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Thread: World War Three

  1. #1126
    Senior Member Aianawa's Avatar
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    Or a cup of tea maybe

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    Super Moderator Wind's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Lord Sidious View Post
    Turn off the tv. In reality, the us forces would not last long against their combined enemies.
    Who do you think makes a lot of the tech for the us forces?
    China.
    Crikey mate, I don't use the telly except as a monitor!
    "The more I see, the less I know for sure." ~ John Lennon

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  5. #1128
    Administrator Aragorn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Diabolical Boids View Post
    I just got chastised for bringing up ballistics?
    If anybody is doing any chastising around here, then it isn't me. I am only being precise about the facts amidst the obvious gratuitous misuse of technical terms within certain cultures, which then ends up creating confusion and misunderstandings. It's no different from the earlier discussion we had elsewhere on the forum regarding Earth's magnetic poles versus its geographical poles and what exactly would constitute the purported pole shift that this so-called Alternative Community™ was (and may still be) so alarmist about.

    Besides, I was talking of calibers, not of ballistics. The ballistics information was only added so as to emphasize the humongous difference between a .22 LR and a 5.56 x 45 mm NATO, also colloquially known in the USA as a .223 Remington — even though it's not really the same thing anymore, because while a .223 Remington can be fired from a 5.56 mm rifle, the reverse is not true (and would be life-threatening to the shooter).

    Quote Originally posted by Diabolical Boids View Post
    Okay it's been established you are allowed to and I'm not. Thank you for that point of clarity.
    Drama much?

    Quote Originally posted by Diabolical Boids View Post
    You are making an argument for a style, an appearance based on what an assault rifle looks like, not what an assault rifle has or does.

    I'll stick with style, retail information and legal information as it pertains to manufacture, US law, and retail. And as it pertains to the Ukrainian civil defense situation, my original post. So, we don't go wildly off topic.

    I specified a particular caliber for reasons of clarity because AR 15 is a style, not a particular chamber or caliber as it effects the situation in the Ukraine.
    Okay, now I'm finally getting what you're talking about, but then let me be clear: you are still mistaken. The style of weapon you are referring to is indeed commonly referred to as "an AR", but not as "an AR-15".

    There are indeed many arms manufacturers offering AR-style rifles and carbines these days, and indeed, as you say, in multiple different calibers. But the term "AR-15" specifically — with the "-15" added — is a very specifically branded and trademarked firearm designed and manufactured by Armalite, and they are the only ones who may legally refer to their AR-15s as AR-15s. Colt also manufactures semi-automatic AR-15s — same caliber and all — but they are marketing them as "M-15"s, because the term "AR-15" is trademarked to Armalite, and while Colt has a license to the patent, they do not have a license to the trademark.

    And of course, Colt are not the only ones to offer that type of rifles and carbines, both in civilian and military versions. As you noted, there are many, many more. And they all have to market them under their own designations, because only Armalite may call them AR-15s.

    So, I guess we had a fit of confusion going on here over the exact type designation, and the type designation is "an AR", or "an AR-style rifle/carbine".

    The second thing you are mistaken in — or actually the third, since you are under the impression that I was attempting to character-assassinate you, which couldn't be farther from the truth — is that the weapons donated to the Ukrainian civilians by the US government would truly be .22-calibers.

    But I cannot blame you for that, because given that the 5.56 x 45 mm NATO round is based off of the pre-existing .223 Remington hunting cartridge, US Americans tend to often still refer to that caliber as a .223 — even though the military variant packs more power — and, misleadingly, also often in a derogatory sense as a .22. Because the calibers are similar in bullet diameter — a .22 LR is a little over 5.55 mm in diameter, and a .223 is a little over 5.56 mm in diameter.

    And so by referring to a 5.56/.223 as "a .22", they are mocking the small bullet diameter and are conveying the message to whomever they are talking to that they would prefer a bigger caliber, like a .308 Winchester, or a .300 Blackout, or something similar. But the bullet diameter is only that, and it doesn't even have that exact diameter anymore when it leaves the barrel, because the bullet is always just a little bit bigger than the barrel diameter. That way, the bullet — which is made of lead or another malleable material — gets squeezed into the lands and grooves of the barrel, giving it a stabilizing spin around its axis.

    Just because it's being referred to as a .22 in common parlor in the US does not mean that it would truly be a .22 LR — or for that matter, a .22 Hornet, or any of the other .22-caliber rimfire cartridges. And sending real .22s to Ukraine would be completely nonsensical, because actual .22 ammunition exists in several different and incompatible varieties, and is in overall very difficult to come by in large quantities. 5.56 mm NATO on the other hand is readily available everywhere, just as 9 x 19 mm ammo. As the matter of fact, it's even easier to come by the military-grade 5.56 mm NATO ammunition than to come by the civilian .223 Remington variant, because the latter is only really used within the USA, and a 5.56 mm rifle can fire either one, while an explicit .223 Remington rifle can only fire .223 Remington.

    And as the matter of fact, the rifles that were sent to Ukraine are indeed chambered for the military-grade 5.56 mm NATO round, not in any of the civilian backyard-plinking .22 rimfire cartridges, exactly because 5.56 mm NATO is available everywhere while .22 rimfire cartridges are not. Hell, even the Chinese military use 5.56 mm NATO in one of their own assault rifle designs — they have several types of assault rifles, among which also AK-47 and AK-74 clones (and derivatives) in both the generic 7.62 x 39 mm Russian and 5.45 x 39 mm Russian calibers respectively, as well as in calibers that are specific to China only and are neither used nor manufactured anywhere else.

    Quote Originally posted by Diabolical Boids View Post
    You brought up calibers and capability that had nothing to do with the models sent from the US to the Ukraine last year.
    No, that is where you were wrong — see below.

    Quote Originally posted by Diabolical Boids View Post
    Which are .22's.
    No, they are often wrongfully referred to in US-American culture specifically as ".22s" because the diameter of the bullet is approximately the same as that of a .22 — as you can see in the photo in one of my earlier posts on the subject — and because "real men use bigger guns", you know? But those rifles are effectively 5.56 mm NATO rifles, and they have all of the performance of a military-grade M16 minus the capability for fully automatic fire, and most likely also without the specialized optics that the military weapons are fitted with, such as reflex sights, laser pointers, night vision sights and telescopic sights.

    So they'll just have the stock iron sights, and maybe they'll have Picatinny rails or Weaver rails for mounting additional optics, or a flashlight, or a vertical fore grip, and so on. Many of the civilian-grade AR-15 variants come standard with such rails, but not all — it depends on the price range. Maybe they even still have fixed stocks instead of the collapsing/folding stocks that most of the military variants now come with.

    Quote Originally posted by Diabolical Boids View Post
    They are not pea shooters for home defense, they are pea shooters when the situation changes (situational awareness) and they are used as civilian defense soldiers with military grade weapons and body armor. Situational awareness. Situations change. Home defense is not civil defense.
    I don't know what you're implying with the above paragraph, because it just doesn't make any sense to me. An AR-style weapon is never a home defense weapon, simply because it's unpractical — it's too big. And I don't see why they would be peashooters — remember, these are 5.56 mm NATO rifles — because as I said earlier, they can easily penetrate most body armor — especially at a close-enough ranges where the bullet still travels at supersonic speed. Remember that 3-mm-thick steel helmet at 500 meters?

    Again, barring the lack of special military-grade optics and the potentially fixed stock — which doesn't really make any difference at all — the only difference between the sent AR-15 rifles and a military-grade M16 is that the M16 has full-auto capability while an AR-15 does not.

    It would even be a ludicrous decision to send weapons over to Ukraine that use ammunition which is both difficult to come by and completely different from what the military uses, and had the US government done indeed that, then the whole of NATO would probably have been rolling on the floor and wetting themselves over such stupidity.

    Quote Originally posted by Diabolical Boids View Post
    Assault rifle is more American political and social programming propaganda.
    The term "assault rifle" is relatively new — i.e. from the 1960s — and was first coined during the Vietnam war. Up until then, the designated military rifle was called a battle rifle, and battle rifles existed in select-fire versions and semi-auto-only versions. They were quite long and typically fired a roughly .30-caliber round — which includes the .308 Winchester round that was used as the basis for the more powerful military-grade 7.62 x 51 mm NATO round.

    But battle rifles were particularly suited for a different kind of warfare — the kind where the opposing armies were fighting each other from within the trenches in an open field, or from both sides of a river. They were way too large and too heavy to be used in the jungle, or even in cities, as the US found out in Vietnam. That's why the battle rifle had to make way among the majority of the military for a shorter and lighter type of rifle that used a smaller but nevertheless still powerful caliber, and that offered the ability for both semi-auto and full-auto fire, as well as allowing the shooter to carry more ammunition on them for the same weight.

    And that's how the term "assault rifle" was born. I don't care what it's called in American culture or how it's used there in pro- or contra-weapons politics and propaganda. To me, an assault rifle is still what it is: a fairly light select-fire rifle that can fire in both semi- and full-auto mode. If it cannot fire in full-auto mode, then it's not an assault rifle anymore, regardless of what it looks like. Similarly, submachine guns typically fire the 9 mm NATO round, but a semi-automatic-only variant of a submachine gun is not called a submachine gun anymore; it is called a pistol-caliber carbine, even if it's an Uzi or an H&K MP5.





    Quote Originally posted by Fred Steeves View Post
    I say time for a thread split.
    That won't be necessary, Brother. Besides, it would be difficult to maintain thread continuity after tearing out the digression about firearms and calibers. And given that I'm being accused of character assassination simply for trying to educate someone on their US-centric — or US-typical? — misuse of technical terms, I'm not feeling compelled to post much more on this thread for the foreseeable future after this post here. I don't like ad hominems and I don't like false allegations.

    Besides, I know I'm right because the Sidinugget and I are from two different countries, and we have both served in our respective military, and he perfectly understood and corroborates the information I've been presenting here. So the point has been made, but there's no arguing with a person who chooses to redefine the meaning of terms according to what would be common parlance in their own culture only. It's exactly this kind of liberal interpretation of what any given thing means that has brought this so-called Alternative Community™ onto so many ridiculous misunderstandings and conspiracy theories.

    "Facts don't matter anymore, son. Hell, just redefine it as however you want. That way, you'll always be right, even if you're wrong."
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

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  7. #1129
    Senior Member Lord Sidious's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Aragorn View Post
    Besides, I know I'm right because the Sidinugget and I are from two different countries, and we have both served in our respective military, and he perfectly understood and corroborates the information I've been presenting here. So the point has been made, but there's no arguing with a person who chooses to redefine the meaning of terms according to what would be common parlance in their own culture only. It's exactly this kind of liberal interpretation of what any given thing means that has brought this so-called Alternative Community™ onto so many ridiculous misunderstandings and conspiracy theories.

    "Facts don't matter anymore, son. Hell, just redefine it as however you want. That way, you'll always be right, even if you're wrong."
    You have indeed been correct on the AR 15/M 16
    Ní siocháin go saoirse

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  9. #1130
    Senior Member Fred Steeves's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Lord Sidious View Post
    You have indeed been correct on the AR 15/M 16
    At what cost though
    The unexamined life is not worth living.

    Socrates

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    Senior Member United States Diabolical Boids's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Fred Steeves View Post
    At what cost though

    My question about culture collapse in other nation has been sufficiently demonstrated.
    We see the same rage over nothing here in the US.

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  13. #1132
    Senior Member Lord Sidious's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Fred Steeves View Post
    At what cost though
    Remains to be seen nugg
    Ní siocháin go saoirse

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  15. #1133
    Super Moderator Wind's Avatar
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    "The more I see, the less I know for sure." ~ John Lennon

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    Senior Member Lord Sidious's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Wind View Post
    Crikey mate, I don't use the telly except as a monitor!
    Yeah.......................nah
    Ní siocháin go saoirse

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    Senior Member Fred Steeves's Avatar
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    The Boom heard Around The World

    "Balloongate", step aside to your proper place upon the trash heap of desperate war time propaganda...

    I don't think a guy like Seymour Hersh is going to put his reputation on the line with something literally this explosive, so ground zero relative to rapidly unraveling world events, unless his source has what it takes to enter the realms of Edward Snowden/Julian Assange types.

    Buckle up boys and girls:

    How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

    The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
    https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/...he-nord-stream

    It will be interesting to see whether this gets an actual challenge to its credibility, or, if it just gets shit all over in passing but minus any official denials.
    The unexamined life is not worth living.

    Socrates

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    Senior Member Morocco modwiz's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Fred Steeves View Post
    "Balloongate", step aside to your proper place upon the trash heap of desperate war time propaganda...

    I don't think a guy like Seymour Hersh is going to put his reputation on the line with something literally this explosive, so ground zero relative to rapidly unraveling world events, unless his source has what it takes to enter the realms of Edward Snowden/Julian Assange types.

    Buckle up boys and girls:


    https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/...he-nord-stream

    It will be interesting to see whether this gets an actual challenge to its credibility, or, if it just gets shit all over in passing but minus any official denials.
    This bomb is huge, if not surprising to some of us.

    Demolition blankets will be in short supply. Demand will be high.

    This qualifies as apocalyptic.

    Unveiled asses hanging in the wind.

    Seems Sholz was in the know.

    Western leadership = Oxymoronic.
    "To learn who rules over you simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize" -- Voltaire

    "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."-- Eleanor Roosevelt

    "Misery loves company. Wisdom has to look for it." -- Anonymous

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    Senior Member Lord Sidious's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Fred Steeves View Post
    "Balloongate", step aside to your proper place upon the trash heap of desperate war time propaganda...

    I don't think a guy like Seymour Hersh is going to put his reputation on the line with something literally this explosive, so ground zero relative to rapidly unraveling world events, unless his source has what it takes to enter the realms of Edward Snowden/Julian Assange types.

    Buckle up boys and girls:


    https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/...he-nord-stream

    It will be interesting to see whether this gets an actual challenge to its credibility, or, if it just gets shit all over in passing but minus any official denials.
    Can you cut and paste the text here for us please, nugg?
    Ní siocháin go saoirse

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  25. #1138
    Senior Member Fred Steeves's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Lord Sidious View Post
    Can you cut and paste the text here for us please, nugg?


    “The only flaw was the decision to do it.”



    THE OPERATION

    Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.

    In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites inside China.

    A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction for years, had become operational and more American submarines were now able to work closely with their Norwegian colleagues to monitor and spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250 miles to the east, on the Kola Peninsula. America also has vastly expanded a Norwegian air base in the north and delivered to the Norwegian air force a fleet of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon patrol planes to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.

    In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.

    Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.

    Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)

    Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.

    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. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.

    After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.

    At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the cover of popular magazines.

    “The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.

    The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it.

    Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.

    The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)

    The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.

    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.

    The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” 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.

    The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.

    And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.

    Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”

    Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing.

    Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.

    The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia.

    The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.

    Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law.

    In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.

    The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?

    The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)

    On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.

    FALLOUT

    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. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.

    While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.

    Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:

    “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”
    More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “​Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

    The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”

    Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.

    “It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.

    “The only flaw was the decision to do it.”
    https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/...he-nord-stream
    The unexamined life is not worth living.

    Socrates

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    Senior Member Lord Sidious's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Fred Steeves View Post
    I was going to post this myself, but you beat me to it.

    Quote Originally posted by Fred Steeves View Post
    It will be interesting to see whether this gets an actual challenge to its credibility, or, if it just gets shit all over in passing but minus any official denials.
    Oh, it has already officially been denied. And it didn't take them very long either.

    WASHINGTON, Feb 8 (Reuters) - The White House on Wednesday dismissed a blog post by a U.S. investigative journalist alleging the United States was behind explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines as "utterly false and complete fiction."

    Reuters has not corroborated the report, published by U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, which said an attack was carried out last September at the direction of President Joe Biden.

    "This is utterly false and complete fiction," said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. Spokespeople for the CIA and State Department said the same.

    [...]



    To be continued... or maybe not...
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

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