I regret that Hersh's reporting relied on anonymous officials. That's not a dig on Hersh - this is the standard for journalism on these topics. As a standard it creates a deniability to any story that comes out e.g. "they probably made it up", "the source doesn't know what they are talking about", "the source is influencing the journalist for their own ends".
I think Hersh's article is interesting and useful however. There are specific details that journalists can dig into in the future to find validating hard facts. This may ultimately press a government to cop up to involvement over time, once enough evidence has mounted. That's not to say there aren't possible false leads and inaccuracies in his report.
For the linked article - it commits far more journalistic sins than Hersh's article - in an attempt to take it down. Through continued use of insinuation, analogies, and strawmen the author makes the strongest possible case that there's not merit to Hersh's argument - but for me it comes across as Sophomoric.
In terms of who destroyed the pipeline it is clear that the United States, United Kingdom and Ukraine had strong motives - and the US and UK capability. It's difficult to read commentary that dismisses these motivations out of hand as outrageous. Or at least, I'm coming in with priors that significantly diverge from these commentators.
There's nothing wrong with anonymous sourcing, but if your thing is based on a _single_ anonymous source, AND you've cultivated a reputation for being a credulous crank (see also the sourcing on the alternate universe Bin Laden writing Hersh did), AND you don't have any kind of editorial machine to back up your sourcing, AND the claim is incredibly inflammatory, then probably that's going to present a problem.
>For the linked article - it commits far more journalistic sins than Hersh's article - in an attempt to take it down. Through continued use of insinuation, analogies, and strawmen
Like what? Give some examples.
Hersh's article is just made up fiction. Hersh has a habit of making up "anonymous sources":
>As soon as he has made an assertion he cites a 'source' to back it. In every case this is either an un-named former official or an unidentified secret document passed to Hersh in unknown circumstances. ... By my count Hersh has anonymous 'sources' inside 30 foreign governments and virtually every department of the U.S. government.
Doesn't have to mean that he makes them up though: when a group of professional "truth fabricators" (or rather "doubt fabricators", they don't really need their stories to be water-proof) has learned that he makes for an effective mouthpiece eager to believe he'll be swarmed with "sources".
it's a useful heuristic of mine to massively distrust anyone who makes silly claims like assigning probabilities at 1 decimal point to things like this:
> 1 Opposition: Opposition forces in Syria (Liwa al-Islam) carried out the chemical attack. 96.4%
> 2 Syrian army: The Syrian army carried out the chemical attack. 3.6%
though it helps when they also explain the process with nonsense like:
> The few prior instances of chemical attacks against civilian targets contain factors that make them poor comparisons to the attack in Syria, leaving motivation as the primary factor. An analysis of the motivating factors behind such an attack results in the Syrian army being twice as likely to launch such an attack compared to an Opposition group, i.e. 67%-33%.
I really hate this style of analysis. It's transparent, yes: it's a prior being updated by evidence to produce a posterior, and you see where the rabbit goes in the hat. But this just puts a sciencism gloss on what are basically qualitative arguments.
A short version of their argument is "You might think for any number of reasons that the Syrian government launched the missile, but other peoples calculations of the launch location were wrong and ours were right so it couldn't be the government." Their prior begins at 95-5 for the government doing it, then it becomes 69-31 for the government doing it when they show a video of an anti-government guerrilla wearing a chemical hazard suit, then it becomes 7-93 in favour of the opposition once they decide they know the launch site. The launch site evidence is supposed to mean the Syrian government's probability is divided by 3 and the opposition's probability is multiplied by 15. That's the whole argument, that's where the rabbit is in the hat. After that point, no other evidence can adjust anything.
Most of the other evidence is just conjecture: they assign a 90% confidence to the evidence point "No western countries shared their evidence that the Syrian government did it" and they feel this fact is enough evidence to half their confidence in the Syrian government doing it. As proof for this, they literally say "The US says they have signals intercepts saying the Syrian government did it, but what if they actually have signals intercepts from the Syrian government asking if they did it or maybe they did admit to doing it but they were lying" This is not evidence.
This really seems like crank people trying to apply a rational choice / scientific skeptic veneer to a process of qualitative reasoning. And frankly I flicked through another ten or fifteen pages on the blog and almost everything discussed was discussed in the exact manner LessWrong/Slate Star Codex commenters would, and many of the issues being discussed were the exact issues discussed on those sites.
(I have no prior at all on the Syrian gas attacks, as I don't pretend to know anything about Syria or chemical weapons)
None of what you said mentions of any specific details of either article, whatsoever. What specifically is an example of an insinuation you object to? Maybe pick one straw man and point it out? Otherwise, what's the informational content behind all this verbiage?
Seems to me equally likely he's saying they'd pressure Germany to not use it or introduce sanctions (to bring an end to Nordstream 2, as a source of foreign currency for Russia and as leverage over the EU). Additionally wasn't Nordstream 2 not yet operational, and mostly Nordstream 1 that was sabotaged?
Nord Stream 2 was operational. It was also targeted but one of the pipes was hit twice, leaving the other intact.
Up to that point, the Russians clearly communicated to Germany that the flow of gas could be resumed either by dropping the sanctions to "repair" Nord Stream 1 or by opening Nord Stream 2.
The reason given by the Russians as to why Nord Stream 1 wasn't running at capacity was technical problems. First it was a turbine which eventually was replaced by Germany. Next it was allegedly damage to a control unit. The Russians claimed the repairs were impossible because of the sanctions.
So up until the bombing, Nord Stream 2 was always there as a possible fallback. Had Germany run into difficulties procuring gas from other sources up until winter, there was this dangling bait in reach of the German government. A freezing population would have been very unkind to a government that refused to open the second pipeline just for political stance.
Since the bombing it has become clear that operating any pipeline through the Baltic might only last for a short time.
Nordstream 2 was not delivering any gas at that point, Germany had refused the offer to open NS2 (after a series of comically timed "repairs" that just happened to require the new sanctions to be broken) and showed no signs of relenting. I think it is an enormous leap to assume that Germany would in this alternate reality inevitably relent and do what amounts to a pro-Russia stance in backpedalling and using NS2, that would not only fracture the country internally but would cause a foreign policy nightmare at the heart of the EU and NATO. As we have seen it was well within the world of possibilities to stand up LNG terminals for delivery by tanker, this would've been known to both Germany and the USA who would have been in discussion about this the entire time Nordstream was being discussed.
My position is: we just don't know yet, nothing is completely certain. I am surprised that people seem 100% convinced because they read an article by Hersh that paints a nice story and uses an as-yet unnamed source as proof and are prepared to take it all at face value. It may well turn out that the USA was responsible after all. But this recent article is, as it stands, no more than a story. It's still completely possible Nordstream 1/2 was blown by the Russians or the Ukrainians or the Brits or the Poles...
> Nordstream 2 was not delivering any gas at that point
I agree. I meant "operational" as in "ready to operate". Sorry for causing confusion here.
> I think it is an enormous leap to assume that Germany would in this alternate reality inevitably relent and do what amounts to a pro-Russia stance in backpedalling and using NS2, that would not only fracture the country internally but would cause a foreign policy nightmare at the heart of the EU and NATO.
I live in Germany. Through the entire summer I heard more and more people (and from surpising directions) voice their frustration that Nord Stream 2 wasn't opened in the face of gas shortages. Where I live, every week protests gathered that demanded NS2 to be opened and sanctions to be lifted.
The signs of a weak polar vortex came in around that time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32985927. Had Europe seen the kind of winter that eventually befell North America, matters would have shifted dramatically. From the outside there was no way of knowing whether an already weak looking German government would not flip whith riots at the door.
For what it's worth I think your use of "operational" was in this context more correct than mine :)
You've probably got a better feel for public opinion in Germany than I do - I'm over the border in Czech Republic so while we'd have also suffered with a gas shortage, the idea of any concessions to Putin here is nearly unthinkable (people crowdsourced a fucking tank they called "Tomáš" for god's sake :D). I figured Germany might be more forgiving, but would still be very resistant and would be supported in doing so by its NATO allies in any way possible.
The majority in Germany, as far as I can tell, is in favour of sanctions. Not so much because of NATO, but because of all the wrongs that are carried out by Russia and a feeling of helplessness.
However, there's also another thing going on. As I said, there are people protesting. They hold banners calling for peace. But they walk behind a row of martial sounding drums. And if you ask them how peace would be achieved they tell you that military support for Ukraine must be stopped. And if you look at them, you realise you've seen them before. Also the drummers. It's the same people who did pretty much the same walking and drumming against masks and vaccines. That movement was known to be heavily influenced by Russian propaganda and RT in general. The biggest support for this "movement" is seen in the former socialist east, by the way. Which is suprising if you look at the rest of the non-Russian former eastern block and how Russian geopolitics are viewed there. It is not suprising if you know that there is still a lot of distrust towards anything western or American there.
I'm sure that, in between all of that, a winter with failing heating and a crashing industry would have tipped something over.
“Put an end to it” seems to carry a bit more finality then “we are going to encourage to not use it, or introduce sanctions to not use it”. Especially in light of the damn thing actually being destroyed…and an end being put to it.
The action that was taken, even though it’s not acknowledged, has brought weight to the statement.
I think if they were planning to do this they wouldn't have sent Joe Biden out and said "alright, drop a little hint that you're going to bomb Nordstream in the event of a Ukraine invasion". And if they were planning to do so and Biden blurted it out (because ... he's Joe Biden) I imagine any plans to bomb the pipeline would surely have been scrapped as he'd have just given the game away.
More realistic is the old man who has famously delivered gaffe after gaffe, who has repeatedly stumbled on his speeches and said dumb shit, said something a bit inelegant that everyone's now seizing on like a bunch of qanoners baking the latest q-drop on 8chan
Even a gaffe doesn’t change the core strategic value, it only adds another variable to consider as part of the possible blowback of the operation.
Regardless, it’s apparent that even with a Biden gaffe in the mix, if the US was responsible it was done in a way that preserved enough mystery to minimize the blowback.
Right, this is what I'm saying. The situation is anything but clear and I don't think Biden's comments that day tell us anything concrete about this one way or another, and I think it's a mistake that some people think it does.
If the USA didn't commit this, then through their various covert actions over the last half-century they only have themselves to blame for the suspicion that it was down to them.
I don’t think the gaffe proves it on its own, it’s the gaffe comment, the fact that the US policy towards Russia/Ukraine directly benefited from it’s destruction, there was bi-partisan opposition to the pipeline, and our history in such things that make me believe the US probably did it.
As President Obama famously supposedly said: “Never estimate Joe’s ability to fuck something up”
A general criminal law principle known as the corpus delicti rule provides that a confession, standing alone, isn't enough for a conviction.
I am not taking a position. I'm saying no one has presented hard evidence. And until they do, if ever, both sides will play hot potato and nothing will happen.
When someone presents hard evidence for either position I'll listen to them happily.
He said that in the context of sanctions, and which did end up shutting it down long before it was blown up. It only appears to be a threat of destruction retroactively because it was later blown up. There were no articles claiming he was threatening to blow it up at the time. Everyone knew the context was with regards to sanctions at the time.
You're looking at a youtube short that explicitly cuts out any semblance of context. The entire world had been discussing nothing but Russian sanctions for weeks at that point. And no, it wasn't a weird way to threaten sanctions, and no one at the time thought any differently, otherwise there would've been a flurry of articles saying Biden threatened to blow it up. But that never happened.
You're looking at a youtube short that explicitly cuts out any semblance of context.
> Lol. Here's the video.[0] The 'context' you're arguing for was a question posed to someone else. The question she asked to Biden--the immediate context for his comment--clearly strengthens the argument that this was a threat against the pipeline.
> The entire world had been discussing nothing but Russian sanctions for weeks at that point.
I don't even know where to start with this one.
> And no, it wasn't a weird way to threaten sanctions, and no one at the time thought any differently,
Listen to the lady in the video above. Why's she so flabbergasted after Biden's answer? How does her follow-up question make sense if she thought he was talking about sanctions?
> otherwise there would've been a flurry of articles saying Biden threatened to blow it up.
> Why's she so flabbergasted after Biden's answer? How does her follow-up question make sense if she thought he was talking about sanctions?
She just asked how Biden would do it, since the pipeline was within Germany‘s control. And he answered: „We will be able to do it.“
He did not identify who „we“ is and how it‘s done. „We“ could be the US and Germany together, it could be the western World or it could be the US alone. If it were the US alone it could be done by imposing sanctions on that particular pipeline and it could be done by putting diplomatic or economic pressure on Germany (many ways to do that) and it could be done by putting sanctions on companies that interact with the pipeline and so on. It could also be done by using force, but that is merely one of many options and I believe that Biden at that time didn‘t even know how himself. He made a strong assertion in order to take control of the situation and he did.
Yes. We can continue to hold reservations but that can be considered evidence. It is akin to someone getting killed and someone else prior saying they would kill that person. It doesn't mean they actually did it, but it is suspicion and motive that should lead to further investigations. That Germany and other countries aren't looking into it can also be considered circumstantial evidence.
It‘s not evidence because the pipeline wasn‘t that important anymore. They also looked into it. And finally any of them could have done it themselves as well. Nothing points to the US specifically.
For the US such an operation would have a huge amount of risk and they have to gain nothing until the war is over and even after that very little or nothing. (Potentially they can sell their gas - but others as well.) So why do it?
On the other hand, Germany had to gain a bit (shutting down the voices calling for it being opened) and Russia had to gain a lot (sowing distrust within NATO; forcing a change from NS1 to the remaining NS2; as a show of power and a threat; making a strategic change impossible to shut down future opposition within the power structure of Russia) or just to complete their shift to trade with China now instead. The NS2 project was already dead.)
The US runs no risk at all in doing something like this.
They've been doing war and killing innocents ("collateral damage", sorry...) for decades, all in the name of some doubtful "freedom and democracy", and what has happened to them? Nothing whatsoever.
Your original claim, which was an opinion stated in the form of a fact, was that it is a Nothing Burger.
Stating one's opinions on social media is generally fine, but stating them in the form of facts is dangerous in that it can cause other agents in the system to have incorrect state, which can have very serious causal consequences, up to and including death, which most people claim to be "a big deal".
It is counterintuitive to think in this way, but many useful things are counterintuitive.
Seymour Hersh's sources for My Lai gave their names and went on the record. The soldiers who revealed it went on TV and testified before Congress. I'm pretty sure that he had additional anonymous sources, but to get it published he had to be able to back it up.
Abu Ghraib was uncovered by Amnesty International and the international Red Cross and they had tons of photos.
By the time Hersh first wrote about Abu Ghraib there had already been reporting on abuses by Amnesty International, and several days earlier some of the photos had been shown on 60 Minutes (as he mentions in the piece). The piece cites an Army report, credited to two named generals, and names seven suspects, six of whom were under active criminal prosecution. His report was published (and vetted!) by The New Yorker. The difference between that piece and this one in terms of sourcing and credibility is like night and day.
I think Hersh's article is interesting and useful however. There are specific details that journalists can dig into in the future to find validating hard facts. This may ultimately press a government to cop up to involvement over time, once enough evidence has mounted. That's not to say there aren't possible false leads and inaccuracies in his report.
For the linked article - it commits far more journalistic sins than Hersh's article - in an attempt to take it down. Through continued use of insinuation, analogies, and strawmen the author makes the strongest possible case that there's not merit to Hersh's argument - but for me it comes across as Sophomoric.
In terms of who destroyed the pipeline it is clear that the United States, United Kingdom and Ukraine had strong motives - and the US and UK capability. It's difficult to read commentary that dismisses these motivations out of hand as outrageous. Or at least, I'm coming in with priors that significantly diverge from these commentators.