It’s instructive to see how having a captured press, plus having well-seeded the public with fables about Ukraine derring-do, allows the Administration and its co-conspirators to run intelligence-insulting stories. A colleague who describes himself as possessing sang froid somewhere between that of a Chinese sage and a dead dog was irate over the latest howler, that of stories in the New York Times and German press, released in very close proximity to each other, presenting the Nord Stream pipelines bombings as the doings of a mysterious pro-Ukraine group.
What got my friend’s dander up wasn’t just the ridiculousness of the claim, but als the suspicious media footprints. The German and New York Times stories came out so close to each other, with the New York Times piece presenting itself as completely independently sourced, that they were clearly coordinated. As we’ll explain, the German stories, with Die Zeit first out of the gate, relied on reports from German prosecutors. The New York Times piece did not mention German reports or German officials, but instead cited only US officials.1
I’m told by German speakers that the summary in Politico is accurate. The “Ukraine link” part is awfully slippery, since rental of a Ukrainian owned ship does not establish the owners were in on the plot. From Politico:
German prosecutors have found “traces” of evidence indicating that Ukrainians may have been involved in the explosions that blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022, according to German media reports Tuesday.
Investigators identified a boat that was potentially used for transporting a crew of six people, diving equipment and explosives into the Baltic Sea in early September. Charges were then placed on the pipelines, according to a joint investigation by German public broadcasters ARD and SWR as well as the newspaper Die Zeit.
The German reports said that the yacht had been rented from a company based in Poland that is “apparently owned by two Ukrainians.”….
According to the investigation by German public prosecutors that is cited by the German outlets, the team which placed the explosive charges on the pipelines was comprised of five men — a captain, two divers and two diving assistants — as well as one woman doctor, all of them of unknown nationality and operating with false passports. They left the German port of Rostock on September 6 on the rented boat, the report said.
Contrast this with the New York Times version in Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say. As we wil show as we go through the article, it states that this “intelligence” was developed separately from the European investigations:
New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, a step toward determining responsibility for an act of sabotage that has confounded investigators on both sides of the Atlantic for months…
Ukraine and its allies have been seen by some officials as having the most logical potential motive to attack the pipelines.
How cute is this? Pro-Ukraine covers a huge amount of terrain, including the Poles, who John Helmer argued were the perps. And the Times manages to skip over that the US was the biggest, as well as baddest, opponent to the pipelines.
And then the Times admits that this “intelligence” is sketchy:
U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains. They have said that there are no firm conclusions about it, leaving open the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.
And this “intel” did not come from the European investigations:
A spokeswoman for the C.I.A. declined to comment. A spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council referred questions about the pipelines to the European authorities, who have been conducting their own investigations.
Needless to say, the Twitterverse treated this news with the respect it deserved:
Recall that even though the US has succeeded in burying the Sy Hersh story depicting Biden and his top foreign policy officials as the instigators of the bombing, it’s gotten traction in Germany.
Moon of Alabama provided a more detailed takedown, using the Die Zeit account:
Politico did put a key point at the end of its account:
Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova dismissed the reports of Ukrainian involvement in the Nord Stream bombings, saying in a post on the Telegram social media site that they were aimed at distracting attention from earlier, unsubstantiated, reports that the U.S. destroyed the pipelines.
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