Tag Archives: Seymour Hersh

“I’m Telling You, He Did It”: Seymour Hersh Blames Biden For Nord Stream Attack

Posted on March 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

Asking Seymour Hersh to back down over his recent Nordstream story in the face of the mainstreams’ “official” story would be like asking Muhammad Ali to back down from the threat of a bunch of 10-year-old girls. From Paul Joseph Watson at summit.news:

Says he made the decision in order to bolster his re-election chances as a war president.

Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc / Contributor via Getty Images

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that Joe Biden made the decision to blow up Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines because he saw being a war president as giving him a better chance at re-election.

Last month, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation.

According to Hersh’s sources, the explosives were planted in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise and were detonated three months later with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy.

One source told Hersh that the plotters knew the covert operation was an “act of war,” with some in the CIA and State Department warning, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”

Last week, the New York Times reported that a “pro-Ukrainian group” had sabotaged the pipelines, using a team with as few as six people involved in the mission, contradicting previous assumptions that only a state would have had the resources to carry out the operation.

According to Hersh, referring to Biden, “He did it. He did it, I’m telling you, he did it, adding, The Biden game is to wait it out and never say yes.”

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LISTEN: Nord Stream Attack an ‘Act of War’, by Ray McGovern

Posted on February 13, 2023 | 2 comments

Intelligence veteran Ray McGovern has an astute take on the Nordstream sabotage. From Ray McGovern at consortiumnews.com:

Transcript

Garland Nixon

Sy Hersh has a piece at his Substack account entitled How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. The New York Times called it a, quote unquote mystery. But the United States executed a covert C.I.A. operation that was kept secret until now. For insight into this, let’s turn to our first guest. He works with Tell the World, The publishing arm of the Ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner city Washington; has 27 year career as a C.I.A. analyst, serving as chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch and preparing the president’s daily brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and he is, of course, Ray McGovern. As always, Ray, welcome back.

Ray McGovern

Thanks for having me.

Garland Nixon

So Sy Hersh writes, last June, the Navy divers operating under the cover of a widely publicized midsummer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that three months later destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines. This is according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

What I’ll say, Ray, is usually when we hear of unknown sources, we tend to question the veracity or validity of the piece.

But if it’s Sy Hersh, I got to give it its due. Ray McGovern.

Ray McGovern

I know Sy Hersh.

Garland Nixon

I know you do.

Ray McGovern

I know him to be a meticulous reporter, winner of five Polk Awards, Pulitzer Prize, you name it. Back in the day when honest reporters were so honored. This piece has all the earmarks of Sy’s meticulous approach, and he clearly has a very good source who felt, well, he felt a constitutional obligation to honor his or her oath to the Constitution of the United States, which is the supreme oath any of us take. And that is to make sure that you tell the truth, especially when the Constitution is being violated.

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Nord Stream Sabotage Was CIA, US Navy Covert Op: Seymour Hersh Bombshell Prompts White House Response, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 9, 2023 | Leave a comment

The mainstream press will do its best to ignore this story, but it’s going to be hard. Hersh’s story is obviously big news in Russia and Germany. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Famed journalist and Pulitzer prize winner Seymour Hersh, who for decades was a star reporter writing for The New York Times and New Yorker, on Wednesday published a new bombshell as his first Substack post, prompting a quick White House response

After conducting his own investigation into who sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines via a series of underwater blasts on Sept. 26, Hersh has concluded the United States blew up the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline as part of a covert operation under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise.

Famous investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Image: Institute for Policy Studies

Hersh, relying on unnamed national security sources, describes months of discussions and back-and-forth involving the Biden White House, CIA, and Pentagon. The report says planning was in the works all the way back to December 2021, with a special task force formed under the aegis of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

“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,” the report, entitled How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline reads.

“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,” it continues.

As momentum gained to proceed with a covert sabotage attack, “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,” Hersh writes.

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‘Our Boys’: 50 Years After the My Lai Massacre, by Christian Appy

Posted on March 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

Eventually there was too much evidence for people to pretend that My Lai was anything but a slaughter of innocents. So those inclined to pretend just tried to forget. Fifty years later, it’s worthwhile to remember, question, and analyze. From Christian Appy at antiwar.com:

Excerpted from American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

Americans, including GIs, were losing their once reflexive faith that the U.S. military, with all its skill and firepower, would prevail in Vietnam as it had so often throughout history. Also shattered was the faith that America’s fighting forces were inherently more virtuous than their enemies. The unraveling of that conviction began in earnest in 1969 with the revelation that American soldiers had murdered hundreds of unarmed and unresisting women, children, babies, and old men in the village of My Lai.

For many people, the shocking news came first in the form of several horrifying photographs. One shows almost two dozen dead Vietnamese bodies on a dirt road. Many have fallen in a twisted pile; some are partially naked. Another photograph shows a woman lying in a field with her legs drawn up under her body. Her conical straw hat has flipped off her head. If you look closely you can notice that a large portion of her brain lies exposed beneath the hat.

A third photograph shows a group of six Vietnamese women and children huddled together. At the center an old woman stands, stooped over, with a look of unspeakable terror on her face. Behind her a young woman clutches her around the waist with her head buried in the older woman’s shoulder. A young girl stands wide-eyed and openmouthed, with disheveled bangs. She is pressing into a balding woman, barely visible, who is lifting an arm over the head of the young girl, perhaps to embrace her. On the other side of the photograph, a young woman holding a small boy in one arm uses her free hand to button the bottom of her blouse. In some magazines and newspapers a caption tells readers that American soldiers are about to kill the people in the photograph. We are looking at the final seconds of their lives.

Some of the My Lai photographs were published first in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A few weeks later a larger selection was published in Life (December 5, 1969). Then they appeared in newspapers and magazines all over the world. They were taken by Ronald Haeberle, an army draftee who was sent to Vietnam as a military combat photographer. He had taken the pictures some twenty months earlier on March 16, 1968, while accompanying an infantry company from the Americal Division.

To continue reading: ‘Our Boys’: 50 Years After the My Lai Massacre

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A New Twist in Seth Rich Murder Case, by Joe Lauria

Posted on August 9, 2017 | 4 comments

A very good summary of the DNC leaked email case. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:

Exclusive: The U.S. mainstream media dismisses any link between the murder of DNC official Seth Rich and leaked DNC emails as a “conspiracy theory” – while blaming Russia instead – but a new possibility has arisen, writes Joe Lauria.

With U.S.-Russia tensions as dangerously high as they’ve been since the worst days of the Cold War, there is potential new evidence that Russia was not behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee, although Congress and the U.S. mainstream media accept the unproven allegation of Russia’s guilt as indisputable fact.

Slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich

The possible new evidence comes in the form of a leaked audiotape of veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in which Hersh is heard to say that not Russia, but a DNC insider, was the source of the Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks just before the start of the Democratic National Convention in late July 2016.

Hersh said on the tape that the source of the leak was former DNC employee Seth Rich, who was murdered on a darkened street in a rough neighborhood of Northwest Washington D.C. two weeks before the Convention, on July 10, 2016. But Hersh threw cold water on a theory that the murder was an assassination in retaliation for the leak. Instead, Hersh concurs with the D.C. police who say the murder was a botched robbery.

Mainstream news outlets have mocked any linkage between Rich’s murder and the disclosure of the DNC emails as a “conspiracy theory,” but Hersh’s comments suggest another possibility – that the murder and the leak were unrelated while Rich may still have been the leaker.

In dismissing the possibility that Rich was the leaker, mainstream media outlets often ignore one of the key reason why some people believe that he was: Shortly after his murder, WikiLeaks, which has denied receiving the emails from the Russian government, posted a Tweet offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the solution of the mystery of who killed Rich.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and publisher, brought up Rich’s murder out of context in an interview with Dutch TV last August. “Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks,” Assange said. “As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.”

Pressed by the interviewer to say whether Rich was the source of the DNC emails, Assange said WikiLeaks never reveals its sources. Yet, it appeared to be an indirect way of naming Rich, while formally maintaining WikiLeak’s policy. An alternative view would be to believe that Assange is cynically using Rich’s death to divert the trail from the real source.

But Assange is likely one of the few people who actually knows who the source is, so his professed interest in Rich’s murder presents a clue regarding the source of the leak that any responsible news organization would at least acknowledge although that has not been the case in many recent mainstream articles about the supposed Seth Rich “conspiracy theory.”

To continue reading: A New Twist in Seth Rich Murder Case

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Has Seymour Hersh Debunked ‘Russia-gate’? by Justin Raimondo

Posted on August 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

This is probably the best of a spate of recent articles about Seymour Hersh’s take on the DNC’s emails, who disclosed them and how they were disclosed. From Raimondo at antiwar.com:

Hersh says Seth Rich contacted WikiLeaks

Journalist Seymour Hersh has given us good reason to believe what many have long suspected: that the “hacking” of the Democratic National Committee, which supposedly delivered the White House to Donald Trump, was an inside job. In a recorded phone conversation (here’s a transcript) with Ed Butowsky, a Republican operative who has been financing an investigation of the Seth Rich affair, Hersh told Butowsky that Seth Rich, who worked for the DNC and was murdered on July 10, 2016, was in contact with WikiLeaks, and wanted money for access to the DNC emails.

Hersh doesn’t buy the conspiracy theory surrounding Rich’s death: he sees it as a random event, one that wasn’t too unusual given the neighborhood Rich lived in – and yet this haphazard tragedy may have led to the unraveling of the mystery that is, today, at the core of our politics: the controversy over who delivered the DNC/Podesta emails to WikiLeaks.

The Democrats, the media, and the War Party contend that the Russians hacked into the DNC, and fooled John Podesta into handing the keys to his emails over to them: a full-fledged federal investigation, complete with a special counsel, is now busy trying to find evidence of the Trump campaign’s collusion with this nefarious plot. On the other hand, the case for Russian “hacking” has been fragile from the start, and has only gotten less tenable as time goes on. Now another blow has been delivered to the “Putin did it” conspiracy theory, one that may indeed prove fatal.

Hersh contends that, upon Rich’s death, the District of Colombia police went into his apartment – with a warrant — and examined his computer, but they couldn’t get into it. So they called in the DC cyber unit, which didn’t do much better, and so they called in the FBI’s Washington field office, the cyber unit, and they got in. “What I know came off an FBI report,” says Hersh. “Don’t ask me how. You can figure it out.” Well, yes, we can indeed. He goes on to say:

“And so what the report says is that sometime in late spring, we’re talking June you know summers in June 21st, late spring would be after, I presume, I don’t know, I’d just say late spring, early summer and he makes contact with WikiLeaks. That’s in his computer and he makes contact.”

To continue reading: Has Seymour Hersh Debunked ‘Russia-gate’?

 

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He Said That? 6/25/17

Posted on June 25, 2017 | 1 comment

From Seymour Hersh, American investigative journalist and political writer, “Syria: Trump’s Red Line,” (article referred to in “Intel Behind Trump’s Syria Attack Questioned,”:

On April 6, United States President Donald Trump authorized an early morning Tomahawk missile strike on Shayrat Air Base in central Syria in retaliation for what he said was a deadly nerve agent attack carried out by the Syrian government two days earlier in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon.

The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack,  including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.

Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president’s determination to ignore the evidence. “None of this makes any sense,” one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth … I guess it didn’t matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.“

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Intel Behind Trump’s Syria Attack Questioned, by Ray McGovern

Posted on June 25, 2017 | 1 comment

Seymour Hersh has broken too many big stories through the years (My Lai, Abu Ghraib) to have to resort to a German newspaper to get a story published that questions the intelligence behind President Trump’s missile strike against Syria. He had to go to Germany because he’s been right in the past and the American and British media suspect he’s right on this one, too, and that runs contrary to their narrative. From Ray McGovern at consortiumnews.com:

Exclusive: The mainstream media is so hostile to challenges to its groupthinks that famed journalist Seymour Hersh had to take his take-down of President Trump’s April 6 attack on Syria to Germany, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

Legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is challenging the Trump administration’s version of events surrounding the April 4 “chemical weapons attack” on the northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun – though Hersh had to find a publisher in Germany to get his information out.

In the Sunday edition of Die Welt, Hersh reports that his national security sources offered a distinctly different account, revealing President Trump rashly deciding to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian airbase on April 6 despite the absence of intelligence supporting his conclusion that the Syrian military was guilty.

Hersh draws on the kind of inside sources from whom he has earned longstanding trust to dispute that there ever was a “chemical weapons attack” and to assert that Trump was told that no evidence existed against the Syrian government but ordered “his generals” to “retaliate” anyway.

Marine General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Marine General, now Defense Secretary James “Mad-Dog” Mattis ordered the attacks apparently knowing that the reason given was what one of Hersh’s sources called a “fairy tale.”

They then left it to Trump’s national security adviser Army General H. R. McMaster to further the deceit with the help of a compliant mainstream media, which broke from its current tradition of distrusting whatever Trump says in favor of its older tradition of favoring “regime change” in Syria and trusting pretty much whatever the “rebels” claim.

According to Hersh’s sources, the normal “deconfliction” process was followed before the April 4 strike. In such procedures, U.S. and Russian officers supply one another with advance details of airstrikes, such as target coordinates, to avoid accidental confrontations among the warplanes crisscrossing Syria.

Russia and Syrian Air Force officers gave details of the flight path to and from Khan Sheikhoun in English, Hersh reported. The target was a two-story cinderblock building in which senior leaders – “high-value targets” – of the two jihadist groups controlling the town were about to hold a meeting. Because of the perceived importance of the mission, the Russians took the unusual step of giving the Syrian air force a GPS-guided bomb to do the job, but the explosives were conventional, not chemical, Hersh reported.

The meeting place was on the floor above the basement of the building, where a source whom Hersh described as “a senior adviser to the U.S. intelligence community,” told Hersh: “The basement was used as storage for rockets, weapons, and ammunition … and also chlorine-based decontaminates for cleansing the bodies of the dead before burial.”

To continue reading: Intel Behind Trump’s Syria Attack Questioned

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The media’s Reaction To Seymour Hersh’s Bin Laden Scoop has been disgraceful, by Trevor Timm

Posted on May 18, 2015 | 1 comment

The following article should disabuse anyone still holding the notion that “presstitutes” is too harsh a term for the mainstream media. From Trevor Timm, at the Columbia Journalism Review via davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public.

Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its role in covering a world-shaping event—but it’s clear the media has trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want to hear.

Hersh’s many critics, almost word-for-word, gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known achievements—breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years later—before going on to call him every name in the book: “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank.” Yet most of this criticism, over the thousands of words written about Hersh’s piece in the last week, has amounted to “That doesn’t make sense to me,” or “That’s not what government officials told me before,” or “How are we to believe his anonymous sources?”

While there’s no way to prove or disprove every assertion Hersh makes without re-reporting the whole story, let’s look at the overarching criticisms one by one:

Conspiracy theory

No phrase has been bandied about more than “conspiracy theory” in describing Hersh’s reporting. Critics argue that he’s accusing “hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years.” How could that be possible?

First of all, denigrating a legendary reporter who has broken more major stories than almost anyone alive as a “conspiracy theorist” because his story contained a few details a little too implausible for some people’s taste is beyond insulting. A conspiracy theory in the traditional sense would be something like The US government is covering up the fact that bin Laden is still alive, not accusing the the administration of telling a story about a highly classified matter that differs from the truth—something it does all the time.

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-medias-reaction-to-seymour-hershs-bin-laden-scoop-has-been-disgraceful/

To continue reading: The media’s Reaction to Scoop has been disgraceful

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Bin Laden’s End: The Truth Comes Out, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on May 14, 2015 | Leave a comment

By now, we know how the government and its minions in the press deal with revelations of previously unexposed scandals, crimes, and other information they would prefer remained buried. At the top of the list is to ignore it, and that, after formulaic sweeping denials, appears to be the tack they are taking for Seymour Hersh’s story, “The Killing of Osama bin Laden,” in the London Review of Books. If Hersh, a  respect Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist is to believed, then the story the Obama administration and its illusionist partners in Hollywood (Zero Dark Thirty) dished out to the public is a truck load of crapola, to burnish Obama’s image and to protect our “best friend” in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. From Justin Raimondo, at antiwar.com:

What we’re learning from Seymour Hersh’s bombshell story

“I’m not saying that they’re at the highest levels, but I believe that somewhere in this government are people who know where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda is, where Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban is, and we expect more cooperation to help us bring to justice, capture or kill those who attacked us on 9/11.”

That was Hillary Clinton, almost exactly four years ago.

Her remarks caused a storm of controversy – not in the US, where suspicion of the Pakistanis was rife, but in Pakistan, where the US was already in trouble due to drone attacks that routinely kill innocent civilians. Presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar denied the American Secretary of State’s accusations, but he did so in a way that, in retrospect, hardly seems like a denial at all: “If there were officials who knew where bin Laden was,” he averred, “I can assure you that he would not be a free man.”

But of course, according to Seymour Hersh’s 10,000-word piece in the London Review of Books, he wasn’t a free man during his years in protective custody in the Abbottabad hideaway so conveniently close to ISI headquarters and within spitting distance of the capital city of Islamabad. There were steel doors on the entrance to his third story quarters and armed guards posted, all of it subsidized by the Saudis. The ailing and elderly Osama bin Laden was a prisoner, and had been since 2006.

Amid the hysterics in our state-worshipping “mainstream” media, where the accomplices of power are busy echoing the denials of various government officials, the key element of Hersh’s stunning exposé is being steadfastly ignored, and it is this:

“A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaeda And they were dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would break out. The Americans learning about bin Laden’s imprisonment from a walk-in was not the worst thing.’”

What would have been “the worst thing”?

Imagine if bin Laden, instead of being killed – in a firefight, according to the Official Government-Approved Story, or simply murdered, according to Hersh – had been captured alive. If Hersh’s reporting is correct – and I believe it is – then a whole can of worms Washington has gone to a great deal of trouble to keep sealed would have come pouring out.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/05/12/bin-ladens-end-the-truth-comes-out/

To continue reading: Bin Laden’s End: The Truth Come Out

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