SEYMOUR HIRSCH’S NORDSTREAM SOPHISTRY? THE PROBLEM: IT NEVER HAPPENED!
Hirsch's script makes for an exciting and profitable fictional thriller for the big screen.
This story begins and ends with the observation: Everything is so, unless it isn’t.
A great fiction scribe but a poor journalist, Seymour Hirsch at SUBSTACK concocted an amazingly-intricate-but-contrived script for a Hollywood production, from which he will make millions for his progressive friends and himself.
What Hirsch’s script is not, is intelligence. Or an accurate recount of what really happened.
Sy provides no evidence to substantiate his LSD-induced hallucinations. Admittedly, I have no issue with other segments of his story about the Russian oil businesses or U.S. government operations, the earlier CIA’s alleged nefarious shenanigans, or even concerning the possible intent of the parties. They are all plausible.
So are ghosts, astral projection, Obama’s birth certificate, and UFOs.
But “plausible” constitutes assumptions that differ from historical facts.
Only the conclusions matter: Is Hirsch’s story true, or is it false?
Not that it is believable.
Within I include photos I took of the Russian naval buildup near Murmansk and St. Petersburg in the Baltic before the invasion of Crimea. I was there. Sy was not.
At the end, I append photos of a glossy before the internet era (from 2004) in which I wrote the correct story of a fable for which Hirsch received much acclaim in the leftwing media and global news. Hirsch’s inventions in that tale required an exorcists.
Hirsch falsely characterized our military and intelligence operations in the very title of his fabulist work, conflating the CIA with Special Operations Command, about which he knew nothing. The leftwinger managed smearing the United States in it, a nation he despised then, as he despises it now. Fact: Hirsch spent a productive lifetime besmearching the United States in every leftwing media.
An excellent science fiction writer and entertainer, Sy knows how to get vast media attention and make oodles of money.
My essay however preceded Hirsch’s by years. It had the places, people, and organizations referenced and characterized correctly. Hirsch’s story was incorrect from the getgo, a fabulism for Mother Jones and HuffPo readers who needed more bias confirmation while they were experiencing acute BDS meltdowns - Bush Derangement Syndrome.
One might ask about Hirsch’s “confidential” source. Does he exist?
Can he be at the two major places relevant to Hirsch’s story: the SCIF where administration officials allegedly made the decision to attack the pipeline, as well as finding himself snorkeling 250 feet under the Baltic planting C4 explosives? Or did Hirsch have several confidential sources willing to sully the United States with another conspiracy a la Doug MacGregor, Scott Ritter, and Glenn Greenwald? As it were, all these men have an enviably long record of sucking up to the Kremlin. Meanwhile these boys also spew anti-U.S. propaganda the self-same Kremlin is now using against us.
Is Hirsch’s “confidential” source as credible as the confidential sources, media, and whistleblowers who contributed to the Democrat coup to amplify the Russia Collusion Hoax? As credible as the “witnesses” in subsequent Trump impeachments? As credible as Representative Adam Schiff’s post-SCIF allegations that he is “in possession” of the “evidence”?
Has Hirsch provided corroboration among more than ten thousand people in several disparate operations, organizations, and places connected to Hirsch’s allegations?
Thousands of actors, and no corroborator has come forward?
Not one “in on it” “leaked?”
Funny thing. During Trump’s four years of being illegally surveilled, and at the subsequent impeachments, Mueller Probe, dozens came forward from a handful of Democrat operatives in Hillary’s and Obama’s employ. The daily FBI and media leaks created a downright flood in the global media.
What am I missing from Hirsch’s convincing-only-for-those willing-to-be-convinced fabulist tale?
EVIDENCE.
What else?
Hirsch reputation behind his Pulitzer Prize may not be as deserved as the charitable Hungarian Jozsef Pulitzer’s largess.
Give it Back! The ‘Russiagate’ Pulitzer of the NY Times and Washington Post
Guess from where today’s Pulitzers come?
Pulitzer HQ at Columbia University where Cloward-Piven’s the Frankfurt School landed. Where Cloward-Piven, Barack Obama and Saul Alinsky landed.
Is Hirsch a Marxist? You decide after you researched his allies.
U.S.A.F. SSgt Shawn Canionero maintains flight line security while an F-117 Nighthawk is refueled. Image: NARA
After Hirsch’s intricate lead-in to the political shenanigans behind the scenes, Sy wrote:
“In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion… Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.”
The actors in Hirsch’s cleverly-constructed play really do exist. So do the stages, props, floodlights and theaters. The evidence for what took place in that room however is what’s missing from this play.
Unless Hirsch’s “confidential” source happened to be the same person, meaning the diver who planted the C4 shaped charges 250 feet below the freezing Baltic on top of the Russian pipeline, after he left the bunker from which Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland gave the orders.
What are the chances?
Hirsch fertile imagination – the fly on the wall:
“Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
In other words, there were dozens of higher ups, including generals and their adjuncts from all branches of our military, CIA, DIA, and thousands of troops partaking in BALTOPS 22, a “13- day exercise which featured 47 ships, 89 aircraft, and 7,000 personnel in the Baltic Sea.”
Hirsch’s “source” must have been present at Langley too: “Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.”
A typical leftwing guru of his time, along with his philosophical mates Noam Chomsky and others, Hirsch has had it in for the CIA’s taking down communist revolutionaries. If anything, Hirsch never wanted America to prevail over the Russians. But bet on it, Hirsch’s tall tales will be promoted by the crackpots on the right too, especially ones now selling tickets for trips aboard UFOs.
As it were, Hirsch became the exact political mirror image of conspiracist Alex Jones. The difference? Just one. Alex will never win a Pulitzer. The left and other conspiracists have always blamed America first and America’s enemies last.
Have the alt-right too, adopted the old left’s historical America-hating narratives, whereas America is always in the wrong, and its mortal enemies are always in the right?
Hirsch’s fly on the wall in the Oval Office: “Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.”
7000 warriors, staff, crew, almost fifty battleships and carriers, 89 aircraft, logistics and supply teams in Panama too, hundreds of military reporters of several NATO nations with cameras and recording equipment at the scene, Russian navy battle cruisers, patrol boats and subs patrolling nearby, hundreds of fishing and recreational vessels, thousands more based in Panama during the “planning stage,” with no evidence on the horizon that Biden has ever made the decision as characterized by Sy. (Other than a few clips of wishing and hoping featured on FOX’s popular UFO show).
Yet not one of these folk could have possibly leaked anything? No other than Hirsch’s “confidential” fly on the wall has come forward to date to verify the content of Hirsch’s upcoming Hollywood blockbuster?
Hirsch’s saga conveniently ignored that Biden’s decision would have kneecapped NATO’s, as well as America’s mission in the region. It would have plunged the European continent and billions into darkness to freeze. It would have crushed the massive EU business empire and U.S.’ trade with it, the third largest U.S. customer base after China.
Europe’s leaders will have found themselves new work after the next elections. You see Dear Reader, every story is believable, unless it isn’t. Every story makes sense, unless it doesn’t. Every story is true, unless it isn’t!
I covered the SOCOM story in which Hirsch mischaracterized a CIA operation in his “Dick Cheney’s Assassins” in my essay AMERICANISM: FAITH IN COUNTRY - see below. It was published in The Improper December 2004. Hirsch’s story, five years later, proved to be false.
In other words, in a fabulism fit for a Michael Crichton and James Bond book, Hirsch’s take down of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney - and America of course - got it all wrong.
Moreover, one can arguably suggest plagiarism, because my expose of SOCOM’s role and the American heroes who took out Bin Laden was published years before Hirsch’s. Years before the film about that story. Moreover, unlike Hirsch’s clever Bondian fakery, my story about the American hero Danny Eggers resulted a few years later in the $190 million Combined Operations Command in Kabul: Camp Eggers.
WIKIPEDIA: Camp Eggers was home to the Combined Forces Command - Afghanistan (CFC-A) and the Combined Security Transition Command - Afghanistan (CSTC-A). It was used by all U.S. military branches and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
Hirsch: “The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island.”
In Hirsch’s upcoming TV series we not only have the German PM Sholtz (who is even more hesitant than Joe Biden supplying Ukraine with hardware), okaying an operation that could start World War III, but a third independent nation from whose territory, now in the way of Norway itself, is used to launch an operation to initiate that war.
Have we asked the Danes about this adventure co-sponsored by the U.S. and Norway? Didn’t think so, but nevertheless, Hirsch wove his intricate whopper through other fictional back channels of cooperation between nations, along with a warning about native observers at the scene who might have called the cops. Meanwhile, there was persistent Russian naval surveillance over NORDSTREAM, which the Russians installed and partly own. Aside these, the film’s Russian characters have not yet been developed. But rest assured, the big screen will make for a thrilling director’s cut once Oliver Stone agrees to direct, and Olga the Hooker in the Trump Collusion tale, plays the female lead.
Hirsch: “The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.”
This is exactly how scripts for spy thrillers combine half fact-half fiction news with historical events and half-baked historical characters. The precise formula for developing successful docudramas to advance political messaging.
We didn’t have to wait long before leading actors Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken made their appearances. So what is missing?
Dialogue, “foley” (special effects, bam, boom, crash, bullets, tracers and shrapnel flying, everything on fire), and enlisting the cooperation of the local armed services to supply military equipment, the key to central casting, black face paint, fully-outfitted newbies as stand-ins in bloodied-up camo.
Half fact-half fiction Hirsch continues: “The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them…. It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.”
Folks, nothing, I repeat, nothing could possibly go wrong here!
Maybe the MGM lion, laughing hysterically, running the other way?
Or…..
A UFO sighting and witnesses who’ll swear on their mom’s grave they’ve been teleported to the best news channel on 6th Avenue in midtown in the 9PM EST timeslot.
Rearview-running my October 2022 take at SUBSTACK, Hirsch added: “In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution.”
I would call Hirsch’s conflating SOCOM’s and DIA’s operations with the CIA’s as an act of self-sabotage.
Hirsch’s tactic? Taking his illogical premise logically to his illogical conclusion.
It is a well-documented technique and tactic of the conspiracist and paranoid mindset – and of the global leftwing.
It begins with the conclusions resolved up front (ie, Trump is a Russian asset), based on apriori bias, mixed-in assumptions from Aesop’s, wishing and hoping for change, wrapping the newly-invented fairy tale around unsubstantiated factoids, out of context sidebars, diversions, pivots, what-ifs, real characters and history-mixed-with-news, and in Hirsh’s case, old news.
Hirsch’s conclusions are as flawed as are his premises which assert that irreparable damage finished off Nordstream. Problem:
The Russians could repair the pipeline in two weeks with little financial or logistical expenditure and they said so. They agreed to resume gas and oil deliveries under the same conditions agreed to earlier. That story is in my October 2022 SUBSTACK written five months prior to Hirsch’s pandemic of inventions about divers in Panama.
World War III may happen, but NORDSTREAM will have had nothing to do with it. Denmark and Norway will have had nothing to do with it. And a fly on the White House office wall with Seymour Hirsch’s bespectacled face will have had nothing to do with it.
October 2022 I began with these words:
“Persons on the political extremes right and left invented the “news” that suggest Joe Biden has blown up the Nord Stream pipelines, because “that is what he had promised to do.“
I’m hardly a Biden fan, knowing well that everything Joe touched turned to disaster.
The conspiracists’ reasoning is just as disastrous.
Russia has no interest in blowing up “its main source of revenue” they argued, convinced of their own drivel.
Russia? “No way,” said these bright bulbs. “Russia won’t act against its interests.”
Certainly not, unless blowing up the pipeline was – very much in Russia’s interests…”
For the photos of the Russian navy pre-invasion of Crimea I took, please click the link above.
ONE IS FREE TO DISAGREE WITH THE GOVERNMENT OF ONE’S COUNTRY ON ANY ISSUE, INCLUDING ITS FOREIGN POLICY, BUT ONE HAS NO RIGHT TO EXPRESS ONE’S SYMPATHY WITH THE ENEMY IN WARTIME, BECAUSE THIS AMOUNTS TO SANCTIONING THE KILLING OF ONE’S COUNTRYMEN. - AYN RAND
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FURTHER READING
© Andrew G. Benjamin is in finance, real estate and equities, a former advisor to New York City mayor’s office (Subcommittee on Taxation, Finance and the Budget). Benjamin wrote extensively about politics, transnational and domestic, intelligence and military affairs, security and strategy, economic issues, Mideast, terrorism, technology and high end audio.
AMERICANISM: FAITH IN COUNTRY
(Photos of the glossy posted here, since these were the days before most publications were posted on the Internet. On the cover, Felix Baumgarten freebasing off the statue in Brazil.)
THE IMPROPER – FAITH ISSUE FOR CHRISTMAS 2004
REVIEW THE ARCHIVES FOR ENLIGHTENING MATERIAL BEYOND THE SPIN!
Sebastian, perhaps I missed something - must have been my waterboarding experience.
What do Abu Ghraib, enhanced interrogations, and Bush have to do with Nordstream?
As for Saddam, yes there were connections to 9-11. Research the name Ramzi Yusef.
https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/world-trade-center-bombing-1993
Saddam gave him the passport with which he entered the US during the Clinton years . Ramzi was part of the World Trade Center garage bombing. I was one of the investigators checking out the bomb-making facility, a garage in Jamaica, Queens New York, on assignment for Rudy Giuliani. This was not allied with the then new police forensic labs, also in Jamaica.
After having escaped from the USA, Yousef landed up in Manila, the Philippines. His bomb making lab in Manila blew up and police found hand drawings with planes hitting skyscrapers in the lab. That intel was given to Bill Clinton who never put two and two together. Ironically I was at Manila airport traveling through just after the lab blew up, when the airport was locked down. We found out after my return to the US that among the plans for the bombs were several airliners going to the US, mine being one.
The last I heard, after having been captured in Pakistan, Yusef is doing time at SuperMax.
Perhaps only a Sy Hirsch would assert that Saddam has nothing to do with 9-11.
LOL random Internet dude with a Substack page or Seymour Hersh and over a year of video evidence, combined with the "Thank you, USA!" tweet by a guy who is in the circle? The Russians blew up their multi-billion Ruble investment that had already been shut down, but could be re-opened with the flick of a switch (and an approval of a replacement part)...Hmm...who should we believe? Again, LOL.