Is Sy Hersh’s account of the Nord Stream incident credible?

Oliver Alexander looks into the nuts-and-bolts details and says no, probably not.

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.

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 (this) 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.

Okay, that sounds a LOT more in line with what we know about USG and military levels of competence nowadays.

As Hersh’s article begins to move into the detailed account of the supposed operation, this is where the factually incorrect statements that can be crosschecked begin to appear.

The next major question mark comes after this description by Hersh of how the Norwegian navy found the “right spot” to sabotage the pipeline. It makes it sound like the explosions all took place in close vicinity of each other. There was in fact 6.17km between the site of the two blasts that caused the two leaks in the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. The third blast which caused the leak in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was 80km away from Nord Stream 1 blasts.

Immediately after this Hersh begins to mention some of the details of the diving aspect of the operation. He starts of by mentioning that the divers would deploy off a “a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter”. No Alta-class minesweepers took part in BALTOPS22. One Oksøy-Class mine hunter, the Hinnøy, did take part in the exercises though. The two classes of ship are very similar, though not identical.

While this ship took part in the exercise, its positioning during the time period does not match what would be expected of a ship supporting deep sea divers.

Joe Galvin used open source AIS data to track the Hinnøy during BALTOPS22 and as we can see from the map in his tweet, the movements of the Hinnøy are not consistent with three lengthy dives at the locations of the three seperate blasts.

That’s only a small sample of what amounts to a quite interesting analysis. I still have no trouble at all believing that the Biden junta would attempt such a thing, particularly in light of the fact that various admin puppeteers had openly declared their intention to eliminate the Nord Streams, up to and including Pedo Joe himself.

That said, though, the chief justification for skepticism still comes back to the motive/opportunity/means triad, with the FederalGovCo buffoons falling far short in the “means” department. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that the Insane Clown (Car) Posse could ever actually pull off such a complex and difficult op without the whole thing blowing up in their faces like an exploding cigar.

(Via Bayou Pete)

Claws: OUT

The Biden marionette bares its wooden fangs at an inconvenient question we all already know the answer to anyway.

‘Give Me A Break, Man,’ Biden Snaps At Reporter Asking if China Deals ‘Compromised by Family’s Business Relations?’

Joe Biden chastised a reporter who attempted to ask if the United States’ relationship with China was compromised by his family’s business dealings with the communist nation.

As reporters shouted inquiries at Biden following a press conference on the Chinese balloon and other aerial objects, one question about his family caught his ear.

“Is your ability to deal with China compromised by your family’s business relationships in China?” the reporter asked.

“Give me a break, man,” Biden replied.

He then terminated the presser and suggested the reporter was not “polite.”

“Polite”? Yeah, fuck you too, you senile, corrupt old kiddie-diddler. In the liver, with a rough-running chainsaw. The only “break” anybody ought to ever consider giving you is of the bones-through-the-skin variety.

Where’s Waldo Pete?

Buttplug must be on another vacay with “his” “family,” I suppose.

Pete Buttigieg And Chernobyl in Ohio

I guess if you are going to be the worst President in American history you want a Transportation Secretary that is equally bad. Pete Buttigieg, the man who ran for President on a solid record of mediocrity and being gay, certainly fits that bill. Ask the people of East Palestine, Ohio.

Last Friday a train derailed in East Palestine, a small town near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. Fifty cars went off the tracks. Ten of those carried various types of hazardous chemicals. Five of those cars were carrying liquid vinyl chloride. That comes out to 1,000,000 pounds of this dangerous toxic substance.

That was bad enough. Then Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation decided to make it much worse. Authorities made the decision to burn the vinyl chloride to prevent derailed tanker cars from exploding.

When vinyl chloride burns it turns into hydrogen chloride. When hydrogen chloride enters the atmosphere it bonds with water vapor and forms hydrochloric acid. That means hundreds of thousands of pounds of acid have now been released into the environment.

There is no precedent for an event of this type on this scale. The only previous similar incident involved the derailment of a single tanker car in New Jersey, but in that case, the authorities did not burn the spilled chemical.

Where is Buttigieg, our Secretary of Transportation? Busy with other matters. In public announcements and comments recently, he has talked about the dangers posed by an excess of white people working in construction. He has also had time to talk about a book called “Song of Achilles,” a gay rewrite of the Iliad. He hasn’t said a word about East Palestine, Ohio.

Well, of course not. He’s completely tied up with what a person of much greater intelligence and competence than Mayor Pete Buttplug can claim once called vital social issues ’n’ stuff.

Lest we forget, Kelly’s show featured a truly great band, too.

Yep, Pete Buttplug has a long, long way to go before he could ever dream of filling dem shoes.

Acts of war

Remember back when some of us, based on the cui bono standard if nothing else, postulated that Russia’s Nordstream I pipeline had been intentionally, actively sabotaged, almost certainly by the US and/or other cat’s-paw nations acting at its behest, and some folks—up to and including various Biden junta hacks, rumpswabs, and flunkies—puffed up indignantly over the patent “impossibility” of pulling off such an operation clandestinely?

Yeah, about all that.

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

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.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.

Imagine my surprise at being proven right yet again. Ahem.

Literally so, at that.

Hate Of The Union

 Once again, I didn’t bother with China Joe’s annual Hate Of The Union meat-beat, and you shouldn’t have either. Ace links to a good article laying out the jaw-slackening lies and distortions, if you’re into that sort of thing at all. But I ain’t, so I’ll limit my own editorial response to the following classic:

I think that about says all that really needs to be said, don’t you?

Update! The great Catturd says it for me.


You and me both, brother. You and me both. Via Dave Renegade.

Updated update! Perfect one-liner from the best Presidential press secretary of all time’s HOTU response: “The choice is between normal and crazy.” You really said a mouthful there, girl.

Well, whaddya know about that

Bumbling moron.


Heh. Hey, looky there, the senile old kiddie-diddler accidentally told the truth for once. UNEXPECTED!™

Another crash ‘n’ burn

You may have noted pRetend “pResident” Pedo Joe’s mangling of Thomas Jefferson’s famed “Tree of Liberty” quote in this post from last night. Or maybe you didn’t, I dunno. But either way, it inspired me to try my hand at making a meme out of it—which didn’t turn out as well as I would’ve hoped, thanks to my complete lack of any real GIMP-fu.

In fact, it was such a struggle and took so long to produce even the sub-par result below that I very nearly went into my daughter’s room to do the thing on the now-retired iMac, which still has a working copy of P-shop on it from my days working for the magazines (the new-to-me iMac won’t run any Adobe products at all thanks to some legacy 32-bit code tucked away in ‘em somewheres, a fact that still astounds me no end).

Understand: GIMP is good software, don’t get me wrong, and Lord knows the price (free) is right. But the learning curve for someone that’s been using P-Shop and Illy since, oh, about 1998 or so has turned out to be steep indeed. The nomenclature describing various tools and their functions is very different, and some things—like, say, the “Stroke” option, among others—just aren’t there at all; they don’t exist in GIMP, near as I’ve been able to determine. Others, such as “Drop Shadow,” “Bevel and Emboss,” “Find Edges,” and various text effects work in quite unexpected ways.

So y’all will just have to cut me some slack with this piss-poor meme, if you can find it in your hearts to do so. I’ve definitely come a long way from where I was when I first tried GIMP out, but I still have a long, long way to go with it yet. On the other hand, if I was the kind of guy who could pass up a chance this good to poke fun at senile Grampy Gropey just because my GIMP skills fall far, far short of the ideal, then hey, you probably wouldn’t be reading this damned blog in the first place, now wouldja?

TJefferBiden web

A sleazy, two-bit con artist like Bribem really ought to keep the immortal Jefferson’s words out of his lying mouth anyhow. Funny, don’tchathink, how he left the word “tyrants” out, ain’t it?

Pick one, fool

Proving yet again that Pedo Joe knows not what he says. Or does, or…well, you name it, really.

Oops: Joe Biden Just Torpedoed the Left’s Entire Jan. 6 ‘Insurrection’ Narrative

As Rick Moran noted on Tuesday, Old Joe Biden just boasted again about how powerless patriots are against his all-powerful and increasingly authoritarian federal behemoth. Biden practically thumped his chest as he declared: “I love my right-wing friends who talk about” – and here he mockingly imitated their dramatic tones – “‘the tree of liberty is water of the blood of patriots.’ If you need to work about taking on the federal government, you need some F-15s. You don’t need an R– AR-15.”

Has any president in American history so delighted in taunting his citizens? And has anyone noticed how Biden, in a single mangled quip, just destroyed two years of the Left’s painstaking work in constructing the Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative?

Biden’s quote from his “right-wing friends,” “the tree of liberty is water of the blood of patriots,” was, as Rick noted, a garbled version of Thomas Jefferson’s adage: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.” Biden was saying, of course, that in our age, such sacrifices were fruitless: the federal government is so powerful that it is unassailable, and so as its tyranny grows, unless patriots can somehow get hold of some fighter jets, they were out luck.

All right, Joe. Point taken. But wait a minute here. On Jan. 6, 2022, Biden stood in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and said solemnly: “One year ago today, in this sacred place, democracy was attacked — simply attacked. The will of the people was under assault. The Constitution — our Constitution — faced the gravest of threats.”

Then on Jan. 6, 2023, he said it again: “Two years ago, on January the 6th, our democracy was attacked. There’s no other way of saying it. The U.S. Capitol was breached, which had never happened before in the history of the United States of America, even during the Civil War. A violent mob of insurrectionists assaulted law enforcement, vandalized sacred halls, hunted down elected officials — all for the purpose of an attempt to overthrow the will of the people and usurp the peaceful transfer of power.”

As we have come to expect from Joe Biden, none of this was true, not even the bit about how the U.S. Capitol had never before been breached in American history. Back in 1814, just before Old Joe entered the Senate, the British burned the Capitol building. Then in 2007, Biden told David Letterman that he himself had breached it, accidentally, at age 21 (which was in 1963, kids, 59 years ago).

Biden claimed fancifully that he wandered into the Senate chamber: “In those days, no guards stopping you everywhere. And they just got out of session. I walked in the back, all of the sudden I found myself in the chamber. I was stunned. I walked up, sat down in the presiding officer’s seat, guy grabbed by the shoulder, said: ‘you’re under arrest.’” Joe is well-established as a serial liar, so this story is best taken with a massive amount of sodium and serves as a reminder that the alleged president can by no means be taken at his word.

That’s doubly true for his nonsense about how the defenders of “our democracy” on Jan. 6, 2021 were “outnumbered and in the face of a brutal attack,” but nonetheless, “our democracy held. We the people endured. And we the people prevailed.” The Jan. 6 protesters were not armed. Was there ever really any possibility that they would actually overcome the combined force of, as Joe enumerates them, “the Capitol Police, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, the National Guard, and other brave law enforcement officials”? They had no leader (with the highly questionable exception of Ray Epps), no plan, no goal, no weapons. They were let into the Capitol by police officers who held the doors open for them.

Which is where they fucked up; next time around, they’ll need to correct that grievous error. You simply don’t go in to beard the lion in his very den without arming up first, and there were enough patriots on hand that day that, had they been carrying AR15s, the outcome would have been very, very different.

Thinking about ice cream

Apparently the senile old crook doesn’t know that the phrase “dead air” strikes fear into the heart of every broadcaster in the entire universe. Or maybe just doesn’t care, who knows.

BIZARRE BEHAVIOR: Dazed Biden Stares into Space for 45 Seconds as Reporters Scream Questions

A visibly dazed-and-confused Joe Biden stared into space for 45 seconds Tuesday as reporters screamed questions about his mishandling of classified documents.

“Mr. President??? What about the documents?” yelled one journalist.

“Any comment about the classified material?” asked another.

What an embarrassment he is.

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