Expert: Facts support pipeline blasts theory

WASHINGTON — The recent report by a renowned journalist in the United States on the involvement of the US Navy in the Nord Stream explosions is credible and is consistent with several facts, an academic has said.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said last week on the US portal Substack that the US Navy was involved in the Nord Stream explosions.

Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said that in June US Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as Baltops 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines three months later.

"I have long hypothesized that the US government carried out this action, and Hersh's account adds to the likelihood of that hypothesis," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in New York, in an email.

Sachs has listed 11 facts corresponding to Hersh's report.

First and second are "the longstanding vociferous US opposition to Nord Stream and the extensive record of US covert operations against the infrastructure of other countries", he said.

US President Joe Biden last year publicly warned that in the event of a Russian military campaign in Ukraine, the US would end the pipeline, declaring: "I promise you we will be able to do it," Sachs said.

Fourth, the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland warned last year that Nord Stream "would not move forward" if Russia launched operations, Sachs said.

Moreover, "very few countries, if any, other than the United States have the technical capacity to carry out such an attack without immediate detection".

He also listed Sweden's remarkable unwillingness to reveal the results of its own investigation into the explosions and the silence in mainstream Western media regarding Hersh's report as two facts that can explain his hypothesis.

The eighth fact is that "Western intelligence agencies have admitted that there is no evidence whatsoever that Russia carried out this act", he said.

'Tremendous opportunity'

The celebration by the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who called the pipeline destruction a "tremendous opportunity "to wean Europe from Russian gas, and by Nuland, who called the damaged Nord Stream 2 "a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea", also increase the possibility that the US organized the destruction, Sachs said.

Finally, Hersh's credible and detailed account had yet to be proved wrong, other than possibly in minor details, he said.

On Thursday the Russian embassy in Washington said the US should try to prove it was not behind the blasts.

Moscow considers the destruction "an act of international terrorism" and will not allow it to be swept under the rug, the embassy said.

Xinhua-Agencies