Source: Unz.com
A few days ago, the UN Security Council held hearings on the accusations by Seymour Hersh that the Biden Administration had illegally destroyed Europe’s $30 billion Nord Stream pipelines. Hersh is one of America’s most renowned journalists and the previous week he had revealed the exact details of the attack, an obvious act of war against Germany, our close NATO ally.
- Seymour Hersh: Standing Tall in a Sea of Lies
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 13, 2023 • 2,000 Words
The story is arguably as big as anything in Hersh’s towering half-century career, but with very few exceptions his revelations and the UN session it prompted have been totally ignored by our entire mainstream media, so that only a sliver of the Western public may ever hear of those facts and recognize their importance. For example, our government’s recent shoot-down of several errant American weather balloons seems to have received at least 100x greater news coverage.
Even among well-educated, intelligent individuals, the overwhelming majority probably still draw their knowledge of the world primarily from mainstream sources and if an event is ignored or downplayed by these, its importance will be doubted.
But although our Western media almost entirely ignored these developments, the Security Council session on the destruction of some of Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure attracted testimony from leading American public figures.
Ray McGovern had spent 27 years as a CIA Analyst, rising to direct the Soviet Policy division, chairing the National Intelligence Estimates group during the Reagan Administration, and serving as the Presidential Briefer on intelligence matters. He explained that twenty years ago, the American government had used fraudulent claims of Saddam’s WMDs to justify our disastrous Iraq War, doing so with the assistance of our subservient media. And today, our media is supporting the extreme recklessness of our current government policy towards Russia and Ukraine, which risks a nuclear confrontation.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University spoke as well, emphasizing the enormously grave consequences of this unprecedented act of international terrorism, and the very limited number of nations that could have been responsible. He noted that Hersh has now provided a comprehensive account of the attacks and one that closely matches the very suspicious public statements made by President Joseph Biden and other senior officials in his administration regarding the need to eliminate the pipelines. Prof. Sachs is a figure of the highest possible international reputation and he used unusually strong language in speaking to the UN Security Council membership.
A couple of months earlier Sachs had met with a small group of Europeans and drawing upon his first-hand personal knowledge, he explained the true origins of the Ukraine War. He also mentioned that when he had discussed the Nord Stream pipeline attacks with a leading journalist from a top American newspaper, someone whom he’d known for 40 years, he had been told that “of course the US did it” but that no one is allowed to say so. Meanwhile, that same paper was running numerous stories blaming the Russians for destroying their own pipelines, and Sachs was shocked that they would deceive their readers. He had trusted that newspaper’s reporting since the Watergate Era, when it regularly revealed all sorts of illegal American government actions. The journalist explained “But that paper is dead.”
All of us draw our knowledge of the world from trusted sources and when a top journalist candidly admits that honesty at his newspaper “is dead” we should be very skeptical of all the critical information provided by our major Western media outlets. So where can we turn for actual facts rather than government propaganda?
I have come to rely upon a handful of very high-ranking individuals who have spent decades acquiring a deep understanding of the national security issues that underlie the Russia-Ukraine war and are unlikely to be deceived or intimidated by the mindless chatter of talking-heads on cable. They have too much self-respect to endorse official statements that are obvious falsehoods and too much loyalty to America’s best interests to support policies that they regard as disastrous. They come from a wide range of different backgrounds and ideologies and may have somewhat different views on particular aspects of the conflict, but they are in broad agreement on all the central issues.
Once every three years, the American Political Science Association gives an award to its most distinguished scholar and Prof. Mearsheimer is the most recent recipient. Col. Macgregor is widely regarded as one of our leading military strategists and he had been a finalist for the post of American National Security Advisor.
Although our political, media, and financial establishment is absolutely 100% on the other side, I find it noteworthy that I can scarcely think of a single individual of comparable stature willing to publicly support the official line on Russia and Ukraine….