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Moon of Alabama — March 7, 2023

On September 28 2022, a day after the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up, I published the available open source evidence which strongly suggested that the U.S. had done it:

Whodunnit? – Facts Related to The Sabotage Attack On The Nord Stream Pipelines

On February 8 the legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published a remarkable similar tale of the story based on insider witnesses.

Hersh: “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline”

I then suggested some minor corrections to Hersh’s version of the story.

While Hersh’s story found an echo in Europe’s newspapers, U.S. mainstream media did all they could to avoid it:

Scores of hits from publications across the globe pop up from an internet search for veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s claim that the US destroyed Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline.

But what is most striking about the page after page of results from Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo in the weeks following the February 8 posting of Hersh’s story isn’t what is there, but what is not to be found:

  •  The Times of London (2/8/23) reported Hersh’s story hours after he posted it on his Substack account, but nothing in the New York Times.
  • Britain’s Reuters News Agency moved at least ten stories (2/8/23, 2/9/23, 2/12/2, 2/15/23, among others), the Associated Press not one.
  • Not a word broadcast by the major US broadcast networks—NBC, ABC, CBS—or the publicly funded broadcasters PBS and NPR.
  • No news stories on the nation’s major cable outlets, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.

Is there justification for such self-censorship? True, Hersh’s story is based on a single anonymous source. But anonymous sources are a staple of mainstream reporting on the US government, used by all major outlets. Further, countless stories of lesser national and international import have been published with the caveat that the facts reported have not been independently verified.

Doubts about Hersh’s story aside, by every journalistic standard, the extensive international coverage given the story, as well as the adamant White House and Pentagon denials, should have made it big news in the United States.

More important, if Hersh got it wrong, his story needs to be knocked down. Silence is not acceptable journalism.

Some papers later mentioned the Hersh story but only in other context. Still the pressure on the U.S. government and media to react to the story continued to build.

The results came today, a full month after the Hersh story, with New York Times publishing another of the usual ‘intelligence’ fairytales:

Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say
New intelligence reporting amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Europe.

All fine – except that there is no ‘intelligence’. There are only claims by anonymous ‘officials’ to NYT reporters that some vague ‘intelligence’ may exist.

Cont. reading: Nord Stream Attack – White House Counters Hersh’s Reputation With Weak ‘Intelligence’