{"id":9867,"date":"2023-02-08T15:02:19","date_gmt":"2023-02-08T20:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/?p=9867"},"modified":"2023-02-08T17:10:44","modified_gmt":"2023-02-08T22:10:44","slug":"acts-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/acts-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Acts of war"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember back when some of us, based on the cui bono<\/em> standard if nothing else, postulated that Russia\u2019s Nordstream I pipeline had been intentionally, actively sabotaged, almost certainly by the US and\/or other cat\u2019s-paw nations acting at its behest, and some folks\u2014up to and including various Biden junta<\/em> hacks, rumpswabs, and flunkies\u2014puffed up indignantly over the patent \u201cimpossibility\u201d of pulling off such an operation clandestinely?<\/p>\n

Yeah, about all that.<\/p>\n

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How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times called it a \u201cmystery,\u201d but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret\u2014until now<\/em><\/p>\n

The U.S. Navy\u2019s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name\u2014down 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\u2019s complex is as nondescript as its location\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance\u2014as 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, \u201cThis is false and complete fiction.\u201d Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: \u201cThis claim is completely and utterly false.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center\u2019s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America\u2019s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n

President Biden and his foreign policy team\u2014National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy\u2014had 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014enough 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Imagine my surprise at being proven right yet again. Ahem.<\/p>\n