I know how Seymour Hersh feels because Workers BushTelegraph tried for years to get the story behind the public trustee’s closure of AHIMSA (Peace) house covered by the media specifically the national broadcaster’s 4 Corners program. To no avail.
In ‘The Crap on the Wall’, Seymour Hersh gives a brief report from the battlefield in the aftermath of the release last Wednesday of his story about Joe Biden’s decision to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines. None of the Australian media including the ABC have taken up this story even though president Biden has denied it. Pundits on social media in the United States and Germany have alternative conspiracy theories about Russia planting the explosives. These theories are cynical attempts to muddy the waters. There is also a lot of disinterest out there, especially in the West.
As far as I can tell, Hersh’s unnamed source is either from the CIA or is a US navy diver. I have some experience as a diver. In the 1970s I spent over a 1,000 hours diving in deep water at research stations (Heron and One Tree Islands) 50 kms off the coastline of Queensland. Laying the explosives on Nord Stream was a tricky operation and I find it possible that this is how the pipeline was blown up. Was the United States actions ‘an act of war’ against Germany?
An Act of war is an action by one country against another with an intention to provoke a war or an action that occurs during a declared war or armed conflict between military forces of any origin. The second limb of that definition could apply. If Biden told chancellor Scholtz beforehand then I think it is not. It was certainly a terrorist attack by the United States and an attack on the environment.
This may explain why the German chancellor has been silent on the revelations made by Seymour Hersh. – Ian Curr, Ed., 16 February 2023.
The Crap on the Wall
First, many thanks for your interest in what the pipeline story was all about: a very dangerous Presidential decision. You are careful readers.
I’m an old hand at dropping bombshell stories that are based on the disclosures of sources I do not, and cannot, name. There is a pattern to the response by the mainstream media.
It dates back to my breakthrough story: the My Lai massacre revelation. That story was published in five installments, over five weeks in 1969, by the underground media group Dispatch News.
I had tried to get the two most important magazines in America, Life and Look, to publish the story, with no success. Editors at both publications had earlier invited me to do some freelance writing for them, but they wanted nothing to do with a story about a massacre committed by American soldiers.
It was a frightening time for me, in terms of my faith in the profession I had chosen. I was allowed to read and copy by hand much of the Army’s original charge sheet accusing a sad sack 2nd Lieutenant named William L. Calley Jr. of the premeditated murder of 109 “Oriental” human beings. I also had tracked Calley, the Army’s only suspect, and interviewed him at a base in Georgia—he was tucked away—and gotten his assertion that he was merely doing what he was ordered to do.
Given all this, I was more than a little rattled—make that terrified—by the failure of senior editors at prominent magazines to jump at a story that would get international attention, especially when those editors professed to deplore the war and want it to end.
Seymour Hersh, 16 Feb 2023
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