Mission Accomplished: Seymour Hersh, Nordstream, and What’s Left on the Cutting Room Floor – TomLuongo 2/10/23

Source: TomLuongo.me

On Wednesday, I turned 55 and I got one of the best birthday presents a guy like me could ever ask for, a major geopolitical bombshell.  Seymour Hersh published his first article in a long time on the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline bombing, directly implicating major players within the “Biden” administration.

Hersh’s story is noteworthy not just because of what it says, but for the timing of him hitting the publish button and to whom this story is directly aimed.

And, more importantly, who it is NOT aimed at.

To be clear, I don’t think for a second that Hersh is whitewashing anything here.  If he is, well, I’ll leave that to the reader.  I believe his story is incomplete and a little too Bourne Identity versus Mission Impossible for my tastes.

Regardless of your conclusions, I think we all can agree we need much better screenwriters than the current crop haunting the halls of SIS in London and at the CIA in Langley.

Their contempt for us is obvious in the shoddy stories they’re telling us now.

Mission Identity: Bourne Impossible

The Bourne story is pretty straightforward.  Agent Bourne is sent on an assassination mission. He has a moment of conscience and his latent humanity asserts itself as he regains his memory.  The mystery was in rebuilding his past which, in the end, is pretty straightforward.

It’s Phil Dick’s We Can Remember it For You, Wholesale, but done right, versus both versions of Total Recall.

Reading Hersh’s article gave me more of the impression of the first act of a Mission Impossible film rather than the whole movie. The missions Ethan Hunt chooses to accept are simple and straightforward, retrieve some Macguffin and stop the bad guys before the boom.

And then as the story unfolds we uncover layer upon layer of what’s really going on. If you’ve seen the last two films, written and directed by Chris Macquarrie, you can probably see where I’m going here.

In Macquarrie’s version of modern spy craft, there are overlapping and contradictory goals of the various intelligence agencies and governments these people work for. These all meet and clash in plot twists so thick and heavy it’s a miracle anyone watching can keep up, given the frenetic pace. {Tom’s note: It speaks to just how good the film-making craft on display is}

In fact, when you parse through the arch-plot of these films, Hunt is fighting The Syndicate — a rogue group of disaffected agents who cause celibre is to tear down the old order through the tragedy of a nuclear event.

It hits a little too close to reality given the post-COVID world envisioned by The Davos Crowd. Cue the arguments about ‘predictive programming’ and all that (see my podcast with former screenwriter Mel K on this.)

These agents are the chaos unleashed by unscrupulous politicians and agency heads on an unsuspecting world. The Syndicate itself was the brainchild of the British government to give the Prime Minister a resource with which he could end-run Parliament to fight terrorism.

Does this not bear some resemblance to Hersh’s story of a “Biden” inner circle trying to do the same thing in keeping the act of war against Russia and Germany a secret from Congress.

In Macquarrie’s scripts, MI-6’s role in trying to cover their tracks over the creation of The Syndicate forms the backbone of the plot of both the aptly named MI:5 and MI:6 films. I’m not accusing Hersh of anything here, except maybe a little myopia. But, the omission of the Brits’ involvement in any part of his story, is, well, curious.

And this is exactly my problem with Hersh’s story, because it puts all the onus of the operation directly on this Gang of 4 in the “Biden” administration and Norway as patsy through NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, which neatly confirms the narrative we’ve been subjected to for nearly two years about an out-of-control US.

Stop me if you’ve heard this studio pitch before:

The US government, desperate to hold onto its global empire, feeling the heat of a failing dollar reserve standard, picked a fight in Ukraine kill two birds with one war: 1) keep Europe a vassal state, especially Germany, tied to the US and 2) destroy Russia with full spectrum multi-theatre warfare.

In this pursuit the “Biden” administration’s neoconservative Cold Warriors were given carte blanche to rain havoc over both its allies and its enemies, no act outside the operational bounds. Bombing the Nordstream pipelines is just another depraved act by a fading global hegemon.

It’s a neat story and Hersh fills the role, sadly in my mind, of useful idiot here advancing what is clearly only half the story. Again, I don’t doubt any of the facts Hersh provides the world to tell this story. The US and Norway have the technical expertise in diving to pull this thing off.

In no way do I think the US is “innocent” here for even very small values of that word….

Read More…