if you posit weld quality caused one failure, its actually more plausible weld quality is an issue overall, than something was done.
The ships could have been doing remote sensing to try and test weld quality, as much as laying munitions.
It feels like partial application of Occams razor or something.
Admitting they did a shit job of laying critical infrastructure is probably hard, for a highly distorted economy. The risk of achieving a window-ejection event, is high.
Well, because as he said, they so far confirm to have found explosive residue at one site, and not the other. And, as stated, there was suspicious activity of a ship directly over the site for a week prior to the attack, where explosive residues have been confirmed, and not over the other site.
The theory is that explosives on NS1 were detonated because the failure of NS2 would have triggered an inspection of NS1 that would have revealed the previously planted explosives.
How do you trigger these kinds of things? I don't think radio works at depth. So you need to actually get close enough for a sonar ping or whatever? Hmmm, 80km in 17hrs...
Because the theory is straw-clutching to discredit Hersh. These kind of pipelines have extremely rigorous testing regimes. The probability that a weld defect caused failure in a non-operational pipeline is tiny.
One of my dad's close friends when he was a companion (compagnons du devoir, idk if it exists in the US) worked on submarine welds. He would agree with you (he just retired because army have early pension)
A second welded for EDF on thermic generators, including nuclear. He would have agreed with you, even when he was detached to China. Until 2010.
Now he rants about quality control not doing their jobs, 28 years old managers who never welded once in their life who can't bother showing up on the site, and the resp ignoring his warnings for years. I'd say the probability is at least small, definitely not tiny.
I read an interesting comment on reddit a while ago, paraphrasing from memory:
Assuming there was definitive proof who did it (and for simplification reason, let’s say it was either the USA or Russia), there is no way they will not classify and bury that. It can’t be the USA for obvious reasons, but Russia would make it too direct an attack on a NATO state, which no one wants either. So the current state of "we have no idea" is the best for everyone involved.
What are the obvious reasons it can't be USA? Seems to me there is nothing obvious about this incident besides the fact that it benefits the USA strategically and economically.
I like this analysis, where it was probably Russia, although we may never know, but it's actually more harmful to Russia if we have these conspiracy theories going around the perpetrator/cause. They want people to be panicked by their hybrid warfare and instead the West is largely ignoring it.
Well on the side of the Americans doing it, we have a reputable western journalist citing their anonymous sources saying it was the Americans and Norwegians, the Americans in the past having actively vowed to stop Nordstream 2 if Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Americans have the abundantly clear motive of kneecapping the Russian economy, while increasing the value of their own oil exports.
On the side of the Russians doing it - the Russians total lack of motive proves it was them. Blowing up your own pipeline is so incredibly stupid and self defeating that people will always doubt you did it, making it the perfect false flag attack! Imagine how inspired the Russians are to support this war now that a piece of inanimate infrastructure blew up with a heavily indirect impact on their day to day lives! Plus the Germans will suspect America because of the Russians total lack of motive.
> Well on the side of the Americans doing it, we have a reputable western journalist citing their anonymous sources saying it was the Americans and Norwegians, the Americans in the past having actively vowed to stop Nordstream 2 if Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Americans have the abundantly clear motive of kneecapping the Russian economy, while increasing the value of their own oil exports.
On one hand, we have a story with no real evidence in anyway shape or form, that gets key facts about the players involved completely wrong from someone who used to be credible.
Wherever Hersh got his story doesn't seem to know a lot about reality.
> the Americans have the abundantly clear motive of kneecapping the Russian economy, while increasing the value of their own oil exports.
If you're going to dismiss Russia's motives as purportedly stupid, you also need to acknowledge the stupidity of America's motives in attempting to achieve what it had already achieved.
One of the things that makes this interesting is that no one has a great motive (save the one actor that most are ready to discount due to lack of opportunity to do it--Ukraine).
Here it's worth adding that none of these pipelines were operational in the first place, so the idea that this was some great economic coup against Russia is kind of off the table.
> attempting to achieve what it had already achieved
It did not. War will end sooner or later and pipeline will again become tempting source for cheap gas for Germany and other European countries. Now after 3 of 4 lines gone Germany has no way back to being dependant on russian gas.
The reputable western journalist has given exactly the same amount of evidence as game theory: zero.
Yes the US had reasons for disliking this pipeline. But I would forward that blowing it up at that time would be a dumb move. They were kneecapping the Russian economy anyway AND getting lucrative LNG business from Europe. The downside to being caught seems to outweigh the gain of doing it in such an ostentatious way.
Plus the US didn't need to blow it up to achieve the same goals. They have so many diplomatic levers. I don't think German politicians give any credence to it being the Americans.
So it could be the US, but only if they were really stupid. I guess Russia doesn't have a monopoly on stupid.
> They want people to be panicked by their hybrid warfare
Why? People were already panicking about Russia (rolling through Western Europe, using nukes, etc).
The argument in the video I linked is not very convincing to me at all. Nobody was ever under any doubt that Russia could bomb some unguarded infrastructure near its border. And he just handwaves the idea that the US could have carried an operation to sabotage the pipeline as a "clandestine activity" (i.e., making it look like an accident) just by hacking it or something. It's a Hollywood analysis of "hackers". Why even fight Russia at all, why not just hack all their military, factories, refineries, communications, and power plants?
It might be a fun exercise in simplistic game theory type analysis but taking that and using it to assign Russia as the most likely culprit seems like astounding hubris and naivety.
When you consider the other things that have been going on it would be but Russia is going to make sure they have a chain of deniability. Would the West go to war over something that doesn't cause mass public outage and they can't pin on Russia with a high degree of certainty? I doubt it.
Actually whoever did it it seems like the best course of action for Europe is to not talk about it. Russia, USA, Ukrainian terrorists it doesn't really matter.
I’m not sure that Nord Stream attack would count as attack against NATO member since the explosions were in international waters. OTOH, the pipeline ends in Germany and is owned by multinational group. But nobody was killed.
I think it isn’t enough to require NATO response. It could be used if NATO wanted to escalate but it would be weak reason. But would be good propaganda. Which means that if the US knew, they would probably announce it.
That Minerva Julie track is certainly interesting.. a week after Russia cuts the gas through NS1, a Russiann-linked oil freighter (that had just been added to Ukraine's war sponsor registry (https://nazk.gov.ua/en/news/companies-from-the-nacp-list-of-...)) spends nearly a week loitering directly over the site of the explosions that would come 10 days later. Far more open source evidence for this theory than Hersh's, though that's not saying a ton.
It was a commercial ship that had just left port in the Netherlands -- it feels like it'd be twice as suspicious if it spent a week adjacent to a shipping lane, in full view of other ships with its transponder off.
Without appealing to semifamous names who have stated their theories, I'd like to just list the entities with both means and motive that are known to exist, some of which are unlikely candidates.
* Denmark
* Estonia
* Finland
* France
* Gazprom as an independent actor
* Latvia
* Lithuania
* NATO as an independent actor
* Norway
* Poland
* Russia
* Sweden
* Transneft as an independent actor and competitor to Gazprom
I don't think any can be conclusively ruled out, but if we start to weight each candidate by things such as
* motive(am I gaining/losing leverage by this?),
* ability (can I actually do/help/enable this action?)
* consequence (can I get away with it? Can I muddle it and make people get along with it?)
* context (a war is going on, but so is internal politics; does my context push me for this action?)
I think probably more than half could be reasonably ruled out, depending on how each of those were weighted. And we could probably reason about the accomplices too
The issue here is that the state with the most motive (Ukraine) is one that most are agreed did not have the opportunity to actually conduct the attack. Nobody else has a strong motive. The US had already achieved what it could have hoped to achieve months before the pipeline explosion. Russia's plausible motive assumes a certain amount of strategic insanity mixed with thuggery. Everybody else's motive more or less rests on making a political statement that they haven't been making in public.
Of course not. It's a fallacy to think it is possible.
Even in the case where someone claims to have been the party that did it and produced documentary evidence showing it the political environment dictates that other parties will claim it is fake or a false flag.
Rule out Gazprom and Transneft, because they are not independent in any way. If you think that there are independent oligarchs that can do such thing, then I have to inform you there are no oligarchs after beginning of 00s in Russia.
Sure there are rich people who "own" big companies, but most of them are Putin's friends and others won't even think about anything like "independence". Putin can say one word and these people (like anyone in Russia) will go to jail for 15 years, die strange death or would have to leave country (if they are able to do this fast enough).
Berezovskiy and Hodorkovskiy examples were enough for everyone to understand that oligarchy is gone.
While this is an interesting theory, it definitely has shades of https://xkcd.com/690/ in it. I never thought I'd see an actual article where I could make that reference. :-)
It's a plausible theory, and it does at least go some way to explaining some of the oddities.
For example, why such a large distance between the breaks in the NS1 and NS2 pipelines? The detail about the Minerva Julie are suggestive.
How true is it? Or perhaps better, how likely is it that it's true? That I couldn't say. I'd tentatively say it's more likely than Hersh's story, but that's a low bar.
It doesn't make a lot of sense (ie, if you accept the premise is true, would you expect the plot to play out as Hersh claims?), it includes several details that are clearly incorrect, it isn't particulary supported by open source intel, and it relies, by it's own admission, on a single anonymous source.
So the situation is essentially "Hersh claims that someone told him a story that we know is at least slightly untrue." Is it possible that the rest of it is true? Absolutely!
...but there's nothing I've seen to suggest that it's likely the rest of it is true. It's just another theory, of which there are many.
Also he only quotes a single anonymous source. He has stated before that he verifies info from multiple sources, and goes to great lengths to protect sources, so it is very likely that there are more but that he cannot give details without endangering them.
There's a few, but as an example, Hersh claims the divers deployed off of an Alta-class minesweeper, which was taking part of the BALTOPS22 excercise.
There was no Alta-class minsweeper taking part in the excercises. And while a similar Oksøy-class minesweeper did take part, it's AIS track doesn't put it in the right spot. When Hersh was challenged on this detail in an interview, he said "It was called the Alta, the ship was there. I mean that is just such a stupid lie." suggesting he meant that the ship was called the Alta, not that it was an Alta-class ship. But the Alta is an Alta-class ship, and also it was in the process of being scrapped at the time, and also wasin't taking part in the excercise.
None of that means that divers didn't deploy off some ship at some point! But Hersh provided very specific details at what ship it was, when it happened, and how it happened, and those details are wrong, which raises the question of what else was wrong. Was it a minsweeper? Was it even actually a Norwegian ship? Was it actually during BALTOPS22? Did the incorrect details come from Hersh or from his source? If the source, was that the source trying to cover their tracks, or did the source, perhaps, not have direct knowledge either, but was just retelling a story they had heard? Etc.
Thanks for the explanation, I hadn't heard that problem before. It does seem strange that Hersh would publish that detail if it could be so easily debunked. I notice it was investigated by the same reporter who came up with the Rupture Catalyst theory.
That's not really unusual for Hersh - he's always been prone to being a bit free with the details. Which hasn't stopped him from getting the big picture right in some very famous stories!
...but he also seems to have gotten it wrong in some other cases. Hersh is a fantastic investigative journalist (and a good writer and speaker to boot), but he has very limited credibility because he will make fantastic claims regardless of whether he has the ability to back them up.
It's difficult to argue in circumstances where some elements of his story that appear to make it less likely are said to be untrue in order to defend that story.
Notably there doesn't appear to be any reason for him to claim it was a single source when he could equally have claimed he verified it with multiple sources (even if there was only one additional source. It's no less untrue, right?)
I think in these circumstances you can only look at Hersh's record. Since the turn of the millennium it really isn't very good. With the exception of the Abu Ghraib story (which he wasn't alone in breaking) I don't think any of his major stories have turned out to be true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh
(He was also very lucky to avoid publishing forged claims about Kennedy in the late 1990's).
The TalkingPointMemo really says it all. He's self publishing or going with minor publications because larger publications do fact checking and the stories aren't checking out.
The Wikipedia article quotes a number of journalists and editors who make similar points.
It's definitely very murky territory. I don't think he claimed it was all from a single source, he just quoted a single source.
It's interesting you question his record, I thought Hersh's record was excellent; which major stories are you referring to? With the kind of reporting he does, I would have expected many more major mistakes to be made but he seems to make them very rarely.
> I thought Hersh's record was excellent; which major stories are you referring to?
I linked Wikipedia, but to summarize some of his questionable claims:
* There were plans under consideration in 2006 for a nuclear first strike on Iran.
* Osama bin Laden wasn't killed by US Forces in a raid in Pakistan
* The Syrian gas attack wasn't done by Syrian government forces
* "I don't necessarily buy the story that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11"
* That the Skripal poisoning wasn't done by Russian forces.
Lots of these views have significant backers amongst conspiracy theorists. But unlike some of his other stories (say in the same time frame) there has been very little to no evidence showing he is anything like correct.
Basically, post 2000 the only one of his stories which has turned out to be well supported was Abu Ghraib.
Thanks for the summary, I read the Wikipedia article but it wasn't clear which stories were incorrect (I guess because there is no evidence either way).
Classified info takes time to be released, so I wonder if the fact that his recent reporting hasn't been confirmed is more a function of freedom of information / declassification timelines than proof that he has dropped the ball.
* Operational details make little sense (using a warship as a diving platform for US divers, elaborate sonobuoy remote detonation, etc)
* OSINT details don't check out (all the implicated ships are accounted for, etc)
* Errors/contradictions in the story (the Norwegian Navy doesn't operate any P8s, etc)
* Long, unbroken track record, going back to 2006, of Hersh writing lurid, discredited stories like this
* No media outlet in the world --- not just in the US but anywhere in Europe --- being willing to run this.
Important caveat that disbelieving Hersh doesn't mean that the US wasn't behind the incident; it just means there's nothing to learn about the incident from Hersh's writing.
It just makes no sense, Russia didn't need to blow up the pipelines, they could just turn off the supply. In fact, they lost a substatial negotiating ability (being able to turn the gas back on) with the explosions.
As always, follow the money. USA are now the fracking gas suppliers to Europe, and have cut European 'dependence' on Russia (aka a modicum of independence from USA) which they'd been bleating about for a long time.
I personally don’t think it’s Russia(I think it’s Poland).
However the theory Russia did it or rather a sect of the Russia’s power structure did it is definitely plausible.
Many hardliners in the government saw the pipeline as a tool to negotiate with the West and a way out of the full scale war many hardliners are calling for. Blowing the pipeline has backed Putin into a corner.
The moderates on the other hand see the same thing as well. This forces Putin into a corner and weakens him considerably if the war goes badly (it was/is).
The only person who didn’t want the pipeline blown up was Putin himself. His power structure all had something to gain if the pipes were blown.
Many people say “well Russia wouldn’t do that” and they’re already wrong. Russia’s motives are not singular they are plural. There are competing groups within the Kremlin that are held together by Putin, not a singular will of Russia.
Often Occams razor applies to these potentially murky situations.
The Minerva tracks are from September, and to me look like they are scanning for something, rather than laying anything in a specific location. Possibly the Russians had a tip-off or spies informing that the pipes were mined.
The story might actually be partly true, except it was the US who feared a pipe inspection, and so detonated the evidence.
The Minerva tracks are from two weeks before the explosion (it left the area on Sep 13th and the explosions came on the 26th) . That timing seems to implicate rather than exonerate..
> Possibly the Russians had a tip-off or spies informing that the pipes were mined.
The Minerva is a Greek tanker that often transports Russia oil, it's not a Russian ship.. if they had a tip about the pipelines being mined, surely Russia would investigate it themselves or with a ship that's equipped to examine the sea floor instead of a random tanker with no such capabilities?
Well by that logic they would obviously lay mines themselves, and certainly wouldn't leave tracks all over the place 2 weeks prior to the explosions.
Those tracks are obviously just drifting or perhaps looking for something. I don't think the Russians mislaid their own pipeline. Maybe communications lines? Or smuggling? Looking for lost treasure?
In any case the point stands, it just makes no sense for the Russians to do this, and contrary to what is claimed, this presentation does not offer any support of that theory IMHO.
All of these people acting like the the EU hasn't officially labeled this event as sabotage. One only needs to ask who would benefit. Perhaps ask Victoria 'fuck the eu' Nuland.
It's absolutely incredible to me that there is even a question about this.
The Biden administration walked back the Trump policy of sanctioning anybody who did work on the NS2 pipeline. Russia was able to use this as an implied bargaining chip against German support for Ukraine.
Who benefits from blowing up a Russian pipeline in The Baltic Sea? Russia? The country that was planning on using this as leverage? Who could have just as easily simply turned the supply off?
The idea that anybody ever bought that is embarrassing.
Germany is trying to avoid WW3 here, which I think is signaled by their initial reaction to the war, and now signaled again with their response to the idea of economic sanctions against China. In pursuit of that, they didn't want to support the war in Ukraine, for what I think should now be obvious reasons. The US was worried that they wouldn't be willing to risk their population freezing to death this winter, so we blew up the gas pipeline and took the option away from them.
What WWIII? The one where Russia, that has no functioning military, together with Wakanda faces the rest of the world? The rusted non-functioning nukes that Russia has no reason to use and only function as a deterrant?
Have to wonder whether the Russia investigation looked in the right places. Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, 1980s wanting its foreign policy back, secretly promising "flexibility" to Putin. Makes you wonder what Putin paid for that kind of flexibility.
By the time it blew up Russia had lost their leverage. It was clear by then that Europe was going to absorb the gas situation. That doesn't rule out the US. This is a reasonable take on it that doesn't conclude anything but looks at the reactions https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EeP_ZZbBIl4
It's one thing to say it's incredibly unlikely, which is fair. Please don't use terms such as "zero percent chance" - there is absolutely both chance and precedent for pipelines to have catastrophic failure, regardless of timing. The chance is never zero.
One question is did the operator do anything after Germany suspended the certification on September 22. Like decreasing pressure or increasing pressure. Those seem unlikely to cause leak but would explain the timing.
We also don’t know anything about the leaks. It should be obvious to investigators if Nord Stream 2 was not an explosion.
The chance is never zero, but it can be effectively zero. And the way we communicate this fact is through inexact language. It's never zero in the same way that you ever having a chance to live on the moon in your lifetime is never zero.
The way you're characterizing is wrong because although it's non zero... this much is true: You have to be pretty damn stupid to NOT think biden is behind the whole thing.
What is the percent chance that the boat laying the pipe would go way off course 50m from where the rupture would later occur, and not go off course in any other place along the pipeline?
You're voted down, but you're not wrong. The government does use agents that spread misinformation. I mean it's a freemarket... perfectly legal for the media too bullshit and perfectly legal for the government to bullshit too.
There is nothing precluding this blog from being written by such an agent.
I see no need for there to have BEEN a second attack, if you posit weld quality caused one failure, its actually more plausible weld quality is an issue overall, than something was done.
The ships could have been doing remote sensing to try and test weld quality, as much as laying munitions.
It feels like partial application of Occams razor or something.
Admitting they did a shit job of laying critical infrastructure is probably hard, for a highly distorted economy. The risk of achieving a window-ejection event, is high.