'Dynamite': Anti-War Pundits Hail Hersh Exposé of US Hand in Nord Stream Sabotage

US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is famed for uncovering the US massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in occupied Iraq. But in recent years he has been ostracized for questioning the Washington line.

Leading anti-war commentators have lauded veteran US sleuth reporter Seymour Hersh for exposing US guilt for the Nord Stream gas pipeline sabotage.

Hersh's bombshell exposé on his personal blog on Wednesday quoted a US intelligence source, who revealed a team of US Navy divers planted explosives on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines under the Baltic Sea last June under cover of the BALTOPS 22 NATO seaborne war-game.

Sections of both pipelines, built to carry large volumes of gas from Russia to Germany, were blown up on September 26 2022. Hersh said the Pentagon ordered the Norwegian armed forces to press the button.

Long before the conflict in Ukraine, the US had pressured Germany not to allow the supply route built by Russian national energy firm Gazprom to open. It was still unused at the time of the blast.

"Look, it's Seymour Hersh. The reputation speaks for itself," former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter told Sputnik. "This is dynamite. And I think this story has legs. And I think this story is going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of people going forward."

Ritter said he was not surprised at the mainstream media's attempts to ignore the story. But he said Hersh did not have to worry about promoting it.

"I don't think you're going to see Seymour Hersh out there trying to pimp this thing. It's going to pimp itself," the expert said.

Environmental Terrorism

Writer, author and lawyer Dan Kovalik, told Sputnik that Hersh's story should be "huge" — but the establishment media was not interested.

"It tells you everything you need to know that he wrote it on Substack instead of writing it for The New Yorker, which he used to do, or the New York Times," Kovalik observed, which only proves that "the mainstream press is so impoverished in terms of its journalism."

The peace campaigner called the sabotage "the greatest act of environmental terrorism in known world history."

"It created a methane leak larger than we've ever seen," Kovalik pointed out. "Methane is 20 times more a contributor to global warming than CO2 is, right? If people care about the environment, they should be horrified by what was done to Nord Stream."

Kovalik also expressed little faith in the governments of Germany, Denmark or Sweden to investigate the crime committed just off their Baltic Sea coasts, "because it implicates them, too."

"Particularly with Germany, they've suffered untold economic damage due to this. And yet they have put up no fight or concern about it," he said.

"It's going to be one of these classic things we see, where 25 years from now they will complain and wring their hands about it, after the time any one cares anymore," Kovalik lamented. "But I don't see the investigation going anywhere in the near future because it's an incredible embarrassment and the media is happy not to push them on it again."

Nevertheless, it wouldn't take fictional TV detective Columbo to find out who did it, the writer argued, pointing to US President Joe Biden's threat weeks before Russia launched its de-Nazification operation in Ukraine.

"If Russia invades... then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it," Biden told reporters at a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. When asked if that was in his power, Biden replied: "We will, I promise you, we’ll be able to do it."

And US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, the architect of the 2014 Euromaidan coup d'etat in Kiev, told a US Senate hearing on January 27 that she and the Biden White House were "very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now... a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea."

"You had Biden who promised he was going to get rid of Nord Stream and then it was gotten rid of. And then you have officials like Victoria Nuland, who recently bragged that it had been destroyed," Kovalik said. "Seymour Hersh himself has often used anonymous sources and again, in stories that proved to be right."

Media Hit-Job

International Relations and Security Analyst Mark Sleboda told Sputnik that Hersh has been given the cold shoulder by the established press for his willingness to challenge the official narrative on the US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

"The mainstream media have essentially become propagandists over the last few decades, Sleboda charged. Hersh "has been discredited, ostracized by the Western mainstream media. He's no longer one of us because he's revealing that. He's saying the quiet part out loud, basically."

The commentator noted that Hersh's article contradicts the alleged leaked SMS message from former British prime minister Liz Truss to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken just minutes after the pipeline blast, saying simply "it's done" — laying the blame back onto Washington.

Sleboda also pointed to "Victoria Nuland laughing smugly in front of Congress, saying how gratified the administration is that it is a hunk of metal on the floor of the Baltic Sea," pointing out that the US "was doing everything possible to stop Nord Stream 2 from being completed, and when it was, they said, we're going to get rid of it. And they did."

"And then everyone says, Well, quite obviously then who blew up their own pipeline? Russia!" Sleboda scoffed. "I mean, come on, you're just propagandists. You don't even believe that."

Veteran Newshound

Hersh won the Pulitzer prize for his investigative reporting of the 1968 My Lai massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the village of Son My by US troops, and uncovered the Nixon government's covert bombing of neighbouring Cambodia.

He later exposed the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US Army guards at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, along with the Obama and Trump administration's exploitation of false claims by CIA-funded terrorist groups of chemical weapon attacks to justify air raids on Syria.

Hersh has also questioned the British government's narrative on the non-fatal poisoning of former MI6 double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in English town of Salisbury.