Saturday, February 25, 2023

America - Home to Deep State Bureaucratic Full Spectrum Dominance

at 41 comments:

Friday, February 24, 2023

Who Loves Ukraine?

 

Source

at 47 comments:

MSM Furious that Jan 6 Abuses Are Being Revealed... and that it will result in Putin Winning in Ukraine!

at 10 comments:

You've Been Lied to. How Many People Did Capitol Hill Police Kill on J6?


Four Trump supporters died that day in the violence. Dozens more were injured. Two Trump supporters, Kevin Greeson and Benjamin Phillips, died immediately when police started firing on the crowd – without warning.

at 46 comments:

Thursday, February 23, 2023

Meanwhile... in East Liberalstan...

 


h/t - Woodsterman

at 21 comments:

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

American Neo-Liberal and COVID Lysenkoism

Does America need a COVID-19 Response Truth & Reconciliation Commission?
at 34 comments:

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Hungary, the Next Ukraine....

Hungary has been in the crosshairs of the Biden/Obama administration ever since Prime Minister Viktor Orban refused to align with the WEF Western Democracies in their quest for regime change in Russia. As the NATO led western alliance assembled to use Ukraine as a proxy war against Russia, Hungarian Prime Minister Orban would not join.

In early April 2022, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was overwhelmingly reelected, despite the massive efforts against him by the European Union, western and euro-centric multinational globalists. As a result of the victory, Brussels was furious at the Hungarian people. Associated Press – […] “Orban — a fierce critic of immigration, LGBTQ rights and “EU bureaucrats” — has garnered the admiration of right-wing nationalists across Europe and North America.” 

Within the statements reported from his 2022 victory speech, Prime Minister Orban warned citizens of the NATO and western allied countries about the manipulation of Ukraine and how he views the Zelenskyy regime: […] “while speaking to supporters on Sunday, Orban singled out Zelenskyy as part of the “overwhelming force” that he said his party had struggled against in the election — “the left at home, the international left, the Brussels bureaucrats, the Soros empire with all its money, the international mainstream media, and in the end, even the Ukrainian president.”

This put Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in the crosshairs of the western alliance, specifically the EU and U.S. bureaucrats who use their power, position and intelligence apparatus to manipulate foreign nations. A year later and now we see USAID Administrator Samantha Power in Hungary openly discussing her seeding of the NGO’s and political activist systems in order to generate yet another color revolution. {Direct Rumble Link}
 
Samantha Power, the wife of Cass Sunstein, is well known as the Obama/Biden administration’s advance operative who uses her position in U.S. government to influence activism in targeted nations. Hungary is now her target.

Why is eliminating Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban now the goal of the Biden administration. Well, a reminder:

♦ Hungary warned citizens of the west about the New World Order, created through Ukraine.

♦ Hungary continued to purchase Russian oil and natural gas. Zelenskyy and the Western alliance were furious.

♦ Hungary said they would continue energy purchases in Rubles if that is what Russia demanded.

The World Economic Forum and NATO/Western Alliance cannot permit a nation to stand on principles of nationalism. Allowing a point of contrast that would showcase the weakness of globalism and multiculturalism is something the western control system just cannot permit.

As a result, Samantha Power, the U.S. State Dept (USAID) and the CIA, are collectively running an operation in Hungary, seeding the groundwork for the next color revolution.

They don’t even try to hide this stuff anymore.

Just keep watching…. More will become visible, and our conversation will now have context for what comes next.

[FWIW, I always suspected S Power of being a CIA operative]
at 35 comments:

Monday, February 20, 2023

Rage Against the War Machine!

at 23 comments:

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Why H8ers H8...

Christian Parenti, "Trump against empire: is that why they hate him?"
Trump was ideologically incoherent and crassly transactional. But the threat he posed to American empire and thus the gargantuan security state helps establish a motive for why US intelligence intervened in both the 2016 and 2020 elections 
 
As president, Donald Trump lavished the rich with tax cuts and deregulation. Yet, contradictorily, he also threatened the structure of American global hegemony that does so much to keep the American one percent tremendously wealthy. In fact, Trump undertook the most momentous rollback of American military and diplomatic power since the current architecture of American informal empire first took form at the end of World War II.

Trump campaigned on an end to “nation building” and then, amazingly, set about actually winding down America’s “forever wars” by simply packing up and leaving. Nor did he start any new wars. Trump cut the number of US troops in Iraq by almost half. In Afghanistan, he cut the US occupation force by half and negotiated a framework for total withdrawal. He tried to end US combat deployments in both Somalia and Syria, and in both cases, despite Pentagon opposition and slow-walking noncompliance, Trump did manage to withdraw the majority of US personnel. In Syria, bases abruptly abandoned by US special forces were taken over by Russians – a development that prompted the New Yorker to accuse Trump of the “abandonment of Syria.”

Worse yet in the eyes of the national security state, Trump went after US operations in Germany and South Korea, threatening highly strategic lynchpins in the global system of US military power. He also made great strides towards normalizing relations with North Korea and producing a peace treaty on the Korean peninsula. In Libya, he declined to escalate and worked with Russia towards a peace settlement. In Venezuela, he first allowed John Bolton and the CIA to attempt a color revolution-style coup fronted by pretty-boy Juan Guaidó. But when that effort faced resistance Trump grew bored, started making flattering remarks about “tough” Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his “good looking generals,” while complaining that his National Security Council director John Bolton wanted to get him “in a war.”

Understanding how Donald Trump threatened American empire and thus the gargantuan security state and its associated industrial complex of contractors and think tanks helps establish a motive for why the FBI and over 50 former intelligence officials actively attempted to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, thereby putting their thumbs on the scale during the 2020 election. This also helps us understand why, in 2016, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and the Director of National Intelligence all signed off on the Russiagate narrative despite the lack of credible evidence. And it helps us understand why, as Matt Taibbi has reported, over 150 private philanthropic foundations came together to create and fund the intelligence-adjacent Alliance for Securing Democracy, which in turn funded the spooky outfit Hamilton 68 which pushed the Russiagate hoax. In short, it helps explain why they hate him.

Trump described his foreign policy as “America First,” thus tapping into a more-than-century-long strain of American isolationism, or conservative anti-war sentiment. But his attacks on American empire were not ideologically coherent. He hated NATO but he loved Israel. He increased pressure in Cuba, but did the opposite with North Korea. He increased the military budget even as he attempted to withdraw troops all over the planet. His reasoning, when given, was crassly transactional.

For example, six months into his administration, Trump met with the increasingly worried Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon in a super-secure meeting room called “the Tank.” The meeting was an attempt to talk sense into the new president. As the Washington Post described it, the Joint Chiefs tried to “explain why U.S. troops were deployed in so many regions and why America’s safety hinged on a complex web of trade deals, alliances, and bases across the globe.” The presentation involved maps and graphics intended to make the issue clear and simple.

Unimpressed, Trump called his generals “dopes and babies” and “losers” who “don’t know how to win anymore.” As his anger rose, he demanded to know why the United States was not receiving free oil as tribute for the US military presence in the Middle East. “We spent $7 trillion; they’re ripping us off,” Trump bellowed. “Where is the fucking oil?”
Despite active opposition from within his administration, Trump also attacked important treaties, ordering the United States withdrawal from: the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR); the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); the Paris Climate Agreement; and the World Health Organization (because Trump saw the WHO as soft on China at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic). He withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a corporate free trade deal which had taken two years to craft and would have been the centerpiece of a US “pivot toward Asia.” With a barrage of punitive tariffs, Trump launched a trade war against China. Although it continued under Biden, Trump’s destabilizing economic confrontation with China came as a shock to business and political leaders around the world.

Accusing Russia of cheating, Trump terminated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. But he also held a cordial face-to-face summit with Putin in Helsinki that took his opposition’s Russiagate paranoia to unprecedented heights. Trump withdrew from the Treaty on Open Skies, an almost 20-year-old mechanism for preventing weapons proliferation. He started to scrap the hard-won nonproliferation treaty with Iran and revised America’s Nuclear Posture Review to, insanely, allow an atomic response in case of cyber-attack!

Most shocking of all, Trump repeatedly expressed his wish to remove the US from NATO, which would have destroyed NATO if it had been done. If NATO fell apart, the entire US-centered global system – that is, the largest, most effective, complex, and expensive imperial project in world history – would undergo a seismic destabilization. American empire is not inevitable, it is not natural, and it is widely resented. It only continues to exist because of constant, diligent, sophisticated leadership. Trump, like a toddler wielding a hammer, spent four years almost randomly smashing holes in that delicate structure.
What is American power? 
Since 1945, American global hegemony has rested on a vast system of infrastructure: embassies, listening posts, 800-plus military bases, naval assets, satellite networks, undersea cables, etc. It also rests on an array of long-standing, multi-national relationships involving state institutions, politicians, diplomats, military officers, contractors, intelligence networks, corporations, business executives, humanitarian professionals, academic specialists, and journalists.

Central in all this, yet often overlooked, is the role of building consent for American power among allies. This consent allows Washington to use allies against adversaries. But it is also a form of control over those same allies. Thus, NATO is about keeping the Russians out of Western Europe, but it is also about controlling Europe, one of the most powerful centers of global capitalism.

The importance of US power to the management of global capitalism as a whole, was described well by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin in their book The Making of Global Capitalism:
“The American state, in the very process of supporting the export of capital and the expansion of multinational corporations, increasingly took responsibility for creating the political and juridical conditions for the general extension and reproduction of capitalism internationally…. As with the informal regional empire that the US established in its own hemisphere at the beginning of the twentieth century, a proper understanding of the informal global empire it established at mid-century requires… [identifying] the international role of the American state in setting the conditions for capital accumulation.”
Trump, it seems, never understood this big picture stuff. Instead, he saw the raft of relationships, alliances, institutions, and programs that comprise the post-1945 American-led global order as little more than a poorly run security business. Consider his view of NATO:
“I met them last year. Stoltenberg, Secretary General, great guy, of NATO. Big fan. No one was paying their bills. Last year I went, a year ago. We picked up $44 billion. Nobody reports it. I just left recently and we’re going to pick up at least another, close to a $1 billion extra. I said to him, ‘you got to pay your bills.’”
Trump treated powerful allies as poorly as he treated subcontractors during his real estate days. Recall the G-7 summit of 2018: Trump arrived late, left early, and refused to sign a joint communiqué reaffirming the G-7’s commitment to a “rules based international order.” When then-German Prime Minister Angela Merkel pressured him to sign, Trump took two Starburst candies from his pocket, tossed them across the conference table and sneered, “Here, Angela, don’t say I never give you anything.”

In 2020, the US Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations described Trump’s foreign policy as “marked by chaos, neglect, and diplomatic failures.” The President’s “impulsive, erratic approach has tarnished the reputation of the United States as a reliable partner and led to disarray in dealing with foreign governments…. Critical neglect of global challenges has endangered Americans, weakened the U.S. role in the world, and squandered the respect it built up over decades. Sudden pronouncements, such as the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, have angered close allies and caught U.S. officials off-guard.”

Mark Esper, who spent a year and half as Trump’s second Secretary of Defense, made an art of blocking implementation of Trump’s empire-wrecking directives. When Trump demanded that one third of the American military personnel in Germany come home, Esper drew up a plan to instead “redeploy” 11,500 troops with more than half of these remaining in the European theater. Indeed, Esper even managed to spin the redeployment as advancing America’s traditional agenda of threatening Russia.

Esper’s memoir portrays Trump as easily distracted: “A discussion would stop stone cold and pivot as a new thought raced through his head — he saw something on TV, or somebody made a remark that threw him off track.” Yet Trump was also consistent in his foreign policy sentiments. “Somehow, we often ended up on the same topics, like his greatest hits of the decade: NATO spending; Merkel, Germany, and Nord Stream 2 [Trump wanted it stopped]; corruption in Afghanistan; U.S. troops in Korea; and, closing our embassies in Africa, for example.”

Trump’s foreign policy team worked to actively thwart him. Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic advisor, went so far as twice stealing from the president’s desk important documents awaiting presidential signature. One would have withdrawn the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. The other would have unilaterally pulled the US out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Later, Trump did renegotiate NAFTA, transforming it into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which did, in fact, include higher wages for Mexican autoworkers.

Trump regularly demeaned and insulted his foreign policy team. In a conversation that included the Irish Prime Minister, Trump called across the room to his National Security Adviser, the dementedly bellicose John Bolton, “John, is Ireland one of those countries you want to invade?” In 2019, Trump unceremoniously fired Bolton by tweet.

Trump’s first Defense Secretary, Jim “Mad Dog” Mathis, openly opposed most of the administration’s foreign policy moves. Displeased, Trump started calling Mathis “Moderate Dog.” In January 2019, when Trump ordered US troops withdrawn from Syria, Moderate Dog resigned.

A “shaken” Nancy Pelosi declared the turn of events “very serious for our country.” Republican Senator Ben Sasse called it “a sad day for America” while a “particularly distressed” Mitch McConnell worried openly about “key aspects of America’s global leadership.”

Vandalizing NATO 
Most alarming to the national security establishment was Trump’s 2020 attempt to cut by one-third the US military presence in Germany. Considered the “bedrock” of NATO, Germany hosts 35,000 American military personnel stationed across 40 different installations. The air components for both U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command are headquartered at Germany’s Ramstein Air. These German-based assets — bombers, fighters, drones, helicopters, AWAC surveillance planes, as well as associated radar, air traffic control, and signals intelligence infrastructure — cover 104 countries ready to provide “expeditionary base support, force protection, construction, and resupply operations” even in “austere conditions.” Germany also hosts an estimated 150 US nuclear armed missiles.

Surprisingly far-flung US military operations depend on German bases. When American soldiers were wounded by roadside bombs in Iraq, their first stop was a local Combat Support Hospital, but once stabilized the wounded were immediately flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at the U.S. Army post in Landstuhl, Germany, near Ramstein Air Base. Yet, in the summer of 2020 Trump ordered the Germany deployment cut by 12,000, or one-third.

“We don’t want to be the suckers anymore,” Trump told reporters when announcing the move. “We’re reducing the force because they’re not paying their bills; it’s very simple.” When Esper tried to spin the drawdown as a mere redeployment, Trump corrected him: “Germany’s delinquent, they haven’t paid their NATO fees.”
The redeployment reportedly “blindsided” both German officials and some American military leaders because neither group was properly consulted in the process, nor was there much planning of any sort associated with the momentous move. As already mentioned, Esper did all he could to distort and block Trump’s order.

More important than the quantity of troops Trump sought to withdraw is the qualitatively greater damage of those withdrawals from one of the most critical, high-tech logistics hubs in the entire imperial apparatus. The Council on Foreign Relations worried aloud about the “message to allies and adversaries alike that the United States is no longer committed to European defense.”

Final Assault 
By November 2019, as Trump’s friendship with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was in full blossom, the American president started musing about withdrawing troops from South Korea and demanded that South Korea – and all other allies hosting US military personnel – pay “cost plus 50%” for American protection.

Trump started by ordering withdrawal of 4,000 of the 28,000 US military personnel in South Korea. As in Germany, American soldiers, sailors, air personnel, and intelligence officers in South Korea do much more than merely guard the country. Indeed, they project American power into the entire East Asian and Pacific region. The US military footprint in South Korea is spread across fifteen bases; one of these, Camp Humphreys, is the largest military base in the world. As with Germany, the US presence in South Korea is the high-tech fulcrum of a region-wide system of bases, air wings, and naval fleets. American Navy assets in South Korea support the Japan-headquartered US Seventh Fleet which contains 50 to 70 ships, 150 aircraft, and 27,000 Sailors and Marines.

In 2020, Trump announced that he wanted all US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The latter half of Trump’s term also saw the beginning of the end of the Afghan war. Even though it was Biden who presided over the final US withdraw from Afghanistan, the conditions for that withdraw were negotiated by the Trump administration. American agreement with the Taliban stipulated that US troops would be out of Afghanistan in 18 months, provided that the Taliban fought to contain terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.

Those who dismiss Trump’s treaty with the Taliban do not understand how the US withdrawal from Afghanistan unfolded. While thirteen American soldiers were killed in an Islamic State suicide bombing at the gates of the Kabul airport and the United States left vast amounts of hardware such as Humvees and helicopters – in large part because the Pentagon refused to cooperate until it was too late – had the Trump Administration not reached an agreement with the Taliban, the US withdrawal would have been a desperate fight to escape.

In 2019, Trump momentarily took an interest in the Libya debacle. In typical fashion he started courting Khalifa Haftar, a US-groomed warlord who came to oppose the US and United Nations-backed Libyan “government.” But then, despite considerable pressure from American allies like Turkey, Egypt, and others to commit more resources, Trump backed off and, once again surprising allies, called for a cease fire.

The United States mission in Somalia, which began in 2007, has been described as “a cornerstone of the Pentagon’s global efforts to combat al Qaeda.” Anyone looking at a map can see the country’s strategic importance: at the tip of the Horn of Africa, jutting into the Arabian Sea, not far from the mouth of the Persian Gulf, with a shoreline along one side of the Gulf of Aden which leads north to the Suez Canal. But in early December 2020, Trump (who in a crude display had referred to Haiti and African states as “shithole countries”) pulled the plug, ordering a near total withdrawal of the 700 US special forces, military advisors, and CIA operatives in Somalia.

The view from inside 
Put yourself for a moment in the position of people like FBI director Christopher Wray, or his predecessor, James Comey. Looking out upon Trump’s foreign policy vandalism, you would feel deep concern. If, like the majority of DC elites, you see American global leadership as fundamentally moral, even vital and indispensable, then Trump’s brazen attacks upon it are extremely dangerous. From such a vantage point, the truly responsible thing to do would be to sabotage Trump’s policy, his legitimacy, his base, and the possibility of his reelection.

Worse yet, Trump is a demagogue. He has created a grassroots movement of deeply devoted followers: the America First movement that subscribes to his Make America Great Again, or MAGA, slogan. They also demand containment; their neo-isolationist politics need to be discredited lest they spread and become mainstream.

The FBI and the CIA have illegally intervened in domestic politics, historically by targeting left-wing social movements. We know they infiltrated Trump’s 2016 campaign, then worked to paint him as a Russian puppet throughout his presidency. Are we to believe that the intelligence agencies would not and could not have intervened to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump? Or that they would not have attempted to entrap, then hound and severely punish the MAGA that that rioted for several hours at the US Capitol on January 6th 2021? Such a proposition strikes me as ridiculous. Yet, many of my left-wing friends refuse to explore the mounting evidence suggesting that such agencies moved against Trump and his base because they cannot see why the intelligence agencies might have pressing reasons to do so.

But look abroad. Trump threatened the entire system of US global hegemony. He threatened it for different reasons and in different ways than might grassroots, socialist, anti-imperialists, but he threatened US empire nonetheless.
at 5 comments:

Saturday, February 18, 2023

The New Corporatism

Derek Royden, "Natural Asset Companies and the plan to financialize the commons"
"Are we fighting to save ourselves and our living planet or are we fighting to maintain business as usual?” 

“The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.” 
-Noam Chomsky

Following the COP 26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, which seems at times like an exercise in public relations for the leaders of richer nations who mostly left after the first week, it’s hard not to feel cynical about the chances that real action will be taken to avoid the worst impacts of climate change in the decades ahead. While tireless activists like Greta Thunberg and the student strikers she inspired still offer some hope through their efforts, the truth is that the neoliberal economic order based on the unending accumulation of riches by the already wealthy and almost religious zeal for ‘free markets’ is in direct conflict with humanity’s ability to confront the crisis.

Thunberg made this point herself earlier this week, “Are we fighting to save ourselves and our living planet or are we fighting to maintain business as usual? Our leaders say we can have both, but the harsh truth is that is not possible.”

For an example of this, we need only look at the latest attempt by Wall Street plutocrats to create infinite revenue streams for the 1% from the work done for free until now by Mother Nature.

In mid-September, the New York Stock Exchange announced it was working with the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG) to create what are to be called Natural Asset Companies (NACs) that will allow investors to profit from natural ‘assets’ like clean water. Although it won’t be mentioned in the business press, which has already shown quite a bit of enthusiasm for the idea, the end of this scheme seems to be the final privatization of the commons that used to belong to all.

The groups involved in IEG are the Rockefeller Foundation, somewhat ironically created by the family that built its spectacular wealth through its practical monopoly over the fossil fuel industry in the US at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, Aberdare Ventures and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB).

The involvement of the IADB should ring some alarm bells as it has acted as a kind of World Bank in miniature in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1959, forcing austerity on some of the world’s poorest nations in the name of multilateral ‘development’. Indeed, one of the most troubling things about NACs, the operations of which have yet to be fully explained, is that former colonies in the global south will probably be the first to see their natural wonders like rainforests monetized through these schemes to fill the pockets of investors in richer countries like Canada and the United States.

Using the language of marketing, the IEG vaguely but oh so positively explains the idea of NACs on their web-site, “We are pioneering a new asset class based on natural assets and the mechanism to convert them to financial capital. These assets are essential, making life on Earth possible and enjoyable. They include biological systems that provide clean air, water, foods, medicines, a stable climate, human health and societal potential.”

As Robert Hunziker more coherently broke down the concept on the web-site Counterpunch on Monday, “In simplest of terms, NACs allow for the formation of specialized corporations that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land. The services might be sequestration of carbon or clean water or possibly rare Tibetan mountain air or maybe a lake teeming with trout in the wilderness. The possibilities are endless when auctioning off major chunks of an asset as big as the planet.”

Once these assets are identified and their ‘value’ has been assessed in a process that hasn’t yet been made public, they will be offered up to investors in Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), which is just one of the incentives the NYSE, which is itself a private entity owned by Intercontinental Exchange, has in listing these companies when they’re created.

While IEG has announced a partnership with an unnamed multinational corporation starting sometime this fall to create a NAC or NACs, it’s been reported by Reuters that the company, with the help of its partner the Inter-American Development Bank, has already begun discussions with the government of Costa Rica to form NACs there and “is also in discussions with other sovereign nations, private landowners, and public companies” to create more.

NYSE President Stacey Cunningham explained that, far from looking to fill the pockets of investors with $125 trillion produced by the natural world in a given year, the introduction of NACs is all about protecting the environment, “With the introduction of Natural Asset Companies, the NYSE plans to provide investors an innovative mechanism to financially support the sustainability initiatives they deem critical to our future.” h

Still, the use of buzzwords like ‘sustainibility’ to financialize the commons was undercut by the NYSE’s chief operating officer. who said this about the upcoming launch of NACs, “Our hope is that owning a natural asset company is going to be a way that an increasingly broad range of investors have the ability to invest in something that’s intrinsically valuable, but, up to this point, was really excluded from the financial markets.”

One side benefit for those who create or invest in these companies will be the ability to claim that they’re doing good for the environment, taking the concept of ‘greenwashing’ to a whole new level. Perhaps governments will even create tax incentives for these kinds of businesses, a win/win for all, except perhaps those who actually live and depend on the resources in areas now owned by unaccountable corporate entities.

Although IEG insists that the profit from NACs will come from their sustainability, what is being sold as a green solution to a problem that didn’t exist could go very wrong in a number of ways. What if the owners of an asset like a forest discover there is mineral wealth beneath it that is worth more in the short term than the money it produces through medicinal plants, water or carbon offset credits over time?

Although it seems likely that it will be the big investment and vulture capital firms who will control the market for NACs, it’s also not inconceivable that some might be wholly bought or created by billionaires like Elons Musk or Jeff Bezos. If NACs come to include ‘assets’ beyond our planet, some billionaire might realize a dream once exclusively associated with comic book villains: ownership of the moon or other planets.

It has seemed throughout the climate crisis that for every positive step forward in reducing emissions or developing green technologies the greed of big business and the uber wealthy ensures that we take six steps back. Natural Asset Companies are just another extreme example of this in action. Tragically, they also seem to foretell the end of the commons, something not even the absolute monarchs of old could do.

Anybody want to trade Forest Growth offsets for Desert mineral rights?  Clean Water offsets for Forest burn credits?  The thermal energy in a geyser in Yellowstone National Park for a windfarm off Cape Cod?  I thought trading NFT's was weird.  This takes the cake.  Come visit Yosemite, sponsored by The Bechtel Corporation.  Selling off the Nation's Public Lands to private Corporations and Individuals.  So who get's to keep the money, or is this all in trade for so-called or imaginary "national debt payment/ relief"?

at 5 comments:

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

And So it Begins...

at 52 comments:

Monday, February 13, 2023

Smoke on the Water...

Oliver Alexander, "Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream"
On the surface Seymour Hersh's story looks passable, but as you dig deeper it has more holes than the Nord Stream pipeline.
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 explosions 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 regards to Seymour Hersh’s past, both his time as a Pulitzer Price winning journalist in the 1970s and his recent factually incorrect takes on the Syria gas attacks and Skripal poisoning, I will let people like Eliot Higgins who worked on these cases give their opinion. 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 United States Navy Experimental Diving Unit 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.

Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.

I am unsure as to why all the intelligence officials in the initial planning meetings for the mission felt that the only possible way to sabotage the pipeline would be at the short section directly bordering Russia, instead of the large section in more favorable waters.


As the operation commences, Hersh states that Norway was chosen as the obvious partner. This entails bringing the Norwegian Navy and Secret Service in on the details of the mission, as they will play a key part in carrying out the operation. This is the same mission where Biden still holds secrecy as the top priority and does not want the “Gang of Eight” or members of Congress to catch wind of the plan for fear of leaks.
During his introduction of Norway, Hersh makes a very strange remark about NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg implying that he has worked directly with the US intelligence community since the Vietnam War. Jens Stoltenberg was born March 16th 1959. The US involvement in the Vietnam War ended April 30th 1975, meaning Jens had just turned 16 when Saigon fell to the PAVN troops. I doubt Jens Stoltenberg was a US intelligence asset in his early teens.

He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.

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.

Hersh claims that the Norwegian navy had the idea of using the annual BALTOPS exercise as the cover for the operation to plant the explosive charges on the pipelines. He then claims that the Americans had “convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program” where the “at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.”

There are multiple problems with this statement. Firstly, mine clearing has long been a staple of the BALTOPS exercises. Implying that this is something that was added as cover for this operation is honestly laughable. Secondly, the people behind this highly secret operation that could not afford leaks had now somehow convinced the BALTOPS planners to change the parameters of their exercise which would have been planned far in advance of the exercise taking place. All of this either without informing them of why or by adding more people to the loop that could leak the plans.

”Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.

The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep.”

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.

Here I have marked the locations of the Nord Stream leaks on top of the map of the Hinnøy’s movement during BALTOPS22 that Joe Gavin posted. Note the even at its closest, the Hinnøy is several km from the leak locations. At the location of the two leaks in Nord Stream 1, the Hinnøy never even slows down significantly.

From the available information I can find, I have found no evidence that the Oksøy-Class can support surface-supplied mixed gas diving. This means that the divers would have been required to use electronically controlled closed-circuit underwater breathing apparatus (EC-UBA) for their dives. In his article Hersh states that the divers would “dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks”. In the US Navy Diving Manual dives to the depths required for the sabotage of the pipelines are to be done using a HeO2 (Heliox) mix. The manual also features table showing the decompression times for divers during the assent for dives to this depth.

For a dive of 260 FSW, assuming that the work to place the charges took somewhere between 15 and 30 mins, the total assent time for the divers would be between 53 and 195 minutes. So for each dive we are looking at a dive time of between an hour and a half to four hours to complete the planting of the charges on the pipeline. Additionally as the three explosive locations were all miles apart, they would require at least 3 separate dives to accomplish the mission.

According to Hersh’s source, at some point the Americans and Norwegians decided to brief senior officials in Denmark and Sweden “in general terms about possible diving activity in the area”. This I do not in anyway understand. Either the same insulated highly secretive operation that must not have any leaks is now bringing further outside actors into the fold or this means that they were just briefed that dives would be taking place. If it was the latter, then why brief them on diving activity when they had supposedly already orchestrated the entire mine clearing part of BALTOPS22 as an excuse for the diving activity.

Then Hersh goes on to speak absolute nonsense about the US having to “camouflage” the explosives from the Russians by adapting their salinity to that of the water. This is complete and utter drivel that makes no sense at all. Russia is not conducting minesweeping operations in the Danish and Swedish EEZ. Even if they were, they are not going to detect what Hersh himself described as a shaped charge placed on the pipeline. The salinity aspect is just random buzzwords.

The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.

Hersh later states that the charges would be detonated by a “sonar bouy” (sonobouy) dropped as a “Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight”. Many problems with this, firstly the Norwegian P-8s are operated by the Norwegian Air Force. Secondly, while they have been delivered per the link he used as a source earlier, this link forgets to mention that they won’t enter into active service until later this year. Here I assume that Hersh thought they were in service as they had been delivered and then proceeded to add this detail to his story, without knowing that they were not yet in service. There would be nothing “seemingly routine” about a Norwegian P-8 dropping sonobouys just off the coast of Bornholm.

Open Source ADS-B Exchange information also does not show any Norwegian P-8 activity on September 26th. While it is possible for aircraft to operate without showing up on ADS-B Exchange, it would make little sense in this case as Hersh states it was meant to look like a “seemingly routine flight”. The timeline for this also does not match up, as Hersh states after the P-8 dropped the sonobouy, “A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission.” The first explosion was recorded at 02:03 local time, meaning that there was no way for the flight to be on the 26th as he stated while there also being a few hour delay on the explosives.

There was one P-8 Poseidon aircraft in the vicinity of the Bornholm around the time of the explosions. This was a US Navy P-8, not Norwegian Air Force P-8. Again though the timeline does not match what Hersh described. The P-8 passed over the area of the Nord Stream 2 leak almost exactly one hour after explosion took place. The explosion happened at 02:03 CEST, while the P-8 flew over at 03:10 CEST. It would later return an circle the area several hours after the explosions took place.

Hersh then goes onto a long rant about how they had to be careful that a random underwater noise did not trigger the explosives, which again makes little sense. This isn’t the 1960’s with phone phreaks getting free long distance calls using cereal box whistles. I highly doubt they would make a trigger mechanism that could be detonated by the “complex mix of ocean background noises”.

Due to the exceptionally high level of secrecy for this operation, one could also ask why the US chose to involve the Norwegian Navy it at all. As the dives were supposedly performed using EC-UBA gear, any ship could have been used and a civilian vessel would have be much more covert and not needed the cover of BALTOPS22. The same question can be asked about the Norwegian Air Force. According to Hersh, they were used to drop a sonobouy from the P-8 Poseidon to detonate the explosives. Why even use an aircraft for this? A sonobouy could be also be deployed by a ship which again is much more covert.

Seymour Hersh’s story would have been a lot harder to pull apart, had he decided to be more sparing with the details instead of going into depth with meaningless details that make little sense. A simpler story could have been believable, but this piece of Tom Clancy fan fiction is subpar.

Finally, through this entire detailed account there is one key thing Seymour Hersh neglects to mention or provide reasoning for. If Biden launched this operation with the express purpose of destroying Russia’s ability to supply Germany with natural gas, why only blow up three of the four Nord Stream pipelines? Why leave one of the two Nord Stream 2 pipelines intact, when they were the ones that Russia was able to open up at a moments notice.

Did Hersch or his "source" "fictionalize" his story to cover "actual" sources and methods?  Sounds like the answer may be, "yes".   The P-8's nationality and service mix-up was likely a deliberate attempt to add more Norwegian cooperation to the "dramatic" story's narrative.  As for the "dive support ship, sounds like there may have been one, or a few undocumented "commercial" vessels involved.

at 42 comments:

Saturday, February 11, 2023

Biden's 87,000 New IRS Agents to Target 'Tip' Reporting by Poorest Service Industry Workers Instead of Billionaires

Meanwhile...back in Congress...
...One of Dervy's Heroes Speaks Up!
at 34 comments:

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

American Intelligence Community (USIC) Declares War on Russia

 

Seymour Hersh, "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.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.

America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.

Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.

Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.

Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”

A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.

There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”

The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.

Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”

The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.

It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.

All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.

PLANNING

In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.

It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?

What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.

Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”

At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.

Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.

A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.

The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.

That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy's intentions and planning.

Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.

Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”

Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”

What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”



Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.

“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”

Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”

The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”

The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”

THE OPERATION

Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.

In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites inside China.

A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction for years, had become operational and more American submarines were now able to work closely with their Norwegian colleagues to monitor and spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250 miles to the east, on the Kola Peninsula. America also has vastly expanded a Norwegian air base in the north and delivered to the Norwegian air force a fleet of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon patrol planes to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.

In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.

Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.

Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)

Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.

The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.

After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.

At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the cover of popular magazines.

“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.

The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it.

Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.

The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)

The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.

The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.

The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.

It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.

The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.

And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.

Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”

Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing.

Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.

The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia.

The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.

Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law.

In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.

The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?

The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)

On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.

FALLOUT

In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.

While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.

Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”
More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “​Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”

Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.

“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.

“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”

The not very credible denials begin...  but it's pretty clear that America needs to fess up to this act of war, and offer compensation to Russia for damages and lost gas revenues.

at 42 comments: