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Blasting Europe's lifeline fiendish

Update: 2023-02-11 02:56 IST

Blasting Europe's lifeline fiendish

A veteran American investigative journalist has claimed that the September 2022 bombing of the under sea Nord Stream gas pipelines was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a covert operation at the direction of the White House. President Joe Biden's administration has denied the allegations and called the report "utterly false and complete fiction." Such a denial was expected of the US. It is not just in this case, the US has been resorting to such covert actions over a long, long period throughout the world. And it had always refuted such information as falsehood.

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Credibility of the US is very low or non-existent on this count. The only country to benefit in case of such an action is the US. Its plans to prop up the war with Russia could have included everything and anything. Russia would certainly not have damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines as it was its business. The US sought to prop up the clash between Russia and Ukraine as the one between Russia and Europe as it wanted to pitch the entire NATO force against Russia to satiate its expansionist designs. Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has previously worked with The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, published the findings of his investigation on Substack. The report claimed that US Navy divers, operating under cover of a mid-summer 2022 NATO exercise, planted remotely triggered bombs to destroy three of the four Nord Stream pipelines. Both Sweden and Denmark which inspected the gas leaks from the multi-billion dollar project last September confirmed that someone had deliberately bombed the pipelines though they withheld information regarding the perpetrator of the crimes. Such operations would leave tell-tale evidence.

Nord Stream has been one of the major sources of energy supplies for not just Germany but all other European countries. The supply became uncertain the moment tensions between Russia and Ukraine surfaced. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Wednesday urged the US to give an explanation over its role in the 2022 explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. "The White House must now comment on all these facts," Zakharova said in a post on her Telegram page. In response, White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said on Wednesday that the investigative article was "utterly false and complete fiction," and the CIA and Pentagon also dismissed the allegation with similar rhetoric, according to media reports.

The article revealed many details of the operation: Explosives were planted by US Navy divers under the cover of the NATO maritime exercise; and a surveillance plane of NATO member Norway triggered the explosives on September 26, 2022 after US President Joe Biden greenlighted the operation. Although there's no final verdict on who was responsible, the US, NATO, as well as investigators from Sweden and Denmark agreed it was "a result of sabotage." Just as China seeks to engage India using Pakistan, the US seeks to weaken Russia using Ukraine. The US never liked Russian supremacy in oil energy and it never really liked Europe to be dependent on Russia for such needs as Russian leverage could increase with Europe.

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