A Quick Comment on the Sy Hersh Nordstream Bombshell

Some people just aren't satisfied...

Well, I’m back (spoken in the manner of the little girl in “Poltergeist”.)

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything here. The reasons are primarily three-fold:

1) There’s been a lot going on in the Ukraine war which I’ve been following closely. More on that shortly here.

2) I’ve been enormously busy with reorganizing my own organization of life and my “plans for world domination” (as they say.)

3) I’ve been having health difficulties – nothing that serious, but somewhat debilitating in terms of sleep: restless leg syndrome, and severe leg cramps at night ruining my sleep. It’s being addressed with my doctor but it may be a while before it’s resolved. Such things – day-to-day health failures which afflict millions of people – are things which the medical profession is not terribly good at dealing with. They can deal with what I call the “3 B’s” – stopping Bleeding, setting broken Bones and delivering Babies – but beyond that they seem to have issues actually solving health problems outside of platitudes.

Anyway, I’ve been planning to do a follow-up to my piece back in May about the origins of the Ukraine conflict. A lot has happened since and deserves a follow-up. I have, for instance, decided to go ahead and violate my advice not to make predictions about how this situation will turn out, simply because I don’t see any other course which Russia could take to insure their security requirements.

However, analyzing all the various aspects of the conflict so far can’t be covered in one article. So I’ve reluctantly concluded that I’ll have to do a multi-part piece over time covering 1) events that have happened, 2) the progress of the war on both sides, 3) what may come next, and 4) what the Russian end-game has to be.

I can’t guarantee when the first piece will come out, so I can just advise you all to hang in there. It’s not like your next meal depends on my schedule anyway, right? :-)

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In the meantime, I want to comment briefly on the bombshell story that top investigative journalist Seymour Hersh came out with recently concerning the apparent plot by the US government and other countries to destroy the Nordstream pipelines which occurred last September. That article is available here on Substack. If you haven’t read it, you should.

But my comment is not at this point about the article itself, but about the response to the article by a couple of other well-known “alternative” journalists, specifically Pepe Escobar. John Helmer of the blog “Dancing With Bears” has also weighed in here. I’ll be addressing Escobar’s recent articles in particular, but I suspect the same issues relate to Helmer’s articles.

I’ve just read Pepe Escobar's latest on Hersh over at The Vineyard of The Saker. He’s also done an earlier piece on the same subject also available at The Saker.

As an aside, if you wish to read Escobar’s articles at The Saker, note that The Saker blog is being closed down on February 29, although I understand the current plan is to keep the site available for viewing for a year from that date.

Here is my response to Escobar’s two pieces, which I posted at the Moon of Alabama blog this morning.

I call bullshit. The only real complaint Escobar has is that Hersh didn't spent a hundred pages discussing the background to the war, all the prior involvement of the UK, Mi6, the Poles, etc. - none of which is the actual content of Hersh's story (although it most certainly is the context.).

It seems Escobar is annoyed at having been "scooped" by Hersh on the details of the story.

Escobar lists the members of the President's Intelligence Council and then assumes that Hersh's source is not someone in that list and therefore doesn't know all the details, or, again completely speculating, that the source played Hersh.

Escobar constantly complains that "the CIA is left to get off scot-free." Well, if Hersh had more details on the CIA's involvement, details he could prove, he would have included them. Does Escobar have any such details? If so, he doesn't mention them either. So why bitch at Hersh for not spending more time on the CIA's involvement, when it's quite possible his source doesn't even know those details. Would that be Hersh's fault? I can't see why. So this is just Escobar nit-picking based on his own speculations.

Hersh in his interview with the Germans specifically said that other intelligence agencies were involved which he didn't write about. Obviously this was done because he doesn't have the necessary corroboration.

Escobar also complains that Hersh doesn't specifically come down on the US' policy toward Ukraine and Russia. That's not the point of Hersh's story, nor does it need to be. Hersh was reporting on the fact that the US authorized and carried out a military operation against assets owned by Germany and Russia. Period. End of story.

Someone at The Saker noted that a lot of so-called "journalists" seem to want to spend a lot of time philosophizing and attempting to appear more worldly than is necessary in a story. While not naming any names, he clearly was referencing Escobar who spends a lot of time in interviews doing just that.

I like Escobar and I don't mind his occasional speculations beyond the available evidence. But he's in no position to be criticizing Hersh's coverage of the central story based on those speculations and his butt-hurt at having been behind the curve of investigating this event. It would be more profitable for everyone if he were to use his own sources to corroborate and expand = with actual facts - what occurred around this event.

I've been irritated for some time at the propensity for people like Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore and others to spend most of their time bitching and moaning at the mainstream media. Not that the MSM doesn't deserve it, but there are plenty of more important issues in the world that they could be covering and analyzing and putting in content for their audiences, most of whom already know the MSM is not trustworthy (and never was, even in the days of Walter Cronkite.) These tit-for-tat spite attacks between the MSM and so-called "progressive" journalists are a waste of everyone's time.

I hadn't expected Pepe Escobar to be partial to that behavior - until now.

I say cut the bullshit and get back to the main task of exposing the actions of the corrupt "leaders" of the West and the risks that this behavior poses to all of us.

I’ll reiterate that I like Pepe Escobar and follow his posts regularly in various alternative sources because he’s a very smart guy who “goes everywhere and knows everyone” and can put it all in a very comprehensive context. I recommend everything he writes to everyone.

But in this case, he’s somewhat off-base and needs to refocus on the main story itself.

That’s it for me for today. Hopefully I can deliver the Ukraine follow-up in a reasonable time frame – and then get on to the meat of this blog which is, as the title says, “The Five Essentials”.